Yeah don’t let this stop you! If you do the side project for fun and/or learning, just go ahead and build stuff. Don’t look at other projects too soon so you give space to your own creativity. But perhaps compare stuff in a later stage.
This is key. One will inevitably make many different design and UX decisions vs whatever preexisting projects are out there, making one’s project more suited to at least a few contexts than anything preexisting.
In addition to being plain demotivating, looking at other stuff too early basically encourages one to just make the same decisions as others, becoming much more like just a second implementation of what already exists.
Also consider the possibility when the other, more popular projects got enshittified. Now the fleeing users have an option to switch to your project. It actually happened on one of my side project. I made it because I want to try building my own version of X. It got ~2000 users, but later down the road, X got sold to a new shitty owner that waste no time to enshittify it, and my side project suddenly grow to 20,000 users overnight.
Execution is what matters, not ideas. Anyone can half-ass an idea and say “I did it first” but whoever comes along and does it right is who gets remembered.
This is where ChatGPT and Codium.ai has been a godsend for me. Something that would have taken me a few hours to 1+ days to iterate on is now reduced down to anywhere from minutes to an hour. I don’t even always see it all the way through to completion, but just knowing that I can iterate on some version of it so quickly is often motivation enough to get started.
If you’re paying for the Plus subscription, GPT-4 with Code Interpreter is absolutely OP. Did you know you can hand it a zip file as a way of giving it multiple files at once?
I’ve been using GPT4 actually, and I agree it’s a godsend for lazy people like me. Haven’t been using it lately because all my ideas right now involves fine tuning LLMs, which I can’t financially justify at the moment.
A project doesn’t have to be unique as a whole. You can always take an already existing idea and add your own twist to it (new UI, new feature, better optimisation, etc). What’s important is actually doing something instead of being stuck in an infinite loop of brainstorming idea.
I’ve built little things that already have a solution when that other solution either didn’t do it the way I had in mind or did more things than I needed it to. It really depends on how you’re valuing your time and knowledge/experience in the end.
Then you fill the fucking code with print statements because you don’t know to use debug, realize the variable feeds some stupid fucking function that does nothing but has to be there and a few hours later comment out said print statements and just re add the variable.
You know, it occurs to me that doing that with print really isn’t any different than the accepted method of debug logging other than where the output is directed to.
Most times I find that these projects are either old or badly made (often both). If you’re inspired and you feel like you can make them better, then go for it.
An artist isn’t going to refrain from painting a portrait of a dog if other artists have already painted dog portraits, so why should you?
It’s difficult but worth the time if you have it. No other language creates programs with such guarantees for not having common memory bugs and performance like c.
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