I would like to know what your hoppy coding project are. It doesn’t really have to serve a purpose, but what are you coding on in your free time that just is fun to you and you enjoy working on?
As a background: I am an experienced programmer and do earn my money with it. In my free time I always enjoyed trying out new stuff related to technology, learn new things and improve my skills by doing so. But lately I recognise that I just have no clue what I should do or what a fun toy project I could work on. I really have no ideas. My head just feels completely empty whenever I open my IDE.
So please, tell me what you are coding on for fun.
I read about this hobby project yesterday and thought it was very inspiring. This guy wrote a scraper that compares the prices of groceries and it made a big political splash too. https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071396799790275
Personally, I also wanted to try some new tech, and created my first android app for my daughter to practice her basic math operations many years ago.
Another option for you would be to find a FOSS project you like and contribute there (fediverse? Hint, hint).
Yea doing some FOSS contributions definitely was something I always was considering. But then as soon as I was looking for the right project things started to get complicated again. And even if you find a cool project you look into the issue list and imposter-syndrome starts kicking in.
FOSS accounting app. There’s like 2 out there that I can find, and I hate them both.
My next project is going to be a terminal tool that takes lat-lon coordinates and a date, and converts both ways between angle of the sun relative to the horizon and time. I wrote a python script a while ago to get times for golden hour, twilight, etc., but I don’t like how slow it is, and I want to make more composable terminal tools that people can pipe together.
Currently, I am writing a Fluid Sim in C++ . I am mostly following the repo by Doyub Kim and the book by him called Fluid Engine Development.
Something I’ve been wanting to work on is a TUI wizard for configuring software.
The thought is most Linux server program use various config files, and in order to configure them correctly it generally takes a few minutes to a few hours to read through their documentation. But a lot of the configuration boils down to passwords/keys, file paths, network locations, a few different booleans, etc.
So the general idea is, for a program, the developer or the community can provide a config file telling the TUI wizard what arguments the config file needs, and this one program can walk the end user through setup and generates the config files. This would reduce the amount of time hunting through documentation and reduce bugs due to typos or invalid choices.
It could go a step further and auto generate keys or passwords if needed, validate entries (ie if the config needs an IP it could make sure it’s valid, etc)
