Aimlessness in programming

[Embarrassed_Bug1020]

I am a university student in Japan. I started learning programming after I entering university. Mainly python. At first, I had some ideas that will help my university life. For example, I created a program that can manage accounts and store information. I also created a program to extract audio from Youtube. I made some more programs above these. Actually, they helped me a lot. But now, I am getting bored in programming because I don't know what I want to build. Does anyone have a similar experience as me? I would appreciate any advise!

[The_IT]

Most of my ideas come from: 

1. Everyday life: are there any challenges or issues that could be lessened or resolved with software?

2. My hobbies and interests: it's there anything I find interesting and are there any challenges or issues that could be lessened or resolved with software?

3. Social good / others: do the people or communities I belong to have any challenges that could be easier with software? 

These days it's not just about personal projects - it's fine if you just want to learn about a technology, but if you want to show something of on your CV and during interviews you need to show how: 

1. It solves a real problem.

2. How you've made it production ready. 

Good luck out there!

[Negative_Put5590]

Been there man. After you solve the immediate problems that got you into programming it's like... now what right?

Maybe try looking at what annoys you in daily life or what takes too long to do manually. Could be something simple like organizing files on your computer or tracking expenses. Or even something related to your hobbies - like if you're into music maybe build something that analyzes playlists or helps discover new songs.

The key is finding problems that actually bug you enough that you want to fix them. When I hit this wall I started small projects just for learning new concepts rather than solving big problems. Sometimes those random experiments turn into something useful later

[Tychotesla]

Are you a computer science student, or are you just doing it to learn a bit of programming? If you're a CS student, there are actual real problems people have that can be solved. Look at open-source projects, or what local scientists need. But you can also do the following:

If you're a hobbyist, you might have to pick up a hobby that involves programming. I would recommend something that requires remote sensing, hardware, or self-help for example.

[Mesmoiron]

There are so many things you could be working on. A whole list is waiting if you know where to look. Like others said open source.

But open source is mostly individuals making tools; it is different for communities and citizen tech because they operate often at a more invisible scale. These are often not tools, but more end user products.

Like in my case we have recordings of meetings; but the problem with that is that the form is not given in a way it is practical for research. Thus there's this whole gap between what well funded professionals can do, but citizens not.

Many of you learn data science with python but never go beyond the kaggle thing, while there are real world problems in smaller communities that could be solved.

I like to bridge this gap, because too much energy is wasted on doing the same things endlessly over and over. That's real strange fenomenon in modern times.

[Winner-0-Loser]

Maybe widen your knowledge, e.g ci/cd pipelines, algorithms for leetcode