I was in a similar boat some months ago but realized my inability to come up with good ideas was really just me getting frustrated by previous side-projects I didn't finish or got bored by.
What helped me get unstuck and get my creativity back up was setting myself constraints, like whatever I work on today, I'll ship it today, or let's try to make an intentionally useless bash script in 20 minutes.
In my spare time I'm working to finally complete creating my own blog/site.
It's built using Nuxt because I've never really played with Vue before and it seemingly comes with all I need for a static, markdown-powered blog. I guess what's been stopping me was me bothering too much about "When is it good enough to be online?" and "What should the first post be?". But I'm trying to get rid of the perfectionism by just putting it out there and just posting something. I think I'll reflect on this in the first post.
To your second point: For me, the major difference between goals and constraints would be that I can clearly achieve a good goal, but a constraint is something that will never be fulfilled. A good goal is to run and complete a 10k marathon, it's easy to tell when you're done, or if you failed, potentially even measuring how far off you were. But a constraint would accompany you until you choose to disregard it. You can respect a constraint, but you can never complete it, only in the context of a finite project.
To me, a lot of this post sounds like goals vs habits, caring more about what you do today than what you may achieve sometime in the future, only that the habits are constraints here, so not doing something. In short, "leave everyone better than you found them" is something you can adhere to constantly (like a habit), but for it to be a good goal you would have to know when you're done finding people I guess.
Ultimately, what I read from this post is that constraints are used to provide identity, to help you guide yourself everyday. And maybe that's what you need more than goals if a lack of identity (in your work) is what's troubling you.
This was a neat way to put it. Goals have always bothered me because they are an excuse to stop working – either because they are fulfilled, or because it becomes clear they will not be fulfilled. Constraints don't have the same problem.
Goals have always been more like milestones to me and also something that you can change. I see goals and constraints both as different kind of tools to be used. If you decide to change direction, both of them can change.
I thought about doing something similar some time ago, because I never quite found the perfect note taking app for myself. There's a million ways how to do notes, and it feels like there's just as many different notes apps.
Eventually, I've settled with Obsidian because of its simplicity and extensibility. You can leave it with basic features and truly own your notes in a simple format (you can also put them into any cloud, as long as that cloud reaches your filesystem). It doesn't do everything just like I'd want to, but I've thought about just building another notes app that reads and writes to the same path your Obsidian notes are in, instead of trying to cover every possible editing feature like most big notes apps. Then I'd use different apps for different needs, with one place to store data.
Since you're focusing on privacy, have you considered using Obsidian? Is there anything particular you want to do differently?
Basically I want to build it with focus on speed and work efficiency from start. To not bias myself too much, I will refrain from doing too much market research. First of all I'm building this for myself, and I'm guessing it might translate into at least a tiny market share.
Are you looking for something like `uv sync --upgrade`? This one should be re-assessing your dependencies (excluding version pinned ones of course) and regenerate the lockfile if I remember correctly.
What helped me get unstuck and get my creativity back up was setting myself constraints, like whatever I work on today, I'll ship it today, or let's try to make an intentionally useless bash script in 20 minutes.