For me it usually stops when I mentally calculate how much work it requires, and I realize I’d rather just play video games.
Yeah I’m at that stage too. I used to have a lot of time for projects but as an adult, I really have to be selective with my time and energy.
This is where ChatGPT and Codium.ai has been a godsend for me. Something that would have taken me a few hours to 1+ days to iterate on is now reduced down to anywhere from minutes to an hour. I don’t even always see it all the way through to completion, but just knowing that I can iterate on some version of it so quickly is often motivation enough to get started.
If you’re paying for the Plus subscription, GPT-4 with Code Interpreter is absolutely OP. Did you know you can hand it a zip file as a way of giving it multiple files at once?
I’ve been using GPT4 actually, and I agree it’s a godsend for lazy people like me. Haven’t been using it lately because all my ideas right now involves fine tuning LLMs, which I can’t financially justify at the moment.
If you’re looking for original ideas… I have bad news for you
They come from unique problems
or you realize that the idea fundamentally wouldnt work. i wanted to build a lemmy music recognition bot until i remembered lemmy has no videos lmao
A Minecraft rewrite in Rust with a very specific engine and goals certainly hadn’t been done… right?..
Guess that depends on what your goal is. Are you doing it for fun? Or for money? If it’s the latter it’s all in the marketing.
Steve Jobs said “you don’t have to do it better, just different”.
Turns out that fruit doesn’t cure cancer either
Yeah Apple’s marketing is incredible
Most times I find that these projects are either old or badly made (often both). If you’re inspired and you feel like you can make them better, then go for it.
An artist isn’t going to refrain from painting a portrait of a dog if other artists have already painted dog portraits, so why should you?
Then a while later you go back and look at what you did and realize it’s old and badly made.
Then you pat yourself on the back for inspiring the next dev that comes across your project
That doesn’t stop the Javascript frameworks.
If it brings you joy, you should make the 27th implementation of neofetch in rust.
What? There’s already 26?!
<types rm -fr neofetch-turbo while drying up tears>
I can’t believe I’ve never seen
rm -frinstead ofrm -rf. “remove for real” is instantly my new method of deleting directories.I’ve been doing -fr like forever. Don’t know why
Learning is the main point of taking on a side project. Whether it’s original or not doesn’t matter
Instead, you can try to extend the existing project with new features, possibly improving your code reading skills and discovering new practices
If it sounded cool to do, I do it anyway, and keep it to myself. Never have to clean that shit up. Unfinished? Who gives a fuck, I did it, job sorted.
If it sounded like it needed to exist… thank god, someone else did it for me! Not my problem. git clone, next idea.
A project doesn’t have to be unique as a whole. You can always take an already existing idea and add your own twist to it (new UI, new feature, better optimisation, etc). What’s important is actually doing something instead of being stuck in an infinite loop of brainstorming idea.
when i created a side project, someone else already did it but they had a flaw in their design, so i created my version to fix the flaw
I came up with idea where instead of typing stuff like “5/6” “6*9” into the terminal, you could have gui interface.
I’ve got some bad news for you about Google and chatgpt
Yeah don’t let this stop you! If you do the side project for fun and/or learning, just go ahead and build stuff. Don’t look at other projects too soon so you give space to your own creativity. But perhaps compare stuff in a later stage.
This is a great perspective. I have definitely fallen into this meme’s sentiment many times. You have to remind yourself that it doesn’t matter.
