What is your current side project?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486996

by christopherDam • 11 years ago

16 41 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi All HN,

1) What is your Current Side Project?

2) How you got the idea?

3) What you want to achieve with your current project? (Learn something new/ Want to do earn / just for fun)

I think it is very inspirational and motivational for others if you share your experience.

Thanks

eip• 11 years ago

Making a Scala project to continue the work of Carl Munck. Writing tools to automate his process of mathematical 'probing'. Creating new UI tools for visualizing his work.

Also doing some data mining on a roughly 2TB collection of esoteric texts.

haidrali• 11 years ago

My side project is http://beta.pollpk.com/ its in beta, Idea is to poll on different social, political and almost any type of issues I got the idea even before Twitter polls but due to some reason couldn't launch it. Now after watching twitter poll failure I think this might be a failure as well so planning to stop working on it

swcoders3• 11 years ago

I am working on machine learning project

bewe42• 11 years ago

My side project is http://codingbrain.com. I want to make learning & coding more efficient. It's desktop app that integrates with existing markdown editor and browser and serves as a central hub that records what you do, helps to generate new content, enables to search/remember and tries to automate as much as possible to increase productivity.

nstart• 11 years ago

My side project is http://replylater.adnanissadeen.com . I'm building it as a way to beat myself when it comes to procrastination. I got the idea when using buffer and I wanted to buffer a reply on twitter so that I could check up on a friend later. Buffer doesn't have support yet for replying tweets such that the conversation thread is maintained on Twitter. There were a bunch of customers who wanted that, so I'm working on it now.

This project also taught me plenty about scheduling. I'll be adding in support for scheduling using a more stable tool later. For now it's using cron :D.

Oh. Source code is here https://github.com/kiriappeee/reply-later

sheraz3• 11 years ago

1. HelloAviva (http://helloaviva.com/?ref=hn) - Niche app for new parents that helps them feel less isolated in their new context. Shows them the places they can go in town with stroller / small baby.

2. Had a kid and discovered how hard it is to take a baby outside the home. We didn't know where to go or how to easily solve small problems like diaper changes.

3. GF and I are doing this learn the whole lean startup / app / growth thing.

Currently in the Apple app store with an MVP and see a lot of room for growth and improvements. We've been live since the summer and have managed to get into Product Hunt as well as the newsletter for the editor of a major news publication in Sweden.

swcoders3• 11 years ago

Great!! Looks you need to do lot of things to get these data. How big is your team?? How do you collecting this data (I assume you are not going single places). It's really great.

sheraz3• 11 years ago

Thanks!

Just two of us. I'm the only technical one. We do a lot of scraping and automation where possible which is how we scale the data side of things. However we are still doing things that don't scale. One of those things is still manually entering good spots as we find them. Feel free to reach out with feedback and suggestions.

GF is in New York this week taking meetings and showing the app to mama groups. Any intros are appreciated

patmcc• 11 years ago

Very cool idea! Had no idea I wanted this until a month ago. Keep expanding, if you were in Canada/on Android I'd drop $5 on it in a second.

sheraz3• 11 years ago

Pat, I've been itching to get started on the Android version for delivery before the end of year.

I should also mention that we are constantly adding locations. Where in Canada would be most helpful for you?

mobiplayer• 11 years ago

This is great, thank you for making it!

sideproject2• 11 years ago

My current project is HelloBox - it's something I've been doing for awhile, but there's a plenty more to do.

http://hellobox.co

I started it out as a "create your own hackernews clone" idea, but it's now evolved into a more of community management tool. I'm hoping that it'll soon be able to charge people for the service it's providing. Would love to hear your feedback!

swcoders3• 11 years ago

I like the idea. Really great and neat. What is your business model?

sideproject2• 11 years ago

Thanks. The business model is rather simple. I'll be charging a monthly fee for the service. Not sure exactly how much though.

Killswitch• 11 years ago

I'm working on a method to containerize standard shared hosting.

I got the idea because a bunch of my previous clients / colleagues from when I worked in the adult industry are still stuck on shared hosting environments because of cPanel and the like.

I want to achieve the simplicity of shared hosting, with the awesomeness of being able to deploy it anywhere and the beauty of Docker.

thecodemonkey• 11 years ago

1) My side project is http://geocod.io

2) It started out because I needed to geocode a large set of addresses for another side project. Ended up building a geocoder and realized that others might find it useful too

3) Making geocoding affordable to the masses and having built something to be proud of. Continuously learning new things because of it too.

gonyea• 11 years ago

That's a really good idea! I've had to deal with API limits countless times and it sucks.

For some projects I had to geocode with multiple providers. Bing seems to be better than Google at geocoding in some parts of the county. I esp. noticed it in the Midwest / Illinois.

jathu3• 11 years ago

1. Annex: http://jathu.me/annex

2. Being tired of how unproductive I was. My friend sending a spreadsheet of him tracking his time and finally watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZexvTZ1sV8U

3. I just want to help myself in becoming productive and in the process help others. So far the app has helped me become more productive and I have received many emails/DMs thanking me for helping others achieve this too. The most important thing I want to learn is how to launch a product and keep updating it with the user's feedback. I received a negative feedback from a bug on my initial app, then I fixed it with an update (and added more features) and the user then changed his negative review to a 5-star positive reivew on the app store and was very happy. This alone sold me on the importance of listening to your customers. This is one of my first iOS apps, so I'm learning about iOS development and launching a product at the same time.

christopherDam• 11 years ago

I really appreciate your work and this app is really cool and great. I am really inspired with your work. Thanks a lot for answering. I just curious are you app(iOS) developer or what's your full time job(Just want to know). What is your monthly revenue of this(Nothing special just want to know if you can earn some money from an app). BTW thanks a lot for posting this. It really inspired me lot and very cool app. I may buy this.

jathu3• 11 years ago

Thanks for the kind words!

I wouldn't call my self a "real" app developer just yet as I'm still learning app development (i.e. still don't know how to sync core data with iCloud). I used to focus mostly on web, but recently started iOS. I'm not working yet, I'm still in University studying CS.

I usually don't like to discuss the exact amount I'm making from my app, however I would say I'm "ramen profitable" for a student.

mapster• 11 years ago

Is there a way to bank user data to measure progress of users / trends / etc? This data would be great to weed through.

jathu3• 11 years ago

This has been on my mind since I began this project. Once I get iCloud integration, I want to ask users to anonymously share their data so I can open source them.

We can study patterns that cause other patterns, the type of productivity, behaviours and so much more.

iqonik2• 11 years ago

Mine is:

propertywizard.io

It's a tool that plugs into the leading UK property website and allows Estate Agents to share their properties, news and status updates automatically (or scheduled) to social media.

Currently making around £1000 per month, if anyone has any questions i'll be happy to answer :)

tixocloud2• 11 years ago

I really like your idea and had wanted to do something similar in Canada. Would love to have a chat with you more about how you got started working with real estate agents :)

iqonik2• 11 years ago

Feel free to drop me an email (in my profile). I'm happy to share how I got started and offer any advice I can.

stevekemp• 11 years ago

A system which integrates git-hosting with Amazon's Route53 DNS infrastructure.

I've not touched it for a while, but it managed to handle around 20 million queries last month, and at least one DNS-update a day on average.

I need a prettier website, but the technology pretty much just works and hasn't been updated in a long time. I keep meaning to delegate the website-redsigne to my partner.

https://dns-api.com/

In open-source work I've spent the past few weeks restarting my console-mail client, with integrated Lua scripting. The rewrite gives a much more unified API, and a lot better implementation.

Delegating more work to the Lua side of the application makes it more flexible, more customizable, and more interesting to develop for:

https://github.com/lumail/lumail2

Still early work - since you can neither compose a new email, or reply to existing ones, but the core is good for viewing things. (It is a modal email client, with a user-interface that is somewhat like mutt.)

tixocloud2• 11 years ago

1. Insightico: Helping Canadians find homes through neighbourhood insights (http://getinsightico.com - we're pivoting away from location analysis for retailers)

2. Had a terrible experience - rented a place only to find out that the neighbourhood isn't right for me. Thank goodness that I only had to endure for a year before finding another place that suits me better.

3. Hoping to build an online residential real estate database for Canada so people can search for homes that fit their lifestyle. Hoping that people can search based on different lifestyle parameters (i.e. good schools, commuting time, neighbourhood amenities, favourite brands/restaurants, investment potential etc.)

cdvonstinkpot• 11 years ago

I have a very low-traffic blog that I'd like to see more visits to. If I can get enough traffic, I'd like to monetize it via affiliate ads- but at this point that's a long shot, due to it's apparent invisibility. Today I published its best content yet, written by an expert in his field. I hope to be able to publish high quality content such as this more often, but I don't know yet how I'll source exceptional writing.

Shameless plug:

The new article is here, for anyone interested: https://christopherbartels.com/2015/11/02/navigating-the-col...

alashley• 11 years ago

1) A dating app: http://coffeefortwo.github.io/coffeefortwoapp/index.html

2) Got the idea from wanting to create something more niche than current dating apps.

3) I'd like to get some side income from it at some point.

chad_strategic2• 11 years ago

1. http://www.strategic-options.com/trade/

2. I had no choice, traditional financial evaluation failed after the great recession (08). Federal Reserve interference in the market, prevented traditional stock analysis. I couldn't get a job in 09-10, even with an MBA. Taught myself how to code and write stock algorithms. Very dark days, I had to teach myself coding, or otherwise I was going to have to go back to the Marine Corps. (I loved Marines, going to back to the Marine Corps, would have been fun and paid the bills, but not a good career move, long term.)

It paid off in the end, I'm a programmer now and I don't seem to have a problem getting work now. However the bad news is that people keep playing me program there lame ideas and my bank account keeps getting bigger. But at the end of the day I want my side project to be only project.

Ugh..... Money doesn't solve everything.

3. I want my side project to become my employment.

(P.S. Looking for some kind of marketing help.)

jyu• 11 years ago

Monthly subscription to "stock tips" scream all sorts of shadiness. That and stating that there's the potential to make "103%" return when you're just cherry picking back tested data. There's a lot that could be improved, but if you really think you found a secret algo that works, I'd focus all my energy on gathering the evidence to convince others that it definitively works. From the information on the website, there seems to be no indication of live trading with this strategy. You may want to add details in how you have tested the different ways you can trick yourself, paper testing results, and at some point trying the ultimate test of live trading.

Good luck!

chad_strategic2• 11 years ago

Some of your points are valid, others not so much.

First off I don't "cherry pick" data. Stock recommendations are made on a daily basis via an algorithm (crontab / php) while I'm at my day job. Right now the algo tracks 500 stocks, so I don't have time to cherry pick data for those each flavor of the week stock. So on 1/28/15 I got a signal to buy Amazon, that signal hasn't changed so it is possible to gain 100% return. It's also doing wonders for http://www.strategic-options.com/trade/stock/chipotle-mexica...

Where I do see your valid point, this could be perceived as a scam. Which ultimately becomes a marketing issue. I'm not really doing a good job of convincing an audience of the potential. I'm to much of programmer/data analysis, that I forget to market it to a general public. Jim Crammer on CNBC is a great marketer, but he is a pretty poor stock picker.

My newer strategy has been http://www.strategic-options.com/trade/alerts at $9.99, seems like it's pretty difficult to scam someone at that low price point.

The end result is I'm in need of internet marketer / growth hacker / seo guru...

drakonka• 11 years ago

1. My side project is a browser based snail simulation: http://liza.io/category/snails/

2. I think my fondness for snails was originally sparked by a game I made up at my grandparents' summerhouse in Ukraine when I was little - I collected a bunch of snails and taught them to race against each other. I got the idea for the project itself over 10 years ago during a move from the US to Australia with my family. It was summer and I was bored, so I had this idea for a snail racing game. At the time it was meant to be a game, but as the idea stayed in my head over the years it evolved into focusing on realism as much as possible and dropping "fun" from its main focus. I did not have the technical ability to build this at first in its full scope and it has gone through quite a few iterations over the years.

3. Learn something new, have my snails surprise me.

girishso• 11 years ago

1. Autosleep: Autosleep inactive Docker Containers - https://github.com/girishso/autosleep

2. I wanted to implement the free tier Heroku feature, sleeping off the inactive apps and activate them whenever someone accesses them.

3. Learn about Docker, Go and use it on my Raspberry Pi!

kkoppenhaver• 11 years ago

Just finished writing up my weekend project from a couple weeks back.

Thinking about potentially turning it into a plugin that would allow blog owners to build email newsletters that can more easily include their Wordpress posts.

https://medium.com/@kkoppenhaver/a-digital-newspaper-with-gr...

gesman• 11 years ago

http://www.bitcoinway.com/ - free wordpress plugin allowing anyone to build online store to sell anything and can accept payment in bitcoins without middleman and without risk of being hacked.

I.e. ZERO risk of losing bitcoins while having fully automated online store.

husseiny• 11 years ago

Nice question. This is bound to get you good Karma on HN :) Anyways:

http://homebuyinglist.com

I just closed on a house and the process was really painful. So I decided to put a list of resources together in the hopes that they will have an easier time on what should be a joyful experience.

heatherb• 11 years ago

1 - Building a Raspberry Pi powered Smart Table 2 - Too much time on my hands 3 - Just for fun. It will basically be a coffee table that tells me the weather for the day, lets me read the news as I eat breakfast, and integrates with my Android phone so that I can reply to text messages.

codeloop2• 11 years ago

My side project is 1. http://www.dealsmanager.net 2. I got this idea when i am searching for good crm for lead management but i think why not create my own as my reuirement. 3.just started it hoping good success in future from it because going to make it huge crm for manage leads.

Avalaxy• 11 years ago

I would recommend you to improve your English and have someone proof-read the texts you write. The grammar in your post as well as on your website is very bad and full or errors. It makes the product look very unprofessional (even though the product itself looks great!).

codeloop2• 11 years ago

Thanks for your suggestion,i will take care about it.