As of today, I have two things in my personal portfolio.
- An Android app called App Usage Monitor.
- A partially built web application at doodlesforum.appspot.com
The motivation for building each of these applications was to learn: to learn about mobile development in the first case and about building Google App Engine web applications in the second case. Secondary reasons for building each of these apps is that I thought some people will find them amusing/useful and that no-preexisting app provided the same functionality.
As I come closer to finishing up my doodlesforum project, I heard about Jeff Atwood's newest project, Discourse. Discourse is software that will help discussions on the internet, aka forum software. I don't know how popular this software will become, but I am pretty impressed that he chose to tackle this question.
I think choosing the right software project to work on next is difficult. I don't know if I'll ever work on a project that has such simple yet profound goals such as:
- Let's build a good internet search engine (Google)
- Let's build a good Q&A site (Stack overflow)
- ...
- Let's build good forum software (Discourse?)
I think a good way to choose projects is to find the pain, and then build something that solves that pain. I'm not sure what pain I'll look to solve for my next project, but it's something I'll keep in mind.
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