The one that keeps floating to the top.
Ask HN: How do you determine which project you should work on?
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you determine which project you should work on?
#121. Do I find it interesting? If it woke me up from my sleep or prevents me from sleeping, because I am so interested in working on it - it's time to work on that idea. 2. If not that extreme - is it worth losing X months of work on my current project. When I set code aside, I can rarely every just jump back into it. I tend to rm -r and start all over. So, is this new idea worth those 6 months I spent on my current pr…
Instead of a backpack, I use a "uservoice" page for projects that are interesting but I'm not going to do them. Then others can add comments, add ideas, implement the ideas, ...
Similar to Tantek's reasoning for wikis, I like sharing the ideas that I'm not going to implement any time soon
Re: Ask HN: How do you determine which project you should work on?
#13I came up with this, but I never use it:
Through the day, I have a fluctuating "importance threshold". During free time the threshold is very low; during work time it's high. At any given time I do the most fun thing that's above the threshold.
Re: Ask HN: How do you determine which project you should work on?
#14First make sure your enthusiasm for an idea is not resulting from hidden assumptions you have made and not realized. Examine all your assumptions.
Also try to avoid falling prey to any cognitive biases. There is a list of them at wikipedia that is probably worth acquainting yourself with. Perhaps you might favor one idea over an other just because you have been thinking about it more recently. This would be related to the Recency Effect - increased saliance and recall of recent stimuli. Thus you will weight the benefits (and drawbacks) of recent ideas more than the benefits (or drawbacks) of past ideas.
One way around this might be to rate your ideas at multiple times after rethinking various past ideas fully.
Re: Ask HN: How do you determine which project you should work on?
#15The one that keeps floating to the top.
I can't agree with this enough. Spend a little time on your candidate projects and the right one will emerge.
Re: Ask HN: How do you determine which project you should work on?
#16When I'm presented with a project (by myself or someone else), my thought flow is usually like this: 1, Is this project interesting to me? I usually trust my gut on this one and what I'm interested on is temporally-variant. I can only apply my self 100% to things I find an interest in. 2, What is the market viability of this project? I do a bit googling around to see if there are any existing implementations of this…
I've been thinking about starting a side project as a learning experience. So what are the ideas and knowledge that you have found most helpful in your current projects? I think having goals about what I wanted to learn would be more beneficial than just doing something, so I'm wondering what all of you want to learn in your businesses/startups.
>>> what are the ideas and knowledge that you have found most helpful in your current projects This is kind of a broad question.
For ideas, I usually look at the usual sources for inspiration such as my favorite applications. One of my favorite things to do is to read academic journals and try to implement some of the algorithms in a way that can be used by consumers.
>>> what I wanted to learn would be more beneficial than just doing something Well, to me this is a trade off.
If I just want to "learn things", I'd probably spend all my time in MATLAB experimenting with interesting code snippets that no one else in the world will see or use. ( I would also apply to grad school... something which I'm trying to avoid at this point ).
On the other end of the spectrum, I don't want to be one of those "web developers" who spends all their time writing the same "to-do-list" or "my own blog system" in some cool new language.
In the end, I think there needs to be a balance of challenge and practicality of the projects which I work on. It has to be technically challenging enough to keep me interested and yet it has to have some practical value so that at the end of the day, I have something to show for it. =)
Re: Ask HN: How do you determine which project you should work on?
#17When I'm presented with a project (by myself or someone else), my thought flow is usually like this: 1, Is this project interesting to me? I usually trust my gut on this one and what I'm interested on is temporally-variant. I can only apply my self 100% to things I find an interest in. 2, What is the market viability of this project? I do a bit googling around to see if there are any existing implementations of this…
On your point 2, the one thing that I would add is to:
1. Try out the existing implementation (a little gap analysis with your idea)
2. Even though analysis from (1) above does not come out with much pros, the project might still be a viable one, depending on the effort needed
Re: Ask HN: How do you determine which project you should work on?
#181. Do I find it interesting? If it woke me up from my sleep or prevents me from sleeping, because I am so interested in working on it - it's time to work on that idea. 2. If not that extreme - is it worth losing X months of work on my current project. When I set code aside, I can rarely every just jump back into it. I tend to rm -r and start all over. So, is this new idea worth those 6 months I spent on my current pr…
Instead of a backpack, I use a "uservoice" page for projects that are interesting but I'm not going to do them. Then others can add comments, add ideas, implement the ideas, ... Similar to Tantek's reasoning for wikis, I like sharing the ideas that I'm not going to implement any time soon
That's a really good idea - I may have to look into doing that.
I don't place ideas in Backpack to keep them in the "walled garden" - it's just the most web-accessible, easy to use area I have for information of that nature (I keep losing sticky notes).
Re: Ask HN: How do you determine which project you should work on?
#19I don't know how many of you will read this, but i thought of posting this new finding that has helped me.
I read Joel's functional spec article some time ago and decided to give it a go. I started writing functional specs for three ideas i was thinking of working on (but obviously i don't have the time to work on all three).
I had a terrible time writing the spec for one idea,one idea was right in the middle between and there was the one i was truly passionate about(not obvious at first sight though).Writing these functional specs helped me find which of these possible projects was the most interesting and promising.
Hope one of you finds this useful.
Here's the link to Joel's article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html