this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
74 points (97.4% liked)

Ask Experienced Devs

1235 readers
1 users here now

Icon base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I am professionally a software developer for 8 years and I simply don't have ideas for personal projects (Can't find any problem that I can fix with programming). At times I feel like that's natural and I shouldn't worry about it. But on the other hand, I do like to imagine having something personal that I can work on so that even if some days on my main job are not satisfying, I can always work on my hobby project and find that missing satisfaction.

End goal here is obviously to get better sleep as sometimes my mind feels dissatisfied with the day's work.

Funnily, I day-dream about the idea of already having done the boring parts (simply manifesting a project that already exists) of some personal project and only solving exciting problems in relation to adding a new feature or exciting aspects.

This creates a problem as I hate staring at a blank file not knowing what to write.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What campolat said. But also, if you're really feeling an itch to do open source development on your free time but don't have a project, why not contribute to some existing open source project? You won't have to do annoying steps like starting or maintaining your own project, and you can just pick some software you already use and add a feature or fix a bug that you'd actually benefit from.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Yeah I should try that. I guess my problem would be I start spending hours on a problem. Instead I should just learn to do stuff outside of the digital space for a while.