The Side-Project Project

http://sachagreif.com/the-side-project-project/

by sgdesign • 14 years ago

95 47 14 years ago

sachagreif.com

sgdesign4• 14 years ago

If you've built side projects before, post them here! I'll start:

- http://patternify.com – A pixel pattern generator that produces CSS Base64 code (made with jQuery)

- http://thetoolbox.cc – A directory of useful web apps and tools (made with WordPress)

struppi• 14 years ago

- http://gclimbing.com/ - A blogging site for climbers (though this took a lot longer than 10 hours).

- http://scribblingspree.com/ - A simple drawing game. The main reason I wrote this was to practice Wicket and Canvas. The initial version took less than 10 hours.

- http://davidtanzer.net/wicketsc - A screen cast series about Apache Wicket.

aantix• 14 years ago

http://www.aantix.com - Personal portfolio site where clients can reach me.

http://www.runfatboy.net - A workout plan for beginners.

http://www.jimasks.me - Morally divisive questions answered by the community.

fratis• 14 years ago

I built http://ipsum.me, an ipsum generator for web developers, with placeholder functionality for those dozen <li> tags in your mockup that you'd like to fill with a list of names.

dools• 14 years ago

Create and share video playlists from youtube without logging in: http://cueyoutube.com/

Easily create digests of emails using forwarding rules: http://emaildigest.me/

These two don't really do anything, they're just ideas with Wufoo forms:

Find out where you rank in terms of salary for your industry and location: http://pimpmysalary.com/

Get a Chinese Business Name for $500: http://www.chinesebusinessname.com/

choxi• 14 years ago

Markdown Wikis: http://www.tryscribble.com

benjlang• 14 years ago

http://blisscontrol.com/ - Easily manage all your social network settings

http://mappedinisrael.com/ - Israeli startup map

http://notificationcontrol.com/ - Email notifications can be a pain! Unsubscribe in one shot

http://relationbook.me/ - Facebook relationship management dashboard

http://falafelday.com/ - Join in with the rest of the world on June 12th as we all celebrate by eating Falafel.

switz• 14 years ago

http://phishvids.com - Phish Videos categorized by show, setlist, and song. Lots of stuff in the works for this one. Built in DerbyJS.

simonbarker873• 14 years ago

http://www.oneqstn.com - create simple one question surveys with no account needed (20 hours)

http://www.efficientthings.com - social product ranking for the Eco / Green market (12 hours)

madjar• 14 years ago

Not as sexy as some of the things you can find on this page, but : https://github.com/madjar/pyramid_persona/ : a lib to use the persona auth system from mozilla with the pyramid web framework (that is specific !)

w00kie• 14 years ago

http://sunsetter.herokuapp.com/ - a small web app that tells you when the sun will rise or set in a particular direction (when you want to take a picture of the sunset behind Mount Fuji or when something like Manhattanhenge happens in your city)

PhilipA• 14 years ago

I built among others http://recovermywebsite.com, which can retrieve your page from the Yahoo or Bing cache. It took more like 100-300 hours instead of 10 :)

jameswyse• 14 years ago

That's cool, my mate cancelled his hosting recently and forgot to download his files. The website needs replacing anyway but if this works at least he'll be able to get the old one online again.

Thanks!

Dramatize• 14 years ago

http://dragthelake.com/ - A place to store timeless articles.

jfoucher• 14 years ago

http://flickholdr.com - get placeholder images from flickr, based on tags you choose

http://lebonmail.com - get classifieds in your inbox from leboncoin.fr, dinkos.com.au and segundamano.es as none of them provide that functionality

TamDenholm• 14 years ago

http://allthefavicons.com - Create favicons and idevice icons in 1 easy step. http://instantise.com - created this for other instant engines when google instant launched, not touched it in years.

marketmonkey• 14 years ago

http://livelystocks.com - live streaming stock news from multiple sources; great for day traders

zachinglis• 14 years ago

- lorem-ipsum.me (Lorem Ipsum with an API) - designblogs.heroku.com (Formerly designblo.gs) - Tons of open-source stuff on Github that isn't designed.

illdave• 14 years ago

http://hackerbuddy.com/ - One on one mentoring for coders & designers (took much longer than 10 hours, but it's free!)

duck• 14 years ago

I have two HN related newsletters:

* http://hackernewsletter.com - best articles from HN each week hand-picked by me

* http://waybackletter.com - a look back at the last five years of HN

ryandvm• 14 years ago

Radar Livepaper: Android live wallpaper that shows the local weather radar

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appidio.ra...

jamessun• 14 years ago

Maybe I should work on a side project which is a user-maintained directory of side projects...

udit992• 14 years ago

http://4.everalone.com A dating site for redditors

http://www.visamapper.com A world map of visa requirements based on your citizenship

sageikosa• 14 years ago

http://www.guildsmanship.com - game from a framework that models OGL-SRD based FRPG

chrisa• 14 years ago

http://mobilesort.com/ - An iPad app for learning piano notes. Took about 100 hours, gets a steady 5 sales per day

j21• 14 years ago

http://clipchoose.com - Let's you make polls with YouTube videos

nemesis1637• 14 years ago

http://flickmail.nicholasblee.com/ - Get a daily email listing all the newly added movies to Netflix's instant watch catalog.

milesokeefe• 14 years ago

10 hours seems far too short for most side projects. Maybe I'm too inexperienced as a developer, but I consider a lot of my projects to be "side" projects, and they take at least 30 hours.

I just don't see how you can create a full, well designed, functional website based off an original idea in under 10 hours.

For those that have side projects that you made in under 10 hours, could you share them?

sgdesign4• 14 years ago

I created The Toolbox in about 10 hours (http://thetoolbox.cc). If you feel like a project will take more than 10 hours, I would suggest scaling your idea back.

Of course, if you have more than 10 hours available then go for it, but a lot of people never start precisely because it seems like too big a task. So I thought the 10-hour rule could be a good way to get past that.

navs• 14 years ago

That's a nice side project. I can see this being useful. Can I ask if the site looked this good on the very first release or have you gradually improved it since its first post 10hr release?

wallawe• 14 years ago

That's cool. What are you using on the back end and how did you accomplish it being a designer?

kamaal• 14 years ago

One question: how many of you have side projects, whose main purpose has nothing to do with the web? I mean do you build/play wth furniture, micro controllers, cooking etc kind of stuff.

I know that monetizing them is far more difficult compared to web ones due to default advantage of distribution on the web.

But what are your successful projects which are non-web?

minikomi• 14 years ago

Very into making chiptune (LSDJ), and now using "Piggy Tracker" - a sampler which is based on LSDJ, but which runs on a lot of handhelds, linux, mac and now Rasberry Pi.

simonbarker873• 14 years ago

I built a room temperature monitoring system with an mbed microcontroller and 29 maxim digital temperature sensors to show how heat is distributed in a room - made a nice 3D visualisation of the data with a Processing Sketch. Completely non-web but a total success in what I set out to do

Pyrodogg• 14 years ago

Interesting, was this developed for something like a generic room in a home or something with many sources of heat like a data center?

damncabbage• 14 years ago

I help put on a yearly pop culture convention here in Sydney (http://www.smash.org.au). Started with 900 people showing up, now at 6000+. Kind of nuts. :)

(Quite an adventure, if not a profitable one; it's a not-for-profit association and we all volunteer our time outside of regular work.)

evilduck• 14 years ago

Homebrewing beer, which has a slim to none chance of me monetizing, but it does save some money on on buying beer (finally...after ~4 years, I'm past the break-even point of equipment purchases) and it's a fun biological science endeavor that you get to drink the results of.

I toy with Arduino and electronics a bit, but my circuits knowledge is sufficiently lacking that it's mostly learning/exploration and not very practical. I can build anything that comes as a kit, but designing anything from scratch is more difficult.

frownie2• 14 years ago

I have a side project which is writing a production management plant for my brother in law's company.. That's not exactly "a quick website", took me around 600 hours (six hundreds) so far. I've worked 2 hours a day, 4 days a week on average for more than 1.5 year now... Still doin' great. No web site so far. Not even github (what for? I'm the only one working on it :-))

udit992• 14 years ago

Any reason for not releasing an MVP with frequent follow-on releases instead of a big-bang release? I ask because I suffer from the problem of not releasing often enough. Saw matching symptoms in your post that made me wonder what your reasons were.

frownie2• 14 years ago

OK, you have good insight. So here's the deal...

I'm rewriting an old, limited BASIC (!) application. So my "customer" knows quite well what he needs (he needs the same, but better). So requirements are rather easy to grasp. I also demonstrate progress every now and then so that he can get a good feeling of what I do. Now, the code has become good enough that I can give it to him to test it (and he'll behave as the usual customer : he will not test enough :-) ). Moreover, I have access to its current database => i've got a lot of data to validate the business rules side of the program.

Concerning the big bang now... The program is quite a "whole" so it's pretty hard to release a part of it. I basiacally made two parts : the classical ERP stuff and the time reporting (machines/humans). Also, working for a small, privately owned company, to replace an existing software is different than a brand new "super idea" web site. That is, the room for error is super small. And since it's a side project, I cannot provide on site support within 8 hours. Therefore, I think the big bang is the only option (well, for both parts of the program). As said, I'm working on a stable requirements basis => I'm confident I can manage the application development and code quality with standard testing...

In retrospect, I think the project is nice but a bit too big. 2 years, day in day out, is quite an endeavour. And although I like it, I feel it has to finish now...

In case you wonder : I didn't use an existing ERP solution because after some tests by my brother-in-law-customer, it appeared that they are either too expensive, too complicated/slow or they impose too much of an administrative burden (eg. ned to declare every single stocks before being able to actually write some production orders...) Hopefully, what we're doing will prove more efficient for our case (and, let's dream, there might be other people interested, I mean, rich people :-)))

stF

Spoom• 14 years ago

On this concept, does anyone know if there's a model for early release of a mobile app, or does that pretty much have to be a big-bang release? My app will probably be freemium with many social options and tie-ins, so I'm not sure how to "release early" with something like that.

michaeltoth• 14 years ago

What hosts does everybody use for these side projects? I'm interested in working on some of my own, but I'm just wondering if everybody is paying for hosting and as you expand into multiple projects how you keep it from getting too expensive. I'd really appreciate any information.

davesmylie• 14 years ago

I use rimuhosting - pretty reasonable service for a decent price.

I had performance issues with my last host that resolved completely when jumping to rimuhosting.

I've got two main apps hosted there (one large, one small), with a number of other random sites that don't do much.

It's costing me about $US40 a month for hosting, which is a reasonable chunk of cash to put down for a hobby/side project every month, but once this amount is offset against ad income it's not really a problem.

rotub• 14 years ago

http://www.movii.es - quickly see what movies are now showing, and judge them based on Rotten Tomatoes and Social Media reviews.

The Side-Project Project

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