Ask HN: How do you come up with hobby projects?

I don't think there is a method to it : as a developer you should see a lot of opportunities to automate things in your daily life. If not you probably need some hobbies outside the dev world.

I started coding about 10 years ago because I wanted to make a better bot for World Of Warcraft than what was available. Literally if it wasn't for WOW and an obnoxious coder that wouldn't share his bot code I wouldn't be a developer today !

Among more recent projects, I made a "green" script to encode videos at night while electricity is cheaper, a tool to extract, rename and classify rared / ziped nested ebooks (obtained from dubious sources ;-), another tool to analyze and optimize my chances at winning on football (soccer) bets (let me say it didn't work very well).

I talk to people. Pretty much every side project I've ever done has come from a conversation about something that someone finds annoying, or an idea that they think is brilliant, or that I think is brilliant. For me, the key to coming up with a project I won't abandon easily is to have other people involved pushing me to work on it.

I think it's ok. I've started, stopped, finished, paused, abandoned a plenty of side projects over the years. But I see them as more of a learning exercise and I suppose I learned much of my current skill set from these projects.

Having said that, getting the project done to a level where you can show other people is a good objective.

[shameless plug] - I run a site called sideprojectors (http://sideprojectors.com). Take a look at all those side projects people started and maybe it might inspire you to find something that you'll like!

I'm much the same, a lot of the time I find it hard to do things like Project Euler or redoing work in a new language because it's not interesting to me.

I have found that watching videos from things like GDC/TED talks about particular software techniques has given me motivation to try and copy them. Yeah, I'm not pushing the boundaries of human knowledge or making a killer app but it's a new piece of technology or technique that I've never done before.

Perhaps look to implement something that you haven't done before in a way you haven't done before. Personally, my current project is a Fiber based raytracer. Having never done either before, it's an interesting problem to solve when you don't look at anything but documentation on MSDN for functions.

Would say general brain storming and inquisitiveness, i.e. how does this actually work and can I improve on it.

As an example of this thinking, I looked at ghostery a while back and thought it could be cool to work out what I would have leaked and to which websites. "Would have been tracked" was born, though still got to get around to coding, feel free to take it you want.

As a few other high level project suggestions; cloning programs for different languages, play around with electronics (there's years there) or pick a few open source projects to contribute to.