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How do I not stop feeling like I am doing nothing outside work? (programming.dev)
submitted 6 months ago by Maddier1993@programming.dev to c/ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev
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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.

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[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev -1 points 6 months ago

Get a notepad, logseq, send yourself messages in Signal, or record audio of whatever idea you have at that moment.

  • "Just browsed an interesting repo on $sourceforge and they are missing linting, maybe I should create a PR"
  • "What if this thing happened automatically when I logged in / opened the website / this even happened?"
  • "The kids have been complaining about slow $something, I'm sure it's because of $cause, gotta check that out"

Hell, maybe write a website where people can send ideas of things they'd like implemented. Others could add tags and emojis, indicate that they're working on it, or share existing implementations, or whatever other feature you can think. Then people looking for stuff to do could filter by stuff like "most popular", "most $emoji", by tag(s), by number of people implementing, etc.
Maybe even build in a system where people can vote on the implementation and have a leaderboard for the people with most reacted to ideas, people with highest rated implementations, etc.

Then you'll have to think about how not to game the system, maybe allow people to put a bounty on ideas, and so on and so forth.

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this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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