The worst "writer's block" is when I'm actively trying to think of ideas of what to program. I get the most interesting ideas for side projects when I'm doing a

The worst "writer's block" is when I'm actively trying to think of ideas of what to program. I get the most interesting ideas for side projects when I'm doing anything but programming. For example, watching the Eurovision semi-finals last night I thought, "the lyrics are so cheesy and awful, I bet they could be written by a computer program", so I spent an hour or two writing a very simple Markov chain generator using input from all this years' English language entries to generate fake Eurovision songs. The other weekend I wanted to play with React and HTML5 canvas, so I wrote a starmap/world generator for an old desktop SF RPG I used to play. I was listening to a podcast about that game so it got me thinking. These are trivial ideas, certainly not earth-shaking or money-making, but they're good practice and fun to work on and if nothing else I can just add them to my Github portfolio.