I regularly find myself short on project ideas to explore in my free time. I’m making an effort here to keep track of project ideas I’ve had or discovered online and am considering pursuing.

Project Ideas

Being a person with restless ADHD, I always need a coding project to work on. This can be challenging when my enthusiasm is short-lived and the web lacks project suggestions for those that aren’t beginners. I created this list to compile my project ideas as they occur to me. These are things that I would enjoy implementing, arranged as well as I can.

Potentially Marketable Projects

Out of all the ideas, I think these projects have the most potential to make it to market and become successful products or services.

Consumer Applications (Apps, etc.)

  1. Build a mobile app that reminds users if they’ve taken their pills today or not
  2. Tenet management system for landlords
  3. Simple chore management site for families, gamified. Created with the Phoenix framework + Elixir
  4. Alternative to Apache NIFI in Elixir taking advantage of it’s fault-tolerance
  5. Animal Breeding software to keep track of animals, genes, expenses, etc.
  6. Resume Screening tool that automatically screens candidates based on search criteria and otherwise.
    • Integration with various job boards to find applicants before they even apply
  7. Dog/Parrot training clicker; one button app
  8. Punkt.ch clone
    1. Application to gamify and promote daily journaling
  9. Feed reminder for animals that are irregularly fed
  10. Customizable Invoice generator
    1. Email to clients, download, convert to any format
  11. Customizable workflow management dashboard
  12. Comic Book Inventory Management System
  13. HR Lead management
  14. Embeddable application that lets you take crypto as payment
  15. Simple Accounting Software for 1099/sole-propreitors
  16. Shopify Inventory Management
  17. Crypto Portfolio Manager; the current solutions suck
    1. Measure coins value
    2. Measure LP positions
    3. Measure vault positions
    4. Measure loans etc.
    5. Measure counter-party risk
  18. Asynchronous Planning Poker Application
  19. Tinder to sort and organize Photos
  20. Small Cap Investor
    1. Tool for monitoring and keeping track of small cap stocks specifically
    2. Thinkfuse clone
  21. Roadtrip Planning Application / Vacation Planner
  22. Simple appointment making application, integrated with calanders
  23. Project Roadmap application
  24. BigCommerce Plugin

    AR/VR Applications

  25. Simple Pomodoro timer for VisionOS.

Micro Applications

  1. A simple Phoenix Liveview website that let’s you create a poll and send it to your friends
  2. Gmail (Chrome Extension) to help organize your inbox automatically
  3. Home investment calculator and simulator
  4. Send yourself (or someone else) an email in the future
  5. Embeddable website chat
  6. AI Enabled email writer/client for writing drafts. I imagine this as a chrome extension
  7. Real Cost Clone.
    1. Input hourly wage, convert website text matching $18.00 to the number of hours you’d have to work
  8. VSCode Extension that suggests SEO edits to html
  9. Chrome extension for quick reporting spam/scam emails directly to the FTC
  10. EZ-Pz QR Code generator c
  11. Discord bot that handles raffles and give-aways (in a provably fair way, something with crypto)
  12. Wish list compiling for weddings / birthdays / etc.
  13. Platform for designing your own subscription boxes
    1. Companies can list their products as available to be used in subscription boxes
    2. Subscription boxes can aggregate those companies products into it’s subscription box
  14. Take crypto donations platform. Take crypto donations, get paid in dollars

Non-software services

  1. Software Development newsletter (very original, I know)
  2. Programming course on Cousera or alternatives
  3. Subscription Box Service of some sort

Machine Learning

  1. LLM trained specifically on the AST representation of a specific programming language.
  2. NSFW Image generation for a small fee

Personal Projects

These are projects that are useful to me personally or offer some simple functionality that I desire on a day to day basis. Alternatively, it could just me something I’m interested in

Directly useful for me

  1. Remote SQL driver server. Spin up the simple web-server and let it handle the querying and sending the results back. For databases without HTTP support
  2. Website that is a decision matrix for which programming language to learn next based on user provided information. Tech: Golang/ HTMX
  3. Personal Finance simulator and decision maker
  4. PQL and SQL wrapper around parquet files with a GUI interface similar to datagrip.
  5. Bitbucket plugin in clojure to add git-semver to PullRequests
  6. VSCode plugin to add Automatic SQL formatting for strings
  7. CLI application to read/parse markdown data and fail a build on grammar mistakes, with configurable proof-reading capabilities. Would be used as a github action for github.io pages/blogs.
  8. Gmail extension that creates a weekly digest from emails you tell it to listen to. Basically combine all newsletters into one newsletter
  9. Modern Terminal multiplexer, with sane defaults. To replace Tmux
  10. Simple command line tool to tell you what versions of OpenGL you support

Interesting

  1. Workflow engine that supports job dependencies, retries and priority
  2. RSS Feed reader that runs as a service and saves the text as blobs in a blob storage mechanism (db?)
  3. Write a dataframe library similar to polars or pandas but for a language that doesn’t have one
  4. Horse Betting (or any other) sports betting with a Machine Learning backend
  5. Trading Model built to trade relatively illiquid markets (OTC stocks, Watches, Wine, etc.)
  6. Pomodoro timer that sends a server-sent event when time is up. Or potentially using websockets?
  7. A terminal based Tamagotchi like creature that you maintain through terminal based means. It should interact with the user in some fashion when healthy or unhealthy
  8. A AWS lambda like service where you can upload elixir functions and set them to run on a timer. They will then get executed on the backend according to your time (basically a cron manager.)
  9. Database that is good at one thing; clustered indexes on time-series data
  10. Transpiler for Python -> Bash

CLI Applications

  1. CLI application called td that takes the input and makes a todo item in the daily obsidian note with the timestamp of when it was made
  2. OpenAPI client generator. Parse a swagger document and generate a client for interacting with that specific API.
  3. Parquet/CSV file combiner and splitter cli tool

Pre-commit Hooks

  1. Linting commit messages
  2. Linting on argocd app-settings to confirm nothing is funny. An interesting technology to use could be Perl 6 or Raku.

Simulations

  1. Evolution simulation game with simple plants and animals (Golang?)
  2. Market Trading Simulator using Agents with simple Neural Networks existing as Coroutines. They interact real-time with a global market data-structure
  3. Agents that use emails to interact with the world (game over SMTP)

Pre-commit Hooks

  1. Git commit message linting and spell checking. Make assertions about how commit messages should look

Exercises in Learning

Projects whose purpose is to expand my knowledge on a particular topic or series of topics. These projects could fit into other categories as well, but for my purposes they are strictly educational.

Functional Programming

  1. Using elixir/F# to build a simple website with as little dependency on JavaScript as possible

Machine Learning

  1. LLM trained specifically on the AST representation of a specific programming language.
  2. Anomaly Detection ML model build on top of Loki logs
  3. Detecting Illicit substances in images (OpenCV)

Programming Languages

  1. Extending a compiler that doesn’t support Tail-Call optimization… by adding tail call optimization.
  2. Create a debugger for a language that currently has terrible tooling.

Projects suggested to me

These are a collection of projects from peers of mine who have suggested an idea to add to this list.

  1. Training a model on a dental X-ray that can detect what type of implant someone has in - Louis DeRienzo, 2024