What are some great project ideas?

That's a bit of a broad statement, which makes it harder to narrow down on what projects that you'd be most successful/interested in building (from a tech stack and general interest perspective).

A side project I'd want though is a old school Maplestory server (any version up until v83 works) that can run on Macs (without needing virtualization software and I can just straight up run the Maplestory Mac client and have everything run). I'd also like the code to be 100% open sourced to set a baseline of how future servers should be built.

I generally have the opposite issue of having too many ideas and not enough time.

Recently I’ve been open sourcing a lot of these projects and have an open sourced-open source Trello board.

Feel free to leverage: https://trello.com/b/6sFAveoP/dcrebbin-open-source

I suggest building something with a frontend (so that it is shiny and beautiful and recruiters and family and friends can enjoy) and no backend (so that you actually ship it and don't get stuck on too many steps).

Personally I'm building financial calculators on Android this way:

• Retirement Calculator
• Loan Calculator

I spent less than 10 hours getting them initially out the door which has been my problem in the past: I think of something way to complex and don't get to the point of actually having a user. Can iterate once shipped on something simple.

I keep a note in my note taking app with a queue of projects that I want to work on. The ideas usually pop up organically, and I'll add them into my queue.

If you are having issues coming up with ideas organically, you can prime yourself each morning to actively look for problems. You can set a goal to write down one problem each day. Then, you can evaluate which of the problems is the most compelling to you and create a programmatic solution for that problem.

Add constraints to generate ideas. Here are some constraints I recommend starting with:

• Build a mobile app (Android or iOS)
• No internet connection should be required
• There should not be a multi-player experience (I should be able to get value as a lone user)
• You should be able to build the first version in a weekend

We talk about this a bit here: [Masterclass] How To Build And Grow Tech Products To 500k+ Users For Free.

A few ideas based on the above constraints:

• A dice-rolling app
• A text/image app which explains 5-10 CS algorithms in a digestible way
• An app that randomly shows you 3 emojis
• and so much more!

It's fairly outdated, but a good amount of the ideas here should still be viable: https://github.com/Gear61/Software-Project-Ideas

Each idea in that repo has the following:

• User need being fulfilled
• Relevant stack(s)
• Product requirements for MVP
• Difficulty
• Possible extensions (if you want to keep iterating on it, which you should)

This thread should help as well as it explains the strategy I used to build 5+ side project apps with 100k+ users: "Finding a mobile app idea - How to do it?"

If you want to go super deep, check this out: [Masterclass] How To Come Up With 100k+ Users App Ideas You Can Build For Free

My website/newsletter exists to solve this problem - providing project ideas: https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/intro

It might help to break this down into two steps:

1. Recognizing what software you use on a daily basis that solves a problem or need that you have. Before the software existed, how did people deal with this? Maybe it was a repetitive task.
2. Now that you have a mindset of recognizing problems/solutions in your daily encounters, ideas might naturally show up. It doesn't even have to be a new solution. It could be an improvement on something you noticed in step 1.

the best projects are the ones you genuinely enjoy and will have use for

back when i was learning Java, I modified the minecraft client to do basic hacks like X-ray to more sophisticated custom hacks like dropping a wall of blocks in front of people around me

needless to say, i have been banned from several servers for doing this but it was a great exercise in navigating complex codebases through sheer experimentation (both the minecraft codebase and the reddit anti-cheat plugins) and I had a lot of fun.