Finding a good side project
Hey folks, need some advice on a good side project idea, not sure if this has been answered before!
I’ve been trying to figure out a good side project to do, one that has impact and can get users as well as allow me to showcase my skills. I want to do one that involves the use of real time streaming technologies like messenger queues/kafka which are commonly sought after in the backend SWEs roles that I’m seeing. Also hope that this could me with some system design prep (eg event driven architecture etc).
I have some basic experience of real time technologies in my day job, but i feel this is insufficient as much of the heavy lifting is done by the data engineers in my team (so I basically don’t get sufficient opportunity to work on it).
I primarily develop web apps, so have no experience in mobile development.
Any ideas or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
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Discussion
(4 comments)- 4a month agoStaff SWE @ YouTube, Engineering Mentor, SWE Guru
I had one I was dabbling with temporarily until I got busy, but maybe you can build it out.
Problem: short video content users (on instagram/tiktok/youtube) receive tons of restaurant recommendations from creators. They either have to disrupt their browsing experience (and manually add the place to some Google Maps list); or save within app and forget about it when you actually need it (Sunday night dinner plans?).
Solution: When seeing a reel/short/tiktok that recommends a restaurant by a creator, you can share the reel/link to an app X. The X app will automatically parse the video, extract restaurant name, retrieve metadata (like price, timings, ratings etc.) from google maps API, and present to users of this app in a few different formats: map view, list view, with filters like ratings, distance etc.
Challenge: the short form videos do not clearly tag restaurants in a well-structured format. Sometimes it's voiced over, sometimes it's in caption, sometimes as a text embedded in the video. Can you use LLMs? 😉 Extract all "text" from the video, feed into an LLM, and that should be able to give you restaurant name.
Technologies needed: react JS, Android/iOS app development, queues for video processing, databases for storing/serving content, LLMs (fine tuning, prompting etc.), Maps API integration, OCR, video processing.
I'd be happy to consult if you need inputs -- this is certainly a 3+ month project to build out MVP (if you work full-time on it).
- 0a month agoEntry-Level Software EngineerTaro Community
Hello! I’ll be interested, will DM you!
- 2a month agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
Alex put together a bunch of side project ideas in a repository here: https://github.com/Gear61/Software-Project-Ideas
(not sure how many of these would involve message queues though)
One comment is that I don't think side projects are the best, or at least most efficient way, to build system design skills. Relevant discussion: How to leverage side projects as a Data Engineer?
- 0a month agoEntry-Level Software EngineerTaro Community
Will check it out, thanks Rahul!
