https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638
Some of you should consider applying to YC as well!
Creates 3D-printable elevation maps of Earth's surface. I originally made it because I couldn't find a tool to make a particular 3D model I wanted, and then decided to open source it. However, to use the code you need to download ~80 GB of elevation data, which I thought would be a stumbling block for a lot of other hobbyists, so I put together a little web interface and hosted it myself.
It sometimes breaks even over a month from the occasional donation, and I think it's gotten me at least one job, but the best thing is the emails I get from users showing me what they've made with it. Seeing these really cool art and education projects from people more creative than me is pretty awesome!
Thanks to cultivation dificulties as well as bad image from previous times (thanks to big yields it use to be used for poducing cheap table wines) make this varietal slowly dying: old blocks are being replanted by other varietals.
I think it is a pitty as St. Laurent wine is very interesting and quite memorable. Luckily I've bought few blocks with old vines and I am selecting plants with loose bunches and am trying to create new clone with more favorable growing characteristic.
It's quite functional but nothing to download yet. I expect it to be out of alpha by the end of this year. I plan to put it on Steam but I don't think it could be a "success" - it's, mildly put, quirky. Maybe I should add mouse support.
Early (no signup/in browser storage) version is live at https://app.flowtelic.com.
A video showing how to use it is here: https://youtu.be/Zo9hIuffz_0
I’m documenting as I build this over on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams
I don't make any money, instead I've spent around $130 and 400 hours so far. It is actually a lot of fun to learn web development and encounter various unexpected challenges everyday. There are also rewarding aspects - 9 couples, who met through the site, have reached out to me and were grateful. This feeling of changing people's lives in this way is amazing! I have no clue where this brings me, but I enjoy it so much. I try to spend at least 1.5 hours a day in 2021. In 2020 I had a goal to spend at a least 1 hour a day on my side projects and that's how firedating was born ;)
Vertical indoor farms are getting a lot of attention in the recent times, but the issue is the lack of plant expertise. Even if you were to go through all the literature, you would never find a holistic study that takes into account all the optimal factors for specific plant growth. For example, for lettuce, the best you will get would be EC, Ph, Light Intensity, CO2 ppm over an average range. However, approaching it from a perspective of 'systems' design where all these things play a role (often in an interaction with all factors) is still missing. For example, what part of the artificial light spectrum + nutrition level + air composition would be most optimal is still missing.
I'm a computer scientist by training and I'm trying to solve this with ML. It's a really hard problem, but I'm doing it. I have a mini-farm setup in my appt where I collect the data, but hopefully I'm getting some more seed-money to build a 10m^2 farm to be able to demonstrate the optimization. My goal is to hit as high as 370 kilos of herbs per m^2 (or 2.5 cubic meter) per year from only a four layer farm.
https://seanwilson.itch.io/wordoid
It's a remake of a game I made for Android years ago that I still get messages about for being really addictive. It was fun remaking it using only HTML5, while polishing the presentation and rules.
I also work on a freeium Chrome extension that crawls multiple pages at once to check for SEO, speed and security issues. Try it on your website or landing page to see what issues it can find:
- https://caseconverter.pro/app - a simple online case converter, could probably grow it with SEO
- https://getworkrecognized.com - app to keep a work diary and create self-reviews, actually paid for itself. Got promoted twice within 2.5 years at current company
- https://linkedium.com - app to schedule LinkedIn posts, mainly for marketing use of the other projects; its also not live yet
Eventually I will make it more like an actual music player since right now it only plays one file and provides different seek points so you can jump to the song you want to hear. I think it will also be an interesting way to keep me invested in releasing new music that I can put on it.
[0] Built it using arwes.dev for that sci-fi feel
In the meantime since DAHDI is giving me so many issues and I’m waiting to receive some alternative hardware, I’ve been working on a very, very rough software simulation of a.DS0/DS1 interface so I can at least start developing the ISDN stack on something.
I built it for myself because I just hate not having privacy living with my girlfriend. Then some other people enjoyed it and I made it into a product that is launching on Kickstarter soon.
Documenting it here: https://surjan.substack.com/
I'm currently learning about sales and marketing and think I can share my modest knowledge on the topic in a way that is fairly systematic.
One of the draws of programming for me—and I believe this is true for a lot of developers—is that software development is fairly a systematic discipline to get into, unlike sales or marketing, for instance.
The path to learning how to program is fairly systematic i.e. learning follows a well-defined path where you learn your first "hello, world", then learn about constants, variables, expressions, conditionals, loops, functions etc. Making recursion the first lesson is a recipe for confusion for most beginners to programming.
My goal with the guide is to explain sales and marketing—in a well-defined way similar to how programming is learnt—using plain language, while avoiding jargon, as much as possible.
Learning this way has been helpful to me and I think a guide like this would be helpful to developers out there that struggle with answering questions like whether to do sales or marketing first, build an audience before building a product etc.
I'm on the free tier of ConvertKit so I'm trying to figure the easiest way to automatically email subscribers a copy of the current draft of the guide.
Here's the current landing page: https://guide.ayewo.com/
Its backend (Exocore[2]) 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 (it was on another tech stack before).
[1]: https://github.com/appaquet/exomind [2]: https://github.com/appaquet/exocore
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/two-birds-one-stone/id15396463...
I have wanted to be able to play this game for a long time, and probably thanks to pandemic, I did the work to enable it to be shared with others. It has made a grand total of 3 sales this year, and that isn't really bothering me (the main frustration is the apple developer fee...)
There is various info (including a trailer of sorts) here:
It schedules meals for my shared household. I can give it a request like: "next week I want to cook 4 vegetarian meals with 3 portions, and 1 vegan meal for 8 people for big shared dinner, and I want <=2 of those to be noodles.
It thinks for a bit with a planner (implemented in Minizinc - https://www.minizinc.org/ - with OR-Tools for a solver), and out pops a plan, like: "OK, you need to check you still have 500 g of potatoes, ..., then buy 1 kg of carrots, 1 liter of coconut milk, and here's links for the online store; I also checked those ingredients in stock; I also need cayenne pepper, you'll have to get it yourself because I don't know how to get it online".
The planner can understand things like "there's risotto rice, jasmine rice, arborio rice, etc.; some recipes ask for specific type of rice but some recipes are OK with any kind of rice". And there's more things I plan to support in the future, like ingredients that allow "use this ingredient or this other ingredient", or optional ingredients.
When we get a plan, we then check we have all the needed stock, and if we don't, we update the stock and replan. And when it's done, it generates an ICS file with calendar entries we add to our shared calendar ("today we're cooking gnocchi with pesto for 4 people, here's link to the recipe"). It also generates stickers, which you print on sticker paper, and you put them on the ingredients that will be needed to cook. The stickers ensure someone doesn't accidentally eat too much of them before we need them.
It's given us a lot of utility for our household. It lets us make tasty fancy meals without the toil of planning. It's quite rough around the edges - no fancy UI, lots of "you have to enter this textproto here and there's next to no validation". But I'm slowly improving it in my spare time to make it more convenient and useful for us.
Right now, the published part of it is not useful, it only includes like 8 recipes that we manually entered. But I'm trying to design it so that it can eventually be a platform, and ideally easy-ish to use for households.
More of a scratching my own itch kind of thing. Has over 30k registered users but I don't even get enough to pay for my server! LOL.. So meh.. doesn't matter...
It's using my custom game engine, that was developed from scratch in C, the only dependencies are SDL2 and OpenGL. The engine and game were developed for the last 6 or so years (with breaks) in the evenings/weekends as my evergreen side project. The game was released last Halloween. I still support the game with patches after the release (both new features and fixes), one of them is expected to come out very soon. And to be honest I plan to do so in coming years. I was fun to develop and still is.
I have no idea how many people are using it regularly.
I think it's more than one, but I don't really care, I enjoy using it immensely and I've been writing ca. 1k words per day, consistently, for more than a year. Can't ask for more:)
(Note: There are still some issues with showing images on iOS browsers)
I mainly made this to satisfy my own curiosity. I had the idea of forming a convex polytope based on an image's colors, and I thought it would be cool to be able to explore that in a responsive way through a graphical UI. Also it was a great way to learn Svelte and ThreeJS, which in many ways work rather well together! If anyone is curious to see the source code, I'm happy to link it too.
It regroups my personal data, and displays it on a timeline. Sort of like if Google Photos also included reddit posts, personal journal entries, text messages and other slices of life. It's a sort of "on this day", but for a single person.
I do it both as a way to back up files and photos, and as a way to keep an enhanced journal. It's also a way to divorce myself from companies that hold my personal data hostage.
It's already live, but I'm still extending it with new data sources (especially GDPR data dumps) and simplifying its structure for further development.
it's essentially a crowd sourced rock climbing destination filter for world class destinations. Most similar tools will have ALL climbing areas meaning you have to filter through a bunch of noise to find the real diamonds.
I originally built it to solve my own problem of "I don't really know where I should go on vacation" so I don't mind if it isn't successful because I actually use it myself quite frequently.
everyone I've showed it to thinks it's amazing and that it will do well but I have no idea how to spread the word effectively so I think it's destined for mediocrity haha.
It's a big alpha WIP a this point and as you say "I don't care if this succeeds" as I know I need it anyway and already use it every day, as well as a bunch of friends. I'm a visual thinker and to me notes in apps like Evernote always end up looking like digital soup. Putting everything on a big 2D map helps me tremendously. So far it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/WkuLENm.png
https://play.caraque.app/ (alpha password: underground)
Once I complete a project, I usually open-source it and write a blog post so I can have something to show it to somebody like a prospective employer. The most recent project I completed is a ray tracer made completely from scratch ->
https://alessandrocuzzocrea.com/how-i-made-a-ray-tracer/
I'm too lazy to open text editor, save a file and run a compiler, so I wrote a service that allows me to do that easily in a web browser. It's kinda buggy, and probably unusable for anyone that isn't me, but it's on the internet anyway.
It got a lot of attention last week, but I've been working on it since 2012, almost entirely for myself. It's impossible for me to know but I assume that until recently I had on the order of ten users at most…
I used to let my DSL modem handle PPPoE and NAT, so failover was easy, but found out fragmented IPv6 crashed the leased modem, and the replacement modem also sucks, so bridge mode + a custom PPPoE client (built from netgraph pieces, I'm not completely nuts) it is. Sadly useful in 2021, because PPPoE is somehow still a thing.
It was a disaster when I announced it on Hacker News, and I got numerous harassments from strangers.
But anyway 3 years since then and I'm still working on it.
Edit 1: 2 => 3 years
Edit 2: If anyone is interested, I wrote a blog on the mistakes I made http://cheng.guru/blog/2018/02/18/lessons-learnt-from-open-s....
So far just me and 2 other users actively using it, lol
Dealing with the changes that occur to data over time can be complex. SirixDB simplifies it somewhat by recording the system time of every transaction. I'm actually writing a blog post to show some of the problems with changing data, and how SirixDB can be used to assist with the problem.
SirixDB also uses functionally persistent data structures to efficiently share data between revisions, preventing storage bloat.
I've been working (on and off) on the ecosystem/tooling for SirixDB for over a year now. I do almost all of the ecosystem work, and for the most part, there is only one dev on the core. While I think that SirixDB is at least feature ready, I don't think anything will ever come of the project. I wish the project would get some users though, that would be exciting :).
A suite of realtime chatrooms, for travellers to talk about their flights, and the airlines that run them.
The idea is to let the use enter their flight details into a search box, find the chatroom for their flight, and let others know what's on their mind.
Before the pandemic, me and my wife would travel to see family often enough to experience the mind numbing frustration of sitting in a cabin of a delayed flight. In some case, for hours at a time.
We were also shocked at how often airlines will change the T&C's, often to the detriment of the customer. Especially in regards to seating plans (separating friends and family), and baggage allowance.
I wanted to do something to help customers challenge airlines on such issues and, where possible, discuss solutions amongst themselves.
Techwise, while simple (Elixir, Vue, CouchDB), I think it works well. But the marketing side of it has been tough... It hard to know where to start.
Not sure if the idea is bad, if the timing is off (pandemic) or the execution needs improving in someway.
I have never written before this, and not sure if it's something I will after this - but at this stage I need to "get it all out of my head". I don't foresee this being a forever project because ultimately I would have said all I want to say. But at this stage, it feels cathartic :)
It's a no signup way to send encrypted messages to people (think usernames and passwords etc) that includes the time limited decryption key in the email we send to the target user and when the target user views the email, the message is deleted from our system.
This way if the target email gets hacked in the future, the link is useless.
Much better than emailing passwords around the place.
Could turn it into a service, but just haven't gotten around to it.
It's not that I don't care about the outcome. I really hope it will be useful to many students, and I mean to publish it. But I am writing it primarily for me, as a way to keep being involved in mathematics even if I am not doing actual math research anymore
ScribeGen (https://www.scribegen.com/) is built with GPT-3 and can help content marketers, blog writers, or just about anyone get working copy to edit from as fast as possible.
The launch has been fantastic so far, but even if it's less successful than I hope the experience working with GPT-3 and other language metrics has been eye opening.
Easily submit HTML forms or JSON calls at it and it chucks the formatted data to an email or Slack channel.
It's pretty fun to work on it and implement new use cases. Right now it supports FUSE mounts, but I'm thinking to make it work as a WebDAV server too.
Also, I'm working on several demos, like SQLite compatibility, similar to https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net, or CSV analysis using Jupyter notebooks for huge datasets like https://ghtorrent.org/
This past month I built a photojournal blog to host my street photography & assorted other shots from this crazy year.
I both wanted a place for my photos to be viewable in higher resolution than Instagram, as well as to establish an ongoing chronological log of my life as it unfolds - as some kind of crazy experiment I will probably soon regret.
I built this from scratch with Next.js and Typescript. Probably spent more time in Figma designing it than I spent programming! This was a fun excuse to learn Next.js though - amazing how far we’ve come since CRA.
I haven’t officially “launched” (promoted on other channels) yet, so I guess I’m soft-launching on HN right now :)
It's almost done, and I do plan to spend a little effort promoting it when it's complete, but it's been a great focus for me even if no one ever reads it.
I use a fair bit of infrastructure at my job that was set up by others. It was nice to go through the practice of setting it up myself.
I learned a good bit, but also it's nice to have all this knowledge written down in a place not owned by the company I work for. If I use GCP at future jobs I'm sure I'll reference this book myself.
The most tricky part is heat treatment. The only supplier I found able to treat sword blades, due to length, is using induction hardening. On paper, that seems to be a pretty good way doing it. Penetration depth can be controlled, almost no deformation. Funny thing is, nobody seemed to have tried it so far. Curious to see how it works out. Maybe I make a blade for destructive testing, but we'll see.
It's a platform for hikers, backpackers, and outdoor enthusiasts to share trail information via GPX files for interactive maps and elevation charts, notes, trail features, points-of-interest, and pictures.
After 6 years and almost 800 individual trails written and tracked (of my own), it seems like this project is a total waste of time some days. Other days it's super exciting to see traffic and knowing folks are out exploring something new. I also never thought anyone would pay money to support the site, so no complaints.
It's also a great way to stay in shape.
It’s a pattern weight, essentially an 80mm wooden cylinder, 16mm thick, with a metal weight embedded inside.
We’ve sold a grand total of 50 (sets of five) but it’s been great as a way to learn to run my CNC router!
Coded it during the Christmas break and improved it a bit since. Scoring still doesn't work and it's rough around the edges, but people been praising it as a fun 5 minute novelty.
I built it for myself, but a few friends have already asked to use it because they are fed up with how bloated and ad-heavy most recipe websites are these days.
I need to do an about building blog post
but I basically just made it to get better at kubernetes design doc writing, and play around with hasura, next.js, vercel and a bunch of other tech toys.
Here are the projects I've done so far:
https://github.com/maxvfischer/Arthur An AI art installation I built from scratch using a GAN network, Samsung The Frame, a button and a PIR-sensor (including, code, images and tutorial). The main draft is almost done, but quite some polishing to do.
https://github.com/maxvfischer/shibusa An automatic Zen Garden drawing infinite patterns in sand. Using stepper motors, inverse kinematics and a Raspberry Pi Zero W (including, code, images and tutorial). I'm almost done building the robot, but still have quite some implementation to do. Also, the guide is far from done, I've mostly uploaded images so far.
https://github.com/maxvfischer/DIY-arcade A full-size Arcade Machine I built from scratch (including, code, images and tutorial). It's done, but there's a lot of improvements that can be done.
Real-time disk IO graphing thingy - https://bvckup2.com/wip/10042018
Both can be developed into proper products, but that'd be beyond what I actually need from these two for myself.
https://progress.bot - slack bot for async standups
https://textareaplease.com - a textarea with text transforms
I built them because I needed them at some point and I'm happy others find them useful as well!
Love a good / dubious project I can bang out over a rainy weekend. Finger.Farm is a modern re-implementation of fingerd in Node, but with an API and whatnot. I built it mostly as a demo for the Jr devs on my team who haven't had the opportunity to finger each other, but there are some ideas there I might bring back in other projects...
With it I can combine multiple representations (0x) (0b) (decimal), do bitwise operations while visualizing the bits, change the amount of bits used in each calculation and some other neat things :)
I care if it succeeds, but I don't feel super attached to the success. Maybe another way of saying it is that my bar is very low — if anyone uses it and it makes any money I'll be happy :)
Built it for fun - mainly to learn puppeteer, how to set up auth, node.js, GSAP and how to write serverless functions.
Biggest highlight so far: got featured in the Google official blog.
App here: https://glitterly.app
Still it’s rewarding for me to work on. I started it after my startup failed and I was so exhausted working on something I wanted to succeed. So I made a totally non commercial open source project and it’s been a lot of fun.
I made it for myself because my notes were getting too disorganized.
What keeps me motivated is how much fun I have working on it. When I wake up every day, I look forward to hearing from my users. It gives me great pleasure knowing a handful of users love my product and use it on a daily basis.
While daily office grind bores me to death, working on my app is exciting.
The other factor is that it costs me $36 per month to run it - so cost-wise I don't mind since its low. I just need another customer to break even.
I don't think anything will change if it grows to a million users. I have not really thought about it.
It was and probably is a playground to learn coding and trying new technlogies: steam bots, rabbitmq, microservice architecture, svelte, typescript. A lot of fun and experience.
We even built a seperate platform for organizers to manage the tournaments. For now we use it ourselves. Pretty cool to host Dota games from the smartphone. Players just get instant invites to the in-game lobby. And after the match is finished the score, the bracket and the stats are updated automatically.
Not much time recently for new tournaments. But very cool to get positive feedback from the community.
A simple (mobile-first) website that helps you convert volumetric recipes to weight. Made this during my baking phase of the pandemic to help me more accurately (and quickly) measure out ingredients.
> You cannot control the actions of others, but you can always choose how you react. > Don't let them steal your peace or your joy.
> If something isn't making you stronger, smarter, or better, then it isn't serving you. > Even if leaving is hard, painful and takes a lot of effort… it's still better than wasting your life. > Go where you are celebrated, not tolerated.
> If you're waiting for the "right time," it'll never happen… just do it. > You can figure out how and why later.
> It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice. #quotes #wisdom
Generated by GPT-3.
While XMPP is still probably the most widely used federated instant messaging network (Matrix is the Internet's darling, but the sheer number of XMPP clients and servers is significantly higher, and even though Google and Facebook may have ditched it it's still widely used commercially and is pretty much the defacto standard in video game chat) so I believe it's an important piece of infrastructure that needs to exist in the Go ecosystem. Also I just wanna chat with my buddies and didn't like any of the TUI clients I've used very much.
I'm mostly writing it for use with my own projects like https://tournify.io but it would be awesome if a few others found it useful too. It's a nice way for me to practice my Go programming skills.
It's a pwa with offline functionality. It can suggest when you might need to buy something again and can also try to give an estimate on how much the current list will cost at the store.
I've been pretty happy using it for the last few weeks, so I don't really mind if the user base never grows.
I'm also writing a WIP blog entry about some of the technology that it uses: https://kylepoole.me/blog/20210201_Bakalist/
I started building it for myself at first, scratching my own itch.
I don’t feel the same pressure as I had with my open source projects. I’ve been adding features when I feel the need for my own use (i.e. alerting system), or customers made a good point for why it’d be useful.
Also, I don’t work on stuff that nobody requested yet. For example, you can’t even change your account email yet.
So far it’s been fun working on it, and slowly getting paying customers. But it might take 1-2 years for it to replace my day job income-wise. That’s fine, it’s just about having the right expectations, and keeping up a sustainable pace.
It's a set of logos with hand-drawn aesthetic. It is meant to create presentations, software architecture diagrams, documentation, tutorials, etc. in the fastest way possible. They are also compatible with Excalidraw[0].
I'm doing the project with my best friend. He's an architect (the buildings type of architect, not a software architect), so he's drawing, and I'm building the site. We would like to make some money out of it, but we are mostly doing it for fun.
Host your shit at home without exposing ports to the world.
There is a pretty popular used car checklist. I thought it needed to be converted to a basic but interactive website, just for fun.
https://github.com/meheleventyone/mixdown
It's been on a bit of a hiatus from development because I've been busy with other parts of another project and the whole pandemic thing.
OpenAI gave up after beating 99% of players in a limited version of DOTA2. They essentially just figured out how to out-micro human players. We want to let players play alongside AI assistance, like a racing car driver backed up by their team of mechanics and engineers.
It's a tool to install (in one line) and manage reverse SSH tunnels for access to my geographically dispersed, outdoor Raspberry Pis (that are contributing to various aeroplane position reporting systems, my most relevant being Open Glider Network e.g. https://www.gliderradar.com/center/39.16414,-12.65625/zoom/3 ).
It’s purely for my own reference, as a sort of glorified bookmark manager, but other people are finding it useful too.
Technically, I built it with Jekyll as it was supposed to be a simple site. I’ve long got past the point where it probably should be based on something more dynamic, but can’t be bothered to do the rewrite. Instead I’ve wrangled Jekyll collections into something resembling a relational flat-file database.
I created this as a tool for me to memorize chess openings. Since then I added more tools like tactics and endgames where I took theoretical winning endgame positions with the challenge to beat stockfish in them.
The project is open source [1] written in Elixir using Phoenix and also utilizing LiveView for some pages like the search pages.
Since about three years I work on a classical Multiplayer Online Role Playing game.
Why I don't care about the outcome: (1) I think such a project is out of scope of a single person, (2) I simply don't have many skills required to make such a game, (3) I think people moved away from this kind of games, (4) I have a day job and only work on it when I have some idea.
But it's amazing to see how complex systems, built from tiny parts take shape over time.
I use it everyday and I like this way of splitting tasks and getting things done. There is so many options out there from a simple txt file to complex apps... this means there isn’t a one app fit all and I enjoyed taking a year off to prototype it and shape it around my paper bullet journal habits. If people find it useful it’s great but I mainly pay 99$/yr for my own custom app which feels great
The engine is not general purpose either, it's specific to the quirks of the original game. The number of weird ideas that I could graft onto it keeps increasing with each week. Yet, without stability and feature parity with the original, it's a long way away from having those things.
Another downside is going back and playing the original now isn't as fun, because I keep thinking I'm playing the rewrite and expecting bugs to pop up at every corner. Working on a project like this for so long affects your perception of the end result in ways you can't easily unsee.
Also gets pretty lonely working on something alone for years you're not sure anyone will care about when it's playable.
Launched in New York and London, more cities coming soon.
I've used it as a testbed for trying out Google Cloud technologies - it works with Cloud Functions, Big Query and Cloud Run.
Sort of like a losslessy compressed bcd format proposed by byuu at: https://byuu.net/compact-discs/structure/
Built it from what I imagined an ideal platform for developers to learn anything, code anything and be productive would look like, of course it didn't turn out to be that but rather 25% of what I imagined.
https://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest
There was a Show HN of https://www.cloudnews.dev/ ( changed a bit now) and I duplicated the sources within 10 minutes with http://cloudnews.sapico.me/Home/Newest
Eg. here's all news related to Cloudflare's blog: http://cloudnews.sapico.me/Home/ByTag?Name=cloudflare
Resources i could find with Azure: http://cloudnews.sapico.me/Home/ByTag?Name=azure-devops
I'll be using it for e-commerce clients, who want to feed the news of anything related to their business. Currently it's kinda slow ( not optimized for 1 million items with tags on my slow VPS, where i host a lot of test things )
[1] decent-signal: https://github.com/theawless/decent-signal
Since COVID people are using it less, but consumption is not all that low surprisingly. And yes it's not 100% compared to a chemical test I know. Same tech but better use than facial recognition.
It’s a free, private online journal with a focus on mental health.
I spent $4k usd in the domain name in 2015 and around another $4k in operating costs since then.
It has virtually zero marketing and has organically picked up around 1,500 users. I use it myself every day which is success enough for me. Fun project that has helped me land a few jobs, and my scant user base seems to dig it.
Field names:
Start (start date of diet)
Waga początkowa (starting weight)
Waga końcowa (detination weight)
Waga (current weight)
Przelicz (recalc)
Data utrzymywania (last day of weight reduction)
Limit jedzenia (how much can you still eat today)
Although they’re no where near breaking even if I account for even 20% of my time, I’ll continue to work on them because I want to see them finished.
I’ve priced them as “early access books” where the price grows as the content does as a way to gain some kind of interest and support the work!
I'm just doing it for the fun of talking to interesting people and a making content some people will enjoy.
A few people have already told me they liked the first interview so I'm happy with that!
It's an open source map to expose fossil fuel polluters. Add custom points to the map by pasting the URL to your Tweet. It can even do longer map stories through continuous Twitter threats.
We started development during the NASA SpaceApps hackathon, we're still going without much attention because we like the idea. Making money is not intended.
edit: spelling.
Link: https://docusutra.com
Unlike retro consoles/handhelds, there doesn't seem to be much nostalgia in the public consciousness for OG iPods - which is fair, given that most people just see them as antiquated MP3 players. That said, some of the later models did have some pretty neat little games which have yet to be preserved, and can only be played by owning the original hardware.
It was a lot of fun hacking away at the project, and I'd made a surprising amount of progress given that I'd opted to roll my own full-system emulator (in Rust!) as opposed to using something like QEMU.
Who knows, maybe when I have more free time I'll revisit the project and keep pushing it closer to completion. Not sure when though - emulation is a real time hog when you're also juggling a full time job!
The site is very new and has some rough edges still.
I wrote a simple markdown to static site script in python, and am hosting on Netlify.
Even if the project fails, I don't care as it solves my problem atleast
I start 99% of my emails with 'sorry' - I live in fear of going into my inbox, and so when I do it's a distinctly whiffy guilt laden experience, so I don't go in again for a while, and the cycle... well, you get the idea :-)
I've tried other addons to help (both using and making), but keep failing to invest the effort. In the end I went with "what's the simplest, speediest change that might have a lasting impact" and this was it.
It started as a weekend hobby in September, but I've been trying to polish it as more people have found it helpful. (This is hard work as I'm a dreadful aesthetic designer. It's more a case of 'monkey see, monkey copy the html').
https://www.3cosystem.com -- a simple startup events calendar. I'm surprised it is still up. It scrapes the Meetup API firehose, filters for tech events, and drops indexes on 65 cities world-wide. It never gets updates, and I'm surprised it still works.
It’s been live and running for 6 months but generates no revenue, and has only a few users. It has monetised features, but no payment or subscription mechanism.
You add your favourite server ip addresses, favourite map names, then you get push notifications whenever any of those servers starts playing any of those maps.
I created it specifically to watch all Zombie Escape servers in CS:S and CS:GO so that I could play whenever servers started playing my own maps in order to record and gather feedback for improvements. Nowadays though, It’s really only useful for some custom game modes on Garrys Mod, Counterstrike Source and Counterstrike Global Offensive (such as Zombie Escape, TTT, Zombie Survival) as they have large map pools, and each play can last for up to several hours.
I'd love to have more users only to get more feedback but ultimately I work on it because it makes me more productive!
This change isn't live yet, but in the v2 (next month or so) it will a) fetch new Spotify releases by genre every week, b) rank them by popularity and extract top 10, and c) publish them as a blog post and add them to a playlist others can follow.
Basically the opposite of Spotify's generated (Discover Weekly / Release Radar) and other curated playlists, because it doesn't care about your listening history what so ever, you just pick a genre and know you won't miss anything.
Starting small (3 subgenres of house music), but once I nail it down, it should be rather easy to scale it up to dozens of genres with little to no time investment on my part.
We operate as a "voice tracking" service but need to cater for presenters with limited hardware. First goal is to give them audio library access, then onto log editing and voice tracking. Even if the current system continues to play audio "on air" for now.
The weird bit is this is an itch I had 10-15 years ago! There's an ancient screenshot from some early cross-platform attempts I made over at https://www.dlineradio.co.uk/articles/radio-station-mobile-a... - spot the Java Swing with MSPaint icons! :P
Do retail traders really care about the small differences between the stock price and where their broker filled them? Probably not.
But it might help educate people, especially after the latest $GME frenzy.
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.papervoice
I wrote it based on some scripts I had, and then added Wireguard support and configuration generation.
I'm now working on making a proper backend so it can be used as a library (i.e. to run a few requests through different VPN connections, e.g. for web scraping for websites with geolocation-sensitive content), and also to learn a lot more about Linux system calls.
Eventually I'd like to expand that to use the network namespaces and firewall rules to allow for different virtual network configurations so I could use it for testing out distributed systems development too.
A big problem I see now is that lot of "positive" changes being added to existing protocols aren't backed by anything but existing holders beliefs that they will work, and being able to simulate changes/forks on local testnets agaisnt will make it easier to objectively say why an additional will be better/worse than another protocol/previous/future protocol changes.
I thought it's absolutely nuts that something simple and straightforward like this doesn't exist yet, so I built it
https://github.com/da-x/foldity
A utility for folding terminal output to fit the screen.
I strongly believe big libraries will come with their own easy to plugin static analysis rules as the norm (a lot already do). I also believe writing static analysis rules needs to be easier. And that devs will write their own static analysis rules more regularly in the future. I wrote checkr as a small rope bridge towards this. Clearly we need something better than simple regex, yet less daunting than abstract syntax trees. But regex gets us a lot of the way there.
Not capable of handling 1 mil+ pages as it still limited to puppeteer or playwright. Working on adding cheerio/jsdom support right now.
I recently just launched this jigsaw puzzle website!
The reason I originally built it was for a few family members who were tired of how slow other jigsaw apps were. I wanted to build something faster and easier to use.
Even if it doesn’t take off, I have a few players already that want me to keep updating it. I don’t mind since it’s pretty cheap to host and doesn’t require any maintenance. It also serves as my first attempt at running a side business with an optional premium subscription tier. And the last thing is that it’s an experiment for me to see how well Svelte and Rust perform in production :)
My take on the todo list, with a feature the procrastinator in me appreciates. Don't forget to bookmark the URL (with UUID) if you don't want to lose your list, as there are no user accounts.
Whenever I want to try out new tech stacks, I add a project here. So far I've played with (and really enjoyed) Django+intercooler, ClojureScript + REST API and Phoenix LiveView, but have only made the bug reporting/feedback system public (that's the ClojureScript one).
The idea is to build up my "making and marketing software products" muscles.
I am doing this in non-work, non-family hours (what few there are) and really don't care what succeeds - it's just if I do t do something I will go crazy.
I don't want a billion - I just want to really try. (without the risk of joblessness and family etc)
The first one - reviewing my kids YT watching habits with them. Got a list of others to try.
I was actually pushed over the edge by a post recently of Andy Fry who is doing a 12 startups in 12 months thing. Had to give something a go after that.
Tired of copying rows from Excel files into SQL insert statements? Try using this VS code extension: https://github.com/reZach/listtosql
An Electron template with security practices baked-in: https://github.com/reZach/secure-electron-template
Print out your own recipe cards: https://github.com/reZach/recipe-cards
Tic-tac-toe against a monte carlo strategist on iOS. Wrote the gameplay code years ago - nothing sophisticated just Apple GameplayKit, pretty dumb strategist but every once in a while it gets lucky. Dusted it off and launched it in the App Store just for something to do during the lockdowns last year. I'm still adding to it because I'm using it as a platform to test some augmented reality gameplay and learn motion graphics that I am using in a new game I have in the works now.
Surprisingly it has been getting a tiny bit of traction without any marketing.
A small search engine for simple, non-commerical webpages.
It's no longer developed just maintained. There are two other users besides me :) (the sample weight history is my own weight over the last 15 years).
MPD android client I made for myself and eventually published as a paied app (just to keep myself commited).
I keep developing and supprting it altough it earns in a month less than what I earn in two hours work as SW developer. https://mafa.indi.software/
Both mainly for my own personal interest and use.
Also an emoji-only twitter
It's a simple app for influencers & brands to make life easier.
Built it for myself so I don't have to manually find & collect stats from my social media when working on campaigns & collabs.
Connects to the social network APIs, loads your posts and stats. Using the Report builder you can add the posts you created and it shows your stats.
Recently made it open for everybody.
Brands can also sign up to get the reports & create campaigns.
Been a bit neglected lately as I am busy with other projects. Friends & other influencers use it at the moment.
Video Hub App - Browse, search, and organize your videos.
Turns 3 years old this month. MIT open source, cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux). Selling it for $5 and $3.50 goes to a cost-effective (my favorite) charity AMF (Against Malaria Foundation). Would be great to get more donations to the charity - it's not a project I need to succeed financially.
However, pandemic forced to close all subscriptions and then the online education market boomed/over invested? with 100s of startups providing 1-1 online coaching.
Long term I believe that kids would get tired of online stuff and would want to do things with their hands and maybe it’ll get some steam then. Till then I’m designing the sheets and working on improving course design algorithms.
Library if anyone's interested: https://github.com/RestitutorOrbis/finsim
Great thing is that I built it for myself as a way of sharing my data science portfolio (https://nbs.isaacaderogba.com/spacy-entities-model)! I decided to make it a general tool in case others wanted to use (and pay) for it. There's comfort in knowing that there'll always be at least one user.
My goal is to launch this and have as many writers as possible use it. But if that fails, I know my old MFA cohort will use it with me, and I’m happy with that.
Here‘s the link to the Ludum Dare entry in case anyone is interested: https://randomaccessgames.itch.io/neon-kata
It uses a custom opengles engine instead of using unity or something for free, as I wanted to practice opengl and android development.
Lately Google Admob DISABLED my ads (they say they are limiting my account even though I did not do anything malicious), but I couldnt care less
- Demo: https://logicboard.com/demo
- Code-Replay Demo: https://logicboard.com/demo/:replay
Was a great mini-side-project to learn some basic engineering.
- https://maxrozen.com - Covers mainly React/web dev topics
- https://perfbeacon.com/blog/ - Covers web performance
- https://onlineornot.com - Covers webmaster style topics for business owners
Looking forward to seeing if anyone finds it useful, but I've primarily been building it so that I can generate particle backgrounds and gradients for websites.
Hopefully it might help others too :-)
https://hopeforthemorbidlyobese.substack.com/p/can-you-reall...
It’s been a lot of fun to develop, and finally gave me a chance to try out Mithril.js which is a pretty sweet piece of minimalist software.
(Also great for solving solo.)
I built it because I wanted it to exist, and it's been fun to build. There's a small group of regular users, and I use it regularly myself. There's no monetization, though I have some thoughts about how that could happen in the future.
Writing about the practice and publishing my analysis is improving me and making me a better investor. I don't really care if it will greatly succeed in driving audience - as the biggest benefit from it, for me, is the practice of putting my thoughts into text.
I'm working on it in my spare time and for now it's really just something for my own blog so I can get some sense of what people think of what I put out, but I'm planning on making some plugins for Gatsby.js and Wordpress.
Playing with procedural content generation for games is a ton of fun, and I've learned a great deal so far in the three iterations of this.
https://jacobdoescode.com/technicalc
It’s done in react native and a good amount of it is also open source.
https://github.com/jacobp100/technicalc-core
It at least covers App Store fees
Its a pretty niche target audience so its unlikely to make money or be any sort of object success. But its self-fulfilling; it has been great for keeping me on top of new research and trends that impact my job.
Helps people discover podcast episodes on business and startups, especially if you don't want to have to listen through 40 mins to know if you like it or not. It forces me to find a podcast that's 'insightful' and it's weekly writing practice. Even if it doesn't succeed, just the learning is worth it.
https://dialectic.design/project/genuary-2021
Would be nice if its picked up by some art blogs or displayed in an art gallery or something but don't really care, what is "success" anyways.
Engram - Open source knowledge management app
Still pretty early on, but I'm excited about the possibilities. This is the first time I'm using an app I built daily.
I love it - it works for me. I am the only frequent user, but I absolutely understand why others wouldn't trust an external website with personal notes, especially these days.
I started this two months ago and it's suppose to be a tool which helps me with personal planning. Sharing tasks with my wife, colleagues, friends and employees.
It's a side project and I still have a job, so I work during evenings and nights on it.
Wordo. An English dictionary that my friends and I built. It has a handful of active users, who swear by it. Other than that, no one uses it. It's existed for a few years and I keep pushing small updated a few times a year, it makes me happy :).
An app to note down the final scores from games with your friends to find out who has the most points at the end of the year. We play it with Doppelkopf (german card game) but it can be used with any kind of games where each player has a score in the end.
I talk about why I built this here: https://startmydj.com/about
Only a few users at the moment but I use it everyday for my toddler.
The extent to which healthcare providers have to go to send production screenshots of their apps paired with my itch to apply CV, done at a YC hackathon a while back
I’m not sure where I’m going to take the project but I hope to inspire other people to take up new hobbies
I love word games, especially Scrabble. I've always wanted a game that is like a rack of Scrabble tiles I can swipe around to try to make a word.
No where near as technical as most of the stuff that's posted on here, but feel like if this could somehow gain a community following it'd be really helpful for a lot of people.
By design it's anonymous, so no account, and no tracking, hence not an obvious money maker.
But I like using it, and I feel no pressure to make it better or fix it, so I can work on it once a year and just be happy.
https://spv.spirofloropoulos.com
Send positive vibes out to the world and see where people are sending vibes to.
Quickly send yourself notes now. tomorrow. next week.
Has about 50 happy users and I'll keep it alive forever b/c I use it every day for time shifting thoughts on my mind =)
Take a look: https://www.play-lang.dev/
Just web DAW. Upload your records and play it live with cool effects, mix it, record it, loop it, etc.
Its just that, for them, the success might not be measured in what others think nor how much money it might make?
I've mentioned it here before, doesn't get any traction at all, but I still love working on it :)
Presbot is the platform to create reliable, no-code, lightning fast chatbot profiles. Host and Embed your chatbot for free
It's basically a clone of jsfiddle/codepen but uses gists for storage. Not really sure why I made it and it's missing features but I use it daily
jsperf disappeared and I didn't like the alternatives so I made this. It's really alpha but I've used it a bunch and so have some friends
Built it because I face the problem of not being able to share links efficiently with friends and family.
Brings me joy every single day, even if I'm the only user in the world :)
The Input and Functions of My Thinking