The reason I'm asking this question is because I realized something recently. I've been a programmer all my life. I used to love programming in Delphi, VB :P, Perl, PHP, Javascript, etc since school. I created all sorts of stupid things like Winamp plugins[1], Graphics software[2], Games, etc. It was programming just because i liked making the computer do things for me.
But then somewhere along the line my projects started making me money and then I start reading all these marketing books and my perception changed. Now if I'm creating a site I'm usually more focused on SEO, list building and crippling my software so that I can extract more money from my users. I am making more money but the joy of doing it is gone. I feel bored writing software and generally browse HN and reddit and generally force myself to work.
Maybe it's time to go back to the basics and work on stuff just for sheer joy of doing it :D
On the gamedev subreddit, it seems most questions are around how to market and get exposure for your game, SEO, making a successful kickstarter, etc.
It's great to take a step back and just make something that people enjoy, even if it does not bring any income. Getting "fanmail" or seeing the # of hours someone has put into something you've made is a great feeling.
As long as you have a day job that pays the bills, I say go for it.
Hi, a software developer here. I also feel like you. Started coding very young, then uni, first job, first team leader position, then moved to Europe for 5 years working in big companies ( and saving as much as I could). Now I'm back home in Latin America. Built a couple of houses cash with savings, got married.
But I'm bored so I spend my time playing with my 3d printer and home automation little projects in my spare time. I don't think I will last much longer working on something I don't enjoy.
Every month I save enough for living at least 3 months (4.5k USD ) without working which is quite good, but on the other hand, I don't like what I do. It's tough to quit when you know other people are struggling to pay for basic needs in other areas.
I guess my plan is to keep saving and at some point next year ( when I get around 2-3 years worth of expenses) do something about it.
Anyways, at the moment my hobbies keep me going. That's my advice, a hobbie.
I think this is the worst thing about startup culture. Don't get me wrong, I like startups, but there's so much hype and so much money around them that it sucks all the oxygen out of anything else.
I can't count the number of times I've been talking about an interesting project idea and heard "oh, so it's a startup!" Or worse, been talking to someone else about their project idea which they immediately follow with "and then I can turn it into a startup!" whether or not it makes any sense at all.
Recent history is littered with ideas that started as an interesting project, turned into a startup for no reason, blew out into some hypergrowth social unicorn, made no money, and then folded, taking the original project with them. Looking at you, Readability.
Entrepreneurship is fundamentally creative, but not all that is creative is entrepreneurship. Startups are a specific structure for a specific kind of project. Trying to cram every idea into that mould strikes me as the business equivalent of "I just learned about NoSQL and now I want to use it for EVERYTHING".
So what is the definition of startup from your perspective? I mean, if I have an idea and just build it, wouldn't someone else take the idea, build it, and look for VCs to make it profitable? In this case, isn't it better to always look for the possibility that my idea can actually catch on?
I recently created Ewolo, it's a web based workout tracker optimized for mobile as well - https://ewolo.fitness
I did it mostly because the existing solutions were horrible and I thought that it would also be a great way to learn redux. The front-end is also open-sourced :)
Haha, yes definitely. There is something to be said about allowing people to get a full view of the structure vs letting them prettify the bundle however.
It was VERY surprising for me to find out that one of the most popular programming languages offers little variety in terms of BT libs/clients. For a long time, if one needed advanced options like DHT or protocol encryption, his only choice would be jlibtorrent (JNI wrapper for the well-known C++ library). Well, not anymore :)
I like to create small tools that are optimized for me and my families use case. For example we used Google Keep for shopping lists, but I found it too bloaty and slow. So I created bös.se (it got SSR and websockets, wohooo!)
It's fun to just care about your own needs when developing. For me it becomes work when I get feature requests that I don't like myself, but I implement them to appease others.
Do you really use those 2700 lines of CSS code? Just asking, as I usually trim all the extra code, and use the one I actually need, in all my single page apps.
Do you have time to share any of your experience with the tools / process that enables you to get this done in a reasonable timeframe? I'm specifcally interested in how these have changed over time - how have changes to tools / process helped get this done faster?
This is a big enough project to can explore most programming subjects (e.g. machine learning, Javascript, databases, email), and I enjoy learning about history by watching old videos.
I created it because I was annoyed with the lack of notifications provided by GitHub for some events like new people following you or starring/forking your projects.
A lot of people are now using it and that makes me happy even though I'm losing money by keeping it online.
Https://github.com/Thorium-sim/thorium - Starship simulator controls. Think Bridge Simulators (like Artemis) meet D&D. The controls facilitate doing space missions, where one participant is a game master and the others take various roles on the ship.
I love working on the controls, and I’m learning a lot too. I’m going to start taking donations soon, but don’t plan on making a ton of money.
Thank you! It depends on what you mean by "often", I guess often enough. I use Pastery all the time (especially the editor plugins), and all my developer friends love it too.
I guess people use some of the other services too, for example I get lots of comments for Spamnesty. I don't really care enough to look, though, as I built them for myself or because I thought they'd be fun, or because I just wanted to make something with a friend.
For me its a bit of a balancing act... You produce a project which is successful means you need to devote time to it. But to devote time to it you need to provide support, updates, etc. If your projects doesn't earn money or you are forced to work on something else it becomes difficult and then you whish people will not use it. Most troublesome are student projects who pm you.
Robotic abuse has a tendency to bring cool projects like this to their knees. Any publicly-accessible, readable/writable service will eventually run into this problem.
Not sure if that would be useful but you could use similar approach to recently posted https://send.firefox.com/ that encrypts content before sending it to server using key that is in # param and is never send to server by browser.
Unfortunately, that would make it hard to provide various features server-side, such as code highlighting, and would require JS on the client (and also break raw file downloads, etc). It would also make the editor plugins much more complicated (right now they just POST to an endpoint).
We think that not listing pastes, having them expire soon by default, etc is a good compromise, as we don't claim perfect privacy, just that pastes are always sort of "unlisted".
First: these are awesome, and thank you for sharing.
(Esp. Spa.mnesty.com - that's hilarious and incredible at the same time)
I tried timetaco.com but it's not doing anything. I tabbed my way through the day (it filled in today's date - 2017, then 8, then 10). I select 5 : 10, which is about 3 minutes in the future, and then clicked 'Generate'. It just changes the date (all three parts) to red, and doesn't do anything.
(I'm clearly missing something - what am I missing?)
Neat projects! I'm curious, have you seen very much interest in eternum? I have an idea for a similar project, but I am not sure how many people are really interested in IPFS.
Hmm, moderate, really, but it's early days. It certainly has been encouraging, and I wanted it mainly for my own use, so if IPFS takes off, that's just an added benefit.
Most of them are just weekend projects, and took two or three days to create. Then I spend the odd few hours here and there. I also go to bed very late, which gives me ample time to work on stuff during the time when everyone else is asleep.
I wake up late, too, yes, but once in a while I'll be so engrossed in something that I'll get four hours of sleep. I'll generally have to make up for that sleep later that week, though.
I tried to create a timeTaco countdown for today, but it didn't let me? AFAICT, it only allows for blast-off dates in the future. Also, a little clarity about time format (12 vs 24) and time zone would be nice. Overall though I love the simple UI.
I'd love to be able to see more screenshots of the game - at the moment they're faded out and placed in the background, and when you click them you end up just downloading the game itself.
I actually don't mind the JAR file thing ;) but I'm unlikely to download and try it without knowing a bit more about the game concept.
I'd hope the title explains the concept fairly concisely. It's a marble maze type game i.e. guide a marble towards a goal, stay out of traps. But the marble is quantum which means it looks more like a cloud and behaves nothing like a marble. This led to the levels looking less, well, maze-like than I'd hoped, but you've got to run with what you got, so I started bringing features into gameplay that wouldn't exist in a marble maze e.g. trying to fulfill multiple goals at once by getting orbits into a certain shape.
One thing you can say about my side projects is that they have been 100% out of touch with commercial reality (excepting a rock climbing website from the late 90s that made me a few k before I retired it)! I thought initially that some game studio might want to put money into developing Quantum Marble Maze beyond proof of concept into something more, but I guess either nobody has heard of it, because my promotion or delivery is somewhat lacking, or they're not that interested in something so experimental. Hell, even after open sourcing it I haven't had anybody contribute. According to the server logs only about 1000 people have even played QMM, and 10 people finished, which makes it considerably more niche than I had hoped for a project which tries to explain a truth "far more marvellous ... than any artists of the past imagined". Good thing I enjoyed the project for its own sake :)
2. Form Filler - This was developed to solve my own problem of having to type common fields like email id, username etc again and again on different web pages (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/form-filler)
3. Subtitle Corrector - This is a linux command line utility to correct subtitle files. Using this one can adjust the entire file by +x or -x seconds (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/subtitle-corrector)
4. 100 - This is a project I started to learn to solve Algorithms and DS problems for my interview preparations. The plan was to solve at least 1 problem everyday for 100 days. But I couldn't do it everyday. Still whenever I solve a problem I put it in this repository (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/100)
5. Desktop Commentary - This is again a linux utility which shows Cricket scores every 10 seconds on your desktop as a Notification Bubble. The problem I was trying to solve here was to avoid going to Espncricinfo website every now and then to check scores when a match is going on (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/desktop-commentary)
https://popmotion.io - JavaScript animation framework. Writing this over the last few years has probably done more to improve my career than my actual jobs.
I really enjoy it but sometimes maintenance does come at the cost of doing other projects.
I'm writing a bot for cryptotrading without having the proper knowledge for something like that. Learning as I go and I expect to lose some money on this (certainly won't give it a budget to manage that I can't afford to lose), but I'm having a ton of fun entertaining the fantasy that I could 'game the system' with my bot
EMA sounds familiar. I'm exactly in the same position with dot net as programming language. I'm interested in working together , i know other programming languages also
584 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadI genuinely find it useful for note-taking and organising things.
But then somewhere along the line my projects started making me money and then I start reading all these marketing books and my perception changed. Now if I'm creating a site I'm usually more focused on SEO, list building and crippling my software so that I can extract more money from my users. I am making more money but the joy of doing it is gone. I feel bored writing software and generally browse HN and reddit and generally force myself to work.
Maybe it's time to go back to the basics and work on stuff just for sheer joy of doing it :D
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2008/09/27/songrefernce-turns-your-mp...
[2] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/extreme-article-marketing-conve...
It's great to take a step back and just make something that people enjoy, even if it does not bring any income. Getting "fanmail" or seeing the # of hours someone has put into something you've made is a great feeling.
As long as you have a day job that pays the bills, I say go for it.
Every month I save enough for living at least 3 months (4.5k USD ) without working which is quite good, but on the other hand, I don't like what I do. It's tough to quit when you know other people are struggling to pay for basic needs in other areas.
I guess my plan is to keep saving and at some point next year ( when I get around 2-3 years worth of expenses) do something about it.
Anyways, at the moment my hobbies keep me going. That's my advice, a hobbie.
I can't count the number of times I've been talking about an interesting project idea and heard "oh, so it's a startup!" Or worse, been talking to someone else about their project idea which they immediately follow with "and then I can turn it into a startup!" whether or not it makes any sense at all.
Recent history is littered with ideas that started as an interesting project, turned into a startup for no reason, blew out into some hypergrowth social unicorn, made no money, and then folded, taking the original project with them. Looking at you, Readability.
Entrepreneurship is fundamentally creative, but not all that is creative is entrepreneurship. Startups are a specific structure for a specific kind of project. Trying to cram every idea into that mould strikes me as the business equivalent of "I just learned about NoSQL and now I want to use it for EVERYTHING".
I did it mostly because the existing solutions were horrible and I thought that it would also be a great way to learn redux. The front-end is also open-sourced :)
It was VERY surprising for me to find out that one of the most popular programming languages offers little variety in terms of BT libs/clients. For a long time, if one needed advanced options like DHT or protocol encryption, his only choice would be jlibtorrent (JNI wrapper for the well-known C++ library). Well, not anymore :)
http://xn--bs-fka.se/test-note
It's fun to just care about your own needs when developing. For me it becomes work when I get feature requests that I don't like myself, but I implement them to appease others.
Do you have time to share any of your experience with the tools / process that enables you to get this done in a reasonable timeframe? I'm specifcally interested in how these have changed over time - how have changes to tools / process helped get this done faster?
This is a big enough project to can explore most programming subjects (e.g. machine learning, Javascript, databases, email), and I enjoy learning about history by watching old videos.
For the crawling part, this might be interesting (I have a talk coming soon too) http://findlectures.com/articles/2017/05/15/Building-a-Crawl...
I created it because I was annoyed with the lack of notifications provided by GitHub for some events like new people following you or starring/forking your projects. A lot of people are now using it and that makes me happy even though I'm losing money by keeping it online.
https://learn-anything.xyz/
Everything is open source and is MIT licensed, both the search engine and the entire database it searches over.
There are however many things that we can still do to take this idea further. Hopefully more people join to help us with that. :)
I love working on the controls, and I’m learning a lot too. I’m going to start taking donations soon, but don’t plan on making a ton of money.
http://ipfessay.stavros.io/ - Publish uncensorable essays on IPFS
https://www.eternum.io/ - Pin IPFS files with a nice interface
https://www.pastery.net/ - The best pastebin
https://spa.mnesty.com/ - Fuck with spammers
https://www.timetaco.com/ - Easily make nice-looking countdowns
And this is just the last two months or so? Also, lots of hardware stuff:
https://www.stavros.io/projects/
Since they don't really make you any money - do people use them often then - if so how do people find them?
I guess people use some of the other services too, for example I get lots of comments for Spamnesty. I don't really care enough to look, though, as I built them for myself or because I thought they'd be fun, or because I just wanted to make something with a friend.
I was just wondering if/how you tried to market it or show it to more people.
Since they don't really make you any money - do people use them often then - if so how do people find them?
I was going to fix it, but I like your reaction, so I might just leave it!
I don't. Please explain?
> Everything goes over an encrypted TLS connection, so nobody other than the intended recipient can see what you're pasting.
It should say "nobody other than the intended recipient and the developers of this website".
We think that not listing pastes, having them expire soon by default, etc is a good compromise, as we don't claim perfect privacy, just that pastes are always sort of "unlisted".
I tried timetaco.com but it's not doing anything. I tabbed my way through the day (it filled in today's date - 2017, then 8, then 10). I select 5 : 10, which is about 3 minutes in the future, and then clicked 'Generate'. It just changes the date (all three parts) to red, and doesn't do anything. (I'm clearly missing something - what am I missing?)
This thread is all over the place haha! Did they ever get to meet at the bridge??:
https://spa.mnesty.com/conversations/amhhqthp/
Upside: it's got a quantum physics game engine, and can teach you quantum mechanics
Downside: HN will continue to tear me apart for making them download a JAR file but you can grab the source and compile it yourself if you like
I'd love to be able to see more screenshots of the game - at the moment they're faded out and placed in the background, and when you click them you end up just downloading the game itself.
I actually don't mind the JAR file thing ;) but I'm unlikely to download and try it without knowing a bit more about the game concept.
Blog describing the physics here https://linkingideasblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/learning-q...
I'd hope the title explains the concept fairly concisely. It's a marble maze type game i.e. guide a marble towards a goal, stay out of traps. But the marble is quantum which means it looks more like a cloud and behaves nothing like a marble. This led to the levels looking less, well, maze-like than I'd hoped, but you've got to run with what you got, so I started bringing features into gameplay that wouldn't exist in a marble maze e.g. trying to fulfill multiple goals at once by getting orbits into a certain shape.
One thing you can say about my side projects is that they have been 100% out of touch with commercial reality (excepting a rock climbing website from the late 90s that made me a few k before I retired it)! I thought initially that some game studio might want to put money into developing Quantum Marble Maze beyond proof of concept into something more, but I guess either nobody has heard of it, because my promotion or delivery is somewhat lacking, or they're not that interested in something so experimental. Hell, even after open sourcing it I haven't had anybody contribute. According to the server logs only about 1000 people have even played QMM, and 10 people finished, which makes it considerably more niche than I had hoped for a project which tries to explain a truth "far more marvellous ... than any artists of the past imagined". Good thing I enjoyed the project for its own sake :)
https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/painting-a-christmas-... - 'painting' the LEDs on my christmas tree.
https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/optical-magnetic-stri... - optically decoding data from magnetic stripe cards.
https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/zymeter-simple/ - a rather unsuccessful attempt at measuring specific gravity.
https://github.com/anfractuosity/musicplayer - playing .wav files via RF emissions from a laptop.
> I now have 57 GB of audio files of bubbles
Sounds like.. FUN!
1. Track Courier - This was developed to learn the tech-stack Node.js + Backbone.js + PostgreSQL (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/track-courier)
2. Form Filler - This was developed to solve my own problem of having to type common fields like email id, username etc again and again on different web pages (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/form-filler)
3. Subtitle Corrector - This is a linux command line utility to correct subtitle files. Using this one can adjust the entire file by +x or -x seconds (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/subtitle-corrector)
4. 100 - This is a project I started to learn to solve Algorithms and DS problems for my interview preparations. The plan was to solve at least 1 problem everyday for 100 days. But I couldn't do it everyday. Still whenever I solve a problem I put it in this repository (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/100)
5. Desktop Commentary - This is again a linux utility which shows Cricket scores every 10 seconds on your desktop as a Notification Bubble. The problem I was trying to solve here was to avoid going to Espncricinfo website every now and then to check scores when a match is going on (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/desktop-commentary)
6. Alarm Manager - This is one more linux utility to set multiple alarms (up to 5) on your linux machine (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/alarm-manager)
https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbobrus
https://github.com/ivanceras/spongedown
https://github.com/ivanceras/curtain
https://github.com/ivanceras/rustorm
I've spin up some semi-polish desktop app, but never get some revenue.
https://github.com/PicassoCT/Journeywar
https://github.com/euvl/vue-js-modal
https://github.com/euvl/vue-js-toggle-button
https://github.com/euvl/vue-notification
[0] https://github.com/overshard/timestrap
I really enjoy it but sometimes maintenance does come at the cost of doing other projects.
I built it to learn React and brush up my Go skills. I occasionally add new features.
It makes $0 now, but I plan to earn 10$ a month before my amazon free tier expires :)