How to choose your next project?

1. Look to your interests

For example, if you’ve played football your whole life, then you may be interested in automating different systems. You could create an app to keep score, build a website for tournament administration, or even use computer vision to gather interesting data about games.

That is only one example, but it’s possible to bring “problems” from basically any walk of life and solve them using programming. If enough people share the same problem, it could even lead to the creation of a startup. 😉

2. Helping out with others’ projects

It’s difficult to come up with ideas yourself, but if you find a project that you already like, you can write to the author and offer your help. Not only can you help with a project, but you also get practical teamwork experience.

If you're hesitant to contribute to someone else’s project, you could find a similar open-source project on GitHub and start modifying and developing it.

3. ChatGPT is your (smart) friend

If you’re running out of ideas, then we mortals have been blessed with such thing as ChatGPT. If you give it a prompt like 'give me programming projects themed X,' it will provide some fairly good suggestions.

Additionally, you could include your current skills in the prompt or specify the skills you’d like to learn while working on the project. You could also ask ChatGPT to outline the core components of the project. However, one should be cautious not to rely on AI to generate the entire project, as it may prevent you from learning anything new yourself.

- Kevin