Ask HN: What is your side project?

36 points by max0563 ↗ HN

44 comments

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Currently most active is Lifoo (https://github.com/codr4life/lifoo), a Lisp/Forth-inspired language that's embedded in, and compiles to Common Lisp. Good luck trying to generate funny money from of that idea :) Still, I wouldn't change the experience for anything; it might be imperfect, but this one is mine; no more squeezing ideas into what someone else once thought was possible.
When planning a yearly roadtrip with with our buddies in a mix of email, WhatsApp and Doodle we figured this should be solved more easily: JayPads (https://jaypad.de/), a tiny mix of Slack and Doodle/Post-Its, requiring no logins or downloads, is the first step.
SendToMyCloud -- A public inbox for your Dropbox or Google Drive.

Launched here on HN a little more than 2 years ago.

https://sendtomycloud.com

(among others mentioned in my HN profile)

Currently improving my postcard sending service - https://postbirdy.com . Which is not really something special, just a fairly basic, yet functional service with my attempt to try making it quite fast and not hated by google PageSpeed Insights.

Also working on a simple service of screenshotting a website from multiple browsers (well, technically just emulating size and user agent with possibly PhantomJS). Not yet live, maybe in a week or two. Taking my time!

A tiny GUI automation scripting language (five commands) built on top of Python 3 and Pyautogui that will enable me to automate more than 50% of my current data entry job. :D
Building mobile apps for http://baghchal.net (it's a board game), but struggling to find out proper business model for it. If anyone gets any ideas on a quick look I'd appreciate a comment.
https://logmyhours.com Time tracking, invoicing, project & employee management. Launched it in Aug 2015, and launched the app last Aug. Hoping to go full time in the next 12 months if things work out.
How's your traction so far?
Bit slow at first, but doing pretty good now. Been maintaining around 10% growth MoM since Jan 2015. This month has been awesome though, almost doubled last month's revenue!
Whats the USP?
Cheaper than most of the competition, easy to use, and epic customer service (Doesn't everyone say this though?).

Basically I reach out to every new user to see if LMH is working out for them, and if there's anything missing or any challenges they might have encountered. I had one user with a few employees that was looking to switch over from one of our big competitors, and he really needed timesheet tags and timesheet approval & locking. I managed to build most of the timesheet tagging while in China on holidays :) and had the locking/approval system in later that week.

I have a few more exciting things I want to do once most of the main features have been built and I'm working full time on this. Currently doing around 20 hours a week.

http://goodfood.tips

A website where I create city food guides. Currently with a nice collection of food articles about that city. Thinking about adding a checklist thingy for dishes to eat when you are for example in Bangkok.

Heads up, getting a SSL cert error ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID
(comment deleted)
SimpleRM, a sort of a personal CRM for friendships/colleagues/etc.

I'm re-doing the frontend right now as the currently available version was from when I started learning React... have come a long way since.

http://simplerm.co/

(it is available in https but my certs expired and I forgot to do them over the weekend :grimacing:)

EngageKit, visioned to be a customer engagement platform.

Currently only the knowledge base feature is built in. The other features are still wip.

https://engagekit.com

One project is Padmapper for affordable housing since the affordable housing sites built by government contractors are not great.

https://github.com/codeforsanjose/findahome

Another project is the programmatic serving of California drought data via a JSON api.

https://github.com/codeforsanjose/calidrought

I also am thinking of a tiny little golang website that helps people organize board game parties - basically a wrapper around meetup.com.

As far as non-tech projects, I want to make a bar cart I own prettier by lining the inside of its top tray with an LED strip.

https://cineargus.com/

Follow directors, script writers and DOPs on movies and get alerted when new movies they work on come out.

I wrote it mainly for myself. When I sit down to watch a movie I decide on what I want to watch based more and more on who made it rather than what it's about. E.g. Taylor Sheridan wrote "Sicario". Based on how much I enjoyed that movie, I knew I would likely want to watch "Hell or High Water".

Still a bit incomplete, I haven't written the "how it works" section yet. But you can search for movies and find people that worked on them, follow them and get alerts.

https://www.skipthestamps.com/

A simple tool to send people postcards (either anonymously or signed). Choose from 5 of my preset photos or upload your own.

Mainly wrote it because I always had issues abandoning side projects before I ever released it to the world.

I also wanted to get more comfortable with React.

SOFTWARE:

TXR: data munging and system scripting language, in active development since mid 2009. Contains innovative Lisp dialect and original document pattern matching language.

http://nongnu.org/txr

NON-SOFTWARE:

Currently subtitling an epic 1980's Japanese rock concert video of the group Show-Ya. Captioning of the original language done. English translation done for the first song.

https://sweatshops.github.io/Komuter_Page/

An iOS app to show schedule of upcoming train in my country, I built it because I got frustrated waiting train as the train intervals is 30-45 minutes in my country, many time spent wasting for waiting train lol.