Ask HN: How do you find side projects?

[philaquilina]

I'm in a slump. I'm not excited about any of my own ideas, and I don't know how to find an open source repo I'd like to contribute to. The latter probably stems from not knowing how to look for repos that might offer challenges that are just outside of my comfort zone. Any advice in finding something to work on in my spare time?

[liranz]

Are you looking for open source projects to join, or do you want ideas for small projects you want to do on your own?

Are you looking for pass-time projects, or do you want to improve your career path?

Assuming hobbies: I'm sure you have a small blog you can create FE or BE to, if you prefer 'real world' or robotics projects you should get Arduino and Raspberry PI and play with it. You can start making your home/condo 'smarer' by integrating physical stuff to it. Try programming an 'arcade' game to a platform you like (web, iOS, Android, etc). Playing with 3D graphics is always fun, learn about 3D libraries and techniques like ray tracing and try to recreate your real world. If you prefer mathematics, read about Bayesian distributions, and this about how you'd make a better recommendation system to ranking system to a site you're using.

This is quite a difficult question without knowing you. My biggest problem is aways picking out what to do with my non-existent free time :)

Most important -- find something that you really like doing and care about, or you'll abandon it quickly.

Good luck, and enjoy!

[rodw]

> I'm sure you have a small blog you can create FE or BE to

What do "FE" and "BE" mean?

[andrewcooke]

i'm guessing front end and back end?

[marco-fiset]

In my case, I've been scratching my own itches. Find something that annoys you in your daily/weekly life, and try to automate it/make it easier with software. In my case it's been very motivating. For the moment, they are private projects, but maybe someday I'll launch them as actual products.

[talihawk]

You can try www.rhok.org or hack4good.io for some open source projects that are meant to help the community/world, you might find something that interest you and help while doing it :)

If you mention what area interest you (mobile / web / data etc) I might know a couple more projects to recommend

[AtTheLast]

The other day I went to github.com/trending and found some decent repositories to go through. You can filter by programming language with is really cool. Heck, You could build a site that helps people discover open source repositories and projects.

[henriquea]

Have look at Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/

[sideproject]

how about going through

http://sideprojectors.com

(disclaimer - I maintain the site).

There are plenty of side projects that people are either selling or seeking a co-founder for. Would love to have you check it out.