Ask HN: What weekend projects have you created?
As programmers, you may have spent plenty of time on learning different skills or technologies. To practice them, you may have created some weekend projects which would not take your too long while implementing something you find interesting. So what's yours? What technology have you used?
74 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadCilia.io
The one little feature it has that I haven't seen in other tools (but I'm sure it's not unique) is that it can reverse proxy by Git commit, so that "<commithash>.ci.example.com" becomes a way to see how the frontend looks at some particular revision.
Actually I wouldn't really pitch it to anyone, because it was quite internal and somewhat made in anger over the complexity of build servers like Jenkins. It was also an exercise in slightly larger-scale shell programming, which is considered extremely stupid around here, so.
Testdown is still the best system for smoke testing React apps I've used, and I made it because the company I was working at really had horrible experiences with frontend testing. The natural language specifications are kind of like Cucumber, except better and with no need to code step definitions, just define the "data-role" attribute on elements, which I found to be a much nicer paradigm than maintaining a bunch of CSS selectors in the test code, etc.
It was really useful to have UI test specifications that could be read by everyone in the company. And because it's made in a way that integrates with the React app, instead of sitting outside watching via e.g. PhantomJS, it can be very accurate and robust. For example, our app showed a spinner whenever it was loading an AJAX call, so we came up with the "Wait." command that simply waits until no spinner is visible, and that worked really great.
I don't care so much about Cilia, but Testdown is still a really interesting project for me. It's as much about a specific implementation as a way of thinking of testing in a pragmatic and nice way. I'd like to try implementing it with a parser based on GF (Grammatical Framework), to be able to handle actual grammatical constructs with more sophistication.
Neither of these projects are mature technology, but they worked like champs internally for about a year, and helped kickstart us into continuous integration of the frontend, which had been a thorny problem.
Currently I actively scan 30+ pastebin style websites, including those on the dark web, but I feel the insiders themselves will be the key. Each has a unique email address assigned to them, which can be added to your userbase. That way, as soon as it receives anything abnormal, you are alerted that there’s been a potential breach somewhere.
The insiders also come with real local mobile numbers, to catch targeted phishing attacks after a breach has taken place. Not unheard of.
Eventually I was scale up to purchasing datasets, dark market dumps etc., however this will take time. Definitely on my radar though.
I still believe in the idea and have been working on it periodically, but I have started other projects since.
More or less a booking service that allows users to pick their bookable hours and set prices for those times. Then they just link others to their calendar, the others can pick the time that works best for them, and pay for that time. Took some advice from HN about renaming it, and should be releasing soon!
Currently talking to a few early testers and doing a bit of extra feature development to better fit into my target niche.
But this targets a fairly large market.
Why do you speak of "niche"? This seems like a generally useful service.
Running on Google App Engine, written in Scala.
I posted my experience here in HN, but didn't get upvotes: https://medium.com/@wiradikusuma/12-lessons-learned-from-12-...
For example, one recent project was this: https://www.teachersdontpayjeff.com/suggestion ... it only really works on desktop currently. But the basic idea is to find words which may be "difficult" for younger elementary school students to read and offer some synonyms/definitions to help them out.
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/pellerin.edouard.liveru...
http://liverunner.peller.in
http://jonathanfromgrowth.com/lol/
It's taking longer than a weekend though. My usual projects are more complicated and I wanted to do something brain dead and relatively instantly gratifying. Clojure + clojurescript(react based).
I'm on the page for "HIFIMAN Edition S" - I'd expect an Amazon affiliate link or something. Earn yourself some cash :-)
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JefryPoz...
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-distractio...]
tldv keeps the scary good yt recommendation away from you
It finds bands playing in your area in the near future and creates a Spotify playlist of them. It still needs a lot of work but it's a fun way to discover shows to go to.
Ended up taking way longer than a weekend but it's still basically a passion project of mine. I used Node.js, Firebase, and React.
Self hosted tiny incoming webhook server with powerful options. Lets user run shell commands on incoming webhook. Has context parsing (use values from payload, query string, headers etc...). Can use context to validate the requests (i.e. only trigger if the push is coming from GitHub and the ref branch is the master branch). More info can be found in the Readme and on the wiki.
Tech stack: Golang
---
Hookdoo - https://www.hookdoo.com/
A SaaS spin on the webhook server. Sort of an opposite approach. Has all the features webhook has, and also implements concurrency management (i.e. only run one script and deny others until it's done, allow parallel runs etc...). Centralized, managed, leverages SSH. No need for the user to install and configure anything on their servers.
Tech stack: Ruby, Golang, Redis, PostgreSQL, ES6 + React
It's plain ol' js. I used it as an opportunity to give jest a try. It took a single Saturday to get the general concept down, then some bug fixes over the next few days as I misunderstood the drawing rules.
https://github.com/kgdiem/fisher-yates-baccarat
Also TextJawn, my first production ready native Android app. It was also done in a single Saturday with some bug fixes going out over the next week. "TextJawn enables password protected remote management over SMS.
Locked out of Google? Forget your phone? No problem! TextJawn lets you ring, locate, and check your messages by sending a text message."
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thosejaunt...
I posted about it on HN and reddit previously, but it didn't get much traction, so it's pretty much dead as of now.
I am not well versed with the specifics of how trademarks work, but I hope this is enough of a differentiator to keep it safe.
And
http://parseaddress.io
Both were spun up in a weekend. They’ve changed a lot since then, but only because of how many people use them now :)
Also, at least in Germany, I can use Deutsche Post/DHL to do the same thing, for cheaper: https://www.deutschepost.de/de/f/funcard.html
http://smtptrap.net
https://elixirjobs.net
conferenceradar.com (it's open source and the list is maintained/ updated through PRs on github)