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.
give space to your own creativity
This is key. One will inevitably make many different design and UX decisions vs whatever preexisting projects are out there, making one’s project more suited to at least a few contexts than anything preexisting.
In addition to being plain demotivating, looking at other stuff too early basically encourages one to just make the same decisions as others, becoming much more like just a second implementation of what already exists.
Someday people might look at your project and become demotivated at their own, and the cycle continues
be the change you don’t want to see
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
But now you have the opportunity to build it in Rust or Typescript! /s
I really need to learn Rust…
It’s difficult but worth the time if you have it. No other language creates programs with such guarantees for not having common memory bugs and performance like c.
You will get there one day, I believe in you :)
This but unironically
Who cares if it already exists, just make it.
Also consider the possibility when the other, more popular projects got enshittified. Now the fleeing users have an option to switch to your project. It actually happened on one of my side project. I made it because I want to try building my own version of X. It got ~2000 users, but later down the road, X got sold to a new shitty owner that waste no time to enshittify it, and my side project suddenly grow to 20,000 users overnight.
X? Social media? /j
third panel: end up doing it anyway because it’s fun
4th panel, you did a great job but nobody gives a shit
So? You did it because it’s fun, not because you wanted a pat on the back.
There are some projects that are just for you, and others you hope people will get use out of / enjoy
I came up with idea where instead of typing stuff like “5/6” “6*9” into the terminal, you could have gui interface.
A Minecraft rewrite in Rust with a very specific engine and goals certainly hadn’t been done… right?..
I’ve built little things that already have a solution when that other solution either didn’t do it the way I had in mind or did more things than I needed it to. It really depends on how you’re valuing your time and knowledge/experience in the end.
Sometimes starting from someone else’s code and stripping only to the functions you need is fun!
