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Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

217 points by shimmmaz ↗ HN
While we were all in lockdown a lot of makers have been making incredible things. So I decided to make Lockdown Showcase to showcase all those products.

Post your own product or browse through other ones here: https://lockdownshowcase.com/

555 comments

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JshWright
Hahahaha....

I didn't quite keep up with my normal responsibilities while also not quite managing to keep up with the remote learning my kids were doing.

kodt
Yeah anyone with young kids had far less time during lockdown, not more.
war1025
Sort of depends I think. We have a four year old and two year old twins. We've found we have a ton more time. Mostly because we were forced to actually slow down and be at home instead of always on the go.
JshWright
We have approximately the same kid layout, just a few years further down the road (twins with an older sibling). Once kids are in school, the situation changes dramatically. School ends up consuming a big chunk of the "work" day, so keeping up with work takes up much of what used to be "family" time, net result is that there is far less free time now than there used to be.
laumars
This has been my experience too.

If both parents are working full time (not furloughed) then you often end up working early mornings and evenings to compensate for lost time during the day.

Same is also true if you have younger kids but either / both parents work jobs that require lots of formal meetings. As understanding as employers have been, there’s only so many times one can have a meeting interrupted because a doll fell over or Duplo piece fell off an impossible structure. So parents will often arrange their day where they essentially tag-team their day, meaning lost hours are made up in the early mornings / late evenings.

laumars
Yeah. I hate reading threads like these because it only reminds me just how stressful lockdown has been and how much less time I’ve had to spend on my personal projects.

Still, I am glad that others have been able to turn a negative into a positive.

Edit: that said, it had been nice spending more time with the kids

war1025
I rebuilt our deck. Would share a picture but not really sure the best way to do that.

Thinking to redo our floors next. We pulled out our carpet on the main floor two years ago and painted the subfloor as a temporary solution. Current plan is to buy 1x8 pine boards and go for a sort of rustic wood floor look.

the_pwner224
> Would share a picture but not really sure the best way to do that.

Imgur lets you upload many photos as an album, with comments for each photo if you want. Aside from that I've used WordPress to quickly put up some content. The hosting at WordPress.com has a free tier, I think it puts ads on the site though. After the set up flow you can just create a post with text, images, files. neocities.org is also good if you want to make a more polished site.

soylentcola
I'm in the middle of doing the same. It's more of a little porch-deck thing--only a couple feet off the ground, underlying structure mostly sound, etc.

The problem I ran into was that I underbought decking boards and now the local Home Depot has been out for the past few weeks. I want to get the same boards so they match so I'm hesitant to shop elsewhere right now. Talked to some folks and it's apparently not any major supply shortage, but rather everyone and their brother having the same idea.

As someone on the Home Depot subreddit put it: "honey, I'll do it when I have time." "Ok, well...now ya got time!"

war1025
I would guess you could put in a special order and then you'd just have to wait for the next time they get a shipment.
soylentcola
Replying a bit late, but the items I need are not available for ordering to a store for pickup. I only have the option to order future delivery to my home for (what appears to be $79 on the website but I haven't dug into that option because I'm not interested). I'll just wait for them to restock.
quaintdev
I have been collecting lot of notes and needed an offline storage for the same. I created this small utility pinotes[1] that I run on Raspberry PI. The best part is I can use browser address bar to save stuff(from both desktop & mobile). I am using it for notes, todos, grocery list, watchlists, bookmarks, reminders, etc,.

I have assigned pin as keyword, so I can use following search terms in address bar

  pin grocery!rice
  pin todo!pay electricity bill
  pin bmark!htttp://news.ycombinator.com
This creates grocery.md, todo.md and bmark.md with their content followed by whatever is after ! in search string.

[1]: https://github.com/quaintdev/pinotes

pallavkaushish
I created an online academy where I publish growth marketing resources to help startups grow from 1K to 1M - https://academy.pallav.io/

I've been meaning to do this for the longest time but couldn't keep my blog super active. In this regard, the lockdown was a blessing for me.

antigirl
Very interesting, defo interested in this space
winrid
Added a ton of features and integration tests to my project:

https://fastcomments.com/

dasil003
I had thought about making something like this in the past. Really like the execution. Hope you are finding your audience and getting a sustainable business going, the world needs more of these.
winrid
I hope so too! So far all the customers I've gotten have been amazing to work with as well. My target is one new customer a day, but so far that's been really hard.
doersino
I've recently written a Python app that selects a random location in an area defined by a user-supplied shapefile [1], grabs corresponding aerial imagery from Google Maps, and posts it as a geotagged tweet:

https://github.com/doersino/aerialbot

I've built this tool because satellite imagery can be extremely beautiful [2], and I was looking for a way of regularly receiving high-resolution satellite views of arbitrary locations such as the center pivot irrigation farms of the American heartland [3] in my timeline. Plus, for obvious reasons, it's nice to see the world without actually having to go outside right now.

Currently, I'm running four Twitter bots based on ærialbot:

* @americasquared, which posts one randomly selected square mile of the United States every 4 hours: https://twitter.com/americasquared

* @placesfromorbit, which analogously posts a 5×5 km square anywhere in the world every 6 hours: https://twitter.com/placesfromorbit

* @baekmanpyeong, which similarly posts a 1.818×1.818 km square (that's a million (i.e. baekman) pyeong, an old-fashioned area measure) somewhere in South Korea every 8 hours: https://twitter.com/baekmanpyeong

* @nihonmusuukei, which posts a square kilometer of Japan every 12 hours: https://twitter.com/nihonmusuukei

---

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile

[2]: https://earthview.withgoogle.com

[3]: http://www.thegreatamericangrid.com/archives/1441

keiraarts
This is amazing, great readme.
doersino
Thank you – approachable readmes are really important to me, so this is validating!
Ave
I built an app to create prints (framed or otherwise) of your fitness activities.

Strava only for now but uploading GPX/KML files coming shortly.

https://cadenceprints.com

CrackpotGonzo
It's simple, but essentially I built a super simple landing page and pay wall for any live class or any other link or digital good. My friend is a yoga instructor and wanted something more simple than her existing setup.

Mostly have yoga instructors on the platform currently and am thinking about other product enhancements geared towards online instructors and classes.

Check it out here: http://classup.io/

daniel_levine
You should consider bundling video yourself and charging for it. Could use something like Mux.com to power it without much trouble.
CrackpotGonzo
Thanks for this feedback, was just researching options, including Mux for video, and have been speaking to existing instructors to see if they're willing to jump to a new video platform.

Some teachers like Zoom to facilitate Q&A, chat etc., but there might be enough that simply want the all-in solution to make the jump.

Thanks again!

gentleman11
A video game... but the trailer, demo, and website won’t be ready for another 1-2 months. Also need to hack together a terms of use that says “you don’t own this demo, but you can play it” and that sort of thing.

I am so close to it being blog-ready though!

teej
I built the spiritual successor to a multiplayer browser game that I’d made back in 2007. Back then, it was (briefly) the highest traffic Rails app in the world.

The new one is built with Django. It’s been a delight doing web work again.

awillen
This is cool - glad to see lots of folks being productive!

I got a bunch of great feedback from another HN thread, so I'll leave my new lockdown company here as well (I also submitted it on your site) - https://coopersdogtreats.com/, where we make healthy, meat-based frozen dog treat mix.

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sethkramer
I built an education site teaching how to build apps and websites without code: www.nocode.mba
readme
but if MBAs can make apps without coders, who is going to ask coders to build their ideas for free?
christopoulos
I returned to creating music on an MPC after an 8 year hiatus. I’m loving being back at it again.
kiwicopple
https://currentevents.email

It’s simply Wikipedia’s current events each day, emailed to your inbox. I prefer email more than RSS, but also it was nice to do a small, discrete project

geerlingguy
I've been working on making my YouTube channel actually useful/updated, and somehow triggered YouTube's algorithm with my Turing Pi (Raspberry Pi compute module) cluster: https://github.com/geerlingguy/turing-pi-cluster

I've also spent a bit of time cleaning and rearranging my workshop, and redoing a bit of my office for better video conferencing and streaming.

CarVac
I added Lensfun lens correction to my photo editing app Filmulator.