How To Come Up With Project Ideas
February 7, 2025
There's no better feeling than starting a brand new project
Whether you're bored or need to fill up space on your resume, here's how to come up with project ideas.
### Pay Close Attention
Pay attention to problems or annoyances that you have encountered in your life. Whether they're big or small. When I was getting annoyed buying bus tickets, I built [GetMeHome](https://ronaldjabouinjr.com/getmehome.html). When I wanted to find the best classes and professors, I built [ProfessorPeek](https://ronaldjabouinjr.com/professorpeek.html). I've also built other small scripts and tools like the [python script to automate publishing](https://github.com/ronjj/ronjj.github.io/blob/main/new_post.py) this blog. If you enjoy using a product but, there's one small thing that annoys you or that you want to change, think of how a Chrome extension, web app, or scrip.
### Open Up Your Ears
Listen to what friends, family, and strangers complain about. Does a piece of software suck and hasn't been improved in years? Does someone wish a specific app existed? Are there a bunch of people +1ing an idea on Twitter? Ask what their looking for and go build it, those can be your first customers.
### Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal
As I was browsing on Twitter, I came across this project. A book recommendation site powered by Claude and Goodreads. I thought the idea was cool and that the website was well executed. A day later, I had the idea of doing a similar site but, for movies. Around this time, Deepseek was blowing up so I made a Deepseek [powered movie recommender](https://x.com/ronaldjabouin/status/1883673381259850237)
The project asked Deepseek for movie recommendations and then for each recommendation, I get the poster and other information about the movies from RottenTomatoes. I spun the project up in a few hours with [Cursor](https://ronaldjabouinjr.com/blog/iterating-fast-with-ai.html) and it was a good experience.
### Boredom
Over time, during moments where my brain is not active, I often come up with new ideas for projects. I unironically get a ton of ideas in the shower. I also find that I get ideas when I let myself naturally take a break from devices and just wander for a few minutes throughout the day.
When I get these ideas, I write them down in a note on my phone. I put some effort into initially fleshing the idea out. Sometimes I have so much energy and enthusiasm that I just start working on the project. Most times, I let the ideas sit in the note for future use.
I find a lot of value in keeping projects in my notes. When I'm looking for something to work on, I go through previous ideas I had and I find that:
- Some ideas were bad but, now with a fresh point of view, I can come up with new ways to improve the idea
- Ideas that I thought would be hard or impossible in the past seem doable since my skills improved or I find a package on GitHub that will help tackle a hard part.
### Gen AI
Come up with a list of five topics, people, or ideas you're interested in. Then ask you're favorite LLM for interesting project ideas in each domain and for a few ideas that combine the ideas. I'm not the biggest fan of this idea since it can lead to projects that have been done before but, it's still a way to get some new ideas.
### Making Something Around Current Events
On X a few weeks back, I saw a post about a [chatbot for the JFK files](https://www.chatwithjfkfiles.com/)which had recently been declassified. The post did pretty well and a similar project would be a chatbot for the MLK files when they get released. Or maybe a web crawler that goes through government sites and detects pages that were removed because of DOGE. News and current events can prevent so many opportunities for projects.
### Other Recommendations
Depending on what you're building and what the goal of the project is, feel free to find other resources that help speed up development time. For example, when doing authentication with Firebase, I referenced the YouTube videos and example Github code to get me started and tweaked it to my needs.
If you're using languages like Swift, Python, or Javascript, there are many packages which can accelerate your development and tackle some major areas. To find these packages, I often type what I'm looking for and then the word Github or pip at the end. So I would search, 'fuzzy word search python pip' or 'customizable date time picker swiftui github'
### Why Build Projects?
From my personal experience, most of my learning in software engineering has come from working on projects. School teaches me information but, I've learned far more researching, writing, and debugging my project code than I did from any class at school.