I would take a pet problem that I have and solve it well. Something so personal that nobody else would solve it. A personal time management app just for me. A way to manage all my contacts so that I can keep up with them intelligently. Something to get me to do that tasks I procrastinate on the worst (like going to the Dentist). There are a million general tools for this, but having your own perfect tool is like having a superpower. And it's a great way to get to know yourself.
Alternatively, you could become the world expert in something small and bizarre. Like VIM. Just kidding. No, like some API. I got to know the MTurk api, and it then became an expert at it. Then people started treating me like an expert. It was cool.
A third approach is find somebody you want to learn from and work with them. Any project you pick will never be as important as what you learn from the project.
Ha, fancy seeing you here (if that username matches up with a certain athena account)...!
That's a very good observation about becoming an expert at a particular niche. The same thing sort of happened to me one summer, when I researched so-called "Blue laws" in the US. Spend a summer diving through microfiched historical laws in the library and soon enough you know more than anyone else in the world on the subject! It's quite an interesting feeling.
However, as hmslydia said, I think an API could be a good niche here.
> A third approach is find somebody you want to learn from and work with them. Any project you pick will never be as important as what you learn from the project.
Finding a good teacher for whatever skills or traits you want to develop is incredibly hard but easily one of the most rewarding things you can do for yourself
In addition: Meteor data is public by default, and the architecture is always online, whereas Hoodie data is private by default, and the architecture is offline by default.
Besides the points already mentioned, Meteor is VC backed. Hoodie is an open source project first, that we founded & bootstrapped a company for to sustain its future, and that we will eventually turn into a non-profit. We are and will be not accountable to any investor with questionable interests in an open source project.
Historical curiosity. This answer to "Why did the chicken cross the road" can be interpreted two ways:
1. it's obvious, absurdist humor
2. it is a pun on the phrase "other side" meaning the after life.
Betcha never thought of the second interpretation!
I did personally think of the second interpretation after many years. Prior to that I thought it was just something that sounded like a joke but wasn't actually funny, or maybe some meme whose origins I didn't understand. Once I thought of the second interpretation, I assumed that's what the joke must have been all along. So I was slightly surprised to read your post there.
