Most of my side projects have been about automating the little things that end up taking me a lot of time. At my first job, part of my work (next to junior dev

Most of my side projects have been about automating the little things that end up taking me a lot of time. At my first job, part of my work (next to junior dev) was to deploy EARs on Websphere. I automated it so that people just had to drop it on a shared folder and I'd just take a look if it failed to install automatically. I wrote a command-line tool to search and download subtitles https://github.com/patrickdessalle/periscope https://github.com/patrickdessalle/periscope I made a browser plugin to compare the price of the European Amazon and a few other websites (it grew to more countries and websites) http://www.shoptimate.com http://www.shoptimate.com And now I'm working on a tool that regularly checks if some of my content is getting adblocked because it's something I periodically do by hand http://www.blockedby.com http://www.blockedby.com In the end, automating things can take more time than actually doing it. But if it's used by others and saves them time as well, it's gratifying.