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Ask HN: How to find a creative idea for new project?

3 points by nsrediron ↗ HN
I am third year CS student but I can say that I start programming one year ago. Before that I was coding only for my homworks. I started coding with my friend in a project. But we are seperated and I will not continue to developing that project. I learnt about web frameworks thanks to this project. Now I want to start a new project but I can not find any idea for what to do. I think I am not only person in this situation. Can you give me advice?

4 comments

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netule
If you can't think of a new project to work on right now, consider contributing to an open source project that needs help. Simply getting started on something will usually get your creativity flowing and ideas will come.
nsrediron
I am thinking to contribute to open source project for a long time but I can not find courage to do that because contribute to open source project is look like very difficult to me, I can start to read and understand the toy projects but I can not find the way for understanding and contributing big projects like mozilla firefox or pyton.
orionblastar
Yeah I can. Find a problem that has not yet had a software solution for it yet. For example the people that made medical software systems that turns patent and medical records electronic and do electronic refills over the Internet, etc, made a lot of money. But that has been solved.

If you can't find a problem that has not yet been solved, you might not be looking hard enough or in the right areas.

You also can write an alternative to an existing software program but make it for the web or in a mobile app, etc.

Start out simple like use data from the baseball website to calculate baseball stats, and show you can customize it for a Little League or armature team.

jdavis703
The most important thing to remember: you're not a programmer, you're a creator. It would be like a carpenter thinking of themselves as a wood cutter. Instead a carpenter will realize a need for something specific and make it. So my question for you, what do you need? Figure it out, sketch out the UI, data structure etc in a notebook, figure out what tech you need to build, and then start coding.