I am professionally a software developer for 8 years and I simply don't have ideas for personal projects (Can't find any problem that I can fix with programming). At times I feel like that's natural and I shouldn't worry about it. But on the other hand, I do like to imagine having something personal that I can work on so that even if some days on my main job are not satisfying, I can always work on my hobby project and find that missing satisfaction.
End goal here is obviously to get better sleep as sometimes my mind feels dissatisfied with the day's work.
Funnily, I day-dream about the idea of already having done the boring parts (simply manifesting a project that already exists) of some personal project and only solving exciting problems in relation to adding a new feature or exciting aspects.
This creates a problem as I hate staring at a blank file not knowing what to write.
I should probably say that I’m more of a product manager these days so I don’t think I feel quite the pressure you feel to have an impressive git backlog but at one point I did feel that way
I’ll get asked by fresh college grads all the time what I’m working on at home and It’ll take me a second to realize what they’re talking about bc I haven’t worked on a real non-work related project at home in years
If anything I’ll get new devs who I’ll invite to lunch and they’ll be nervous so I try to break the ice by asking what have they been up to or what their hobbies are. They’ll start speed running through their list of pretty obviously pointless github projects that remind me of the fluff ones I did when I first started. It’s adorable
The only personal projects that ever get my attention are the ones that the person describing them is obviously passionate about. You’ll see them grinning ear to ear when telling you how many hours it took to fix a bug.
This is a very ranty way of saying that you shouldn’t stress about projects at home. I was told early on that social skills carry you further than technical skills which is probably bullshit but I was never going to be an amazing coder so let me have this one