When I'm working on a side project, I always prefer to do something that hasn't been done before, even if it's just a small improvement. I wouldn't criticize yo

When I'm working on a side project, I always prefer to do something that hasn't been done before, even if it's just a small improvement. I wouldn't criticize your chess app, and that sounds like a great learning experience. But even if the goal is to learn something new, I'd prefer to end up with a project that is useful or interesting, and might even make some money. In other words, I only want to build something if I can write a blog post about it and Hacker News might find it interesting. (And there's plenty of ways to make a chess app interesting - using a different programming paradigm, machine learning, AR, building a chess engine in VHDL for an FPGA, etc.) > Why do people learn to play songs on the piano that millions before them have learned? I honestly asked myself that same question when I was a teenager, and I decided to quit piano lessons. It felt like a waste of time and a useless skill now that we have MIDI and self-playing pianos. So I switched to jazz and improvisation, and tried to compose my own music (although I'm not very good.) But I enjoy the creativity a lot more than playing songs from sheet music.