This post was originally written for my blog.

I noticed some free-time coming my way as my current project is now completed. Now I'm not that creative to pull ideas out of thin air. Thus a need arrived - where to look for these inspirations.

First - I needed to decide the field I was going to work in - An app, or a front-end landing page maybe - or a full blown platform with scalable back-end.
I decided to build a full blown platform. This was important as my search will gravitate accordingly. I would suggest to choose the field and not the language . Rather build the project in the language which most suits the needs.

Second - Go hunting!

I needed to compile a list of ideas before I can find a diamond among them.

1. I hunted the apps present on my own phone. I got some brilliant ideas I can recombine and some that I would love to re-do.
   I categorized them and my categories were social media, wrapper clients (like Boost for reddit etc.) and services (Note-taking etc).

2. Next I explored public API's and aimed to find something easy to do. Maybe write a client above an already established API.

   • Todd Motto Public APIs Github repo is a great place to start looking - Repo link
   • Abhishek Banthia Public-APIs
   • Security APIs
   • More APIs

   You can also combine different APIs into a common client making it easier for a person to use multiple platforms.

3. Then I went to the buzzword Machine learning and tried finding machine learning models using github.
   Other buzzwords are Artificial intelligence, Deep learning, AR, VR, Blockchain etc.

4. The best place in my opinion I trekked to was Github Trending. You can explore different langauges of your selected field and see what's new. Integrate these github repos ideas with each other - and you have something new!

5. Using Github search led to something interesting - a compiled list of project ideas (tons of it).

6. Spent some time with HackerNews everyday. I found some really interesting tech news and ML model submissions there.

Some stuff I didn't do personally but you can try it out are:

• Find sub-redddit of choosen language and keep an eye on its submission.
• Devrant collabs (Of course- Take ideas with permission)
• Explore the new apps on PlayStore

Project ideas

Here are some of the project ideas that I compiled

• Use security API's to make a platform to scan files for you through different APIs
• Air quality / Water quality API clients
• Client which finds - other github repo like this (not based on topics rather more on context)
• Plugin on some editor to analyze code and offer advice to turn code more functional (Functional programming)
• Analysis of publically available data streams like Twitter to generate a report around a keyword (Like "android" was mentioned this many times, it's usage has come around this century, it's meaning, latest articles on this keyword etc.)
• A HackerNews client
• CamScanner clone
• News app
• Note-taking app with backend and offline sync functionality
• Markdown electron app
• Visualization of finance world
• Use those awesome Art API's to provide a way to search through art
• Rich-text editor plugin or component. Should be plug-and-play type and configurable.