Ask HN: What is your side project for 2018?

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I just started learning Developing application and I am looking for passive income ideas. I'm actively looking for income sources and my skills. I just launched https://www.cmyport.com/ as a side project and adding new feature soon. I am learning php/mysql and looking for suggestions.

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I've two side projects that I plan on working on in 2018:

- A "Travel Guide" for Physics, which collects the best explanations for any physics topic and sorts them depending on the required level of sophistication: https://physicstravelguide.com/

- A platform, where students and researchers can publish their notes: https://physicsnotes.org/

We are a software development company from Nepal. We launched http://www.99leave.com/, a complete attendance and leave management system.
My antivirus marked this as malware!
how do you prevent on https://www.cmyport.com/ which is allowing someone to port scan another IP?
Why would he try to prevent that? If you have computer/device facing the internet with public IP you have to acknowledge that anyone can poke at it.
Thank you sdangol, the only way I can do is to limit the scanning to origin IP.
I don't know yet. For me "side project" means significantly less planning. My method is to listen to people around me, "I wish I had a tool that could do x."

If it's simple enough, I don't bother Googling for a solution, I build it for them. Exactly as they request. Nothing more, nothing less.

If any of you are interested in working on side projects full time, we're starting a community in NYC of people doing just that.

Check us out if interested: recesslabs.com

For me, my last side project was a crypto-related joke site (sendcryptopeopletulips.com).

I think the next one will also be a humor + tech project. I'm really interested to explore tech as a medium for comedy.

This sounds interesting - working on side projects full time sounds like a contradiction in terms however...
I will work for you if you allow remote worker
As a side project to learn React and Firebase I threw together a side project in an afternoon to help couples spice up their bedroom time (very slightly NSFW, no nudity). https://pairful.com

Obviously a lot of CSS work to do, however with some better SEO and animations, it could be a useful tool with affiliate possibilities. This isn't an area I know much about/care for, however.

I'm working on a browser extension that replaces the New Tab page with a Bitcoin price chart: https://crypto-tab.com
This is neat! Can we have an option to change from USD to EUR and select a preferred exchange? I'd like to see Bitstamp prices in euros if possible.
Not yet. Currently I'm working on adding Ether and Litecoin. But I'm adding this suggestion on my suggestions list! Stay tuned :-)
Hookdoo: SaaS that allows you to create incoming webhook endpoints to run shell scripts on your remote servers. https://www.hookdoo.com/

And of course my open-source webhook server project: https://github.com/adnanh/webhook

How does Hookdoo differ from plain old CGI scripts? I have no idea why I would need it.
Hookdoo allows you to execute the same script on multiple servers. It's centralized, and you don't have to maintain multiple versions of the same script on multiple hosts. You can easily add or remove servers where the script should be executed etc...

It also adds the concurrency control feature so you don't have to worry if you want only one instance of the script running, or want to kill the currently running one, or run them in parallel etc...

Another feature would be generic trigger rules where you can use values from payload to see if the script should be run at all (i.e. push to the feature branch, but you want to run the script on merges to master...).

As a developer, all of this might sound easy to implement, but whatever you make, you also have to maintain... And as you know, the business requirements tend to change quite often and you'll get to a point where you have to generalize your custom CGI scripts, and you end up spending more time maintaining infrastructure than doing development on the actual product.

Webhook on other hand is pretty much a CGI server with a few handy features :-)

Changing my job. As I'm looking for remote only in European hours - it will be quite challenging. Family issues don't allow me to work in US hours from Europe. I think this will be my full time project, as such a position is quite unique in Europe.

Besides I'm going to read a lot, and finally understand Haskell.

As for the programming stuff: write a book about databases, and write some Postgres patches for fun.

I won't mine hanging around, reading your book, and testing your patch
12 smart contract projects, one for each month. So far I have a list of 9 projects to do, easy stuff. The usual, lottery, auction... But I want to do it from the point of view of a python backend server, so I plan to use Viper.
I'm interested in doing similar. Due to time constraints might be be per 2 months.

Some ideas:

Poker variant - quite hard but thought of a way to do it without a trusted oracle.

Hodl contract - forces you to hold for X months

Simple asset price contract where 2 parties bet each way. Requires an oracle.

Sports betting. Oracle.

Reputation coin - prove your general rep by aggregating HN, SO, Reddit etc. scores. Oracle.

The usual lottery

A "ponzi"

Let me know if you want to get in touch and I'll stick an email in my profile. Would like someone to bounce ideas and help each other if stuck.

I am really interested! I particularly like your idea about the simple asset price contract. Could be really cool to get in touch.
Would be cool. I'll stick the blog URL in my profile for a couple of days and you can find my email that way
I will keep working on CryptoProphet.co - a smart alert system to keep you updated on any unusual changes of prices of your favourite cryptocurrencies. We send our cryptocurrency price alerts through Telegram.

https://cryptoprophet.co/

What kind of algo are you using to detect changes?
porting and finishing a game I made to the nintendo switch
I will keep working on CookArr, and maybe get my 2nd game out :-)

http://cookarr.com

Gosh, those marshmallows looks devine! I'll make sure to link to it within my side-project (once the new version is up).
I have 3 big ones.

- Nulis - a tree text editor for writers

https://nulis.io/

I have built a beta that was very well received, now it's time to clean up the code(rewriting it from scratch), add some cool features, and follow the roadmap to complete v1.0.

- Helix - a habit tracking app

https://helix.startuplab.io

Designed this app mostly for myself, but I think it turned out great, has a lot of potential, and users seem to love it. My goal here is also to complete all the functionality I've set out to complete with my roadmap and reach a solid v1.0.

- Startup Lab - blog

https://startuplab.io/blog

I want to seriously pick up the pace and quality of my blogging. I want to finally develop a sustainable daily writing habit, and make some successful posts.

====

If I succeed, I will have two awesome SaaS projects to sell, and a great traction channel(articles + medium publications + reddit) to promote them.

I've estimated that I will need 40k total visitors(or 9 months of 150 daily visitors) to reach my goal of $1k MRR

(40k visitors * ~5% retention * ~10% conversion to paying customers = 200 paying users. 200 users * $5/mo = $1k/mo).

If I successfully accomplish my plan - I will finally achieve my dream and become a successful startup founder.

====

As a bonus, I would love to find a good voiceover actor and produce YouTube videos out of my articles(or learn to speak better and do voiceover myself); and I would also experiment with engineering as marketing(I have 3 smaller projects I could promote and use as a traction channel).

Is there a "long-term" view for Helix where you can zoom out and see a map of your activity? Kind of like GitHub's contribution graph.

I'd use this, looking forward to a V1.

Yep, there is! Open the menu and click "Calendar".
I just signed up. Going meta for a second, this only works if you make using Helix a habit :).
I started out trying to figure out what a weekly sprint kanban board might look like if it were a pocket notebook. Ended up somewhere a little different (https://1rick.github.io/bluebird/), but it suits me ok for my own pocket task manager.
I have been developing https://useragentinfo.co/ as a side project. It's a simple device, browser and OS detection. Currently it's running in a single server setup over linode. By Jan2018 I'll be migrating it to AWS Elastic Beanstalk for stability. This will be my weekend timesink.
I've just started a native Android project for wrapping Wakatime operations (I find current offerings not good enough). So that will be a project going forward into 2018.

Also going to create some free example applications for hopefully teaching more advanced native concept on Android to any who want.