Years ago when I was really active at the Milwaukee Makerspace a member there would ask me about the projects I made, and how I came up with ideas for them. Well, I’ve always been a weirdo who thinks about weird things, so I’d usually get some idea and try things and occasionally it would become a project. Sometimes they were neat, sometimes they were dumb, sometimes other people thought they were interesting, and sometimes I was the only one who cared about it!
So this Maker said to me “I had an idea for building something but I looked online and someone has already made one.” and they seemed genuinely defeated.
I think this Maker’s goal was to get recognition, maybe via Hackaday (which is a double-edged sword) or… I don’t know. But they seemed upset that someone else did something they wanted to do.
I had some advice, which I’ll share here:
“Just make the thing you want to make. Who cares if someone else has made their own version. Make your own. It will be yours, it might be different. You might made different choices, in fact, you can make different choices. I typically don’t bother looking to see if someone else already built the thing I am going to build, as mine will be unique because it was made by me.”
Look, people have been on this planet a long time, and have created a lot of things… some would say nothing truly “new” has been created in decades, or centuries, and everything at this point is just rehashing or reimagining what has come before.
So just make your own damn thing, and make it yours.