From the Archive – International Ideas Month 💡

[#1]

I had this article in the drawer for a while 🗄️ and as March is about to end, I believe it’s time to publish this!

Did you know that March is International Ideas Month? It’s a time dedicated to celebrating creativity, innovation, and the power of new ideas—whether they’re big or small, work-related or just for fun!

I could sometimes say I have too many ideas and not enough time to realize them all. 😅 Adult life definitely shifted my focus a bit, but back in school, I loved turning ideas into reality—especially with Legos.

One of my biggest childhood fascinations? Amusement park rides. Not just for the thrill, but for the engineering behind them. Where I grew up, we didn’t have big amusement parks, but traveling fairs would come to town for a few weeks. While most kids were excited to ride, I was more interested in how everything worked—especially how these massive structures could fold up into a compact trailer and move from place to place.

Long story short, as a huge Lego fan, I decided to build a working model of a ride called "Crazy Surf"—basically, a row of seats moving up and down. I believe that it was 2016 when I spent my summer designing it, but since Legos aren’t exactly cheap, I found Lego Digital Designer—a CAD software from the Lego Group that let me create virtual models for free. Three months and ~10,000 bricks later, I had a fully designed, functional ride, complete with power functions and the ability to transform into a trailer, just like the real ones. I never got around to building it physically, but the more I think about it, the more I want to make it happen! 😃

Sadly, LDD retired a few years ago, but the Lego community (shoutout to BrickLink!) created their own version—BrickLink Studio—which even allows importing LDD models. I still have to polish my model (some pieces are missing due to misplacement) but the software has a brilliant model renderer 🤩 (this is not AI)

*2010s were ‘golden age’ for fairground rides when many people, such as MrDestroyer008, built incredible Lego amusement rides, including Mondlift and a massive 2.5m Ferris Wheel!

💡 Speaking of the Lego community, did you know that Lego fans can submit their own designs to Lego Ideas? Some user-created models have even become official Lego sets, like The Globe, Home Alone House, Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and many more.

Now, a few questions related to the 'ideas' theme:

• Do you have any ideas you’ve always wanted to realize?

• Where do your best ideas come from? → I like(d) sitting in my backyard, putting on some music, and closing my eyes.

• What’s an idea you had that turned out amazing? → The latest one I can remember is moving my expense tracker from Excel to Jira—turned out even better than I expected!

• How do you capture ideas before they disappear? → I just use Confluence now. Although, now when I think about it, I might switch to JPD 🤔

Feel free to drop your thoughts below—I’d love to hear how you turn ideas into reality. 🚀

[Dave Mathijs]

Hi @Tomislav Tobijas thanks for the inspiration. I'm interested in your expense tracker in Jira (moved from Excel). Could you please explain a bit more how you configured it?

[Matt Doar (Adaptavist)]

That's a wonderful piece of work, congratulations!

My ideas come from searching for answers, usually out of curiousity, and not finding what I want. I searched for books about software tools in 2003, didn't find any general ones, so I wrote my first O'Reilly book "Practical Development Environments" over the next 15 months. Changed the direction of my career with it

[Tomislav Tobijas]

I know the feeling @Matt Doar (Adaptavist) 😄 It's pretty much how I ended up being Jira/Atlassian admin myself - by not finding what I wanted at the first place 😅

Btw, nice 1 on the book (congrats as well)! I'll have to put it on my to-read list.

---

@Dave Mathijs might as well write an article about those expenses, but if I'd sum it up:

• I use software project for this, with two issue types - "Story" and "Transaction"
  • "Transaction" is, as you can imagine, used for storing all transaction which I categorize by "Expense" or "Income"
  • "Story" on the other hand is a 'placeholder' where these items are automatically generated and are named "Status: <year>, <month>"
    Basically, these are used to store total income, total expenses and difference between the two.
• As for the intake form, I hacked it a bit by using JSM forms in Jira projects and it looks smt like this (the 'info' part is relatively new so don't mind that):
• I use date fields (Due date on "Transactions", and both system date fields on "Stories") to track when each transaction took place and for which period I'm doing the calculation on each "Story".
  This is all done via automation, but as Free plan has its limits, I do "Story" calculations only 2 or 3 times per month (not after each entry). 
• I also have scheduled automation for creating 'fixed expenses and income' for each month so I don't have to enter this manually. When I spend or receive the money, I simply transition that transaction to status "Done"
• There are also some additional tweaks such as automations for additional dates. default tables for receipts and connection between those and ideas I'm tracking.

Lastly, I have some relatively basic dashboards combined with some free chart apps to visualize specific data (would need to upgrade that at some point to take full advantage of the entries I'm making).

[Barbara Szczesniak]

Good topic for a Monday, @Tomislav Tobijas (well, Saturday for you, Monday by the time I got to it). I spent a lot of years when my nephews were young as a buyer of Legos, but my brother-in-law got to be the builder when they were too young to do it themselves.

I always found that sitting by water (lake, river, ocean, babbling brook) helps when I'm actively looking for ideas. Or, as one office mate put it, "you're not looking out the window; you're looking in the direction of the window while you work out how to describe something."

Of course, I also think of amazing ideas while someone else is talking, and I (now) do my best to listen to what they are saying and not to rudely interrupt them with my idea.

[Tomislav Tobijas]

@Barbara Szczesniak Hah, I love the 'looking in the direction of the window' perspective! 😄

Sitting by the water sounds like a great way to let ideas flow, but I’m way too far from any water-like area to experience that. Might have to build a pool or a fountain in my backyard just to get a glimpse of it! 😅

And yeah... I definitely get a lot of ideas while listening to someone else. I have a memory of a goldfish, so I have to write them down immediately—otherwise, they vanish as my thoughts overflow. 💡

Anyway, thanks for sharing!

[Marshall Walker Lee]

In a previous professional life, I used to spend a lot of time mentoring junior creatives, helping them develop techniques and practices to develop more ideas more quickly. I still think this little book offers one of the best frameworks for ideation: A simple technique for producing ideas