| Interesting topic. I used to work in a payday loan company for couple years, and while my collegues were awesome, the business itself was/is absolute bullshit. Meaningful? Far away from it. I decided to try my own wings, and that has been one of the best decisions of my life. Software work has become more and more meaningful because for one, I get to decide what's done and when. When I see a problem in my world, I ask myself if this problem would concern other people's worlds too. If it's a yes, I'll start working on it. Fundamentally, if I can solve a pain point for others, doesn't it make the world a better place? My latest meaningful (hobby) project has been working on the General Index published by Carl Malamud couple months ago. Science should be free, and accessible so mr. Malamud released a dump with over 107 million academic papers. I've been building a public search layer on top of this, with my angle being to find connections between scientists. There's only a 1/6th of a dump, and very very POC phase but it works: https://spider.clousby.com/ |