HACKER Q&A
📣 renzokuken

How can I find a toy/side project that will captivate me?


I know that this sounds like one of these questions where only the one asking them knows the answer, but I'm hoping that someone else can relate to me.

I've been working in the same company for the past 8 years and I'm pretty happy with it.

However, at times I feel like I need to express my creativity and curiosity by having a side-project that I'll be passionate about. My GitHub though is full of unfinished toy projects.

I'm thinking antirez and how he had an idea that brought to life and continued working on for 11 years (Redis).

I'd love to have a project I care about and pour my passion for programming and energy into it, evolve it and make it something noteworthy.

TL;Dr How can I find the drive and motivation to create a piece of software that I will love working on for a decent amount of time?

However I can't find something that could motivate me to up to this point.

Have anyone else felt the same? If so, did you find a way? How?

Thanks in advance!

  👤 verdverm Accepted Answer ✓
Don't start with the tools for implementation of creation. Find a problem you are deeply passionate about solving or improving. Then figure out the best way to approach it based on your current understanding, and then iterate and evolve.

My history was:

- Stock Market / tradebot (unfinished)

- PhD work to find math formula in big data to help scientists

- SpotJams, Hans together for music (real human contact in a digitally divided world)

- Hofstadter, current, helping people realize their ideas through software, aka dev tools / low code

- on/off line predators and groomers because I recently found out someone very very dear to me is one of many dozens of victims of a man still walking the streets freely. And likely by extension and generality, child abduction and human trafficking.

As you might see, the motivations and inspirations have evolved into aspirational goals to the point I don't care what it takes to fix it, it just needs to be done!

Also AR/XR because I recently picked up the Hololens 2 and it's the bee's knees