Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

What tasks do you do manually in your life/job that is boring? Automate it wherever possible.

Help users of nonprofits understand them better - watsi, Kiva etc share data that can be visualized in a variety of ways.

Teach (blog, video etc) - this is especially effective in topics you already know, but have gaps. Teaching forces you to clear those gaps.

Do exercises from project Euler, Rosetta etc

I am putting together a crm and data extractor with nomad/consul/fabio. I feel there is a lack of good content on how to build cloud solutions with proper security. Feel free to reach out.

I'm currently working on a progressive web application for support workers in care homes.

I've seen through first hand experience how much paperwork there is in this setting (daily outcome charts, medicine administration records, abnormal behaviour records, dietary and fluid intake, etc) and how many clerical errors there are. I've also seen first hand the key-document-dependency there can be around service user files, communication notification booklets for staff, etc, where changes often happen synchronously and are forgotten because the document isn't available in the moment.

I've spent the last 4 months or so taking a sabbatical from working as a software engineer to work for £9.00/hour at a support home for people with mental and physical disabilities (think Down's syndrome or people who are unable to live in an independent setting). As a result I now know an awful lot about this setting, the people who work in this industry, the minimum feature set I would need and the legislative landscape these companies operate in.

The best way to find a profitable side project is to become familiar with a none-technical discipline which is direly in need of modernisation. If you don't want to take time out of work, then choose an industry (it could be tree felling, red-brick manufacturing, shale oil extraction or solar panel installation) and figure out what the problems are plaguing the companies, staff or end customers.

There are so many $1,000,000,000 companies out there just waiting to be founded in areas which are considered unsexy and don't involve yet-another-to-do-list application. Find one company, with one problem, fix the problem, there's your profitable side gig.

I would probably get downvoted for this..

It's very rare to find those "scratch your own itch problems", the solution to that itch is most likely a google search away.

Pick a good product that you use and clone it. Keep an open mind because you can never copy the entire business since there is only so much you can see. Atleast you get some direction to start and you know that you are not trapped in building something people don't want.

Since you mentioned making your skillset strong(technical?), either way you win by just starting something.

Excellent advice.

You can even go further and you'll notice that the vast number of VC backed companies are just focused snippets of Microsoft Office Apps.