I don't know what to build. I'm looking for ideas. It doesn't matter the programming language or framework.
Thank you!
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:
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.
My website/newsletter exists to solve this problem - providing project ideas: https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/intro
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.
Add constraints to generate ideas. Here are some constraints I recommend starting with:
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:
It's fairly outdated, but a good amount of the ideas here should still be viable: https://github.com/Gear61/Software-Project-Ideas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:
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
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 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.
It might help to break this down into two steps:
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.