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Ask HN: What is your job role and what are the side projects you are working on?

37 points by aryamaan ↗ HN
The question in itself is self-explanatory. Please mention your normal day job role (backend developer, full stack engineer etc) and what are the side projects you are doing currently. This question is about having insight about what people are doing.

66 comments

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marak830
Freelance web/c# dev, and my side project is a voice command and control system for star citizen(similar to voice attack but with fullscreen overlay and natural speaking - sites currebtly down while i switch hosts and domain name though haha).
formichunter
Engineer The sarcasm fun task of helping the company clean up their technical debt and become an automated cloud company. It's a billion dollar company so I'll be done in 5 years.
sridharpoduri
Program Manager, working on SaaS application to reschedule meetings based on user rules.
michus
At work I am a full-stack front-end developer, working on:

https://wifi.garden - Public WiFi network advertising platform.

https://mykoob.com - School and education network/system.

And few school related web-apps for Russian school networks.

At home I also like to try back-end development and mobile app development, currently on weekends working on a Fiverr analog for Baltic market: https://faifsapp.com, writing myself the backend, API, frontend and mobile app.

manu29d
Web developer (recently started on Nodejs, prev: Rails).

Side projects include evaluating the use of NginX as an app server (ref: open-resty). I am overwhelmed by the abundance of web frameworks available and the never-ending list of tools/libraries to learn.

cruppstahl
Engineering team lead. My side project is an embedded key/value database: http://upscaledb.com
zerr
Nice. Any resources/books recommendation for those who are interested in coding similar project? e.g. ACID implementation, etc...

Btw, how is it going with sales?

louisswiss
Technical cofounder of a SaaS company based in Switzerland.

Side project is a simple e-commerce website selling handmade jewellery (http://www.wiggles.ch) - I won't retire off it but I spend < 4h/month on the project and it pays the rent...

kidk_
Customer Success Manager at CoScale

Side projects:

- Felt: front-end load testing https://github.com/kidk/felt

- Pomodoro timer with stats (not public)

- Map of glutenfree restaurants in Ghent (not finished)

Pyxl101
> what are the side projects you are doing currently. This question is about having insight about what people are doing.

I find it interesting that you ask primarily about side projects rather than just projects. Why are side projects more OK to discuss (or more interesting) than projects?

I think it is sometimes a bad habit to follow the impulse to pursue an idea as only a side project. Whether you're a line employee or a founder, I think there's value to seriously pursuing ideas that you believe to have merit and attempt to get traction behind them at your company. It's the path to career growth and success in both cases. Keeping an idea as a "side project" limits its potential success compared with sharing it with others at your workplace and attempting to establish consensus around it and simply doing it as a project. You learn a lot more that way, not only because you get feedback from others about the idea. (Are you invested in the idea, or not? I don't mean financially. Success does not come from investing in no ideas.)

Perhaps what you are asking is: "what are you working on that is too small for you have bothered to try to garner consensus around it with others, to get their support for your idea". Just a thought. Or perhaps your question betrays an anxiety about one's inability to influence one's employer by altering business plans -- that is to say, if you don't pitch an idea, then there's no opportunity for it to be rejected. That is the impulse that I think we should not generally encourage, since it does not promote growth; it allows fragile and bad ideas to survive longer than they should, and it probably stunts good ideas too. This is just my opinion.

All ideas also deserve a time where they're cultivating and premature to share with others. Perhaps you are asking, "Share an idea here that you have not yet shared with anyone".

Perhaps what you are implying is that it would be improper for someone to discuss what they're doing at their job, in the context of their role at their job. "I am a developer at X.com and I'm working on a project for X.com where ..." - perhaps this class of answer seems uninteresting for surface reasons. But why shouldn't it be interesting? Would it be boring to say, "I work at Comcast and I help transition our legacy IPv4 networks to IPv6", or, "I work at Google on an upcoming Google Compute Platform service", or "I help launch the Apple iTunes store in new countries and territories worldwide".

Perhaps what you're asking is, "What work do you do will benefit and be interesting to other engineers (e.g., building general purpose libraries and tools for other software engineers)?"

Sorry, I don't mean to be contrary. I like to play devil's advocate, and I think there's something interesting to dig into regarding what you intend to ask and the implications behind the question. There is a whole bundle of implications in that word "side project".

chippy
so...how would you answer those different questions?
cjfont
In many cases, side projects have absolutely nothing to do with one's mainstream work, so trying to have them gain traction at a company is moot. For instance, if I work for the government doing IT services, why should they sponsor my idea of creating a mobile game app?
rootlocus
Fronted software engineer for a HFT company.

Side project: UI framework over OpenGl for java, to be used for a 2d game editor, to be used for a 2d game.

dood
Was a senior backend/full-stack Python developer, now considering career options, thinking about contracting or perhaps finding a remote position.

On the side I'm playing with Elixir/Phoenix and working on an experimental knowledgebase.

sycren
In London, I work as a consultant growing startups - but now I'm looking for a full-time role in growth/marketing/partnerships for a high growth tech company...

My side project is a hackathon/startup school hybrid focusing on creating entreprenurial solutions that tackle the challenges of diversity - http://www.startupandbloom.com/

Currently, I'm writing up press releases and sponsorship documents.

onion2k
Senior developer.

Side project #1 is a Chrome plugin to record user actions on a web page and use the data to automate end-to-end testing with Nightwatch/Karma and Selenium.

Side project #2 is a Chrome plugin to add tags to web content (anything, but it's intended for tagging usernames) and share the tags between groups of users.

jeremiecoullon
PhD student in applied Math at UCL in London. Side project is public engagement: short documentaries about academic research (http://knowitwall.com ); My role is web developer (starting learning web dev from scratch which was and still is overwhelming but fun :) )
njpatel
Technical Lead, Xamarin Insights (https://xamarin.com/insights)

Side Projects: https://github.com/skizzehq/skizze - High-throughput probalistic data structure service. Also working on it's Golang and Node.js client bindings (see the org.)

https://github.com/njpatel/grpcc - a nice-to-use gRPC CLI for testing/debugging gRPC services

https://github.com/njpatel/HiveKit - a British gas Hive Heating -> HomeKit bridge

Also working on another little utility for devs around sending files between machines, should be out by the weekend!

mytochar
I'm a backend developer;

and, for a long time, I worked on side software projects; but, when I get home, I'm often so tired from coding all day that I don't program as much at home anymore. Lately, I've been learning to play a midi-controller and maybe make some music :)

harperlee
Big 4 technology advisory manager. The main side project I'm working on is a MOOC platform written in clojure (nothing to see yet, though).
ehartsuyker
I was hired as a Data Engineer for my skills in Scala, AWS, and other data technologies. I ended up falling into Backend Engineer (also Scala) as our core services needed significant support. From there, I drifted into Operations as our infra and deployment processes were negatively impacting QOS and the time from code-to-prod.

In my spare time I:

  - made a shitty personal website[0] for kicks

  - maintain an npm package[1]

  - contribute to SecureDrop[2]

  - run the not-yet-live BerlinLeaks[3]
[0] - https://heartsucker.com

[1] - https://github.com/ehartsuyker/node-deb

[2] - https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop

[3] - https://berlinleaks.com

aryamaan
I see. Your site is shitty and good simultaneously. berlinLeaks is a nice idea but I don't see any posts on it.