u/05ck20

I want to start some kind of educational project to level up my skills, but I keep running into the same wall: I have no idea what to build.

Whenever I go fishing on the internet for project ideas, I only ever find two extremes:

- Too easy: todo apps, calculators, weather apps. Stuff I could finish in an afternoon and learn almost nothing new from.

- Too complex: niche projects that use specific technologies I don't know about at all.

There's rarely anything in between, and even when there is, it's usually some generic tutorial project that I'll build once, stare at, and then archive forever.

What I actually want is a project that:

- Pushes me to learn something new (not just a rehash of stuff I already know)

- Is scoped small enough that I can realistically finish it

- Is actually useful to me afterward, like a tool I'll keep opening, not a dead repo

Basically, I don't just want practice reps. I want to build something that solves a real, small annoyance in my own life or workflow, so the motivation to finish it (and keep improving it) is built in.

So how do you all find projects like this?

So I finally decided to start commenting on Reddit, but I have this problem: there's always someone who comments faster and more precisely than I can. For example, I tried answering a post asking about karma and account-age restrictions on some subreddits. The post had been up for 8 minutes when I started writing my comment. By the time I posted it, I saw that someone had answered 3 minutes earlier with more detail and better formatting. This makes me feel like my comment is useless, since someone with more experience answered first. How can I keep up then?