Ask HN: Deciding which project idea to pursue?

1 points by belltyler 11 years ago | 1 comment

Hello, friends. I've built a few small projects in my time and as a PhD student I enjoy working on smaller projects outside of my research to keep my skills honed and to keep my exposure to other programming languages, ideas, etc. up. I currently have a list of project ideas I'd like to start; I'd like to choose one that is not only fun to work on but one that may have the potential to turn into something a little longer lasting.

So I'm curious, what heuristic would you use to go about ranking a list of project ideas in terms of what to spend my time and effort on? Have you been in a similar situation? What decisions did you make and what were their results? I appreciate anyone's help / feedback.

Tyler Bell

Jun8 11 years ago |

If the projects are amenable to that, create a landing page and have people sign up to be notified of project updates. This is an easy way to gauge customer interest.

From a personal perspective I would maximize the learning experience, e.g. choose one that you can implement with a new language/framework/stack/etc.