• unagi@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    Yeah don’t let this stop you! If you do the side project for fun and/or learning, just go ahead and build stuff. Don’t look at other projects too soon so you give space to your own creativity. But perhaps compare stuff in a later stage.

    • Atiran@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      This is a great perspective. I have definitely fallen into this meme’s sentiment many times. You have to remind yourself that it doesn’t matter.

    • outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      give space to your own creativity

      This is key. One will inevitably make many different design and UX decisions vs whatever preexisting projects are out there, making one’s project more suited to at least a few contexts than anything preexisting.

      In addition to being plain demotivating, looking at other stuff too early basically encourages one to just make the same decisions as others, becoming much more like just a second implementation of what already exists.

    • abejfehr@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Someday people might look at your project and become demotivated at their own, and the cycle continues

    • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      Yeah I’m at that stage too. I used to have a lot of time for projects but as an adult, I really have to be selective with my time and energy.

    • Zetaphor@zemmy.cc
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      1 year ago

      This is where ChatGPT and Codium.ai has been a godsend for me. Something that would have taken me a few hours to 1+ days to iterate on is now reduced down to anywhere from minutes to an hour. I don’t even always see it all the way through to completion, but just knowing that I can iterate on some version of it so quickly is often motivation enough to get started.

      If you’re paying for the Plus subscription, GPT-4 with Code Interpreter is absolutely OP. Did you know you can hand it a zip file as a way of giving it multiple files at once?

      • magic_lobster_party@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I’ve been using GPT4 actually, and I agree it’s a godsend for lazy people like me. Haven’t been using it lately because all my ideas right now involves fine tuning LLMs, which I can’t financially justify at the moment.

  • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.com
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    1 year ago

    Who cares if it already exists, just make it.

    Also consider the possibility when the other, more popular projects got enshittified. Now the fleeing users have an option to switch to your project. It actually happened on one of my side project. I made it because I want to try building my own version of X. It got ~2000 users, but later down the road, X got sold to a new shitty owner that waste no time to enshittify it, and my side project suddenly grow to 20,000 users overnight.

  • TheCheddarCheese@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    or you realize that the idea fundamentally wouldnt work. i wanted to build a lemmy music recognition bot until i remembered lemmy has no videos lmao

  • nothendev@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    A Minecraft rewrite in Rust with a very specific engine and goals certainly hadn’t been done… right?..

  • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Guess that depends on what your goal is. Are you doing it for fun? Or for money? If it’s the latter it’s all in the marketing.

  • tahoe@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Most times I find that these projects are either old or badly made (often both). If you’re inspired and you feel like you can make them better, then go for it.

    An artist isn’t going to refrain from painting a portrait of a dog if other artists have already painted dog portraits, so why should you?

  • db2@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    I’ve built little things that already have a solution when that other solution either didn’t do it the way I had in mind or did more things than I needed it to. It really depends on how you’re valuing your time and knowledge/experience in the end.

  • Mikurei@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Instead, you can try to extend the existing project with new features, possibly improving your code reading skills and discovering new practices

  • SimplyKnorax@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    A project doesn’t have to be unique as a whole. You can always take an already existing idea and add your own twist to it (new UI, new feature, better optimisation, etc). What’s important is actually doing something instead of being stuck in an infinite loop of brainstorming idea.

    • sociablefish@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      when i created a side project, someone else already did it but they had a flaw in their design, so i created my version to fix the flaw