Ideas out of Nothing

Full-stack developers are passionate about making stuff, so am I. It’s hard to count how many hobby projects I started and abandoned over the years.

Building software is easy nowadays — you merge some pre-made stuff (packages, frameworks, or even apps) together, and wrap it in a whole new thing. But it’s getting tough when it comes to finding ideas and inspiration. No one wants to spend time building stuff that no one would ever use. So here go two problems — an idea and its validation.

Last week I noticed a tweet from Adam Wathan that complained about the lack of simple image converters. It might sound ridiculous, but there’s no app for macOS that does that one single action. I mean, there are lots of bulky tools that could convert, resize, optimize, and even apply filters to the images, but I’m talking about a simple, lightweight thing.

So, let’s build it. How to make a desktop app that uses some complex algorithms you have no clue about? Take a ready-to-use solution, an existing tool … an existing app!

There’s plenty of CLI tools developers are obsessed with. While some of them are really supercharged and feature-rich, many also cannot boast their simplicity.

The idea needs validation before it comes to a business. Ok, I got a single potential user, but what’s next?

The main trick is that when you dress up an existing tool, the idea is already validated by the original app’s users. That’s how a dozen of Git clients were born, I believe. That’s how macOS, Linux, and Windows were made. We took things, merge them, and get whole new things. That’s what developers do.

Read the full story in my blog: https://lepikhin.com/posts/3-ideas-out-of-nothing
Get Lens here: https://getlens.me/

I hope you'll enjoy the read!