Ask HN: What are some real problems people can solve with coding projects?

8 points by kaamkiya 1 year ago | 5 comments

I see a lot of project ideas, and I see a lot of people shoot them down because no one would use them.

I recently made a project called gg[0], and it's a collection of TUI video games. It's really just a toy; it doesn't solve a problem.

I'm curious, what problems do you have that could potentially be solved by developers?

[0]: https://github.com/Kaamkiya/gg

P.S. This is my first HN post. Feel free to give me feedback on it :)

cssanchez 1 year ago |

Game wise- a Scrabble that allows custom dictionaries made by the community to allow bilinguals to shine and use the findings for linguistics / sociology research (words removed vs words added, trends, measure new language acquisition from influencers, etc.).

Been a pet project idea of mine since the pandemic but never got around to it. I saw the new Rails framework is out and thought of starting this idea to learn Ruby.

austin-cheney 1 year ago |

The iOS as a software platform is draconian and intentionally cripple to encourage use of the App Store and iTunes Store. I wrote a node app to build media players with media playlists in the browser. That solved a problem I had and I am happy with the result.

I am currently writing home server management as a node app. It already provides support for many simultaneous http/ws servers with built in proxy and certificate support managed though a web based dashboard with real time status. I am also adding a similar management feature for docker containers via docker compose. I will look for other services and management features to add when docker support is written.

nicbou 1 year ago |

I write a lot of software to help people deal with German bureaucracy: letter generators, form fillers, appointment finders, tax calculators etc.

It saves people thousands of hours a year.

sandwichsphinx 1 year ago |

> what problems do you have that could potentially be solved by developers?

an offline Grammarly alternative, ideally as a progressive web app that I could add to my home screen without needing to install anything from the App Store. I find the built-in spell check on my iPhone underwhelming, so I’ve disabled autocorrect and predictive text.

kaamkiya 1 year ago | |

Interesting, certainly something I had never thought about. I don't think this is even slightly feasible with my pretty low level of NLP and text analysis, but intriguing nonetheless. Thanks.