HACKER Q&A
📣 princevegeta89

What is your current side-project?


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


  👤 krapp Accepted Answer ✓
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.


👤 Glench
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


👤 drakonka
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).

👤 sideproject
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!


👤 zachm0
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


👤 bsldld
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.


👤 Measter
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.


👤 privatemonkey
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.)


👤 vocabboost
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/.


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

Like Google trend but based on content people write.


👤 DarrenDev
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/


👤 approxim8ion
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.

👤 adamhp
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.


👤 firedating
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.

👤 app17
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.


👤 vinhnx
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!


👤 XCSme
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! :)


👤 eivarv
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...


👤 zb1plus
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.

👤 lbutler
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.


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

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


👤 dddiaz1
Trying to use ML to predict exercise type based on blood glucose data. https://dddiaz.com/post/glucose-datascience/

👤 tadhunt
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.


👤 psmithsfhn
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/


👤 m_j_g
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 :)


👤 dsgrillo
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.)


👤 zeeshanqureshi
Interactive used-car buying checklist for car noobs.

https://www.isthatalemon.com/

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


👤 seymon
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


👤 the_only_law
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.


👤 kureikain
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.


👤 tiddles
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!


👤 ecesena
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


👤 DataCrayon
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!

👤 soulchild37
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.


👤 jtchang
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.


👤 wdfx
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.

👤 EvanKRob
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.


👤 saahilclaypool
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

👤 donny3000
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

👤 privapps
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


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

👤 fooray
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

👤 kilroy123
A daily newsletter about art: https://randomdailyart.com/

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


👤 shanecleveland
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

👤 lmiller1990
I post videos about Vue.js on YouTube [0]

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


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

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

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


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

👤 apineda
Custom renderer for a classic game.