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I'm looking to start freelancing as a full-stack web developer, but before going out to find leads I want to get to know a particular tech stack very well. On the front-end side of things, I hear Angular is in very high demand, and React is also worth looking into. However, I'm more conflicted over choice of back-end tech. It seems like there's plenty of demand for node.js skills, but at the same time I know that lots of node.js devs are moving to Go because of node's debugging/performance shortcomings. And is there any demand for Go freelancers? The job market for Go seems much smaller.

Should I learn both as part of my freelance offerings?

As far as other back-end options go, I could maybe learn some Rails or some PHP CMS, but I'd much rather focus on JavaScript. I've done some Android/mobile work before and it isn't that interesting to me for now, even if there's money in it.

I work on boring enterprise software for my day job, and in my free time I try really hard to come up with project ideas that are manageable, completable, inspiring, and entertaining if not useful. But no matter how hard I try, I always end up brainstorming a bunch of ideas, then having to toss them out because of infeasibility, or because the idea already exists in some form and thus wouldn't be interesting to make, or because the idea flat out isn't interesting enough to work on.

Here are some examples of my ideas and justifications for tossing them out:

* Something for managing my bookmarks - nah, Chrome's built-in Bookmark Manager is fine for my purposes

* Trello allows people to make lists of lists. What other data structure could I draw from as inspiration for a web app? - nah, can't think of anything

* Make some software that makes chiptunes - nah, this exists already, and all the Michael Jackson chiptunes I want to make already exist (heh)

* Make a tiny dog food firing catapult - maybe, but I'd have to spend some time reading about Arduino or something

* Make an app that visualizes acne outbreaks over time - maybe, but the result isn't worth the effort. I don't want to look at my face anyway.

* Do some OCR - sounds boring

* Make a better DataTables - don't need it

* Write a GLSL parser and evaluate things in JavaScript for debugging purposes - would be cool, but don't really need it

* Make a web app to send yourself an email in the future - Google Calendar does this

* Write a program to control your laptop's fan speed - sounds boring

* What's this React nonsense - ehhh don't care, won't need it if I'm not making a single page app

And there's always game projects and procedural generation-ish stuff and graphics, but that's kinda it's own category of project and doesn't fit my criteria of being something useful.

Does anyone else have this problem? How do you go about getting ideas for projects? Please discuss.

I'm a CS major in my third year. I'm familiar with Python, C++, C, and JavaScript, though I don't have much of a GitHub to show for it. I'm open to and capable of picking up new languages. Since I normally live in NYC and since NYC is a tech hub, I figure I should look for a software development internship in NYC.

But I'm kinda lost as to how I should go about looking for an internship. So I have two big questions:

1. What are the general developer job "buckets" in NYC? (Startup, big company, Rails shop, Google, contracting?)

2. I don't know what kind of development I want to do. Which should I focus on applying to?

If I had a well-defined goal (say, I want to work with Python at so-and-so), I could put all my time and energy toward building something with a particular language, to demonstrate that I'm qualified for a job. However, I don't know what's out there and I don't know what I want to work on. What do you think? I'd be very grateful for some advice.

I'm in the third year of my undergrad CS degree, and it's only recently occurred to me that I should study abroad while I have the opportunity. I'm a native English speaker and I understand 90% of Mandarin Chinese conversations, though my Chinese speaking skills have withered away. I'm open to learning an entirely new language. Where do you think I should go?