HN Explorer

Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

39 points by princevegeta89 ↗ HN
Hi all,

Been experimenting a lot with Mobile development recently and yet to start on something. Just wanted to see what you guys are building so I can keep myself in the loop

79 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] thread
zb1plus
I have two side projects. The first is a PDF reader that persists reading state between devices and has a queryable notes overlay. For this project I am using SwiftUI and targeting iPhones and desktop MacOS. The second centers around exploring how to conduct interactive virtual lessons in VR using Mozilla hubs.
XCSme
My main project is a self-hosted analytics platform: https://www.usertrack.net

I am still struggling to accomplish my goal of becoming sustainable by focusing on the self-hosted part instead of the SaaS part, but I'm not giving up. I do think that self-hosting is the future! :)

enonevets
Honest curiosity here. With so many competitors in the space both free and paid, and with many doing self-hosted, privacy conscious angle, and many open source as well, what are you doing to separate your tracking from those. At a glance, I wasn't able to discern the major difference and I'd imagine a lot of users looking for analytic solutions might fall into the same thoughts.
XCSme
Thanks for the feedback!

I think most of the unique points are mentioned on the landing page in the "What's different about userTrack?" section.

The main gist is that userTrack is primary self-hosted, so the product's goal is aligned with the customer's goal. A platform like Matomo for example, earns money by providing a cloud solution, which means that anyone who chooses to self-host instead of using their service will reduce their revenue. This also leads to them making it harder to install and maintain the self-hosted version and they also provide some features only for the cloud plan (session recordings, heatmaps). Most of the other open-source analytics platforms that you might be referring to are pretty simple and usually only provide basic visitor stats.

tl;dr: ease of installation, automatic updates, human support, highly performant/well optimized, unique interface and features, very affordable compared to alternatives with similar features, bootstrapped.

Apart from this I am also trying to promote self-hosting as much as possible, thus I am continuously looking for and promoting different ways to reduce 3rd party dependencies and making it easier to do so.

tadhunt
My main side project is: https://minecraft-playdates.com Minecraft server hosting for parents. This is a fully fleshed out and working service with paying customers.

My secondary project is https://golang-labs.com. With this one, I'm exploring whether there is a need for an enterprise focused module proxy for Golang. The issues I see with the public proxy are: build repeatability, license compatibility, and information security. Please reach out if this is something you care about.

app17
I have been working on Exomind (https://github.com/appaquet/exomind), a personal knowledge management tool that takes the form of a unified inbox in which you can have your emails, tasks, notes and bookmarks organized into collections. I have an iOS and a web/electron client at the moment, and a simple Chrome extension for bookmarking.

Its backend, Exocore (https://github.com/appaquet/exocore), is built on top of a personal / private blockchain and is made from the ground up to be hosted in a semi-decentralized fashion on your own personal devices (your computer, raspberry pi, a cloud instance, etc.). It is written in Rust and has iOS, C and Web (WASM) clients.

It has very rough edges, but I'm using it daily to organize my life. It has also been my learning playground to improve my Rust skills over the last two years. If all goes well, I'm a few months away from some kind of tech preview.

Glench
Mine is a service to take payments inside browser extensions without needing to run your own server backend! https://extensionpay.com :D

I made it so I could use it in my own extensions. Definitely lowers the barrier to making profitable side-project extensions. Open-source library is here: https://github.com/glench/ExtPay

obviouspenguin
5% on top of the Stripe fee? That seems extremely high - do you actually have customers willing to pay that?
Glench
Yep! My customers so far have been really happy. :)

To compare to other services: the Chrome Web Store fee was 5%, Gumroad's fee is 5% + the Stripe fee, and my main competitor is charging 6.5% + stripe fee. Pretty standard. Why do you feel it's extremely high?

And if you think about the value of ExtensionPay... it saves people at least $5 / month on server costs, plus the time/ energy/hassle of creating their own payment system (which involves creating a user management, integrating it securely with the extension itself, figuring out how to integrate with a payment processor, setting up a database, sending emails, managing a server etc etc). Plus a lot of my customers are indie developers with limited resources that just want to focus on their extension.

saahilclaypool
I've been building a locally-hosted version of Pocket that saves articles (and pdfs) to a lucene index, and provides full text search over them. https://github.com/SaahilClaypool/SearchStory
meagher
Good idea. I would pay for this.
saahilclaypool
Thanks! Still very early, but hopefully once it's closer to a useable product I'll post around and get some real user feedback.

Worst case it'll be useful for me and my house mate who made the original request.

krapp
Godot tutorials[0..2]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjT5sLMD7Kw&list=PLkhDORpHGm... Card Game Tutorial

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAbG8Oi-SvQ&list=PL9FzW-m48f... Make an Action RPG in Godot

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRHN_WEulLc&t=6906s Godot 3D: Code architecture course in a single video

And a roguelike in C with SDL and Lua that really just exists to scratch my itch for "low level" development

Also getting thread folding working in Anarki.

Also a HN client in Godot/C#.

Why no, I'm probably not actually ever going to finish anything, thank you for noticing.

path411
Why are your godot tutorials across different channels? Is there a single site or something I can sub to for all of your tutorials?
krapp
They're not my tutorials, they're tutorials I'm following that seem better than the usual. Sorry for the misunderstanding - I see now I probably should have been more specific.
fooray
I’m working on a pay comparison and career planning app for skilled trades workers. Went live last week, but still missing a ton of features. https://skilledpay.co
seymon
I am building a CLI tool for OAuth and OpenID Connect based access control. It allows performing auth flows with and without browser redirects, decodes JWTs, inspect OIDC issuers, etc. It is written in the go language and has multi Platform support. The next steps are about adding login profiles as config values. Also adding impersonation support with the OAuth Token Exchange protocol.

https://git.schuerg.net/simon/actl

SinisterAlex
You say multiplatform - .NET?
seymon
No, it's written in Golang. It works on Linux, macOS, and Windows. There are currently builds for x86_64, but compiling to other architectures should be easy.
msantos
the fact that your tool is browser-less makes it quite interesting. Do you have plans to build support for AWS "assume role"?

I've used this Okta tool for a while but it requires a browser. https://github.com/oktadeveloper/okta-aws-cli-assume-role

PS: out of curiosity, why do you host your own instance of GitLab? What's the overhead like?

soulchild37
https://apps.shopify.com/cancellable

Did it for my cousin's Shopify store originally, as she was getting a few of order cancellation requests via customer email almost everyday. Thought to automate to let customer by themselves, and she is quite happy with this lol, and a few other stores owner in Shopify liked this app as well.

DarrenDev
I'm working on a a text classification api. It's a huge project, but I'm starting small and hope to to have a beta out there next week. Initial target niche will be data from legal firms.

https://liet.io/

tldrthelaw
Lawyer geek here, happy to weigh in if you need it. Looks interesting and will be following.
bsldld
I am working on https://loan-free-ed.neocities.org

A non-profit open source platform to facilitate loan-free education to help life-long learning, as well as increase income of teaching and non-teaching staff of education institutions.

Edit: Any feedback, suggestion will help improve the project. Also, if you want to collaborate or want to know more about the project, then please email me. My email is in my profile.

_448
What is the tech stack for this project?
bsldld
This is tentative, but I was thinking of Hyperledger Iroha, Sovrin, Stellar and GNU Taler.
Glench
whoa this is REALLY interesting! I wonder if you could try some pilot programs with places like https://www.recurse.com/ or other alternative educational institutions.
bsldld
> whoa this is REALLY interesting!

Thank you very much!

> I wonder if you could try some pilot programs with places like https://www.recurse.com/ or other alternative educational institutions.

Yeah, that would really be helpful. Would you like to join the project and/or mentor me? You have fantastic profile and lot of experience in the education domain. You joining the project and/or mentoring me will make a huge difference to the project.

Glench
I'll do you one better and connect you with one of my friends who is actually an experienced educator/administrator. Send me an email: hello at glench.com.
drakonka
I've been writing fiction. For years my side projects were all programming related, and that was awesome, but last summer I decided to try something different and get into creative writing again. I used to love it as a child and haven't done it in years. It is nice to do something that is quite different from my day job, and brings in a bit of a satisfying side income as well (not that it'll be paying my rent any time soon).
zeeshanqureshi
Interactive used-car buying checklist for car noobs.

https://www.isthatalemon.com/

Not a side project, more of something I built for fun.

CallMeMarc
Widescreen monitor gang checking in:

https://i2.paste.pics/07309cc21f8f2c93c354c4012e60c8a7.png

Would be nice to have a max size for the font on your headlines so they don't collide with each other :)

zeeshanqureshi
Would you mind sharing the resolution?

EDIT: Ok, I figure you must be using one of those ultrawides.

Thanks for pointing this out, I̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶f̶i̶x̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶d̶a̶y̶.̶

Fixed it :)

sideproject
Building a tool to make use of un-used domain names.

https://www.newsy.co

I had about ~30 domain names which were not doing anything. I got tired of them. But I didn't want to spend time working on them.

So I built Newsy, which converts your domain name into a fully functional & automated content site. It finds niche contents and display them like Reddit.

Over the months, I've built membership, newsletters, comments, social sharing, widgets, RSS, API and even sending email using your domain name via GMail.

Finally, I've started to letting these domain names to monetize via adding your own ads.

Got any un-used domain names? Would love to hear your feedback!

EvanKRob
This is really cool. Do you have any examples of live sites?
the_only_law
Currently working on a complete user mode ISDN BRI+PRI stack for interfacing old equipment plus a number of utilities for it like a softswitch and things like a H.320 multipelxer. Once I got a baseline working I might work on some little integration programs like a bot that lets you connect to a discord voice call from an ISDN videoconferencing terminal.

Once I’m satisfied I have an old CMTS and limesdr sitting around I might try to build a custom DOCSIS modem with.

adamhp
My girlfriend and I really enjoy good food and travel. We spend a lot of our time cooking, eating, and going to breweries and wineries. We have a few favorite cities near us, like Charlottesville and the surrounding wine country in Virginia, and Portland, Maine. We've been there with enough frequency that we've developed a sort of reputation as the go-to experts for those areas, and have sent a long e-mail itinerary and travel guide to our close friends probably 10 or 15 times for each place.

Sometimes our friend doesn't drink alcohol, so we go through and scrub all the breweries and wineries. Sometimes they're gluten free, so all of the pizza and bagels we love get cut. After doing this several times, we realized it would be cool to have an app to do this. So that is my side project!

It will be part Canva, part Facebook Recommendations, maybe part knowledge-base? Filterable lists, creation of itineraries, notes about each Place. Export to a static site with a link you can share. It is already integrated with Google Maps and Places APIs, so it's pretty easy to get up and running.

The neat thing is, as I mentioned above, it has filters. So you can tag places with "winery" or "vegetarian" or something, and when you're crafting your collection of places for your friends, you can filter on those tags really easily. You could just click the "winery" tag to instantly create a "Virginia Wine Guide".

I'm not totally sure it has broad appeal, but I'm hoping a few travel bloggers might get some use out of it. V3 will probably have some sort of "export to CMS" feature.