One where you don't care if it makes money or gets a lot of attention, but you are working on it regardless. I don't think I mean private hobbies, exactly, but projects that could or will be shared with others - you just don't care about the outcome.
Not a hobby. Makes money sometimes. I play professionally. For money. On stage.
If you play for your entire life, you can get really good at a ton of things.
I played pedal steel at a rehearsal for my country band tonight. I played piano at a rehearsal for my hot club jazz band on Monday. I played upright bass at a rehearsal for a string band last night.
Sunday I recorded a new track with my girlfriend, ambient techno (novation circuit, moog, girlfriend's esoteric warblings).
Monday I finished an EDM track.
I have a bunch of aspirational goals. I'd like to DJ at my local ecstatic dance. I'd like to front a Louis Prima style jazz band.
I've been playing trumpet and trombone every day for the last 2 months.
I don't care if I have any professional success. But hard to say all that is a hobby. Maybe I'll eventually be able to retire and just work as a musician, teaching and doing my little gigs and producing the records I engineer for other folks and running sound for the little parties we play out in the desert in Utah.
Don't care. My kids are raised, I've got a reasonable remote day job.
We'll see how it goes.
I currently know of only 3 people using it, but I'm one of them and I believe this is something that should exist, so I don't care that I'll likely never evem break even on it. I've started a nonprofit to fund the project, but it's been mostly my own money so far. Working on it has been really fun and I learned a ton about how stuff gets done in the intersection of public and private sector - both positive and negative.
// For anyone in Slovenia interested in using it, there's an email in my profile. It's currently a closed beta, but everyone is welcome
I'm the kind of person that always buys electronics used on eBay, where you can get really powerful but 2-3 years old devices for a few hundred $. And, I find shopping for used electronics elsewhere is still terrible (how good is a 1yo i5 vs a 3yo i7?). So, I made this site to help me in that -- I started scraping eBay listings for laptops, picked out the specs and cross-referenced them to benchmarks.
True to form, I made this early in the pandemic for the fun of it (I'm not even a software dev), then realized marketing is boring and never shared it with anyone. Real life makes me busy, but there's tons of features I want to add eventually. And now I have a very interesting dataset to play around with.
I've been running siftrss for about five years now. It lets you enter an RSS feed, add a filter, and get a new RSS feed excluding the stuff you specify. I made it to scratch my own itch.
Originally it wasn't going to be public but I thought, "eh what the heck, it's only a bit more effort to put a simple interface on it." Since then more than 100k feeds have been created and donations have paid for the minimal hosting costs.
I do get feature requests from time to time,and I would like to fulfill them eventually, but for the most part I rarely work on it. I'd love to have richer, more powerful filters with boolean logic along with feed combining, rewriting of tags, proxies, all sorts of things... but I've been a software engineer long enough to know that the greater complexity would mean more people emailing me their demands and blaming me for their (mis)use of the tool. It just wouldn't be fun anymore. It'd be another chore.
I've thought about trying to monetize it but 1) it seems unlikely that it'd ever amount to anything substantial, 2) probably wouldn't be worth the effort, and 3) kind of feels against the spirit of RSS.
I guess in some sense it has succeeded, but in reality it succeeded on day one when I was able to use it myself.
This time I wanted to make a full-on project with professionally-done models, art, music etc. It's a reverse of the 4X formula - rather than starting as a small country and becoming a vast empire over the course of the game you start off heading a vast empire that's on the brink of collapse and you've got to try and prevent that from happening as long as you can.
I've never run a project with this kind of scope - I've been on them but when you're actually making the decisions it's a real change in perspective.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1830290/Fall_of_an_Empire...
Lots of riders are elderly and find themselves sitting on the curb, feet in the gutter, as they wait for transit. Studies suggest that perceived wait time increases by 30%+ when riders are forced to stand while they wait. There's no cheaper way to shave several minutes off of perceived trip time, for every trip.
Inspired by https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam....
The proposed replacement for the beautiful maps they produce now is "print electronic maps yourself". Unfortunately the electronic charts are only usable with an interactive interface which paper is not, to say nothing about their aesthetic qualities.
There are data errors too in the new "custom charts" that are being offered for printing, one such error is that virtually all US water lots a foot of water according to the maps! I investigated this and it is due to rounding down when converting to meters and then rounding down again when converting back to feet.
Let me know if you care, or want to help.
I know, it sounds a bit, non-English, but in my defense: it was my first time using Fiverr and I had no clue how to use it. The ad is up for a few months already, and I had many laughs creating it, but yesterday I had my first client! I panicked, I realized that I am as bad at picking bad stocks as good ones. I felt like a fraud! And I was laughing so hard that I felt like a fraud.
I genuinely have impostor syndrome telling people how to pick the worst stocks of their lives that will lead them into financial ruin :') I feel there's something funny about the whole aspect of: you ask for a service where you lose your stuff, now you gained more stuff, you're happy as a person but probably not too happy with my service.
Writing the order was a ton of fun! I just get so many questions. Why would one want to lose money? Why listen to me? Would he want to adopt me? What are they really expecting? How does one pick a horrible horrible stock? Should I inverse my own trades, or should I lose the money to feel a sense of comradery? How serious should I be?
The result is: I set up this persona that I feel is funny as hell, yet I try to analyze things as intelligently as possible and really show my real side as well.
Thinking the question through: how can I deliver the worst possible stock (that is not something synthetic, or an index)? Really having the same strong drive that I normally have when I want to buy a winning stock.
I can't put my words on it, but I feel it's splendidly beautiful if done in moderation.
And I am proud to now say at parties: I am a professional financial advisor, I make sure people lose all their money. I am so good at it, I need a place to crash, can I stay at your place tonight?
It can do a full regex search on the entire UE4 codebase in about ~6s on my SSD. Searching just the game's codebase takes ~200ms, enough to feel instant. The speed is all credit to the developers of ag, I just put a convenient interface on it.
I use it essentially as a navigation tool and it's a core part of my workflow, but haven't gotten any paying customers. I initially had hoped to sell a few copies, but since it has completely solved my own problem and probably saved me hundreds of hours of waiting for slow searches, I'm happy.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=CaseyBan...
At the end of the day, I realized that the very fact of caring too much prevented me from creating more. The more I created, the more people would engage and those projects would succeed. Weird how that works.
I've been working on translating Japji Sahib - which is the foundational prayer of the Sikhs - into English poetry. The original is a poem, but most of the existing translations are in prose and use Western religious terminology that's not really appropriate to the original.
I just wrapped up a first draft of the translation itself. Also working on putting together an essay on why I felt another translation was necessary and why preserving the form of the poem is important to understanding its contents. Planning on getting it published one way or another.
Been sharing snippets from my translation here, if you're interested in following along: https://twitter.com/verseofpunjab
- A chronological history of the workouts I've completed.
- Notes and like/dislike tracking on the workouts I've completed.
- Real search capabilities to let me find particular types of workouts (e.g. filter to yoga workouts and search for "pigeon")
And, if people actually use it, then that'll be a big win, because I'd love to be able to see others' thoughts on workouts, find out what's popular in a category, etc.
I have an 'invitation only' system in place on the site today to help mitigate the risk of spam, but I've been sending out invitations to people who sign up pretty much immediately.
p.s. in case anyone's curious about the tech stack: it's a completely boring Rails 7 website with a Tailwind-based UI, backed by Postgres, and running on Render (https://www.render.com).
My wife and I started an online/offline shop last year. When our very first orders came in, it was the best feeling ever! I wanted some kind of celebration device that would turn on and play some celebrating music each time this happened. So I started learning IoT / hardware and build a cool retro-looking police light that I can plug into our WooCommerce/Shopify/Zapier accounts (or really anything else with webhooks). This was such a fun project and people wanted to get some for their own. So I'm working on making it a "real" product. I don't care if it becomes a "success" or not, I'm already so happy to use it for my own and my friends.
So as a change of pace, physical games! I’ve released 2 so far, next one coming in March.
One is a set-collection competition called Come to Call where players are royal PR people. You’re trying to win the favor of rich patrons without seeming too desperate. Your goal is to send the least interest delegate that will still steal the show. It’s a game of kings, queens, fools, and way too many butlers.
The second game is a push-your-luck dice-rolling egg hunt called Egg Roll! You’ve only got time to make 6 stops to find eggs. Roll the dice to find eggs. If you find some, you can move those to safety or roll to find more. Find nothing and score nothing for the round instead. Works well with kids and adults alike! And comes with 6 variants to change the game up.
You can see both at my little corner of the web, https://fredandfun.com
If you use the coupon codes on my site, I make less than 50¢ per game sold. I’ll never recover what I spent on art. But I dob’t care. As long as someone anywhere has fun with either of them, it’s all worthwhile.
A first instance judge had committed a serious criminal offense. Her husband, a wealthy and influential lawyer then bribed the presiding appeals court judge. So I made the assumption he would also influence the ensuing constitutional court case.
The case had been accepted by the court and assigned a case number. I waited for a month then caused the husband to panic with a morning fax sent to his law firm making fun of his felonious wife and mentioning the case. Without thinking, he used his close connections to the court, trying to save his wife I suppose. Apparently unaware I had caused this in a provable way, the top court decided the very same day to not take the case and gave no reason whatsoever. Such decisions are supposed to be scheduled ten days ahead by law, which did not occur here. The case was also objectively valid since one of the appeals court judges had refused to be on the panel, so the assignments were wrong, a severe procedural error. The judge assigned to fact-finding in the case was the President of this court, the number five in the diplomatic ranking of this nation.
My intent is to end his judicial career and thus alter the course of his nation a little bit.
I am only doing this for fun and don't care if this succeeds.
E-Mail in profile if you are a lawyer or journalist and want to see something interesting happen. There is already a public website with all case materials that caused further drama within the judiciary.
A tech connection: a false claim of immediate threat to the life of the felonious judge had been made to obtain an IP address from Cloudflare, bypassing due process.
Another tech connection: The legal entity operating the website is a DAO on Ethereum, the (minimal) costs are paid with funds originated from a tech billionaire...
Amazing result. Very distinct clusters on relative usage between the undisputed non-Pauline letters (John, Peter, etc) and the undisputed Pauline letters.
Almost all the disputed letters fall in the non-Pauline cluster. Only 2 Timothy falls within the Pauline cluster, and does so smack dab in the middle of it.
Currently debating formatting the results for peer review (which probably won't publish for a year at least) or just creating a post with pretty graphs.
As an aside, the whole "can't have published preprint elsewhere and can't submit to multiple journals" submission policies at academic journals is dumb.
Video podcast: https://www.youtube.com/c/TaylorDorsett/
It's fun because I get talk with smart people about a topic with no real solution, then sometimes I do well or sometimes I get destroyed in the interviews. I'd love to have more subscribers but I don't think its ever going to make me any money.
I thought that if I could express permutation generation in language that the SAT solver could understand I'd end up with something faster than simply generating every permutation and checking to see if it is pronounceable.
I can't be sure if I was wrong, or if my implementation sucks, but it's halting-problem grade slow (https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/tomriddle), an utter failure.
Despite this, I sent a link to it in an interviewer with the message "here's some code I've written, in case you're curious". Instead of a coding challenge he just had me give him a tour of the code. I got the job (which is a good thing, because I become a much worse coder when people are watching me, I'd probably have bombed the coding challenge).
* The buy targeted ads from Google, served on YouTube targeting small children and clients of a particular carrier
* When you click on the ad (even if by mistake) you find that you are subscribed to a game service and immediately charged a small fee (5 euros) via your carrier (DCB). You may or may not see a chrome window open and close.
* If you extract the link from your chrome history and visit it again on your computer it looks like a benign form, with terms of use and you need to click at least twice to subscribe.
Now these guys will actually return you the money if you bother to find them and ask it back. They will appear really legitimate as the fraud is difficult to reproduce, and the bet is that they steal a relatively small amount of money and it's possible not everyone notices it on time. Worse I'm sure many parents will blame their kids.
The awful thing is that this scheme wouldn't be possible without Google and the mobile carrier. I actually had DCB disabled because I knew the problem exists, but the carrier had reenabled it without my knowledge. I clicked a link by mistake when I was choosing a video for my kid and got charged.
My project is to research a possible way to reliably reproduce their fraud so I can report it to the authorities. I know for sure they don't have the means to properly investigate it..
I've been performing intermittent upgrades over the years as I wanted to retain the simplicity, ease of use with a focus on providing the most accurate and clearest Ayat text in any app.
The latest update has incorporated word by word audio timings and advanced play back controls for a completely hands-free operation, even serves as a teleprompter for the Qur'an.
Moreover, the existing platforms encourage doom-scrolling and keep our attention focused on one page for advertising clicks. As far as I'm concerned this is one of the most socially harmful and divisive anti-patterns created.
So, I started developing a site which presents a chronoglogical list of events each of which has, in chronological order, all the news articles, tweets and youtube videos I can find which are related to that particular event reliable sources where possible. Not exactly curated, but not clickbait either.
Looking at the site quickly I've got 317 articles for 'Partygate: The Sue Grey Report'. The 'Guinea Bisseau Coup D'etat attempt'? Around 30 articles in arabic, english, spanish, french and portuguese. The Kazakh protests? probably around 300 in more than ten languages. And there are currently 977 events. This grows every day as I find more sources.
To my mind this is an unbelievably valuable resource, and I want everyone to have access to it. I have plans to expand this much further and the only dev is me.
There's still a ton of features I want to add before I put it out there including internationalisation, accessibility support (The difficulty in finding a chronology of news for an event which people with screen readers experience boggles the mind)
If I were to share it here today it would most likely get hugged to death. But rest assured that this audience is the first I will introduce it to.
Edit: I should also add that I am also looking for investment to increase the 'dev' team. But I'm more the idea / prototype guy. How does one start and yet protect the idea?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1778910/Let_It_Slide/
It was my first entirely finished project: gameplay, 2d elements, sounds, musics (but not 3d). I'm just proud I finished this project, having a tendency to get bored extremely easily and only motivated by new stuffs (oh a bird!)
Example: Team Voldemort taboos his name, so that if you say it, his goons show up to arrest you. So everyone tries to stop saying his name. But here’s another idea. One person says his name while another hides nearby. After saying the name, the first person disappears, and then whoever shows up, the second person shoots them. Like, with a gun — a magical gun, if you want! Do that as many times as it takes until there are no more Death Eaters.
You get a very different book with characters who think like that, and it’s been a lot of fun to write.
EDIT: link, in case this is your thing: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8180098 caveat that I have very uneven abilities as a fiction writer
I have a tools section where I make small edge-case tools for myself, I host it on Render and use django admin so I can get away without having tons of core functionality in my tools. Technically they're MVPs that I launch on PH, but they never do well, but they're still useful to me and the problems it solves in my own life.
But to answer you more seriously, I'm my own "I don't care if this succeeds" project. I don't think that I'm particularly smart or talented but I'm still young and excitable and exploring my own nature through software. Hopefully I'll make something that's really valuable to the world one day, but for now I learn, build, meet new people, fail, and grow. And that makes me happy.
The site has < 10 monthly active users on average, but they're middle-school (or younger) kids, and some of them have been using it for years now! It brings me great joy to work on it in the evenings whenever I can make time for it.
[Edited to add an example]
Here's one of the regulars:
The site went down a few months ago, but now it's back up. The first new Taaalk I'm having is with another engineer, and we're trying to publicly solve a technical chanllenge - how to repopulate the Taaalk database from archive.org download.
https://www.taaalk.co/t/repopulating-the-taaalk-database-fro...
I love Taaalk so much. I love all the little design features. I love tinkering with it. I love the conversations I have had with people on it; you can check them out on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20210316214650/https://taaalk.co....
I don't mind if it fails but I do have high hopes for it!
It's a "universal shortener" which means it doesn't just shorten URLs - it shortens anything and turns it into a short, recognizable code.
Or, what would be a recognizable code if anyone used it :)
Here's an example: https://0x.co/examples.html ... and for some reason I am still enamored with the "send a text to someone in the future" use-case.
[1] https://0x.co
https://donotplaythisgame.click/
In short, you accrue points while you aren't playing it, but you have to log into actually get the points (similar to "the game", which you just lost). You get your global ranking only after logging in though.
Finally, I made this service available to everyone so that it can be useful to others. I have also obtained the necessary permissions from the HN moderators to share such a service with you. So, I hope you will not miss important stories from this awesome platform with the help of this service. Also when I share this service with HN, I hope I will receive this story as a notification.
And this is my "I don't care if this succeeds" project because I am already using and I just shared with everyone.
Also I just received this post via this service and just came here to share this.
active & hiatus projects (published in Google Play & Apple App Store)
https://ABCDutch.app - Various Dutch learning apps I made for my son
https://ChronoBook.app - Muji Chronotebook for iPad
https://CloudArchitect.app (see wayback) - AWS/Kubernetes/Google/Azure Cloud Whiteboard Magnets for iPad
https://SketchDesigner.app - UI/UX design tool for iPad
PencilPuzzle - Over 25k+ puzzles, pictionaries, sudoku for iPad
sunsetted projects
https://PrintableFaceMask.com (see wayback) - last option printable origami Facemask to fight COVID-19
Various auto-generative NFTs (anon. around ~6k ERC-721 NFTs minted)
Too many. https://jjuliano.github.io/jjuliano/stuff-i-did.html
It's an attempt to organize world's knowledge. Right now, it looks like GoodReads-like social network for learning resources organized by topics, formats, difficulty levels etc. But there's a knowledge-graph that separates ideas and the medium those ideas are expressed in. For eg: "Sapiens - the book" and "TED Talk given by Yuval Harari" are connected to the same node.
This idea isn't anything new. Here is Danny Hillis talking about it at OSCON 2012: https://youtu.be/wKcZ8ozCah0
The code is open-source on github: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/
It runs on a $5 VM along with some other small projects, so it doesn't cost me much and hence the outcome doesn't matter.
A ML pipelining/build library. Think like make but for ML models, but written in Python code and invalidating results based on data and code changes using Merkle DAGs. Similar to DVC, but again using pure Python instead of YAML files, and (arguably) more powerful caching. I use it myself and find it very useful, but don't have the energy to polish and promote it :) Maybe that will change in the future though!
Data only push notification -> text to speech to bone conduction headphones (or really any headphones). Tells me the current task. Two buttons on my wrist. One is next task, one is "toggle repeat mode". I have voice actions that load specific lists or any of the other things I want it to do. Basically all manner of software exists in varying forms for working on basically every native user interface I interact with. Global hotkeys, system tray icons, background services, etc etc.
The cli, custom launcher, watch software, and the chrome / firefox new tab extension get the most use. Small feature set makes "software for everything" realistic. "See/hear current list item", "Next task", "toggle repeat" -- I treat it as a way to learn things, but I also use it absolutely every day. I like to act like when I inevitably develop cognitive issues in my old age that this will be a useful utility to have.
When I make a very detailed list for the day and burn it all down by just listening to what I'm supposed to do and tapping a button on my wrist for the next thing, I feel far far more productive than my baseline just due to not context switching. Put up the blinders, get in the zone, stay in the zone. :)
It's a complete faillure by any standard, lol. But it has a handful of power users who have begged me to keep it online. I built it years ago because I was fed up with the other dictionary websites, they have clutter and ads. And the definition text is so small. Wordo is very simple: https://wor.do/love.
Users also have profiles, and can follow other users. They will be notified if one of them 'likes' a new word ("@pg likes the word 'cap table', 14 min ago"), like this: https://wor.do/@aminozuur
It's a variation of chess where the capturing piece acquires the movement capabilities of the piece it captured.
I originally wrote a version seven years ago, but never got far in building a good AI for the bot player. As much as I like the idea behind the game, the program is really a testbench for me to work on memory and speed optimization techniques and probably eventually learn some AI/ML.
We started designing it at the end of 2020 and released it in Jan 2022. We met over word games, and love playing them together so we wanted to make one with all the polish we could put into it
It's inspired by the 1970s, old Atari game packaging, VHS tapes, Beach Boys albums, etc. We spend time making the puzzle together each day and put quite a lot into it in terms of stories for the different words, themes, and curating words based on upcoming events. You can see what I mean from our Twitter[1] or Instagram[2]
Our goal was to have it cover its own costs, to earn about $500/year (Apple Dev expenses, font licensing, hosting, Firebase). This would allow us to justify working on it. It has earned $1000 in January so far (probably because Apple featured it) so we consider it a success for this year and next year
Honestly, I'm only doing it because it's a nice way of wasting time whilst convincing myself that I'm not wasting time!
Pros:
- Rendering for multiple platforms
- Much efficient server side rendering with all the goodies of SPA (no need to scale nodejs servers)
Cons: It's just a proof of concept and I don't have enough bandwidth to take it to a full blown framework
I think this actually falls in line with most subreddits. You build or support a community because you want to discuss something and there isn't anywhere else to do it.
This is kind of a loose interpretation of the "gets a lot of attention" requirement though.
2. I'm discretely working in Lobster [2] because I don't like current Smalltalk IDEs and I want one with a native look and feel. So far I have implemented Transcript, Workspace, Inspector, REPL and partially a Class Hierarchy Browser.
[1] https://github.com/sebastianconcept/Mapless [2] https://github.com/sebastianconcept/lobster
I had a lot of fun building this and thinking through the user-flows while I was out on long runs. That alone was satisfying enough, but it would be fun for more people to use it!
https://github.com/62726164/ed25519-login
I built a website that uses public Ed25519 keys for user authentication (rather than passwords). Users sign the current Unix Epoch time (with the private Ed25519 key) and paste that base64 encoded signature into the login form.
I don't care if the idea succeeds or not, I use it for myself. I like simple, secure things and I feel webauthn is too complex.
While building this I realized I wanted it to interact w/ other programs in my operating environment: so I made some tools to take queries and spit out hardlinks on the filesystem hosting the content store. This would let me write a quick query in my shell, spit the results to a taxonomy of ephemeral folders, and then access those folders from your usual "naïve" applications.
Then I became addicted to this workflow and realized I wanted to organize all my media this way; which spiraled out of control when I realized I never wanted to deal with paths again for any of my documents.
I'd stress that the idea of content-addressable storage w/ an interface on top is most emphatically not novel, Venti[1] from plan9 was doing it in the early aughts w/ references to prior work from the decades prior, git and many VCS systems are just interfaces into a content-addressable store as well. It's just that hierarchical organization won in popular culture, and as best I can surmise nobody is really interested in replacing it.
The problem one naturally runs into is: hierarchical storage is inextricably linked into our modern operating systems, file systems, shells, protocols, etc. at the most fundamental levels; so the complexity grows enormously w/ every layer I want to subsume. You either deal w/ the friction of the "impedance mismatch" between your storage and operating environment, or you basically resign yourself to building an entire OS where "files" live at one and-only-one path, with a myriad of indexes & manifests to make sense of it all.
Am I likely to succeed in killing the "filing cabinet" metaphor? Probably not. Has the journey been worthwhile? Absolutely.
First is a site that has existed for around 25 years now, although it was shut off for several years. It came back to life when the pandemic started, and is behind private auth now. Basically, it lets me and other creative writers collaborate on branching fiction novels together. I write a chapter and put a couple of choices at the end, which serve as writing prompts. A reader comes along, clicks a choice, and is faced with the need to write that chapter, and so on. Our favorite story is currently 288 chapters, and is projected to reach about 1000 pages when it's done, which will probably happen in the next few months. We're all good enough writers to pay attention to characterization, dialogue, and theme, so all the threads tend to reach natural narrative conclusions, and I'm even able to export it to a printed "branching fiction" format and publish the books through Amazon KDP. Someday I'll find a lawyer and figure out how to open it to the public (it supports multiple in-progress stories) but for now I'm quite enjoying having weekly Discord meetings with my writer friends, writing a handful of chapters per week. As for the tech side, probably the most fun recently was writing a react component that lets you graph out the animated chapter map in all sorts of fun ways.
Second actually has some technology in common with the above. I'm enamored with using propositional logic (not predicate logic) to make and verify argument graphs. Meaning, you create some nodes with sentences and truth values, and build up actual visual graphs with sentences in bubbles that you can derive from other premises, and then collaboratively judge whether the truth value is propagating throughout the graph. It would enable people to browse to someone's conclusion, and then explore down through their entire argument down to their facts (which should have the same truth value for all people) and values (which should have truth values that can differ from person to person), and then people could pick points in the argument to disagree with or challenge. Kind of my own attempt to turn the current age's destructive argument habit on its head, into something constructive and collaborative, in a journey to discover shared truths, and opposing perspectives that we can respect. Like I said, ambitious.
There is a sequel on homological methods, which is not online, and I am currently trying to publish both. When I have time, I would like to write a third volume on homotopical methods (essentially all the stuff needed for André-Quillen cohomology and the cotangent complex).
It initially grew out of a test to build a shell-based encrypted method for posting and reading tweets, compounded by an underlying desire to figure out how to make twitter "useful" for me somehow. Discovering that stego data does not get stripped was an eye opener on the size of data chunks that could then be stored as tweets, which allowed me to push larger configuration files, while still having them be largely useless to random viewers.
https://www.bryanpg.com/games/pragma_twice
I plan on doing a Kickstarter this year just for fun, but even if it doesn't get funded I'll still continue to work on it.
Trace Wizard [0] - Peoplesoft App Server trace file analyzer. Shows execution paths, sql statements, exceptions and a bunch of stars.
DMS-Viewer [1] - Peoplesoft uses a program called Data Mover to migration data between databases. It exports the data into an undocumented file format. This utility allows you to inspect and alter the data before importing to a new database.
Pivet [2] - command line utility that dumps various Peoplesoft definitions/code to disk and leverages git for tracking the changes. Intended to be run as a scheduled process.
[0] - https://github.com/tslater2006/Trace-Wizard
Right now it's just a Git repo: https://github.com/ThingamaNet/uce
My project goals:
- minimal but stable FastCGI runtime that recompiles server pages as needed
- minimal dependencies
- web apps written for it should still run in 10+ years without change
- combine the advantages of C++ with those of PHP
- equal-or-better performance in most scenarios
- implement an additional WebSockets broker so I can use the same runtime for live apps
It’s not a best seller, but thanks to it, I connected with engineers all over the world who I would never have met otherwise.
I built it mainly to scratch my own itch out of frustration with recipe blogs and their endless stories and photo collages before they get to the point where they actually tell you how to make the recipe.
It seems a pretty common complaint, so I thought other people might be interested. I added a subscription because I don't like ads and tracking and everything that goes with that. A few people have signed up but, so far they all cancelled before the end of the free trial. I get a lot of use out of it though, so I'm pretty happy with that. It's cheap to run and gives me something to tinker with now and again.
It's been such a joy to work on it and add features and improvements. No way of making money, but seeing the game evolve and getting positive feedback from players has made it worth it already. :) I love small projects like that where there are no expectations or real targets, just the pure fun of creating.
1. A scripting language, designed to be embedded in other programs, emphasis on web templating. C++20, Flex, Bison, Unicode, Unit Tests, Doxygen, Github, Docker compilation, and a YouTube series over its development and explaining how everything fits together. I'm almost done with my 1st draft of the language (6k lines of code, 3k lines of comments), after which I'll begin recording.
2. I record hymns in congregational style, as the traditional pianists used to play for church services. I'm focusing on public-domain hymns, re-typesetting them using Lilypond, and including the choral music as an overlay with an overhead shot of my hands playing. I don't care if I make money. I believe that this playing technique (improvisation based on 4-part vocal music) must be preserved, and I'm trying to do so.
3. I am planning on recording an instructional course (available for free) to teach how to play in the evangelistic church pianist style. Using my approach, I have had adult students go from "never touched a piano or read music" to "can play a hymn for church with the big, full sound of the evangelistic style" in 3 months. Again, I believe that this style needs to be preserved, and I've seen a lot of the existing materials (and even bought them myself to evaluate, to the tune of thousands of $$$ spent), and I'm greatly disappointed in what is available. I teach technique and theory (I have a BMus in piano performance from a state university), and I really don't care to teach classical piano. I would rather teach church musicians.
I think that specialised search engines are gaining ground, it has become easier to set one up, thanks to elasticsearch/lucene. They can be quite good, for a limited domain, and they don't have to invade your privacy in order to find out what you are looking for. I think that what is missing are tools like this, that would aid the discovery and use of these search engines. I hope that this will allow them to eat into the market from the 'low end'.
The projects source is here: https://github.com/mosermichael/duckduckbang
Unfortunately they don't invest too much into !bang operators at duckduckgo, however that's my input data...
In SEO terms it's one of my most successful projects though -- not a lot of competition :)
It backs up personal data and puts it on a timeline. It's cool to pick a random day and see what I was up to. It also serves as a backup tool.
Somehow, people find out about it and star it. One person even contributed a pull request. However I strictly built it for myself, with no intention to make a product out of it.
It allows you to:
• Focus on a user, keyword, or conversation
• Highlight users or keywords
• Filter/Mute users or keywords
It also has an Unlimited Message Buffer feature that prevents messages from expiring from chat.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/electric-chat-for-...
A few years later, I learned that most Craigslist ads sucked. So, I created a simple "make your craigslist ads better" tool. You'd go to the site, fill out a much better form than the one Craigslist provided, and it'd spit out a much better ad that you could copy and paste. Then, whenever I saw a car ad that was crappy, I'd message them with a link to my tool and ask them to update the ad. People did it and it was growing organically. I was glad that people found it useful.. it was free and going to stay that way forever. Then I got a Cease and Desist from Craigslist.. for using their name, I think. They've made similar boneheaded decisions.. no wonder they're declining.
Right now I’m just building the basic forms and such, but I plan on implementing fasta file parsing and an algorithm to locate the conserved regions
My wife thought it was an excellent idea. I wasn't convinced. But I really liked the challenge of building it. It took me two and a half years and I reasoned that if it would fail as a business at least I would have had some really fun years. I supported the thing by occasionally doing some freelance work and living frugally.
After launching it in 2009, it turned out lots of people liked it. Now 14 years later, it's still a very viable business.
So to all you stubborn and freewheeling people out there, go get them! It's great!
Today, in a way, my motivation is still the same. I should focus all my attention on marketing, SEO, and promotion. That's where more growth, money, and 'success' are to be found, but I just want go over the top with the quality of product and customer support. Financially probably not the wisest course but "I (still) don't care".
Currently at 100+ MRR but I don't care much about it.
I ll keep working on it even no-one would buy, because I love this project so much.
Latest weekend project: 32 bit clone of PDP-1 Minskytron https://github.com/yekm/mtronpp
https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts
Certainly uplifting and interesting reliving the old retro technology back in the day.
https://seanwilson.itch.io/wordoid
Working on games without thinking about how you might monitise them is a fun way to spend some time. :) It's a nice feeling to know some other people got some fun out of something you made too.
It's stupid that there is no centralized database of detailed golf course information. People love their local munis, but they never get enough attention because there is no marketing dept for a municipal golf course. Jr golfers shouldn't have to pay hundreds of dollars for yardage books to compete on the same level. On top of that, the number of golf courses that even exist is shockingly low.
Using SVGs, now supported in all browsers, the course maps/yardage maps can be easily be editable (especially once I build an in browser editor).
This is a website that should obviously exist and i will keep building it and adding courses i've played, alone, by myself, until the day i die.
Is both true that I wish to have the means to work on it full/half-time and doing for pure enjoyment when I have time.
ananke.dev
I'll likely host the web version for free, and then allow folks to choose their price if they want a digital version (that includes packaged code samples). I don't really mind if ten people read it or ten thousand, I just genuinely enjoy working on it and hope it will help someone.
The idea sprouted some years ago when I had used Slack for the first time and wondered why there wasn't a non-enterprise/gaming open chat app for news discussion.
It's the most ambitious thing I've built and the most joyful part has been meeting and building friendships with complete strangers across distant continents all through this silly website I built!
I won't say "I don't care" if it succeeds because I believe one must give it their all and not worry about the outcome, but regardless it's been an invaluable learning experience and at the end of the day I have no regrets.
It's my own personal hiking journal that I've made public so that other folks can document their own adventures too. It'll always be there as a way to explore something new or challenge myself - either to hike more miles, more vertical feet, adding new trails, or by building new features and working with contributors. There will always be new trails to explore, map, and write about over the course of my life. When I'm old and can't get out, it'll be nice to poke through the data, revisit the places I explored, and relive memories I had with friends, family, or loved ones while out exploring the woods.
I made it into a podcast because I wanted to practice my editing skills, but it was also kind of therapeutic being able to talk about all this. So I don't care whether there's a huge audience. Creating the podcast was a goal in itself, which I achieved :)
If you're Dutch and want to give it a listen, here you go: https://stitcher.io/de-job
Turns out it's quite interesting. When crypto goes down, many folks sell into USDC, which causes more USDC buying by the exchanges. But when crypto goes up, people often get in with USDC.
So basically: USDC goes up. And since this money is sitting in Circle's bank accounts, imagine what happens when the Feds raise interest rates. $CND is the SPAC supposedly taking Circle public, if it ever goes through.
It's a very fun to use CAD program, but is somewhat limited in capability. When I came across it I loved it but quickly ran into its limitations, so I joined the effort. Long term I don't see it growing into full-fledged CAD, but I'm happy to see it progress and help it along. Some day, someone might undertake the major refactoring of the internals to enable it to go beyond, but in some sense I don't really care. It's just a fun project to work on and I like to watch it grow.
Fun story: I tried building social-media share buttons (just links, no creepware SDKs or JS imports) and was so confused why my icons disappeared as soon as I added links. That's what happens when you've been using an ad-blocker for so long you forget it's there. :)
Visualization of what the people of Twitter are feeling right now across the globe (or at least the ones who have geolocation enabled :)). It's fun to have it up on a monitor in the background to periodically gaze at.
I'm an Engineering Director and can rarely justify finding time to code anything significant during my day job these days, so this was my cut-loose-and-have-fun project over ~a weekend. Had a blast doing it, and then rewriting it half a dozen "cool" frameworks ranging from NextJS to RemixRun.
(It works on mobile, but much nicer on desktop)
Self-published on Amazon this year. It was one of the five finalists of the French Amazon Storyteller contest. It currently has a rating of 4.3 with 90 reviews. It makes very little money but it's exciting to have people read your book.
Tonya Harding, Patrizia Gucci, Anna Delvey (Sorokin)... Bad guys (and gals!) are having a moment right now in popular culture. I wonder if I should pitch the story to Netflix, but have zero idea how. (Also, the book is in French).
Java version: https://github.com/stickfigure/hattery
Typescript version: https://github.com/stickfigure/hatteryjs
I love working on it and wish I could make a living on it, but the nature of the app means I can't pursue commercial gains from it. It's the only side project of mine that I actually use all the time and it has gained a small fanbase, but really, I'm building it for me.
While I do care about the outcome, I work on it regardless. It's a lot of fun from a technical point of view and I keep meeting amazing people through it.
It's a DNA sequence manipulation tool to quickly get alignments, translations etc. for DNA sequences. It's already a couple of years old, never got any traction, but I'm using it for myself on a very regular basis.
It's just radically freeing to not have to wait for a boot, to have direct control over hardware resources like the frame buffer and audio registers, but to start with something as simple as Hello World and go in either direction from there — up in programming complexity or down in systems understanding. I'm very close to getting it into friends' (and their kids') hands. I'd love for it to take off, and have experience actually selling services and products, so I don't think it'll just be a hacker toy, but who knows? Regardless, it's been probably the single best learning project I've ever done. And it's so fun! It'll continue to be so for me whether it sells and/or has a community that builds up around it, or if it's just my passion.
At some point (hopefully soon) I plan to make a new personal homepage for my projects, get back into streaming on Twitch, and make more Youtube videos about my games (I only have like 7 overview videos of my board game designs on Youtube when I've made like, 40+ over the years, the ones with videos are only the ones I submitted to competitions), but in the meantime I'm just hacking away on them in the background.
https://www.youtube.com/user/cableshaft/videos
Like a new version of my Proximity video game I've made a decent amount of progress on this past year but my only update video is still from October 2020. I had intended to make that update weekly, and stream every time I worked on it but then I got busy at work and worn out and my office became a mess and I stopped doing it. Been telling myself each weekend for the past like three months that I need to make a new update video and still haven't yet. Maybe this weekend I'll finally do it: https://youtu.be/0IAx9fsBuus
I created the current version in around 2017 and finally gave a real name to the project about a month before a very similarly named game launched to big fanfare.
My trivia game is a multiplayer live quiz aimed at the nostalgia of the IRC quiz bot days. I have started several rewrites from scratch over the years but only now do I finally have a version that seems ready for public release soon with more friendly features. (I'm targetting Feb 22nd!)
My mom's a textile designer, contracting with large companies, but somehow not getting to use any fancy tools they. She says design software existd, but it's pretty expensive.
At the core, she's making plaids - a black-and-white pattern (2d grid) corresponding to vertical and horizontal threads being above one another, and color schemes (2 arrays) for the vertical / horizontal strings (in most cases, does not match the size of the grid).
So she made her own monstrocity of a pipeline, with Photoshop, Plaid Maker (a rather old web app, https://www.plaidmaker.com/), screenshots, Excel (for designing stuff - yes!), and an old Soviet-era MS-DOS designer program (in Russian, of course).
Throughout uni, I was jokingly saying I'd build a better Plaid Maker for her, even if the web is not my area of work. After The Great Resignation I figured, why not?
Lots and lots of back-and-forth later, here's the outcome: https://plaid-designer.vercel.app/
Note: not for mobile, but should work on a tablet. Privacy: no analytics are used, but it does rely on Google Firebase for authentication and auto-saving of your designs. Log in to keep them permanently; otherwise, they're saved on an anonymous account, cleared up once a week or so
(Inspired by Two Minute Mysteries by Donald J Sobol)
Life. Whether it "succeeds" or not (ignoring the biological succession pun) is in the eye of the beholder, but choosing whether to care or not is a fairly continuous active choice for the individual. At some point in life some of us may reach a state of not caring whether personally or societally important individual life goals are reached. Not caring can offer some nice freedom, although it might be unsettling for some people (akin to being disassociated from reality).
Non-commercial endeavors, aka hobbies or passions. Dancing, playing music, woodworking, etc. For me it's music, dance, massage, and building things. All of these can be shared, directly/physically or at least in ways other people see and experience.
Massage is my most practical example. I have some training, but I don't do it for money or profession. With friends, family, and lovers, there are many opportunities. And when traveling in places where massage is common, I occasionally offer to trade places with the therapist in the latter part of the time. Many therapists who work for a living are in great need of massage and therefore most appreciative. It is very rewarding. (I still pay the full price for my massage I received.)
People who blog (not me) are very admirable. Most of them earn nothing, and often what they write is of value to others. This is very true for tech people who write solutions to bugs or problems or who build tutorials just to share. These latter cases often result in financial gain for their readers!
I then wrote an iOS app, Stats Hammer, because I wanted to use it on my phone and wanted to learn some swift.
Both are free for anybody to use and it warms my heart to see people using them, but I don't really care if either succeeds because I got what I wanted out of them
The aim is to help you with financial planning. I don't think it will ever make money but it's growing so I'll just see where it goes.
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https://github.com/darekkay/dashboard
Customizable personal dashboard and startpage. I have a pinned Firefox tab that I check daily to get a quick overview of some areas I find important.
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https://github.com/darekkay/static-marks
Shareable bookmarks. I have first built it to maintain a list of bookmarks for me and my work colleages. Later I have migrated all my personal bookmarks as well. Now I can type "sm" (for static marks) in any of my browsers followed by a search term to open Static Marks and get to all my bookmarks, filtered by the search term.
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https://github.com/darekkay/evaluatory
Web page evaluation with a focus on accessibility. My motivation was that my blog previously had a small accessibility issue. I didn't catch it, as I've tested only the desktop breakpoint. Evaluatory runs axe-core at multiple breakpoints at the same time and generates an HTML report.
Create a programming language with a friend currently; again to scratch an itch. It will be launched somewhere 2022 hopefully but if we are the only users, it is fine. If not, so much the better.
Learn the tool behavior in a safe way very quickly. Thats my goal. I'll at least force it on my teammates for a small workshop.
The idea is similar to Roblox, where it's all user-generated games. If it gets attention, I'll continue evolving it, if it falls flat, I will still sleep like a baby at night.
You can learn more in our docs: https://docs.acos.games
I feel like there is a vast untapped potential for exploring the amazing photos that are there now and appear every day as well as new functionality - for example, I think there is probably a good way to tag the start/end of a sequence of photos you come across and use them to generate a movie clip which would be neat.
I still haven't found the right UI/UX and my web skills are sorely lacking so it all feels a bit clunky. It's fun to experiment with though and lots of eye candy to see - my daughter (8, now 10) and I worked on the first version which was nice too.
All open source if anyone wants to fork and play.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/singletab/hjohicao...
https://www.simongriffee.com/notebook/windward/
I’m glad I can finally point to a book and say “I made this” with no excuses. Don’t care if it sells. Just happy it is finished!
Back in the mid 2000s I was invited to come to Boston in the first Y-Combinator batch. Because of border and money issues I could not go and I regretted it as I had a project related to visual art and photographs that I wanted to make.
But in a way it was a blessing because instead I concentrated on photography and visual work which is more compatible with the way my brain works and which I later came to understand makes me happier.
I am thankful for this website and community of kind people interested in technology living on a [light blue dust dot][1] in the universe. I have learned so much here and continue to do so, and maybe I will make that project eventually, crappy code and all :)
As Hawking says in the Pink Floyd song, all we need to do is to make sure we keep talking.
Peace.
I am far from being able to program competently, so this was a stretch goal for me (using up all that lovely creative energy people had early in the pandemic) on a topic I care about. Code is horrible (with my minimal knowledge now even I can see that) but there wasn’t anything reliable enough in the App Store at the time. There’s no way I can monetise it (albeit on the even worse iOS app I did I show ads, as much to learn how to integrate them rather than derive any income) so it is purely a passion project. There have been over 1000 downloads, and based on the numbers using one of the data feeds I can see there are regularly 20 people using it throughout the day when their devices are on. Small wins.
I seem to collect passion projects like nobody's business - honestly I think I get excited by concepts then bogged down in the details, but I'm starting to overcome this and get deeper into projects now so let's give this a whirl:
- civarium, a game AI desk-toy where little villagers go about their lives and expand the village themselves (think Banished but zero-player) - pretty early days but good fun to occasionally tinker on: https://github.com/ajeffrey/civarium
- my main fun project at the moment is a private branch off of the above - I'm trying to make a really systemic game where you're a mage apprentice trying to solve quests without violence. Not public yet but will be if I get to the point where the first demo quest is fully playable. The idea is that the world is data driven and by being one of the first magic users you can push various systems out of their attractor/equilibrium states.
There is no analytics. No ads. It just sits there, costing a few $ in hosting and doing it's thing. It's been running for years, just for the sake of it.
- Hub20: self-hosted, open source payment gateway for crypto [0]
- Communick: XMPP/Matrix/ActivityPub-provider-as-a-Service [1]
- An e-book for people that want to get into crypto but are (rightfully) weary of all the scams, the baseless hype and all the get-rich-quick schemes.
- A yet-to-reach MVP website to help curate, fund and collaborate with open source projects
The idea for me is always to keep making the things that are interesting/rewarding on their own, and expect that on aggregate these become bigger than whatever single "obsession" could end. It is what Daniel Vassalo calls "a portfolio of small bets". Done right, there is always something to learn from these projects.
[0]: https://hub20.io
[2]: https://areyouinterested.co/site/rational-investors-guide-to...
This works best on a device like a computer which is capable of 60 frames per second or higher refresh rate. Please also change the resolution in YouTube settings to 720p60 for best results.
Warning: these videos contain lots of visual movement (basically lines moving around like on an oscilloscope), please avoid viewing if you are prone to seizures. But it should be fine for normal people (the level of visual intensity is comparable to watching an action movie).
A few examples:
1. Dialtone using dual-tone multi-frequency signaling and 56K dial-up modem connection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FomWraKuDFg&list=PLn67ccdhCs...
2. Deluxe Multitone Car Alarm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4uKcvZL7HM&list=PLn67ccdhCs...
3. Composition using only sounds from Windows 98 and XP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lT-jr9sS6Y&list=PLn67ccdhCs...
4. Piano Music (Ballade Pour Adeline): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnAfrEk429w&list=PLn67ccdhCs...
5. Electronic Music Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MllJLIX1glg&list=PLn67ccdhCs...
6. Super Guitar Bros. cover of the Gerudo Valley song (from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXVbDfj4lzY&list=PLn67ccdhCs...
I'm someone who struggles to enjoy a game without some kind of purpose or goal, this helps provide one for me whilst playing competitive games with friends.
https://projects.vdf-guidance.com/projects/hammer
It's only 21 years in the making :)
Oh and I should mention that it is my main programmers editor for a variety of languages (not just DataFlex)
Nanosite[0] Static site generator using Pug as a template language, and supporting translations. I have a couple of sites in production on Netlify and Cloudflare Pages, and it's a breeze to use.
Spatium[1] Time tracking tool for my freelance business. I use it in a Git repo and have CI hooked up to generate artificates, timesheets for the customers in html, csv, pdf, excel and json. The data is stored in a rather simple json based database[2] I created, you should really don't do that, but it had to be easy to handle merge conflicts in the data.
[0] https://gitlab.com/lvq-consult/nanosite [1] https://gitlab.com/lvq-consult/spatium/spatium-cli [2] https://gitlab.com/lvq-consult/spatium/spatium-db
I’d like to think one day this stuff could end up in a compiler optimization or something, but I’m not too worried about it.
Cleave lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading all 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; Alternatively as "tab-groups", but encompassing multiple apps.
I started working on it 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...
In the meantime, I've used various browser extensions to save and restore open tabs.
I find it interesting (particularly from an HCI-perspective) that there hasn't been more research into the concept on an OS-level, as I can think of many times maintaining a set of application states for continued or re-use makes sense.
Uses Cloudflare Workers to globally distribute the API, and I intend to keep it free for individual developers.
I might monetize it for teams eventually, but I just like having a simple, performant way to disable/enable features for my other projects.
Weird idea, but I can't stop thinking about it work on a project from time to time.
Eventually, I want a random person be able to "lease" their old phone compute to my cluster for reward.
You can play the test version using Chrome, however beware as it needs to download over 2GB of game resources, and still has a few glitches with audio. That said it runs at a stable 60fps on most systems I've tested so far. We have two test servers, one in AU and EU. Auto-account creation is on so just type in a username/password to get started.
The server the client connects to is another project myself and a few others are working on. It's a ground-up rewrite of an early 2000s custom server for UO called Zuluhotel.
I'll throw it up on GitHub under WTFPL if I ever get an afternoon to comment it and write a readme.md for the benefit of anybody misfortunate enough to stumble across it in the future.
I might also add the option to do a lefty or righty gauge. It's identical in outcome, but I could see it being more ergonomic.
[0] Just like this one: https://lostartpress.com/collections/tools/products/bevel-mo.... I'd have probably bought one if they hadn't mentioned lasering them. Since I have access to a laser, I figured why not brush off the old programming skills. For the record, I'd have come out ahead buying one.
Mainly started building it because I wanted to learn more about running a business, marketing, and SEO (all the technical parts of the business are relatively easy in comparison).
I started with literally just a Lambda function that checks if static websites were still online, added an email alert if it's offline, wrapped authentication around it, integrated Stripe, and shipped it.
I launched it into 200 competitors providing the "same" service and still managed to get customers.
Mainly from working two hours a day, every weekday, for almost a year now. Each feature I ship has to be shipped within a two hour block and iterated upon later (so I use feature flags - the other service I built), and I only build features actual customers ask for and can explain how that new feature would fit into their business processes.
It's specific to a UK audience but I made a tool that, at least in my mind, is better than the existing tax calculators for UK workers, and goes a bit further with letting the user forecast potential wealth building, using a very popular approach (index funds using ISA wrappers).
It costs $12/mo, runs on FreeBSD just like HN originally did, and requires almost no moderation. It succeeded in replicating the feeling of HN’s early days, in terms of a sense of wonder when you stumble across it. But almost no one comments, much to my surprise.
I should probably do a writeup someday. But mainly I wanted w high quality HN implementation. pg’s original code vs this took two months of dedicated work. Figuring out firebase and algolia bindings for Arc took some (enjoyable) doing.
There's no practical use case for it except that it looks cool. I don't plan on making it useful either, instead I'm gonna implement all kinds of awesome looking but useless eye candy stuff. But it's a good excuse for a quant to get into graphics programming.
Nobody uses it, not even me... but damn was I happy when all the tests passed for the first time
I've also immersed myself in game dev blogs and podcasts and similar, which is giving me new things to discover and learn about, so I no longer have that problem of "what am I going to watch on netflix tonight", since its a new world for me to discover. It's opened up the things I watch because I have never immersed myself in things like what makes a game engaging or similar, so its all new and interesting to me.
There's a chance I'll get tired of it eventually, but right now I don't see it happening. I'm not worried about not finishing because I've had fun along the way. It was worth it in that sense already.
I've been working about 2 hours per week since 2017. 10,000+ frames taken so far. At 12 frames per second, the video runs about 14 minutes.
It all started after I uploaded a video of Marble Track 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlUqu6QE7bw (nsfw language) and some people asked me how I made the marble track.
This URL will show (a playlist of the snippets showing) in great detail exactly how to create a marble track.
https://mt3s.marbletrack3.com/
The snippets are still silent, given that filming isn't even close to completion.
On the same channel, there are behind the scenes videos of me creating the track. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHiQhB8J_KI2LYQ7dsexfLw
I have done some livestreams and recently some "summary" videos, done in a timelapse style.
Because work on the track takes a lot of time, almost every piece has its own name, and the site https://www.marbletrack3.com/ aspires to document all the pieces, and show which characters made which parts of the track.
While I am hoping the project organically gains visibility and financial support, I am not pushing for that so I retain creative freedom. In any case, I will keep making the movie of characters making Marble Track 3.
On top of that it's what I use to trade. Hearing the feedback from my subscribers is my gold. https://mometic.com
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who feels that all existing file transfer and cloud apps suck. They are either too slow, or don't allow syncing everything for offline use.
Even if I end up the only user, I'll be happy and my time would be well spent.
Its primary purpose is to get me to build the habit, and so far it's working for that :)
Why I’m building it/what it is:
- Disclaimer: I don’t intend to shit on any work by comparison, everything else is also a monumental effort and in most cases a labor of love as well
- Problem: there are several “blazing fast” alternatives which either are not as fast as they think, or are feature limited and hard to extend
- Not as fast as they think = highly optimized but their metrics omit their biggest overhead (eg spinning up new threads)
- Feature limited = poor support for ESM, build tooling at runtime, caching and mocking don’t work as expected
- ESM first, natively, correctly according to standards
- TypeScript without additional build config or FS output
- TS support is built on ESBuild, but I’m taking care to work around some of its limitations like lack of support for the new JSX transform
- ESM imports can be mocked trivially without memory leaks
- Ergonomic improvements to common setup/teardown APIs: beforeAll/beforeEach can return isolated values for tests
- APIs for aroundAll/aroundEach which allow tests to be executed in the same stack as they’re declared, which in turn means you can use things like async hooks and other stack local references (motivating use case: rolling back transactions to a clean current db state without re-running migrations)
I’m probably forgetting other nice things going into this. And it’s just a yak shave project because I want this to test more concrete things I want to build
At the start I had dreams of selling tons of DVDs via Amazon associates. But I'm terrible at marketing :) So these days it's just a simple site with no ads -- just 1258 landmarks from 322 movies. I sometimes announce new additions on twitter from https://twitter.com/movielandmarks but it only gets about 30 or so visitors a day (mostly bots).
There’s no making money or early retirement possibility with this hobby nor fame and glory. Just something cool, so if i do it that’s awesome but if not it’s still fun trying.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/globemallow/jibhio...
A few years ago I learned about how large of a CO2 pollutant the Internet is, and I became extremely fascinated with that concept because I had never thought about it before. In fact, a lot of people haven't it seems.
I researched sustainable methodologies for internet development, and created the Chrome Extensions listed under Globemallow.io. To help people become more aware.
It shows users a rough estimation of their internet browsing energy usage, and CO2 emissions emitted.
Globemallow Dev view shows sustainable development best practices, and how a page has implemented them.
Check it out, and give any feedback. Thanks in advance!
A simple VTT for playing D&D with my friends. I found the other web based VTTs to be too tedious or confusing. I just wanted to load images I found online and move little circle pawns around a map.
A cherry on top would be maybe $100 a month or so. Even $50. Just to buy a couple meals with income from it.
But if it doesn't, I won't be hugely disappointed. It's just been a fun side-project.
As far as Tech, I've got my KaithemAutomation server(Think Home Assistant esque but focused on commercial installs on cheap SD cards), which I'm working on extending to be a CCTV NVR.
The idea of motion detecting multiple high res IP cams on a Pi at once is just too cool to ignore, and current CCTV software is so far behind where I want it to be that It's still exiting to work on.
https://github.com/maxvfischer/DIY-CNC-machine A CNC-machine I built using 40x 3d-printed parts.
https://github.com/maxvfischer/Arthur An AI art installation using a GAN network, Samsung The Frame, a button and a PIR-sensor.
https://github.com/maxvfischer/DIY-arcade A full-size Arcade Machine.
Mathematical LaTeX editing in Emacs with automatic inline rendering of math, tables, and TiKZ diagrams.
It's hard to imagine this getting popular because (a) it's Emacs, (b) LaTeX is a pain and Overleaf is pretty nice, (c) I think it would require the Auctex team to want to adopt my implementation, and combine their expertise and code to parse LaTeX math delimiters as reliably as auctex does, (d) I only use and develop Xenops when I'm studying maths, which is not much now I have a real job again. But Xenops is nice to use.
Site: https://dustinbrett.com/
I built it to get email reminders about things that expire, such as passports, free trial cancellation dates, Covid antigen tests, travel reward and free night expiration dates, etc.
My real sob story is that my passport unknowingly expired and I didn't notice until I was checking in to an international flight. I really don't want that to happen again, especially now that I have more passports to keep track of in the family.
It's built with blitz.js, Go, Postgres, and runs on a tiny VPS. I use it for myself and haven't marketed it much.
I made it for myself to make my life easier come tax season. Current solutions just didn’t meet my needs. I made it a desktop application with a perpetual license because I just didn’t see the value in a cloud service subscription for something I only need to do once a year. Hope to one day make it useful for others looking for alternatives, but operational cost is nothing, just a static website - so not really concerned if it doesn’t go anywhere.
Disclaimer - I’m not a tax expert/CPA, use at your own risk.
So far I’m loving doing something real, as opposed to mostly software, but ultimately I don’t intend for it to become some sort income source so if it turns out I’m terrible at it, meh, at least I had fun learning some stuff.
I've pretty good memories of how I learned to program on a computer with a much simpler environment than today's, and I've been trying to recreate that using modern technologies. Part of the motivation was to have something to teach the basics to my kids... but, well, all my time has gone into building and extending this stuff instead of teaching haha.
I envision the focus to be on the users writing the reviews/recommendations (rather than on a restaurant's star rating), where users and restaurants are suggested based on how well their own recommended and visited restaurants overlap with yours. In this way, you would be able to follow other users whose taste you trust.
Its useful for me, and kind of relaxing to work on, so I'll keep hacking away at it, adding new tools over time. But I haven't really shared it with anyone yet.
Built with React, hosted on Netlify. Probably riddled with bad practices, but it seems to work for now.
My current task is trying to figure out Fabric.js integration with React so I can do some more dynamic graphics (like general frame and truss analysis)
Make timelines from markdown-ish text.
Real musicians don't really make dance music anymore so we figured we would get weird and build a "Dia de Muertos Disco Punk Band". It's a blast. People dress up and come to our shows. We drink, party, dance, and hang out with musicians. Though we get paid, we have to cover the horns and the makeup which are both more money than we make typically. Its still a cool project.
Unfortunately, Covid messed everything up for live music. I have high hopes for this year coming up
https://aaronbrooker.com/vdttool
Most corporates only have MS Office so I've had to stick to using VBA.
Built to save me time in my day job, but has become a passion project. The most challenging part has been improving the algorithm for displaying the trees in a compact form but with an eye-pleasing amount of whitespace.
v2 on master is as simple as it gets, but still incredibly functional; my team is dogfooding the hell out of it at work.
v3 on the "commandbased" branch is a total rehaul on the works, hoping to make this a more traditional/complete package, with a command-based interface (i.e. similar to how git works)
We're building on Zulip and for now it's also open source.
inviteme@forecast.chat if you care. Please include some links to thoughtful social media posts you've made.
https://theteardown.substack.com/
Recently writing more frequently and focusing on the intersection between every day technology use and health (physical, mental). I like to dissect my own life to help describe that interplay in more detail. And I hope some of you can relate to the stories about experimenting with technology as you grow up and navigate adult life.
Some recent favorites:
https://theteardown.substack.com/p/the-different-internets
https://theteardown.substack.com/p/is-it-better-to-look-stup...
Two older posts:
https://theteardown.substack.com/p/wanted-just-friends-the-t...
https://theteardown.substack.com/p/paul-grahams-essay-about-...
I started it to track my all my investment accounts in one place and a couple of years ago decided to open it up to the public. Active users are in the hundreds but not growing rapidly. Tried to monetize it with Patreon but only 2 people actually subscribed.
It's a fun project to work on, though, and not having paying customers allows me to ignore it until I get the enthusiasm to work on it again :)
I create them for my own consumption, but make them available to anyone that wants to use them: https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/
Nobody seems interested, which is just fine, by me. Releasing them as shipped products, is one of my “best practices.” It keeps the Quality of my work high.
- System to visualize code coverage/quality, to figure out where to focus improvement efforts, think mix of codecov/sonarqube, but better (in some ways)
- A desktop client for Jira, so I can work offline and have instant responsiveness
- Website for building resumes based on JSON, with export to word and PDF (currently offline)
- Typescript to Go transpiler (only for really simple programs right now)
It's almost done, but really kicking my ass about the styling of the app (which is not the best right now).
As a developer who's been working in the field for a while, this is the first SaaS app I've launched, and I will say I have been battling with myself non-stop over "imposter syndrome" and thinking I'm just wasting my time for building it because no one will use it.
Even if it never makes any money, it's something that i wanted to see built, and it's helping me expose my weaknesses (in this case, design/UI/UX) to hopefully become a better "product engineer".
It hasn't launched yet, but has gotten 1 $29 sale, so that's something :D
If anyone with a design background would like to work with me, or give a critique, I'd love to find a way to return the favor.
Also, still thinking of a name for it
I know there are about a billion podcasts and it is unlikely to ever make money.
Nevertheless, I enjoy the process, I get to learn a lot and it pushes me to become better at interviewing. So I keep going.
https://github.com/The-Next-Bug/k8s-node-watcher
It's really crappy go code, but it seems to work well enough for what I needed, which is basically a toy.
A simple website deployer that has free server-side analytics on deploy.
It was a pandemic side-project, and I was mostly just interested to see what was involved in building it.
I made a paid plan and integrated stripe because I liked the idea of it possibly paying for its own infra costs at some point. I have some ideas for features I want to add for fun, hopefully in the next couple months.
https://gallery.fitbit.com/details/2187c817-4a13-409a-bf6c-8...
At some point I might separately publish the JS library that does all the calculations if I can get the code to a less embarrassing state.
Many times after reading a book, that I know a friend or colleague recommended me, I forgot why they told me to read it and couldn't follow up with them. I also use it to take notes of the books I'm reading.
It's open to the public but it's good enough to build on it for myself.
I found that this tool is quite a sweet spot for bringing small teams of technical and non-technical people together and get stuff done, but I yearned for an open-source version of it to hack around.
It is all still in a very early prototyping stage, but I plan to release an alpha until summer.
There's no money in poetry, and yet the world of poetry continues to insist that the only way to move a poem from the poet's mind to the reader's eye is by publishing it - either in a literary magazine, or a pamphlet/collection, or an anthology. An alternative route, through newspapers and magazines, has collapsed in recent years. Sharing poems via social media - in particular Instagram - has shown some promise, but the end goal still seems to be some sort of publishing deal with the traditional suspects. Maybe TikTik poets will be able to break the cycle?
Whatever. I decided long ago that I didn't want to play that game. I enjoy writing poems, and I enjoy sharing poems with friends, family and whoever else might be interested in it. I built the first website to host my 'self-published' works back in the early 2000s; much of my coding learning and skills developed from the work I've done on this, and similar, hobby sites[2].
One nice thing about my approach is that the British Library regularly snapshots the site as part of its mission to capture/archive .uk websites. My words won't die when I die - though I doubt they'll be of interest to future generations.
[1] - The RikVerse - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/
[2] - I've documented the work I did to create this latest version of the site in a series of blog posts, starting here - https://blog.rikworks.co.uk/2020/02/01/Recoding-the-RikVerse...
The gist of it is feedback on how you play videogames via comments on videos that you upload. This is really the tip of the iceberg but you can see it in action here:
The majority of software I use on a daily basis was created through such projects. Projects initiated not to make money or to garner lots of attention. Of course, eventually many of these projects became popular and/or comercialised somehow.
For me it's https://togetherdb.com, my passion project that I enjoy working on so much. It's an online database for developers, you can also manage your existing databases with it. If you work with databases, then please check it out!
This led to me starting to build out a suite of HelpScout integrations. They had some momentum at the beginning, but from a combination at me not being good at marketing and HelpScout’s marketplace not being mature, it was hard to keep it moving. I also ended up happy again in the corporate world, so my own motivation dwindled.
That said, the tools continue to run well today, and I just have them up and do the occasional feature addition or bug fix. I have completely removed my ego from that project, but I was very excited to see this month I got my first recurring subscription payment!
It's just a fun little project that I tinker on in my spare time. The code's still not close to feature complete, nor is it very clean ATM but it'll shape up soon :)
I used I for fun, then some supplemental income, and now as a test-bed for my software driven plugins for Eurorack.
it's been an amazing amount of fun and most of the ones I gave away for free were released with a very permissive license.
I made it to scratch my own itch mostly, as I’d often visit Wikipedia pages and find myself wanting to save multiple references (text and links included), but didn’t want to manually copy + paste all the little details.
EDIT: I think at one point, when I was close to releasing the initial version, I really _did_ care about whether or not it “succeeded” (as judged by how many people used it), and I tried to write the code/docs to make the project as easy to use as possible. But then I realized it’s a bit niche, and I was just happy with the fact I made it. There are still multiple improvements to make, but I’m currently focused on a different project.
I don’t care if it succeeds because, like most projects of mine, I made it out of curiosity for the domain.
It’s in beta right now, and I don’t have any plans to make it paid. I just wanted to bring mtg to the web.
Unity HDRP is really nice!
I’ve been writing with it every day for the past two years and I generally suck at sticking to new habits, so I’ve been happy with it so far! It’s my favourite project that no one uses.
It has very few users but I don't care because I built it mainly because I didn't enjoy dndbeyond and wanted something different. I'm using it for all my sessions :3
> The rules are simple: you have 10x10 field and two different shapes to draw. Each your move will randomly regenerate one of the shapes. The main goal is: build the lines, collect points, and struggle with other users in the leaderboard.
No ads or collecting data, no internet communications (except GameCenter integration, which is optional).
If you find it interesting - feel free to rate the game in the AppStore!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tactris-tactical-puzzle/id1537...
First is Sonic Postcards - a digital postcard and playlist of my favorite music for the week. Pretty much doing it as an excuse to find new music, learn about the artists, and keep a writing habit going.
https://www.sonicpostcards.io/
Second is Streamster. OSS lib designed to make working with natural resource related APIs easier. Main goal being to provide an easier way to get the data and have it returned in a more consistent format. Allow devs to leverage the data and not spend all their mental bandwidth wrangling with it.
Depth-camera powered MIDI drum kit. This has been my labor of love for the last several years. The current iteration runs on randomized decision forests trained to identify pixels as different parts of the hand.
I have been working on this investment tracker for the past 3+ years. What started as a set of spreadsheets and python scripts has slowly evolved as my daily driver for keeping tabs on my investments across many asset classes.
Of course, I took the time to productize it, but at the end of the day whether I find people who resonate with the product or not, I'm happy to continue refining it. My ultimate goal is to never have to go to other sites or use other means (notes, financial news sites, watchlists, etc.) for keeping tabs on my stocks, crypto, real estate - the total picture.
Feel free to pop on over and give the free trial a spin, love to hear any and all feedback from those who resonate!
The project includes a simple system for writing provably-correct software, an innovative UI that integrates text and GUI interaction, and a plan to collect and recycle the plastic waste of the various oceanic gyres (the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, et. al.)
It probably sounds overly ambitious and even crazy, but all the necessary pieces are there, it's just a matter of putting them together.
I made it to teach some kids, including my own. I've got it up for sale with $0 marketing budget. If it sells then that's great, if not then that's okay too.
Was fun for a while and mostly for myself. A few 100 ppl used it, but I found I didn't really enjoy reading that way as I thought I would... especially when Covid killed commutes.
I use it to generate passwords, hashes, colors and base64 encodings :-) I plan to add more stuff in the future...
Sessionless, all state in URL.. no registration ... not sexy, just simple. (and buggy)
https://mexicantrain.online - an online version of the dominos-based game, Mexican Train. Made during the pandemic so my wife's family could keep playing. It averages 50 - 100 games played per day, mostly by older folks. Donations are generous, and I regularly receive heartwarming emails of thanks.
It's built primarily for my use - I just never liked most existing note-taking apps and wanted to make one that's easy to use and fit the way that I think. I made it open source [2] so other people can build on top of my ideas, and released a hosted version so that other people can use it if they like it.
It would be nice if other people found it helpful, but regardless it's something that I intrinsically enjoy working on.
[1]: https://notabase.io
I'm currently thinking about how the log view can be improved.
I'm calling it Yokel Answers right now.
Wanted to see if I could source Facebook comments by location and wound up building this whole thing for fun
Some of these things I work on with the hope of making money off of them someday, while others I never really had any financial interest in to begin with. But in either case, I really look at the true value of the projects as being the lessons I learn and the knowledge I gain from working on them.
In the end, I figure I learn something from everything I work on, so in the sense that learning is the real goal, all of my projects are ultimately a success to some extent. It's only a question of degree.
dv new emacs dev-img-emacs:latest
dv start emacs
dv conn emacs
The first line creates a new "development environment" named emacs, based on the docker image dev-img-emacs:latest. The second line starts up a docker container based on the saved image. The third line connects to the running image via mosh (or ssh).
Mostly I just meant to use it as a learning experience, but it's actually been really convenient in a lot of ways, so I think I might develop it further.
I'm doing some work on a website that compares boardgame prices. I scrape about 10 boardgame stores in Greece and save them in a database that I've got in a raspberry pi. Then I try to associate the listings with games that are on boardgamegeek.com and then I put them online.
This has a couple of interesting problems. E.g. scraping data, associating scraped data to a basepoint, so that I can group them with the data from other stores, how to save the data in a website that is basically serverless, etc.
It's like jsfiddle but your code is stored in github gists. It's entirely open source and except for the oauth handshake to log in it's entirely a static website.
I don't really care if anyone else uses it but I used it a ton. Of course I worry that github will take it down or I'll hit some other limit but it was fun to build and your gists won't be lost.
Also https://jsbenchit.org which similarly, uses gists and is open source, and, again I don't really care if anyone but me uses it but I do use it.
I am passionate about this, because decentralization is the most liberating online experience. Share anything, in any way, to anybody of your choosing without third party restrictions, their privacy violations, and no weaponizing of your data/content for any purpose.
I set up everything myself. From getting a dynamic DNS service with duckdns, to configuring web servers with nginx, then figuring out that it’s very complex and that lighttpd works just fine.
I’ve also learned about Linux server administration. I’m also running some services I built myself like a tiny webserver accessible from here [1].
Also, I have a git repo @ [2] and used to have an archive box instance but I’m having some trouble with docker.
Additional info on the blog:
It uses markdown. The discount version, the closest one to the first proposed standard [4]. Also, it uses blogit. My own fork actually, accessible thru the git repo. Very simple. Uses git, if you don’t track a file it isn’t deployed. The blog itself is a git repo and in theory you could view the history of my whole blog thru git. Also, whenever I push to the server repo it deploys automatically and runs a git hook that just executes the blogit command and lighttpd merely serves static files so yeah, pretty cool.
Not to brag or anything but I am amazed at how much the internet has helped me. I am still a high school senior but like programming and got into Linux like a year and a half ago and I’ve just learned so much on my own and with the help of the internet.
I did not take any formal classes to do any of this, but thanks to free knowledge I was able to do all this. I ain’t trying to share or promote some propaganda, just my thoughts and me kinda spitballing here.
So yeah, that’s it. I have a list of possible project ideas on my blog as an article. I’d love to start out with a simple url shortener. No fancy data structures, no sql, no Db, plain C with sockets, maybe a linked list and maybe less than 500 LOC ?
[0] https://trevcan.duckdns.org/blog/
[1] https://trevcan.duckdns.org/short
[2] https://git-trevcan.duckdns.org
[4] https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/discount/
.PS yeah I skipped [3] because why not.
After spending a day in meetings dealing with architecture astronauts poking holes and questioning the quality of my work, it's nice to have positive real world feedback.
It’s an interactive fiction game engine built in Haskell. It’s still in development which I’ve been doing on my stream [0] purely for fun and to show what it’s like working on a non-trivial Haskell project.
It has a UI built using a library called monomer and some basic interactivity. The plan is to build it up to a workable engine with decent authoring tools to make simple games with.
On a more serious note, I made a game with a friend that I care a lot about: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1462830/Super_Sketchy_Par...
I’m working on a project to focus on reading things and writing more. I found that it helps quite a bit and ill continue working on it as I personally find it rewarding.
The project is in the space of stuff like second brains, and zettlekasten note taking but I think something with a really good ui is needed to make this stuff popular. I went the other way and made it as simple as possible.
I’m using this project to focus on limiting the amount of code I write as I want this working for a long time and I believe that having less code probably helps that goal.
It is resistant to cropping and other such edits.
I don't care if it is successful because I was originally just having fun with steganography and stumbled on to this use case.
About 7 months ago I started writing a role-playing game because I loved the premise: you play an android who has spontaneously and mysteriously developed consciousness—but android manufacturers are actively hunting down these "Awakened" robots and suppressing knowledge of the phenomenon.
I'm about 60 pages into the core rulebook and still working on the design and playtesting. Sign up on the homepage if you're interested!
It is a free app that allows people to use their iPhone as a webcam for their Mac.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stampfx/id1583460487#?platform...
I built it to be an example to explain APIs. Turned out to beautiful to listen to, so I keep it alive for my own amusement.
If it's useful to people that's just an added bonus, but it was just a way to learn the development and CI/CD aspect of SSG
The idea is that I pre-create hundred of thousands of pages at build time - all the pages can be seen here: https://marketcapvsmarketcap.com/sitemap.xml
Generate an audio or photo bird-identification quiz for the species at any location in the world. (Click on "Help")
Been working on a website builder for almost a year now. Started as a series of fun interaction prototypes, then became “What if everybody could make expressive, stylistic websites?” and now I have so many ideas for it — big features, small polish, soft UI ideas, Easter eggs — that I can’t imagine running out of steam anytime soon. Having something always there, something that I care deeply about, however silly it is, has been a real source of constancy and satisfaction.
I've been working on "Daily" [1], a desktop app for creating blogs and websites. Everything's stored in a single file, local preview, output static files or upload to Vercel. It's nearly at a point, where it's finished. Of course I've lots of ideas for features. and monetisation. But I don't like the marketing part, except talking about it here and there. And that's fine.
Examples of usage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-40ITVSRBE
I thought that it might be fun for others as a great learning opportunity but I haven't managed to go through the scope of my own friends.
This was made redundant when the standard library introduced the same thing.
I’m still convinced mine is better, and offers a lot functionality the standard lib doesn’t.
It can be extended to add functionality based on file type (it abstracts the blob, not just the path).
It’s also a lot faster.
It also has limitations the standard lib doesn’t. For example, it doesn’t go to great lengths to support every file system under the sun.
So it’s going to lose eventually.
I’m not going to link to it because there are a ton of libraries doing the same thing. They might be even better.
But they’re all in maintenance-only mode.
https://rate.house is a user generated media database. It's like IMDb but also has music, literature, video games, and podcasts.
https://newsasfacts.com provides the most important news around the world concisely.
https://wordhoot.com is a word guessing game inspired by Wordle featuring multiplayer, unlimited plays, and detailed playing history/stats.
Originally I picked a SiFive microcontroller but found that all of the ICs which mediate USB/JTAG/etc are hopelessly sold out. I switched over to a microchip based ARM chipset with built in USB. I’ll probably need to pick up a JTAG probe to do some debugging but that’s fine.
It’s been fun and very educational. I hope I get to finish it.
Usually I was sending some logs to Slack, but I didn't get any stats from that and couldn't read easily the history of events/logs, so I created the Logspot which monitors user activity and automates workflows (WIP).
Couple of users has registered - not much, but I'm still hoping it's going to take off some day.
I made this mainly for myself because I was really into synthwave compilations at the time and YouTube's playlist functionality wasn’t getting the job done.
I run the update script every week and fix the occasional bug. I'll continue maintaining it because I like using it.
I would run it just for myself, as it is already much better than the alternatives but decided to run it as a service so that others can enjoy. I have a handful of users but don't plan on making it big, ideally it will pay for itself and maybe a nice dinner from time-to-time.
Have done other dev projects for improving my productivity (eg. Infra setup, Automation etc) which all aligns with fact that i'm the first user and not worried about its success.
Even-though not focusing on marketing for the same, i wish more people use it and can extend it for value add then complex featurewise.
It's not core to the mission (so it will be free after normal security checks), but we were already building a bank transfer system, and I'm tired having to manually move money between savings and checking or set it aside for taxes. It goes live to site in 2-3 weeks... and then the 'finances-on-autopilot' bliss!
I think part of me cares about making them presentable "just in case" they blow up. I'd love for my projects to spread an interest in conlanging, voting method theory, agroecology, or whatever else I'm currently obsessed with but I don't really care if they go unnoticed too
It's a library and design system for creating and exploring geometric forms in surprising ways.
I'm yet to figure out who it's really for and how it should be presented (A polished app? A design tool? A web app? Something purely generative without much interaction) but I find the results endlessly fascinating and creatively stimulating so I keep plugging away at it
microM8 Apple II emulator (does 2.5D rendering) https://paleotronic.com/microM8
and a crazy amount of mostly instrumental music I've composed just to stay sane, really https://soundcloud.com/xennial
Success will be when my blog is hosted on it and I open source the code so thst it might be useful to other Bear aficionados. No expectation of anything more.
I made a very simple feedback/bug report web app which can be integrated into other websites using a one-liner, because I wanted to quickly start getting user feedback for my other projects. Feel free to give it a try.
It was also a fun way to learn ClojureScript, which I now love using for my side projects (although I find I'm slowly moving towards Elixir/Phoenix).
- A Highfleet ship optimizer (Highfleet is a fun game where you build ships to wage a pirate / rogue state coup de etat)
- Hypothesis testing tools for my Hunt Showdown matches to determine optimal loadouts https://github.com/jodavaho/kda-tools
- A portable, private, roam-enabled dynamic dns service.
And tons of other stuff at https://aenac.dev
Finally gave it a shot and whipped up a site this week. I'm having fun building it while using it. I hope it'll be helpful to some other people too, but even if it isn't it's enough for me.
I am building a Knowledge Transfer platform for software engineers that let's people make documents with video recordings, screen recordings, voice recordings, diagram making, document hosting, and more all in one place. The goal is to put all the features native to the platform, that way the user can just click and use rather than be redirected to a third party integration.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buffer-buddy/ehngg...
If you work in GA on a large website I'm sure you'll appreciate it.
Ufortunately I didn't put much effort into promoting it. Nevermind!
Idea is just learning me some Web VR by building a site about VR that can be visited in VR, like a meta-meta-museum :-)
This is nowhere near complete or functional, and I don’t expect it to move super fast, so not much to see yet, but exploring web VR has been fun!
http://opensea.io/collection/deepbream @deepbream
Distilled is based on an evolution in my personal philosophy about how effective testing works and about how good APIs are designed in general. My goal building it was to have something that is extremely flexible, but that is also so simple that I can start using it within about a minute of setting up a new project. When I start writing Javascript, I don't add a testing framework immediately. Instead, I import Distilled and write my tests in the same file that I'm writing my code in. Later on, as the project evolves I start to separate things out and build a more complicated testing setup.
I have obviously put some work into documenting it and making it available to other people, but I don't need anyone else to use it. The project is already mature enough that I am using it in every single personal project I maintain. It doesn't need a big ecosystem, it doesn't need a big community. I haven't touched the API in probably close to 2 years.
I will likely use Distilled for the majority of all of my personal projects in Node for all of the foreseeable future in my development career. I've used a lot of testing frameworks, and for my particular needs I think that Distilled is the best testing library available for me to use. It has saved me an enormous amount of time, and it makes it easier for me to do complicated things with my testing suites, which has made developing other personal projects much easier. If nobody other than me ever picks it up or uses it, it doesn't matter. It's already paid for its own development costs in personal time savings on other projects by an order of magnitude, and I think it will continue to do so in the future.
I think it's one of the most personally useful pieces of software I've ever written in terms of pure benefit to my own development processes, and (while I'd be happy to see more people use it) I don't think that having a community around Distilled would change anything or introduce any giant benefits. I'm not going to add a bunch of extra features or methods to the API. It's really stable and extensively tested; I've been using it for years and I'm not aware of any bugs that need to be hunted down that a community could help with. So if other people want to use Distilled, great, but them using it or ignoring it changes nothing about how useful it is to me.
Despite the fact that in my head this product could eventually have a roadmap that disrupts the music industry, for now, even if it only helps me and my friends avoid the sucky process of sharing music links back and forth on WhatsApp, i'll be happy enough
It's all a figment of your imagination anyway
In the spirit of this thread I don't care if it succeeds because there is no 'success metric' as such. What I would love to happen is someone mentions this site back to me and I get to tell them 'Ha, I made that!'.
Not holding my breath though.
Takes your location, and tells you which neighborhood of SF you're currently in, as defined by datasf.org, and displays that on a map of the city's 117 neighborhoods. Built it just for myself, hosted for free on GitHub Pages, and it's been endless fun for me to use ever since.
It is supposed to replace a clunky spreadsheet I normally use for my job search. But I ended up working on it more and more.
An object-oriented time series processing library without using any Pandas or Numpy data structures. It's "my" thing, "my way", don't care about the outcome or if someone likes it, just having loads of fun working on it :P
I created Plorium to solve a problem I've had personally: finding the "best" way to learn something new (ideally for free too). Right now, it's quite rudimentary, but I hope other people might find value in using this instead of sifting through ad-ridden Google search results.
Still in progress, but you can see my existing playthroughs at https://relentlessoptimizer.com/KR/maps.
- Create
- Share
- Collaborate
On group plans. I eventually want to add in simple commenting + note taking features, but for now you can register, create/edit plans, and share those plans with other people.
No ads, no plan to monetize.
I'm building a cybersecurity database that aggregates vulnerability information from about 100 different sources in one cohesive structured dataset that can be easily queried. It'll be much faster than CVEs and include way more things (remedy information, news, social media, forum, advisories).
Wouldn’t do it again here though! Was almost as stressful as being a founder with zero of the ROSI
Anyway, I've been sitting on a plan for a little while to deal out some karma - involving some ML, a camera, an SDR board and a Raspberry Pi.
It's mostly just a small convenience for me because sometimes I'm too lazy to open Firefox and search a something. You just type `gs "Anythin g you want to search"`. There will be gs(google-search), ys(yahoo-search), ds (duck-duck-go search) and bs(bull-shi-- bing-search).
Despite an ambitious roadmap to change how the music industry works, even if this just helps me and my friends share music without having to hop through multiple links on Whatsapp/DM, I'll be happy enough
It’s fun to work out the different card / game mechanics and how they all interact. It’s a good different project from the typical web-dev-y stuff I do every day.
Why would I otherwise want to put time and effort into something I don't care about? That's irrational
github.com/brianvoe/gofakeit gofakeit.com
shorten your web links/street adresses
If you are a last.fm user you can use this to recalculate your weekly/monthly/yearly album listening stats based on the track count per album, which makes a difference if you listened to albums with lots of tracks.
The idea is to put the shortened links in social profiles to the content user want their visitors to visit or just use it as a URL shorten-er.
It generates commands to launch Windows Terminal in any layout. I use Windows Terminal every day and found writing the split-pane etc. commands difficult, so built this to make these commands easy to generate.
I've always wanted this service, so even if I'm the only user, I'll keep it online.
It's actually picking up some speed and have a small base of active users, but even without what: I learn a ton from this project, definitely made me a better developer and entrepreneur.
Started as a way for me to learn some Javascript and get an overview of execution metrics for myself. Found it easy enough to host with Netlify, so might as well make it public!
You can view it at voterscore.org but the front end needs some cleaning up.
It’s fun trying to work out the different card / game mechanics and how they all interact.
it actually already works, with a few short cuts for generating itself... and ive used bits of it to do the 'make a scheme in x hours' thing in x/10 hours... the next step is unpicking those shortcuts so it can be completely generalised - there is no theoretical boundary there, just work i need to do which is boring.
kinda like flex/bison/yacc/bnfc/antlr but not of jaw-droppingly abysmal quality.
too much time is wasted on compiler development, and academia seriously dropped the ball there... the last decent effort i've found is the META work, which is basically ancient now.
I made it one weekend years ago and I've been using it daily ever since. It is completely free. My reward is the occasional fan mail :-)
It was going to be used for my kids' school (people exchange uniforms a lot) , but then we switched schools. So it's in a limbo now.
The expectation was to learn how to create a browser extension. Since its been released, I have had a few hundred users consistently using the extension for the last 3 months, so I am planning to add more features in the near future.
The extension is available on Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/real-estate-b...
And the on the Chrome store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/real-estate-buddy/...
I really need to work on how it generates though.
Story is, I wanted to make some simple website project using Java, so I had to use some sort of web framework since I've read that CGI should not be used for medium sized project (like very simple social network, or whatever stores and handles data server-side). All the web frameworks I tested for Java (Javalin, Spring, something else I dont remember name of) used Maven, which I'm not familiar with. Why not create my own web framework then? Insert xkcd 927 With knowledge about HTTP protocol, I started making simple framework which uses sockets and regex for request handling, and allows developer to create simple endpoints. Main point is simplicity. It doesn't need any dependencies, just compile it to JAR, import to Your project, and that's it. Project itself is faaaaaaar from perfection, however it works as far as I tested it, and I think young/beginner developers would find it fun and easy to use in private projects.
Framework is in very early development stage, many things might change.
It's 2022 and there should be a place on the internet where you can voice opinions/feedback towards your favorite products, and feel heard.
A web platform I created 3y ago to help Musicians to find spaces to practice music.
I'll most probably not be able to live on it, but it might generate some income.
I don’t care if nobody plays it. I am in love with everything I’m learning by making a game rather than robotics software.
It may never get traction, but it feels good to build something from scratch.
Built it, use it, enjoy it, get value from it and I think everyone could. May turn into 501c3!
1. Basic charting capabilities 2. A tab that stores queries and their results in plain text format
Especially (2) is vital for regular users where I work.
https://www.interactivelatin.com
Classic Latin texts, where you can click on any word and see all possible translations
- App that documents all the steps to successfully get married - App to organize my video game collection
They are personal projects so I don't care if they succeed.
After several days of work it still wasn't learning anything, but I don't care.
I've been working on pieces of it on and off for years and as it stands it's very incomplete. More of a collection of systems and interesting mechanics that I've been trying to figure out how they fit together.
For some reason I always find it difficult to make games, I can build complex systems spanning multiple servers that interface with clients, but the second the "what do I build next" becomes less a problem to solve with existing constraints and more an artistic decision, that the two sides of my brain decide they aren't really able to agree >_<...
My creative side suddenly becomes the worst kind of client wanting all kinds of weird stuff that it thinks are cool and my dev side goes, great, but that's super vague, how does it work? What do I need to build?
"But this would be really cool!"
"Ok, but you're going to have to make some choices here so I can start implementing something, what do you want this or that?"
"Ahh, I don't want to pick and also now that you've said that, that makes me think of this other thing that would be interesting, can we fit that in there somehow?"
"How?"
"You are the one who knows how to build stuff, you figure it out!"
~Brain locks up~
It's super rough, you've been warned =)...
The gameplay is still sort of non-existent, performance is pretty bad, there's still a lot of existing pieces from those old projects that I need to work out if I should add into it and code quality is kind of all over the place as I'm still really trying to work out how to build stuff like this and I know if I let my dev side have too much leeway it's going to take over and I'll probably no longer be able to figure out what my creative side wants to do.
It's a fiddly balance that I'm still trying to figure out.
I've intentionally not said anything about the game itself, you're welcome to ask me for details, but there are also bits of info littered about here and there[3].
- [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130124211012/http://www.dev.gd..., original HN discussion [1]
- [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5096009
- [2]: Itch: https://folcon.itch.io/fruit-economy, GH: https://github.com/Folcon/fruit-economy
Eventually I could develop a neat budgeting app which help people realize that the point of money is to finance their needs, from physiological to spiritual.
Really meant as a critique of late stage capitalism where companies like Headspace have ads in New York encouraging us to “optimize” our mindfulness practice so we can train harder…
Since June 2021 I have been co-developing my side project - Difree https://www.getdifree.com/ - a rich text editor to write on many things in a distraction free way.
When I asked myself a question, is my side project, the project:
where I don't care if it makes money or gets a lot of attention, but I am working on it regardless.
I mean,
1. I don't care about if it makes money or it gets a lot of attention.
2. But I would love people to find Difree and find it useful, as I do. That's it.
Does it mean, I want 'a lot of attention'? I don't know.
Right now with Difree I have been basically scratching my itch. We have been developing it, because I found I had a problem and there was no suitable solution for that.
In the past, I missed a tool, where I can write something longer and/or more meaningful, like a reply to an e-mail or a post on Reddit, in a simple manner without distractions.
Built-in editors in websites like Gmail, Reddit, or Slack leave much to be desired, eg.
1. Gmail's text editor is poorly designed. By default, I have to write an e-mail in a small window, in the bottom right corner of the website.
2. Slack's text editor is full of distractions. While writing I am usually being bombarded with incoming messages.
3. Reddit's text editor is... well, both :-)
My workaround was, I wrote the text aside in an external tool and then copy-paste it.
But I couldn't have found the right external tool, e.g.
1. Notepad sucked at formatting.
2. Evernote was slow to start and difficult to write.
3. MS Word is not free and cluttered.
4. Google Docs is overcomplicated for this purpose.
5. Google Keep is for taking short notes, not meaningful writing.
The only tool that partially worked for me was iA Writer. It looks neat, simple, and elegant. Writing is distraction-free. I used it quite often, but I missed two things. The ideal text editor for me should be handy and fast.
1. By handy, I mean I could work on many things.
2. By fast, I mean open in a second.
This was when the idea of a simple, fast, and distraction-free editor came to my mind. Using the proven framework for text editors like Quill and making it easily accessible as a browser's extension, seemed to be the fast lane.
The keynote for Difree is to build the text editor that is
1. distraction-free,
2. fast,
3. and handy
I guess, if it works for me, that's fine. I am sure, there will be people having the same problem as I had and find Difree useful.
To wrap that thought up: I guess I don't care too much about success in regards to adoption and this becoming actually the world of VR after the C64-homecomputing-uesqueness that is the Quest and Meta et al.
In my free time I work on some projects at various scopes, and they built upon each other.
So, for a starter: currently I'm working on a plugin to enable me to use the janet language in godot. Because I like it. I think it was a mistake that javascript has the syntax that it has and even though I can't relocate the video that claimed that js originaly was supposed to be a lisp, this would have been magnificent! Well, as I said, I like it.
And I want to develop something in it: at first I want to bootstrap me an OS-shell in which I then could implement vr representations of tools like a filemanager and a spatial Lisp codetree editor. I will definetly need an integrated webbrowser that you could place anywhere like a TV. Also handy would be a way to peek and poke at the host operating systems desktop. Also an HTTP server. And while were at it also slap in some IPFS and GNS ( www.gnunet.org ) and the 9P protocol for good measure.
So that's as for how much software I guess I dream to write. Well, one key at a time. But what would you want all this for?
Well, it is absolutely understandable that the zuck would have wet dreams over ready player one.
But instead, or even meanwhile, I could imagine a decentralised DIY scene of VR homebrewers: Let's imagine I pulled through and my software is setup and running on your VR machine. You load up the vrkbnch and it presents you with your garden of code; Your Lisp code is visualized as trees that you can modify with various tools to cut or copy or search and replace, you know, just like in a normal editor. Well, I don't know yet if visualizing code like that is actually advantagous to software development in any way, but lets imagine this is the most efficient way to code in VR: you can grab your code "branches", cut them out and put something new in its place. I think it might be a neat idea and would like to try it out. ^^ Also I have some ideas for spatial vr keyboards...
So you got your garden in which you tend to your code and you can of course programmatically change your environment, you can add other rooms to your world and each room is just another VR experience you can been working on.
You can also create rooms that really are links to outside systems containing their "entrance" room, akin to an index.html file hosted on some webservers. Or perhaps a auto generated lobby that contains all their shared VR experiences?
Also, rooms could be packaged in fossil-scm.org repos. I really prefer how fossil keeps the repo in a sqlite db file over the mess that is /.git/
But yeah really at the beginning of that first project... but this is the big picture
Here is an example, which I chose by picking a file of my code at random, then scanning it till (after scanning about 80 lines) I found the first fragment that is clearly indented differently than how a normal Lisp programmer would indent it:
(while (sit-for 1e-6) (save-excursion
(while (progn
(goto-char (random (- (point-max) (point-min))))
(not (and (eq ? (char-after))
(setq face (get-text-property (point) 'face))
(setq bg (plist-get face :background))
. nil))))
(assert (stringp bg))
(setq bg2 (substring bg -2))
(put-text-property (point) (1+ (point)) 'face (list :background
(if (consp prefix) "black" (cat (substring bg 0 5)
(if (string= cc bg2) "ff" cc)))))))
This next is not valid lisp (or more precisely you would never actually write it):
((((((((((((((((((((((((((foo
bar
bash))))))))))))))))))))))))))
In exchange for being able to handle multiple open parens with only one level of indentation, I have to impose a rule that when I close one of those open parens, I have to close all of them. (I have Emacs signal an error by making a sound when I attempt to indent a line that disobeys that rule.)
So for example this next is illegal in my indentation method:
(foo (bar
xxx)
yyy)
(foo
(bar
xxx)
yyy)Is
Not
Genera
TLDR: I built a bookmarking app with full text search across your bookmarks and browsing history, permanent archiving, browser extensions, mobile apps, tab saving, and more. Open source. I'm looking to release it as a SaaS and any assistance will be greatly appreciated.
—
I built a bookmarking app called Crestify [0]. I use the internet to teach myself everything from programming to guitar playing, being more productive, design, product development, and a variety of other topics.
I would be researching a topic and come across a blog post or message board discussion that I thought was quite insightful or useful. I might bookmark the page in my browser, upvote the discussion on HN or Reddit, save it to Pocket, and so on.
There were numerous issues with this, including the fact that things were scattered all over the place. I didn't always remember the website or the title of the page where I read something. I may recall a few words, but they may or may not be exact. A lot of the time, I'd have a hard time finding a page again, which was extremely frustrating.
The vast majority of apps did only one thing, so I had to use a variety of apps and scatter my data, including Pocket (reader view), Pinboard (archiving and search), browser bookmarks (quick access), Evernote (search and access on mobile), archive.org and archive.today (archiving pages), onetab (saving open tabs on a topic), and others. Some apps didn't work on mobile, some were discontinued (Dragdis, Readability), some were clunky and broke my flow.
I wished there was a single app that could do it all. I didn't know much about web development, but no one else was going to make it, so I decided to build it myself and learn as I went. Having an idea that I was eager to see become a real product kept me motivated, and I was able to immediately put what I learned into practice, which helped to solidify the learning. As a side note, I believe this is the most effective way to learn something new.
This is what Crestify does:
- One-click bookmarking with browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome (Working on a Safari extension now)
- Reader view for bookmarked pages
- Full text search for bookmarked pages
- Save your open tabs and then open them again with a single click on any device.
- Context view - after finding a bookmark using search, use context view to see what you bookmarked before and after that one.
- Tagging for bookmarks
- Permanent archives - Archive a public copy to archive.org and a private copy to crestify itself (can archive SPAs too). If you bookmark using the extension, the archive will be exactly what you saw, so this could be some Gmail messages, or Facebook comments, or paywalled articles, it doesn’t matter. What you saw is what gets archived. You can also search through the same. This is something that no other bookmarking service does.
- Mobile apps (webview based but share menu extension is also present) - this is a WIP, but I’ve been using it on my iPhone for the last couple months and it’s great being able to add bookmarks on the go.
- History saving - This is a fantastic feature. Keep on browsing as usual, and the text of each page is automatically added to Crestify, where you can search through it. This can also capture paywalled pages or pages that require a login (you can create filters to exclude certain pages, or keep the extension disabled in incognito mode).
- It is fully open source [1]. Everything from the frontend to the backend, extensions to mobile applications. I need to upload some updated code to the public repo (with history saving, mobile applications, and so on), but first I need to clean up the code. Crestify is BSD licensed.
- It can import bookmarks from a variety of sources, including Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, Pinboard, and browsers. (The importers need some improvement; I'll get to it soon. If you can share sample export files, please send them to dhamaniasad [at] gmail [dot] com).
- I've also just begun work on a Safari extension that will work on both macOS and iOS. Once this is completed, you will be able to use all of the features (including history saving) on both desktop and mobile (can already use it in Firefox on Android). Since the current extension is written using the WebExtensions API, this is not a huge task. Still, certain APIs work differently in Safari, and I never had the motivation to create a Safari extension until Apple added support for extensions in iOS).
--
I want to offer it as a SaaS, but I fell into the trap of always thinking it's not ready yet, and I'm also having a bit of trouble identifying the niche (since it's a pretty specialised product). I'd started working on my startup shortly after developing this, and then moved to freelancing while traveling, so I never had the opportunity to release it, but I want to release it this year and would really appreciate any assistance or advice.
Why doesnt this succeed? I can't share it with anyone outside our non-profit membership.