Ask HN: How did you find your great side project idea?

I was a moody teenager (maybe 16 years old) who had just been forced to move from her home in the US to Australia. We moved in summer and had nothing to do for a few months except explore Fremantle, and all of our luggage had not been transferred yet - we were staying for the summer in a company-provided apartment and my parents decided there was no point in getting everything shipped to this temp apartment. I was mad at my parents for making me move, bored, missed the horse farm I worked at in Alabama. Usually I'd always be tinkering on the PC making weird web projects and playing games, but now I had no computer. Basically I had a lot of time to think about random crap. Thinking back on it now it was my favorite time to be in Australia. Fremantle is a gorgeous, quirky city and I had all the time in the world to walk around the cool little hipster artsy stores and the "psychic" shops selling crystals and stuff. My imagination ran wild!

Anyway, during this time I thought a lot about all the places we'd lived and was feeling a bit nostalgic both for Alabama and my original home in Ukraine. I thought back on my favorite childhood memories, which were all at my grandparents' summerhouse in Kherson. One day when I was maybe six or seven years old it was raining really hard and a bunch of snails were crawling around everywhere. I captured some and had them race on the pavement. I "trained" them to crawl in a straight line (I swear this actually happened - or at least that is how I remember it). When I was done I put them all in my orange fishing bucket with leaves, water, and berries and put them aside figuring they'd be gone by the evening. When I came back in the evening they _were_ gone, but I spotted them all around the bucket (crawling away). The next morning, though, they were all back! This went on for a few days - the snails would leave around the evening and be back in the bucket by the next day. I thought it was really cool!

A few days later we had planned to go fishing the next morning with my grandfather so I knew I'd need my orange bucket back. That night before going to bed I put all the snails out into our garden patch and cleaned out the bucket to be ready by morning. But in the morning, the snails were back again. So I couldn't go fishing. This went on for another couple of days and each time I got more and more annoyed at the snails coming back. Even though I tried to "hide" the bucket from the snails by moving it around, they would always find it. One time I put the snails out into the patch again in the morning and went to get ready for fishing thinking they wouldn't be able to crawl back that fast, but when I got back most of them were just back again. I'm not sure why my kid-mind at the time didn't just put the snails away again right before leaving and take bucket, but I didn't.

Finally one morning after a few days of this I was angry. I was really excited about going to fish and there were a bunch of snails in my bucket again. I grabbed the bucket and started throwing the snails out one by one into the patch. I was so annoyed and didn't care about taking them out of their home anymore. The snails landed out of sight and in my mind I wasn't hurting them, since I was throwing them where they'd land on vegetation or soft earth. Except I misjudged a throw and accidentally threw one of the snails right in front of me - it hit a rock or branch or something and its shell cracked in a really bad way. I could see the body spilling out of the shell, and it was still alive and moving but I knew it was dying. That's when I realized I'd been hurting them, and now I'd killed at least this one. I was horrified, started crying - the thought of putting the snail out of its misery didn't even cross my mind. I felt awful and decided the snails could have my bucket and live there for as long as they want, so I tried to find some of the other snails I'd thrown away but it was too late - I couldn't find them anywhere. I ended up leaving to go fishing with the bucket.

As a kid I got over and forgot the incident by probably the next day, but in Fremantle when I thought about it again I just felt guilty again. And then I remembered how cool it was that the snails would crawl in a straight line when I raced them, and how it was even cooler that they kept coming back "home" even though I wasn't trapping them in the bucket! So I got the idea for a snail racing website where people could find virtual snails, take care of them, race them against each other, and breed them. My favorite games to play at the time were PHP browser games, so I envisioned it being written in PHP.

I had a few false starts over the years; when I first had the idea I only knew a bit of HTML and CSS and had no skills to build this thing. I didn't seriously start working on it until later, but that is my side project - a snail and snail management simulation - and I have a feeling I won't move on to anything else for a very long time.

I'm building a game wiki/guide platform right now[1]. The idea mainly came from just wanting to re-create a game's interface on the web[2] and it gradually grew to a game guide and now a multi-game guide platform. I tried to learn new tech on the way to keep myself interested. The large parts being LeafletJS/PixiJS, moving onto React, then Firebase, and so on.

A lot of my web project ideas are related to the video game community because I often use and contribute to them and constantly find certain things lacking (wikis, forums, list trackers, news). So this project has nicely grew into something that I can both learn from and enjoy building for the long term. Of course there are the tedious parts (like upgrades and maintenance) but they're overcome gradually; it is just a side project right now.

[1] https://frontiernav.jahed.io/ ↗

[2] https://frontiernav.jahed.io/explore/game0/visualisations/map/nodes/s1i51-6 ↗

For us, the idea came from working at a startup doing something completely different. We were developing a software to leverage the Cloud as primary storage. At the time I joined, I wanted to understand the space better and how our competitors were positioning themselves. I looked for tools that can show top performing content across blogs and social media networks, I wanted to see what type of messaging was resonating with people and driving the most traffic and engagement. I found a few but they lacked the simplicity and ease of use that I had in mind. Most would return the results in an excel/table format or just give you a link with some stats and force you to manually visit each link to see the actual content and what people were saying. After I left the company, I decided to pursue this idea and build a social media management platform that can solve this problem (among others). In a nutshell, the idea came from a problem I encountered in the past. Our platform is going live in a couple of weeks https://socialweaver.com ↗.

The more people you talk to and experiences you expose yourself to the more ideas you will have.

I spoke at PyCon AU 2016 on "Controlling a 3D Printer with Python" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgvnPB_77z8 ↗). I wanted a 3D-printed prop and came up with an idea for The Pythonic Staff of Enlightenment - a staff with the Python logo on top. A friend designed it, I printed it and it was a big hit with the Pythonistas. A few asked "where can I buy one?".

A year later we're about to launch Enstaved (https://www.enstaved.com ↗). It's a service that lets you design your own staff using a range of toppers and colors which we then print and post to you.

Back when I was streaming games on Twitch I cared a lot about my followers count. When you only have 10 followers and all of a sudden someone unfollows it's kind of a big deal, especially if you're trying to grow your followership. I usually spent some time checking my followers list to find out _who_ unfollowed me.

To save me the hassle I developed Unfollow (https://www.unfollow.io ↗). You sign up, connect your Twitch account and it starts tracking your unfollowers and notifies you.

I didn't develop this because I want to encourage people to care about their unfollowers. It's about curiousity. The curiosity about this person who's not following you anymore. I hope the tool can help people satisfy this curiosity.