I maintain a list of "student project ideas" here: https://github.com/OmarShehata/works-in-progress/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Astudent-project
When I was a student I had a lot of time & energy, but didn't know what I could work on that would be useful or interesting.
When I went into the industry, I started seeing tons of opportunities for ways to contribute to society, things that no one was doing, and would be easy, but I didn't have time to do them.
This list is my attempt to try and bridge this gap. It's a collection of ideas that I think should exist and would be genuinely useful, but I don't have the time/energy to pursue myself.
- the work is genuinely useful & novel, not a toy example
- minimal MVP is sufficient to provide value
- ideally even the "grunt work" provides teaching value (like learning how to deploy a web app / how to setup a database etc)
- niche
- there are a lot of things that would be useful but no one is doing them, because it's too niche/specific
- but that is often a really good way to make your first useful contribution to society
- my most successful piece of writing ever was "beginner's guide to graphics shaders" and it was because I couldn't find anything online explaining what I needed, so I wrote it
- anything you try to google, and can't find a straightforward answer. You can research it & your own explanation in your own words, and that will be more valuable than whatever any expert can write
Examples:
- Jared Scarr's deck.gl open source contribution https://dev.to/jaredscarr/my-first-open-source-contribution-3j07
- Visualizing Lyft's self driving car sensor data https://blog.codeday.org/what-its-like-to-run-a-virtual-internship-with-codeday-labs