Your Next Big Weekend Project

Starting a new project can be quite challenging, especially when you’re struggling to come up with exciting ideas that truly ignite your enthusiasm. Luckily, I’ve always had a knack for brainstorming wild and wonderful concepts. Of course, being just one person, I can’t possibly pursue every single idea that pops into my head. That’s why I decided to write this article—to provide some much-needed inspiration for those of you who are currently facing a creative block.

After much deliberation, I’ve managed to compile a list of five fantastic ideas that are bound to get your creative juices flowing. Who knows, one of these ideas might just become the perfect weekend project for you. So, without further ado, let’s dive right in and explore these exciting possibilities!

1. The friend debt counter

   
   

   Now I know that money splitting apps are a dime a dozen on the app store and google play store alike but stay with me here a moment. What if instead of just splitting the funds, the app also keeps track of all the expenses you contribute when your friend group goes for an outing? I don’t know about you, but I have been in situations where I haven’t always had change to pay for my auto-rickshaw and one of my friends has swooped in to save the day. The app can help you keep track of all such little monetary nuances so that no one may call you a penny pincher the next time you decide to stop being the charity that serves cold coffees to aggrieved almost engineers. You could also maybe add a payment utility where all of your friends’ Paytm accounts can sync on one of the devices via some authentication and one account pays the establishment after collecting the split money from all accounts. Now that is stuff dreams are made of.

2. A hospital suggester

   
   

   Now since I plan to pursue my master’s in applied machine learning, it should come as no surprise that I decided to drag my personal interests into this otherwise generic list. I came up with this idea while watching one of the wonderfully informative (insert eye roll) news channels of our country. One of the age-old arguments used by media to slander any law enforcement agency is the time delay that takes place during transportation of the victim to the hospital. This issue sadly is not just an argument but in reality, many grievances turn to fatalities due to time delays. This project works to alleviate this latency. Real-time traffic data from google maps can be accessed to take care of the choice of the optimum route. The real work is to create and integrate a utility at the end of hospitals. Each hospital may have a central system that tracks the number of empty beds in the emergency room and using Bluetooth technology, the number of available doctors at that instant. Machine learning can then be applied to make optimum hospital selection where guaranteed and quick help to the victim is provided. If this entire technology is concentrated into an application, it can be of immense use in case of accidents or medical emergencies.

3. A songwriter/Composer AI

   
   

   This idea came to me while I was decorating my Christmas tree and was on the 3 millionth iteration of the same Christmas playlist. Since I have worked on creating AIs that can formulate fortunes/ horror stories when fed the right data, creating one that can come up with songs when fed a lyrical database shouldn’t be too difficult. The composer part may need some work. The composer section would require the model to be able to come up with a novel tune for the song that the lyricist part generates. Although it may sound pretty difficult, people have worked on this problem before. The article [here](https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2020/01/how-to-perform-automatic-music-generation/) may serve as a beginner’s introduction to creating a tune-generating AI. With both components of the project down, you can go to town with generating hundreds of songs of whatever genre you want. Just try not to get caught up in intellectual property lawsuits!

4. An app for quick CGPA reference

   
   

   Now I can’t speak for other colleges or universities, but the lack of centralized and reliable unofficial transcript generators for IPU students is the bane of my existence. Now, some online tools can be used to get semester wise results, but sadly they are pretty rudimentary with a very non-intuitive GUI. The CGPA reference app would need to create a central database by scraping the result data from the official IPU website which will not be that difficult because it is all publicly available as pdfs. The main part would be building an intuitive GUI which can serve as a quick reference for students when they are filling an internship application for the umpteenth time. One may also consider adding a CGPA converter that converts the CGPA from a 20.0 scale to a 4.0 one for all those poor souls who want to pursue higher education abroad.

5. A portofolio website

   
   

   Seriously Harshita? This is what you’re thinking right now, isn’t it? I know. But trust me, however overused this project idea may be, it actually is quite beneficial in the long run. If you’re an engineer like me (well almost engineer anyway) then there may come a time when you have multiple projects that you have worked upon that really highlight your unique skillset. But since the resume you create should ideally be only one page long, you can’t include all of them on there. In such cases, it’s easier to have a website where you can showcase all your projects (maybe add cool demonstrations?). You don’t have to be into web development and create everything from scratch. If you’re a machine learning person like me (oh, how I hate CSS), you can make use of online tools like WordPress and Wix to create beautiful websites in a matter of hours. That is pretty neat in anyone’s book!

And there you have it! I am all out of ideas, for now anyway. If you have any follow up questions feel free to drop me an email.