Ask HN: Any “useful” side project ideas?
At my work I get a couple of weeks of low intensity work for every 4-6 months when I have about 20 hours/week I can spend time on doing side projects or maybe learn something new. In the past I have taken on multiple projects that couldn’t be finished in 2 weeks and when I come back to them 4 months later I would have to basically start from scratch due to lose of flow hence it would be difficult to get motivated. Is there anything useful I can do that may be helpful for the world in these two weeks. I’m not too concerned about putting stuff on my resume. My primary goal is to be useful and secondary is to have fun. While I feel I do have a pretty good knowledge of algos and data structures, being a hardware engineer (RTL, HDL etc) my software skills, especially knowing the latest frameworks are not the strongest for sure.
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I spent about 20 or 25 hours building a website to republish some county data that people frequently check. It's been a big hit with my local friends.
Another one I will probably do soon is a script to check weather & water conditions in my area to tell me if it's a good day to go fishing. Namely, I'm going to check the water level of the local river via the USGS, and see if it's within a certain range that are ideal conditions.
I think a good value add for me would be some home-automation style voice commands, but with [whatever I dream up] types of outcomes. Like an actually-useful set of commands added to Alexa, let's say.
That depends, really on whether or not you will be around to support them after the launch, throwing something out in two weeks usually works well if it does not see adoption, then it's just a way to train your brain. But if it does see adoption then you have a responsibility towards your users and in that gray area where it requires serious time but not enough to live off you will end up harming your reputation and your users. I usually decide against side projects unless I'm 100% sure they will not become a burden and my users interests are safeguarded.
What are your interests outside the tech domain? Try applying your tech domain knowledge into something in your area of non-tech related interest. It can be as simple as monitoring energy usage in your home or as complex as automated smell removal and seepage from garbage can. Do a side project for yourself.
I like to study new stuff, mostly mathematics/quantitative oriented. When I am reading a book on a topic, I try to figure out how I can implement the things explained and written in the book.
I recently took up Golang and had a great time building an IRC client. I was never around when IRC was bigger, but I enjoy hanging out on it now. Kinda reminded me of how HAM radio guys must feel about building their own rig.
This book helped a lot: https://quii.gitbook.io/learn-go-with-tests/ ↗
Depends on what you mean by useful for the world.
One response could be volunteering for a Wikimedia tech project, another for a charity etc. Another may be to offer tech support to the old people in your town.
Figure out what kind of thing you'd like to help first and then look for projects. Or figure out the type of work you want to do and then look for openings.