I’m a sucker for frameworks. Not UI frameworks, decision frameworks. Guidelines, north stars, decision trees… you name it–and the simpler, the better.
When I encounter a good one it gets stuck in my head and becomes a part of my little repertoire, like a Pokémon card.
One that I think about often is:
“The best projects are ones where you’d be happy if you found out that somebody had already done it.”
Back when I encountered it–at a Mozilla all-hands party in 2015–it seemed like a more sophisticated version of “scratch your own itch.”
But today, when a coding agent can help me knock-out the sorts of scratch projects that would usually be abandoned after a barebones prototype it’s taken on a new meaning.
Thanks to coding assistants, the payoff from doodling around to learn a new framework is lower than ever.
At the same time, knowing what to work on seems like it might be more valuable than ever.
For hobby projects in particular, this is not necessarily something economically productive or something technically impressive.
Just something that does a thing that’s worth doing. To the point that you’re happy that it exists, even if you didn’t do it yourself.
Because finding things like that is probably a muscle that you can train, just like anything else.