I've got a huge movie collection on DVD. Rather then use Plex I made my own website to do the same thing. I have a lot of PDFs of books I want to read, made similar software to allow me to keep my position in my browser
I wanted to study for a HAM license general exam do I made this: http://ham.joshuakatz.me/exam
I've been looking for a thinkpad x220t so I made this go scrape cregslist for me: https://github.com/gravypod/BargeIn
(I live in N. NJ if anyone has one laying around)
There are thousands of examples where I've done this and it's very fun. It improves your abilities and toolings and in general makes your life on the computer much easier.
You don't have to be trendy just be useful to yourself and people will like it.
Perhaps the problem is you're wanting a side-project for the wrong reasons.
This year, my girlfriend and I were using Google Sheets to track our expenses and compete to see who could spend less money. We eventually decided it'd be a way better experience if we had a dedicated app for it, so I worked relentlessly to build one and polish it up until I was pretty proud of it. I "released" it to a couple of online communities where I thought people might be interested, and I gained exactly 1 active user who I don't know in real life.
It's all good, though, because my girlfriend and I use it every day, so that's all that matters to me :D
But yeah, it can be difficult to "scratch an itch" if you feel that nothing needs scratching. If that's the case, I wouldn't really worry about it. If you don't need to build anything, then don't spend time building anything. It's nothing to feel bad about.
CS seems to have this feel around it where it has to be both your job and your passion. Recruiters want to see that you spend all your time outside of work/school programming, which makes it difficult for people like us who have other hobbies they like too. I wonder if it will ever change?
Most successful side projects come from people wanting to express themselves. If you don't have an idea that you want to build at the moment, don't force yourself, just enjoy life and only jump on it when you stumble upon an idea you really want to work on so much that you would even sacrifice your sleep time.
We had gone for a group outing, had million photos, less than 10 people in each photo, so didn't make sense to give the same photos to everyone, so wrote a basic app which would let me tag people and created eachone's folder and copied photo in it.
Starting a side project shouldn't be done by the goal of starting a side project, look around you, is there a manual process which you wish there would be a better way to do? sorting photos was one such way and I wrote an app for it. I did the same for a todo list manager, didn't have internet or any good todo list manager, so I wrote one and learned the Go language and the Vue.JS framework
