Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348142

39 79 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi all,

Been experimenting a lot with Mobile development recently and yet to start on something. Just wanted to see what you guys are building so I can keep myself in the loop

zb1plus• 5 years ago

I have two side projects. The first is a PDF reader that persists reading state between devices and has a queryable notes overlay. For this project I am using SwiftUI and targeting iPhones and desktop MacOS. The second centers around exploring how to conduct interactive virtual lessons in VR using Mozilla hubs.

app172• 5 years ago

Is your PDF reader open sourced? It's a feature I'd like to implement at some point in my own personal project (https://github.com/appaquet/exomind)

Irongirl1• 5 years ago

hth:

https://onesimpleapi.com/docs/web-page-to-pdf

ecesena• 5 years ago

Primary: Saasform, landing page for saas with auth & payments (very alpha). https://github.com/saasform/saasform

Secondary: MultiPreview, replace images when you share blog posts -- micro-saas built on saasform (just put it online yday night, full of bugs lol). https://multipreview.com

XCSme2• 5 years ago

My main project is a self-hosted analytics platform: https://www.usertrack.net

I am still struggling to accomplish my goal of becoming sustainable by focusing on the self-hosted part instead of the SaaS part, but I'm not giving up. I do think that self-hosting is the future! :)

enonevets• 5 years ago

Honest curiosity here. With so many competitors in the space both free and paid, and with many doing self-hosted, privacy conscious angle, and many open source as well, what are you doing to separate your tracking from those. At a glance, I wasn't able to discern the major difference and I'd imagine a lot of users looking for analytic solutions might fall into the same thoughts.

XCSme2• 5 years ago

Thanks for the feedback!

I think most of the unique points are mentioned on the landing page in the "What's different about userTrack?" section.

The main gist is that userTrack is primary self-hosted, so the product's goal is aligned with the customer's goal. A platform like Matomo for example, earns money by providing a cloud solution, which means that anyone who chooses to self-host instead of using their service will reduce their revenue. This also leads to them making it harder to install and maintain the self-hosted version and they also provide some features only for the cloud plan (session recordings, heatmaps). Most of the other open-source analytics platforms that you might be referring to are pretty simple and usually only provide basic visitor stats.

tl;dr: ease of installation, automatic updates, human support, highly performant/well optimized, unique interface and features, very affordable compared to alternatives with similar features, bootstrapped.

Apart from this I am also trying to promote self-hosting as much as possible, thus I am continuously looking for and promoting different ways to reduce 3rd party dependencies and making it easier to do so.

tadhunt• 5 years ago

My main side project is: https://minecraft-playdates.com Minecraft server hosting for parents. This is a fully fleshed out and working service with paying customers.

My secondary project is https://golang-labs.com. With this one, I'm exploring whether there is a need for an enterprise focused module proxy for Golang. The issues I see with the public proxy are: build repeatability, license compatibility, and information security. Please reach out if this is something you care about.

visox• 5 years ago

https://insightrend.com/?page=term-trending

Like Google trend but based on content people write.

app172• 5 years ago

I have been working on Exomind (https://github.com/appaquet/exomind), a personal knowledge management tool that takes the form of a unified inbox in which you can have your emails, tasks, notes and bookmarks organized into collections. I have an iOS and a web/electron client at the moment, and a simple Chrome extension for bookmarking.

Its backend, Exocore (https://github.com/appaquet/exocore), is built on top of a personal / private blockchain and is made from the ground up to be hosted in a semi-decentralized fashion on your own personal devices (your computer, raspberry pi, a cloud instance, etc.). It is written in Rust and has iOS, C and Web (WASM) clients.

It has very rough edges, but I'm using it daily to organize my life. It has also been my learning playground to improve my Rust skills over the last two years. If all goes well, I'm a few months away from some kind of tech preview.

lmiller1990• 5 years ago

I post videos about Vue.js on YouTube [0]

[0] https://youtube.com/c/LachlanMiller

dddiaz1• 5 years ago

Trying to use ML to predict exercise type based on blood glucose data. https://dddiaz.com/post/glucose-datascience/

Glench4• 5 years ago

Mine is a service to take payments inside browser extensions without needing to run your own server backend! https://extensionpay.com :D

I made it so I could use it in my own extensions. Definitely lowers the barrier to making profitable side-project extensions. Open-source library is here: https://github.com/glench/ExtPay

obviouspenguin• 5 years ago

5% on top of the Stripe fee? That seems extremely high - do you actually have customers willing to pay that?

Glench4• 5 years ago

Yep! My customers so far have been really happy. :)

To compare to other services: the Chrome Web Store fee was 5%, Gumroad's fee is 5% + the Stripe fee, and my main competitor is charging 6.5% + stripe fee. Pretty standard. Why do you feel it's extremely high?

And if you think about the value of ExtensionPay... it saves people at least $5 / month on server costs, plus the time/ energy/hassle of creating their own payment system (which involves creating a user management, integrating it securely with the extension itself, figuring out how to integrate with a payment processor, setting up a database, sending emails, managing a server etc etc). Plus a lot of my customers are indie developers with limited resources that just want to focus on their extension.

saahilclaypool2• 5 years ago

I've been building a locally-hosted version of Pocket that saves articles (and pdfs) to a lucene index, and provides full text search over them. https://github.com/SaahilClaypool/SearchStory

meagher• 5 years ago

Good idea. I would pay for this.

saahilclaypool2• 5 years ago

Thanks! Still very early, but hopefully once it's closer to a useable product I'll post around and get some real user feedback.

Worst case it'll be useful for me and my house mate who made the original request.

krapp2• 5 years ago

Godot tutorials[0..2]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjT5sLMD7Kw&list=PLkhDORpHGm... Card Game Tutorial

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAbG8Oi-SvQ&list=PL9FzW-m48f... Make an Action RPG in Godot

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRHN_WEulLc&t=6906s Godot 3D: Code architecture course in a single video

And a roguelike in C with SDL and Lua that really just exists to scratch my itch for "low level" development

Also getting thread folding working in Anarki.

Also a HN client in Godot/C#.

Why no, I'm probably not actually ever going to finish anything, thank you for noticing.

path411• 5 years ago

Why are your godot tutorials across different channels? Is there a single site or something I can sub to for all of your tutorials?

krapp2• 5 years ago

They're not my tutorials, they're tutorials I'm following that seem better than the usual. Sorry for the misunderstanding - I see now I probably should have been more specific.

fooray• 5 years ago

I’m working on a pay comparison and career planning app for skilled trades workers. Went live last week, but still missing a ton of features. https://skilledpay.co

privapps• 5 years ago

Open source: End to End Encrypted Notebook / Website & Builder. Just had first release last week to fight for privacy and freedom of speech.

https://github.com/privapps/notebook

seymon2• 5 years ago

I am building a CLI tool for OAuth and OpenID Connect based access control. It allows performing auth flows with and without browser redirects, decodes JWTs, inspect OIDC issuers, etc. It is written in the go language and has multi Platform support. The next steps are about adding login profiles as config values. Also adding impersonation support with the OAuth Token Exchange protocol.

https://git.schuerg.net/simon/actl

SinisterAlex• 5 years ago

You say multiplatform - .NET?

seymon2• 5 years ago

No, it's written in Golang. It works on Linux, macOS, and Windows. There are currently builds for x86_64, but compiling to other architectures should be easy.

msantos• 5 years ago

the fact that your tool is browser-less makes it quite interesting. Do you have plans to build support for AWS "assume role"?

I've used this Okta tool for a while but it requires a browser. https://github.com/oktadeveloper/okta-aws-cli-assume-role

PS: out of curiosity, why do you host your own instance of GitLab? What's the overhead like?

kilroy123• 5 years ago

A daily newsletter about art: https://randomdailyart.com/

I feature random artists from around the world, plus a lot of classic art.

soulchild37• 5 years ago

https://apps.shopify.com/cancellable

Did it for my cousin's Shopify store originally, as she was getting a few of order cancellation requests via customer email almost everyday. Thought to automate to let customer by themselves, and she is quite happy with this lol, and a few other stores owner in Shopify liked this app as well.

DarrenDev• 5 years ago

I'm working on a a text classification api. It's a huge project, but I'm starting small and hope to to have a beta out there next week. Initial target niche will be data from legal firms.

https://liet.io/

tldrthelaw• 5 years ago

Lawyer geek here, happy to weigh in if you need it. Looks interesting and will be following.

bsldld3• 5 years ago

I am working on https://loan-free-ed.neocities.org

A non-profit open source platform to facilitate loan-free education to help life-long learning, as well as increase income of teaching and non-teaching staff of education institutions.

Edit: Any feedback, suggestion will help improve the project. Also, if you want to collaborate or want to know more about the project, then please email me. My email is in my profile.

_448• 5 years ago

What is the tech stack for this project?

bsldld3• 5 years ago

This is tentative, but I was thinking of Hyperledger Iroha, Sovrin, Stellar and GNU Taler.

Glench4• 5 years ago

whoa this is REALLY interesting! I wonder if you could try some pilot programs with places like https://www.recurse.com/ or other alternative educational institutions.

bsldld3• 5 years ago

whoa this is REALLY interesting!

Thank you very much!

I wonder if you could try some pilot programs with places like https://www.recurse.com/ or other alternative educational institutions.

Yeah, that would really be helpful. Would you like to join the project and/or mentor me? You have fantastic profile and lot of experience in the education domain. You joining the project and/or mentoring me will make a huge difference to the project.

drakonka• 5 years ago

I've been writing fiction. For years my side projects were all programming related, and that was awesome, but last summer I decided to try something different and get into creative writing again. I used to love it as a child and haven't done it in years. It is nice to do something that is quite different from my day job, and brings in a bit of a satisfying side income as well (not that it'll be paying my rent any time soon).

zeeshanqureshi3• 5 years ago

Interactive used-car buying checklist for car noobs.

https://www.isthatalemon.com/

Not a side project, more of something I built for fun.

privatemonkey2• 5 years ago

Love it! Fun UI.

zeeshanqureshi3• 5 years ago

Thank you, glad you like it.

CallMeMarc• 5 years ago

Widescreen monitor gang checking in:

https://i2.paste.pics/07309cc21f8f2c93c354c4012e60c8a7.png

Would be nice to have a max size for the font on your headlines so they don't collide with each other :)

zeeshanqureshi3• 5 years ago

Would you mind sharing the resolution?

EDIT: Ok, I figure you must be using one of those ultrawides.

Thanks for pointing this out, I̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶f̶i̶x̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶d̶a̶y̶.̶

Fixed it :)

sideproject• 5 years ago

Building a tool to make use of un-used domain names.

https://www.newsy.co

I had about ~30 domain names which were not doing anything. I got tired of them. But I didn't want to spend time working on them.

So I built Newsy, which converts your domain name into a fully functional & automated content site. It finds niche contents and display them like Reddit.

Over the months, I've built membership, newsletters, comments, social sharing, widgets, RSS, API and even sending email using your domain name via GMail.

Finally, I've started to letting these domain names to monetize via adding your own ads.

Got any un-used domain names? Would love to hear your feedback!

EvanKRob2• 5 years ago

This is really cool. Do you have any examples of live sites?

austincheney• 5 years ago

Privacy focused point-to-point social media starting with the file system. https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems

the_only_law• 5 years ago

Currently working on a complete user mode ISDN BRI+PRI stack for interfacing old equipment plus a number of utilities for it like a softswitch and things like a H.320 multipelxer. Once I got a baseline working I might work on some little integration programs like a bot that lets you connect to a discord voice call from an ISDN videoconferencing terminal.

Once I’m satisfied I have an old CMTS and limesdr sitting around I might try to build a custom DOCSIS modem with.

adamhp• 5 years ago

My girlfriend and I really enjoy good food and travel. We spend a lot of our time cooking, eating, and going to breweries and wineries. We have a few favorite cities near us, like Charlottesville and the surrounding wine country in Virginia, and Portland, Maine. We've been there with enough frequency that we've developed a sort of reputation as the go-to experts for those areas, and have sent a long e-mail itinerary and travel guide to our close friends probably 10 or 15 times for each place.

Sometimes our friend doesn't drink alcohol, so we go through and scrub all the breweries and wineries. Sometimes they're gluten free, so all of the pizza and bagels we love get cut. After doing this several times, we realized it would be cool to have an app to do this. So that is my side project!

It will be part Canva, part Facebook Recommendations, maybe part knowledge-base? Filterable lists, creation of itineraries, notes about each Place. Export to a static site with a link you can share. It is already integrated with Google Maps and Places APIs, so it's pretty easy to get up and running.

The neat thing is, as I mentioned above, it has filters. So you can tag places with "winery" or "vegetarian" or something, and when you're crafting your collection of places for your friends, you can filter on those tags really easily. You could just click the "winery" tag to instantly create a "Virginia Wine Guide".

I'm not totally sure it has broad appeal, but I'm hoping a few travel bloggers might get some use out of it. V3 will probably have some sort of "export to CMS" feature.

dsgrillo• 5 years ago

I have 2:

1. https://www.criarenquete.com.br - an easy and quick way to create a poll and share a link or embed it in your site.

2. https://www.gpebahia.com.br/gpe-pesquisa - a mobile app to collect surveys (with GPS tracking and random audio recording) and a dashboard administration to manage/monitor the surveys and extract data (pivot, frequency tables, etc.)

vocabboost2• 5 years ago

I am developing a browser extension to make a fill-in-the-blank language test out of any webpage.

I personally used this to improve my German vocabulary. This way one can learn new words from materials they naturally enjoy (vs boring text books).

The extension is available for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vocabboost/obgbcam...? Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vocabboost/

There is also a video example here: http://vocabboost.online/.

carmen_sandiego2• 5 years ago

Maybe you already know, but ‘cloze’ is another keyword for this that you might want to pepper around to get more people finding you.

vocabboost2• 5 years ago

Thank you! I wasn't aware of this keyword! Yeah, discoverability is a problem.

firedating• 5 years ago

I've been very busy lately with my hobby project - https://firedating.me/. It is a community of people interested in FIRE (Financial Independence / Early Retirement), who are looking for friends and a romantic partner. The stats are public: https://firedating.me/open.

iandinwoodie• 5 years ago

The sudden drop of RAM and disk usage from 2020-12 to 2021-01 stood out to me. Any reason behind that? (e.g., deployed new release which contained optimizations)

donny3000• 5 years ago

I'm working on a discussion tool with different modes (real-time, async, docs). Started out as an internal tool for remote writing culture, but have found use cases for communities — https://demo.gardens.to

sbacic• 5 years ago

I'm writing a personal kanban app with everything I miss from existing apps available on the market: pomodoro, estimates, statistics, etc...

apineda• 5 years ago

Custom renderer for a classic game.

zachm0• 5 years ago

I've really enjoyed my Pi-hole so far, so I decided to make an open-source version on the ESP32. It's not quiet finished yet, but it is very close. There are only a few small things that need to be done before I can call it stable, but the last 10% of a project is somehow always the hardest.

Pictures can be seen here: https://imgur.com/a/uwwA54Y And the repository: https://github.com/zachmorr/esper

Senwerks• 5 years ago

That's really cool. I wouldn't have thought the ESP32 could handle something like this.

Measter• 5 years ago

I've been (slowly) doing Advent of Code 2019 on an STM32F303 microcontroller. I want all of the problem data to be stored in the binary, with the answers being output on a display. Most of my time so far has been spent on getting the clock working, and compression/decompression. I only have limited space (256KB), and the 20 of last year's problems I solved take up 221KB, so I decided the best course of action would be to store them compressed when possible.

I did consider just using compression library, but decided against it partly because it would be more interesting to write it myself, but also having a quick look I couldn't find one that could do decompression without needing additional temporary storage. It's not that fancy, just LZW with a multi-stage compression to optimize the dictionary.

Because of how many of the inputs work, you can often handle it in smaller chunks (e.g. one line at a time, I called them records), so the inputs have a small amount of pre-processing on my PC to split them up into smaller chunks so the entire input doesn't need to be held in RAM at once.

Of course, not all input data will compress well, some will even "compress" to a larger size, so I've also abstracted over the data storage so that it can handle reading records from compressed or uncompressed inputs.

I've done 4 days so far, and none of the inputs have compressed. Total runtime is 3.24 seconds (that day 4...).

Current state can be found here for the morbidly curious: https://github.com/Measter/AdventOfCode2019 Spoilers are in the mcu/src/challenges folder.

privatemonkey2• 5 years ago

Cool to read about all the various things people are doing.

I'm building a virtual tabletop for tabletop roleplayers that play narrative driven games and theater of the mind style games.

I'm using text parsing to accomplish different tools for storytelling and improvisation. Believe that is the quickest way for a GM to produce content and rig their games.

The tech stack is Svelte and Sapper with MDSVEX and Pouch/CouchDb/Websockets. The database part has been the hardest so far and haven't gotten that far. Got some decent character sheets out there but just using local storage for now. Got working slide decks, rollable tables and interactive fiction in dev but knitting it all together is a big job. My goal is to run my first game session with friends in May and open it for alpha June/July.

https://www.fictionboard.com/

https://app.fictionboard.com/actors (The character sheets - in regards to mobile I think they work quite well.)

jtchang• 5 years ago

https://github.com/openmiko/openmiko

Software to completely replace the core functionality of cameras like WyzeCam while allowing it to be used in a purely local (ie. cloud free) setup wihtout phoning home to anywhere.

DataCrayon• 5 years ago

I've been working on Chord Pro (https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/chord-pro/) for interactive data visualisation with chord diagrams... adding more features over time. It's a fun project, but it's operating at a loss if I factor in my time!

wdfx• 5 years ago

I've spent 2 months on https://connoise.lon.dev an audio synthesiser. Mostly to brush up on my c++ knowledge and modern standards. It's working but not perfect, I've got a few interesting problems to solve yet.

person_of_color• 5 years ago

What are some other good C++ project ideas?

shanecleveland• 5 years ago

I’m needing to track some things to help a chronic health issue and I wanted something super simple with a focus on seeing trends through a broad visual overview: howsyourblank.com

liuxiaopai• 5 years ago

Mine is Notion Dog. https://github.com/notiondog/notion.dog

The easiest way to build simple, powerful websites with nothing but Notion.

vinhnx• 5 years ago

I have been working on a universal Calendar app for Apple platforms, as iOS, iPadOS, watchOS and macOS specifically; named Clendar -- it's Calendar without an "a", I know, I'm not good at naming. [0][1]

My goal is to learn SwiftUI and explore new technologies.

The app is now open source on GitHub as well, it's my way to give back to the community as I was learning it. [3]

Feedback welcome!

---

[1] Download link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clendar-a-calendar-app/id15481...

[2] Landing page: https://vinhnx.github.io/clendar-site

[3] GitHub: https://github.com/vinhnx/Clendar

Hope you all have a great weekends!

psmithsfhn• 5 years ago

Been working on a service to let you listen to the web -- similar in function to the audio part of the Pocket app.

Mostly using AWS Lambda and SNS.

Some occasional weirdness in stringing functions together -- might do more with Step Functions.

But weird part is some calls just seem to hang and never return -- unless they get a clean/new function of their own.

Using Pythom 3.8 with Boto3 library.

But generally amazed with what Lambda seems like it might be able to do if I can get it humming.

http://readonthegoapp.com/

carmen_sandiego2• 5 years ago

Step functions are interesting in theory but they become quite messy in my experience. Are you using Chalice for your Lambda functions? Or something else? What kind of problems are you having with SNS? With Chalice it should be pretty easy to just trigger on SNS messages that come after each step, though I’m not sure which steps you would need for your app. Is it TTS with Poly running async or something?

mihailpalelogu• 5 years ago

I'm making an online store builder with local shipping and payment solutions most used in my country.

EvanKRob2• 5 years ago

Mine is not exactly for the demo of HN crowd but I’m proud of its recent launch. A community around my sports podcast. https://www.redwhitenetwork.com

200+ members and a few dozen paying subs, I’m ecstatic.

approxim8ion• 5 years ago

I started a blog last year, just trying to be regular at the moment. Nothing groundbreaking, mostly writing for myself. Trying to stick to a post per week and hoping the finesse comes with time.

lbutler• 5 years ago

Simulating water distribution networks in JavaScript.

I maintain a JS conversion of the EPA's simulation engine EPANET. https://epanetjs.com/ https://github.com/modelcreate/epanet-js

I've built a few open source apps and few other little projects to help automate my workflow.

There are only a handful of providers of modelling software, most are commercial and one recently sold to Autodesk for $1B.

Not sure I'll convince the industry to change but I'm enjoying tinkering around and making my own small difference.

eivarv• 5 years ago

https://cleave.app

Cleave is an application that lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level.

Started because of frequent multitasking of heavy work with limited resources. Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all resources.

I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...

kureikain• 5 years ago

https://hanami.run an email forwarding service built with Ruby on Rails and Stimulus

It enables you to have unlimited email address on your own domain and forward to a personal email address. You can reply through our SMTP server as well.

I have learn a lot about Postfix, email, DKIM, SPF, DMARC the past few months.

astralwebb• 5 years ago

making youtube tutorials about ecommerce and the web. crazy addicting and getting lots of great feedback

https://www.youtube.com/c/Astralwebincloves/videos

m_j_g• 5 years ago

https://raw.githack.com/marcinjangrzybowski/cubeViz/master/m...'

Visual editor for cubical-agda code, currently I am rewriting it in haskell and integrating with emacs. New version will allow to edit code in 3 and 4 dimensions :)

tiddles• 5 years ago

A Dwarf Fortress-like game (and engine) in Rust: https://github.com/DomWilliams0/name-needed

Ambitious to be sure, but after a year and a half I'm still consistently working on it, and still enjoying it!

Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

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