This is an extremely general question, and it’s pretty much completely opinions only, so bear with me.
An acquaintance and I, who have worked on development projects in the past, are looking for something to dig into together. Here are our potential goals, although we haven’t ironed anything out.
Something fun to work on together, since we’re friends but have very limited time to spend doing much.
Something that will better us as developers
Something that might make money
We’ve worked on developing many ideas in the past, but only ever really worked on one - a text based browser game in the vein of Star Kingdoms or Ogame or the like. We had one developed to a rough pre-alpha state, and then stopped.
So, here are our ideas for new projects:
A text based browser game. We’re familiar with the genre, we’ve done work in this field before, and have a million ideas. However, I can’t see this ending up lucrative, and I really can’t see it being successful - the market is so very niche and dying off.
A task manager. There are far too many of these out there but I’ve never met one that I liked 100%. It’s an area in which I have lots of expertise, but my friend doesn’t. (Use of task managers, experience using a variety of them).
A job/career search site. This field seems to be monopolized by a few big names. It’s probably the most lucrative potentially, and the most useful to other people, but possibly the most boring.
We’re both PHP devs. He’s a bit better at PHP than I am, I’m a bit better with frontend. Neither of us has any experience with Angular or Node to speak of but we’ve considered a MEAN stack for this, or just a PHP site with loads of AJAX. Depends on the project probably.
Anyway… any suggestions for other project types? Any advice on how to spend this nugget of free time we’re trying to cordon off? Any technologies that we should really focus on using this opportunity to learn? I know it’s a vague question, just looking for some brainstorming ideas or advice from other programmers on the most useful languages or scripts or frameworks they use.
My opinion won’t matter much since I never worked w/ friends before but I’ve heard many bad things…like breaking up friendship and etc…
My suggestion is to build it yourself and evaluate. Use your friend to review the tool and if he wants to contribute then go from there. Most importantly, pick a project that you deem as FUN…otherwise…you’ll reach a choke point of boredom and just say 'F*ck it… I’m done". I’ve used Angular before and it should be an excellent choice as MVC framework. If you’re not strong UI person then have a look at ExtJS.
It walks you through creating a simple twitter sort of clone application using Ruby on Rails. Testing, Deployment, Version Control all that good stuff and is kept quite up to date. I cant recommend that book enough.
Rails probably wouldn’t be the greatest choice for a text based game. But the task manager and the job/career site are right up its alley. The book should make it less scary and give you a solid direction skill wise to make anything you want.
Learning a new language, perspective or paradigm in coding will never hurt your skills, I personally find it the quickest way to step up my experience.
Also at the end of that book you will have an application sort of like twitter, maybe a good starting point for some sort of community type application… Following things, posting things, replying to things… Just a thought
Ruby is a fun language to write in, it can be a little tricky to get things up and running for your first project. I’d definitely go through that book @orodio linked to, its real quality. Rails is certainly suitable for building an API based application in, and if it’s your first introduction to ruby and REST, I’d definitely recommend using Rails.
Personally I’d look into something like Node for your text based game, I don’t have enough understanding of what you want to do with your task manager, so unsure there, and a REST based app for your job/career search site.
Also, as an aside to your “most boring” comment, I would say that a lot of devs may not be personally interested in what the application that they are building does, but solving technology challenges is always interesting, no matter the application you are solving it for.
Bit late to the party here, but I wanted to offer my opinion anyway.
I would recommend doing something that is motivating and rewarding, but above all fun.
Of the three options you list, the task manager seems to be the best fit and this would allow you to dig into one of the JavaScript frameworks out there (Angular or Ember for example). It also sounds like you would be scratching your own itch, which is a great way to learn and this in turn will make you better devs. If you get some kind of product out of the door and it proves to be successful, this will increase your profiles and would look good on a résumé. You can always try, but I would imagine that it would be hard to create something that will make a decent amount of money, with very limited time, especially if you are not 101% motivated.
Back to the bit about fun: over the past year or so, I have been building up a collection of links to interesting articles about new technologies and the like, which I intended to read. Unfortunately, I never had the time and the list got longer and longer until I just avoided looking at it. From being a potentially pleasant task, it became a chore. So, earlier this month I took a deep breath and deleted the lot. Although this was hard to do, I found that I could then focus on things which motivated me (not things I felt I should be learning) and I have been considerably more productive and happier since.
TL;DR - Build a task manager, have fun doing so and see where it takes you.
MEAN stack is the way to go, IMO. Many companies are leaving Rails for Node, myself included. But in the end, it’s more about what you find easier to learn and develop with, so try them all, search the forums and have fun!
It would depend on the project. Node devs are hard to come by, so unless you are doing it on your own, some projects may warrant something less intense, like Laravel.
Just come back to this conversation while tidying my bookmarked threads… how did this pan-out, did you and your friend decide on a side-project, or is it something that’s gone on the back-burner for the meantime?
My friend was more interested in the browser game, with a backend of PHP, probably in a framework that we wanted to get more intimately familiar with, Laravel or some such, and with a JS/AJAX heavy frontend. However, we’ve done nothing more than kick ideas around, as we’ve both fortunately/unfortunately had a mess of “real life” issues to deal with since the holiday season or so. I’m not sure if it’ll happen, or when, or what we’ll decide on for certain, but that was the direction we were leaning - improve and expand on skills/tools we already use, and by extension perhaps get a usable product more quickly. Not sure if that’s specifically the correct solution, but maybe there isn’t a correct one, I don’t know.
I’ve still got MEAN and RoR and a few other items on my “I’d like this quite a lot” list, so we’ll see what I can get into this year either way
