I am professionally a software developer for 8 years and I simply don’t have ideas for personal projects (Can’t find any problem that I can fix with programming). At times I feel like that’s natural and I shouldn’t worry about it. But on the other hand, I do like to imagine having something personal that I can work on so that even if some days on my main job are not satisfying, I can always work on my hobby project and find that missing satisfaction.
End goal here is obviously to get better sleep as sometimes my mind feels dissatisfied with the day’s work.
Funnily, I day-dream about the idea of already having done the boring parts (simply manifesting a project that already exists) of some personal project and only solving exciting problems in relation to adding a new feature or exciting aspects.
This creates a problem as I hate staring at a blank file not knowing what to write.
If you want to build stuff but are struggling to motivate yourself, take a walk or go exercise and stop thinking about it for a bit. Sometimes that helps me. I’m in the same boat. I tend to work on a lot of things but I have a treasure trove of 10%-50% completed projects.
Lately, I’ve used ChatGPT 3.5 to help me figure out ideas or work through places I’m stuck.
I’ve gone to 4 conferences in the past 6 months. Most of the open source devs there that made big waves in the community are actually doing their jobs and their company open sourced their work. React, by way of example, is a Meta project that was open sourced.
So, sometimes, the intimidating projects have someone working full-time on them. So don’t feel like you should try to accomplish that.
As other people said, if you end up not being interested in doing development in your free time, don’t worry about it. It’s normal and fine to just go home and enjoy your life.