HACKER Q&A
📣 throwaway83242

Who needs help with side projects?


In the spirit of other Ask HN : Hiring and who wants to be hired, I thought I would help people with their side projects. For free or otherwise.

Please post what your side project does and whether you need help with technology(frontend, backend, databases) or with marketing/growth hacking/sales etc.

Personally, I can help with Python, Java and other backend technologies.


  👤 josephrmartinez Accepted Answer ✓
I'm building a simple web app to help me spend more time actively creating ideas when I'm online and less time just passively consuming information.

The app is super simple. It just encourages you to write ten ideas on a topic. You can either come up with the topic or borrow a pre-existing topic from someone else on the site. When you finish coming up with ten ideas on that topic, you can see all the other ideas that everyone else has come up with on that topic.

So instead of just scrolling and never contributing anything actively, I have to at least think about the topic and work on it a bit if I want to see what other people are thinking as well.

I can select a topic prompt "10 ideas for fun weekend DIY projects that cost less than $300." I write my ten ideas and then I see that 6 other people have also written ideas. Bam! Now I can see 60 more ideas for weekend DIY projects.

I've put together a very rough mock up using Anvil here: https://ten-ideas.anvil.app/ (Anvil lets you build web apps using nothing but python).

I'd love some feedback on what to do next for: - finishing the project on Anvil - finding about ten initial users to give feedback - sensible ways to put this out in the world

I just started learning to code a few months ago. My profession is farming, this is just a fun, non-commercial side project to learn and encourage positive online habits. Any pointers would be massively appreciated.


👤 thenewwazoo
I've got an open-source Homebridge plugin (https://github.com/thenewwazoo/homebridge-lutron-caseta-leap) that has a bug in its client-handling code. There is some problem with connection handling that is causing user pain. I am an experienced developer, but new to Typescript, and absolutely cannot chase it down. I would love the help of someone with Node socket coding knowledge willing to take a look.

👤 pdyc
I am working on creating a hosting server that can cater to landing page+blog+selling digital content with minimal maintenance overhead.

Beta version is ready here https://github.com/newbeelearn/sserver

I am looking for following - marketing and sales (I need some guidance from experienced marketer who has done this before) - beta users to try this product and give feedback so that i can improve - frontend for admin UI (backend api's are ready)

I can help with golang based backends if that is needed by anyone.


👤 bhu1st
I am working on weekends occassionally on a side project of mine, a real-time version of board game Baghchal (http://baghchal.net). The stack is Node.js/MongoDB.

I have identified couple issues that I'd love to work on at https://github.com/bhu1st/baghchal.net/issues but I lack time/resources.

Many thanks in advance for any technical help/support/collaboration. Please DM me.


👤 hacky_engineer
I am working on a baby book called Computer Engineering for Babies (https://computerengineeringforbabies.com). The biggest question I have is an SEO/branding one. I have about 3 brand names, and I don't know how to structure them or which ones to get rid of, and how to have a cohesive brand. Anyway, I'm looking for someone that can coach me on some SEO/branding stuff..

👤 jms55
I'm working on a Screeps-like game using WebAssembly. You compile a script to WebAssembly, and for each robot you control on the server, it runs the script in an isolated environment to choose an action for that robot. The goal is to write a program to coordinate your robots into gathering resources, replicating, and expanding your control of the server.

Here's an example bot script: https://github.com/JMS55/botnet/blob/master/example_bot/src/...

The basic infrastructure of the project is more or less in place, besides a visual replay viewer which I'm working on right now. What's needed is a bunch of work in designing game mechanics and APIs. I don't actually have any plans at the moment beyond bots running around and harvesting randomly generated resources. Feel free to open a discussion on the github page if you're interested in Rust, WebAssembly, and video games.

https://github.com/JMS55/botnet


👤 meesterdude
My project is a new way to browse the web, spatially. Built in unity/c#. Mostly done but there's always more to do so open to help with hte dev, Would also be great to work with a Ruby on Rails dev on building out the platform side.

would also love help building up traction/excitement with users/potential customers.

email is violentpurr at gmail if you're interested. I'm based on the east coast.


👤 mannanj
Your Life in Blocks: A concept inspired by Tim urban's Your Life in Weeks and by my weekly poster which I write a few blocks of text in.

I wanted a way to track significant things that happened in my life, and looking back at the physical poster, it has quite the impact on my perspective but I noticed it's a hassle carrying that thing around.

Angular, Firebase, Sass, NGRX Store: The MVP was functional for this stack but only for one account and without Firestore rules written. It has since been defunct and I've been stuck on scaling it to work for more than one user without public database rules.

Site: https://yourlifeinblocks.firebaseapp.com/user

Git (open repo): https://github.com/mannanj/life-in-blocks


👤 muzani
http://random-character.com

It generates characters from tropes, weighted by the popularity of those tropes. Which was a nice experiment, but it's probably not the future direction.

This is something with a lot of iteration. Procedurally generated stories and backgrounds. Letting users input a character and using the tool to shape the character around it. Relationship graphs to other characters.

AI will be in use, but it functions more as a renderer, with good old algorithms forming the structure. But this needs a lot of development work and involves taking money from users, at the very least to pass the cost.

Looking for: Anyone interested in writing or AI content generation. Will profit share but currently profit is $0.

Traction: Approx 2000 users/month, mostly from Bing. No marketing besides mentioning it on a forum twice a year.


👤 zzo38computer
I am working on "Free Hero Mesh" project (but it is not written in Python or Java). It is a puzzle game engine, and is FOSS.

Things that I can use help with are including (but not necessarily limited to):

- Promotion of project

- Testing

- Bug reports and feature requests

- If you are interested to make something with this

- Porting and distributions

- Patches to the code, if necessary

- Maybe someone has idea to improve documentation (such as tutorials) or to make a logo, or something else

http://chiselapp.com/user/zzo38/repository/freeheromesh


👤 samsquire
I wrote a dynamodb querying, SQL and Cypher database in Python. The code is very small and simple HTTPS://GitHub.com/samsquire/hash-db

It supports distributed joins over SQL. I plan to add multimodel specifically GraphQL and document storage.

I also wrote a multithreaded user space M:N scheduler in Rust, C and Java. It multiplexes N lightweight threads over M kernel threads like Golang goroutines. I also wrote an evented version with a multiconsumer multiproducer RingBuffer that handles IO. I need to add epoll network events and you have an application server. This is like Libev or libuv an event loop for processing and queuing up blocking syscalls without blocking.

I want to implement a LLVM JIT runtime. I have an idea for a very simple event queue that handles multithreading while being threadsafe. One of my other projects is multiversion concurrency control.

If you find this comment interesting you might enjoy my blog. https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas4 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas3 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas2 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas


👤 livinglist
Currently working on a Hacker News client using Flutter: https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki

There’s currently an issue with Android version where user can’t login for some reasons… never been able to reproduce it unfortunately… https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki/issues/58


👤 abe-101
I recently published a command-line tool written in python that'll convert a YouTube video into a Podcast (anchor.fm)

https://pypi.org/project/tube-cast

Under the hood the tool uses yd-dlp to download the video and pyppeteer to publish it on the site anchor.fm as a podcast.

I could use help with documentation and testing

https://github.com/abe-101/tube-cast


👤 jka
I've been developing a recipe search engine and meal planner at https://www.reciperadar.com/ -- all the code is free and open source.

I think the two largest challenges it has at the moment are:

- Developer experience / infrastructure setup: the service is Kubernetes-based, composed primarily of Python+Flask microservices, and although the setup steps are documented[1], they're not yet automated.

- User interface: my lack of user interface design skills are fairly apparent, I think. Having some clear UI goals to work towards would be helpful - there's likely some overlap with product design questions here (what should be the range of functionality that the the app offers?)

To be transparent: although I hope to offer compensation in future, the project is zero-revenue currently, and I don't feel ready to provide any monetary returns yet. If that hasn't put you off: any feedback is welcome, from discussion comments to pull requests to business model questions/critiques!

PS: Don't forget to mention one or two of your own side projects if there's anything you're looking for help with, too.

[1] - https://github.com/openculinary/infrastructure/


👤 melezhik
http://sparrowhub.io:2222 - SparkyCI - dead simple CI service.

Please give me a shout if you need to add other languages support. I would consider such an interest as a help )))

So far the service supports amazing Raku language, but the platform is general enough to support other languages as well …

Also I would appreciate help with frontend … The UI is simple html plus some JS / css under bulma.


👤 colthn
I'm working on an in-browser Doom-like level editor. I'd really appreciate some constructive criticism of the architecture or anything else that jumps out for rewriting besides some general code cleanup.

https://bitbucket.org/bbcolt/unnamed-project2/src/master/


👤 pm2222
There are columns of data, and as a simple example they are {{1,a},{1,b},{1,c},{2,a},{2,b},{2,c},{3,a}} of two columns and seven lines. I'd like to process the data through a function which would yield {{{1,2},{a,b,c}},{{3},{a}}} which is slightly better than {{{1,2,3},{a}},{{1,2},{b,c}}} because former has 7 leaf elements vs latter 8 leaf elements while both has if you will two lines.

How to write that function?


👤 Rodeoclash
I have a video player designed for esports coaches to do gameplay reviews of matches that their team has played. It has the unique feature that you can synchronise multiple viewpoints from a match together. It's free and open source.

https://github.com/Rodeoclash/vodon-pro

I've built it using Electron as an MVP but I'd like to rebuild the most successful features into a native app using gstreamer as a V2 version at some point.

I'm looking for help with reaching more esports teams that might be interested in using it, graphic design feedback (I've done it myself :/ ) and someone who has knowledge building native apps that I could bounce ideas off.


👤 ta_1
I am working on creating a fully static site Stackoverflow clone. My UI & UX Skills are terrible. I would appreciate any help.

- Site: https://www.altqna.com - A sample question page: https://www.altqna.com/questions/remote-origin-already-exist...


👤 xieweizhi007
Hi, my friend and I have a side project that let users learn almost anything for free online. We are both front-end developers and want a backend developer to join. If you are interested and want to learn more. Just drop me a message deexie1990 # gmail.com

👤 frozencell
A model that gives hackernews feed a two-layer ontologic classification of articles. The first layer is the type of medium (ie. ebook, blog post, research paper, question, ...) and the second is the category content itself (ie. health, programming, ...)

👤 sharemywin
Interests:

Web3, OpenCV, NLP, using AI libraries and Apis, semantic search.

Languages: C#, Asp.net, Databases, some python, Played around with Django,

I was working on a way to scrape problems out of social media.

Also an AI idea generator.


👤 is_true
Which is the cheapest way to serve Json to customers with a budget under usd10 a month, a Json size of aprox 50KB and aprox 1 million reqs/day

👤 shakezula
In a similar vein; if anyone is looking for an accountability buddy on their project, hit me up!