You can't pull project ideas out of thin air 
Tags: programming, dev, projects
Published: 2018-03-31 08:35:50

---
title: You can't pull project ideas out of thin air 
published: true
description: Pulling project ideas out of thin air is very hard. Here is my journey to finding inspiration for my idea.
tags: #programming,#dev,#projects
---

_This [post](https://www.chaddhag.com/pullProjectIdeas) was originally written for my blog._

I noticed some free-time coming my way as my current project is now completed. Now I'm not that creative to pull ideas out of thin air. Thus a need arrived - where to look for these inspirations.

**First** - I needed to decide the field I was going to work in - An app, or a front-end landing page maybe - or a full blown platform with scalable back-end.
I decided to build a full blown platform. This was important as my search will gravitate accordingly. I would suggest to choose the field and not the language . Rather build the project in the language which most suits the needs.

**Second** - Go hunting!

I needed to compile a list of ideas before I can find a diamond among them.

1. I hunted the apps present on my own phone. I got some brilliant ideas I can recombine and some that I would love to re-do.
I categorized them and my categories were social media, wrapper clients (like Boost for reddit etc.) and services (Note-taking etc).

2. Next I explored public API's and aimed to find something easy to do. Maybe write a client above an already established API.
  * Todd Motto Public APIs Github repo is a great place to start looking - [Repo link](https://github.com/toddmotto/public-apis)
  * [Abhishek Banthia Public-APIs](https://github.com/abhishekbanthia/Public-APIs)
  * [Security APIs](https://github.com/deralexxx/security-apis)
  * [More APIs](https://github.com/TonnyL/Awesome_APIs)

    You can also combine different APIs into a common client making it easier for a person to use multiple platforms.

3. Then I went to the buzzword *Machine learning* and tried finding machine learning models using github.
Other buzzwords are *Artificial intelligence, Deep learning, AR, VR, Blockchain* etc.
4. The best place in my opinion I trekked to was *Github Trending*. You can explore different langauges of your selected field and see what's new. Integrate these github repos ideas with each other - and you have something new!
5. Using Github search led to something interesting - a compiled list of [project ideas](https://gist.github.com/MWins/41c6fec2122dd47fdfaca31924647499) (tons of it).
6. Spent some time with *HackerNews* everyday. I found some really interesting tech news and ML model submissions there.

Some stuff I didn't do personally but you can try it out are:
* Find sub-redddit of choosen language and keep an eye on its submission.
* Devrant [collabs](https://devrant.com/collabs) (Of course- Take ideas with permission)
* Explore the new apps on PlayStore

# Project ideas
Here are some of the project ideas that I compiled
* Use security API's to make a platform to scan files for you through different APIs
* Air quality / Water quality API clients
* Client which finds - other github repo like this (not based on topics rather more on context)
* Plugin on some editor to analyze code and offer advice to turn code more functional (Functional programming)
* Analysis of publically available data streams like Twitter to generate a report around a keyword (Like "android" was mentioned this many times, it's usage has come around this century, it's meaning, latest articles on this keyword etc.)
* A HackerNews client
* CamScanner clone
* News app
* Note-taking app with backend and offline sync functionality
* Markdown electron app
* Visualization of finance world
* Use those awesome Art API's to provide a way to search through art
* Rich-text editor plugin or component. Should be plug-and-play type and configurable.