HN Explorer

Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

77 points by princevegeta89 ↗ HN
Hi all,

Been experimenting a lot with Mobile development recently and learned Flutter. I am currently trying to build a collectibles app for games like Pokemon Go. Was curious to see what you guys are up to these days!

136 comments

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allenleein
I'm working on a visual search engine for screenshots, videos on iOS/macOS ( using OpenAI ClIP + Core ML )

https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/sorting

onemiketwelve
Is this so I can search something bothering me on my screen? Or do you mean it's for searching my own personal screenshots on the device?
allenleein
It's for searching your own personal screenshots on the device.
[dead] calltrak
I'm working on Textita. Phone verify any app or service using a Temporary Phone Number to receive SMS verification code online. https://textita.com
onemiketwelve
I got into scuba diving a year ago and every dive you're supposed to log data about the dive like duration, location, type of air etc. It's partly for safety, partly for curiosity, and partly to prove that you are as experienced as you say you are for advanced trips. It seems like 75% of people use paper booklets, 5% a myriad of shitty apps and the rest (like me) don't bother logging because it's so tedious.

So I'm putting together a really simple "Strava for diving" app in react native to suit my needs and then at the same time having a reason to learn a bit about go for the server.

Also @op one of my coworkers told me she built something to track some Disney collectibles game, and she gets thousands of users which is really cool, but you won't believe the entitlement from people asking for bug fixes on a free web app lol

5cotto
Have you looked at subsurface? The author is somewhat famous.

https://subsurface-divelog.org/

onemiketwelve
yeah, unfortunately it's desktop only :(

And you can definitely tell linus made it. The UI is very... engineer-y and not simple at all

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yen223
I've always wanted to be able to do some development work on my phone, or my iPad. So I'm building a tool that let's me build and deploy backend APIs easily, and without much code.
gmanis
This sounds fantastic. Kindly do a Show HN when you’re ready.
quazar987
Apple usually don’t approve apps which can write codes
sircastor
Didn’t Coda Lite do that? Or do you mean compiling?
krapp
I had a ton, but I just discovered LuaJIT and its C FFI was a thing and now I'm going to be going down that rabbithole and rewriting a lot of code for projects I haven't even started.

I hate these threads, by the way. I always want to have something cool finished by the time one pops up. "Writing vector and animation modules for SDL's float API that will eventually appear in a roguelike, or shooter, I haven't decided which" doesn't have punch.

I'm also working on and off on a HN client for Godot. It basically works.

Also working on the Anarki forum very, very slowly.

Unfortunately I'm a magpie and I'm distracted by shiny new toys, which right now is the fact that I can write C in Lua much more easily than I could write Lua in C.

Thank God none of this my job...

Oh, and I started a blog with Lektor that still has nothing on it.

cvwright
I’ve been learning SwiftUI and building an encrypted social network app. It’s called Circles, and it’s almost ready to go.

https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

Next I need to make the Android version. I’m hearing a lot of good things about Flutter.

hideo7746
I created a simple, low cost alternative to square appointments called Unstuck (beunstuck.me). You can use it for managing virtual appointments (booking page, payment handling, creating event). I use it for my math tutoring business, and am hoping other tutors and content creators can use it to connect with their audience in a different way.
ammmir
I’ve been running https://kvdb.io as a side project for a while. This weekend, I woke up to a bunch of alerts that the server had run out of open file descriptors (rookie mistake, I never expected to receive more than a thousand simultaneous requests).

It turns out someone wrote a tutorial on how to automate COVID-19 appointment slot bookings and used KVdb to store SMS OTP codes. Never expected it, but a great surprise. Long tail of SaaS is just wonderful :)

kondu
Hey, I used one of those vaccine booking projects to get my own shot in India, and it made use of kvdb.io. great work!
abhijat
I am writing a basic database from scratch in C++, trying not to use any third party dependencies. I followed bits of the cmu videos to get started. It's not something I knew about before starting but it's a lot of fun and I got to learn a lot so far.
zd123
This sounds really interesting. Do you have any recommended reading lists for this project?
abhijat
Sure, I mostly went through this playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjbohkNBWQs_... (I haven't seen all the videos yet).

Also some parts of this book https://www.amazon.com/Database-Internals-Deep-Distributed-S... were very useful when working on the file structure.

I also just recently saw this project https://cstack.github.io/db_tutorial/ which builds a database in C. I have not gone through it but it seems like quite a good resource.

For the overall design the CMU playlist is the most helpful.

devtailz
Also experimenting with mobile development (for now a Progressive Web App) slowly building https://engramhq.xyz - the closest thing I can get to a brain computer interface
dglass
I've been building a few nodejs + vuejs apps in order to round out my typescript skills lately, but my real side project doesn't involve a single line of code.

I'm writing a book about career advice for programmers titled "Junior to Senior" that will be published later this year by Holloway[0]. It's been years in the making and there's still some work left, but it's been encouraging to hear the positive feedback since I announced it publicly.

[0]: https://www.holloway.com/b/junior-to-senior

winrid
My next project is going to be a (hopefully simple) fuzzy search database, and I'm seriously considering using Nim.

Thinking about calling it Gramcracker (ya know, for n-gram).

The idea is to store lots of data with little memory usage and have predictable performance, by having an on disk index similar to sqlite.

The goal being to get rid of the existing in memory search engine that fastcomments uses, since it's rarely queried but data size keeps growing.

tofukid
https://sumi.news — A peaceful newsfeed. Read RSS, Twitter, and newsletters without ads, algorithms, or distractions.
simple1
This is great! I was recently thinking of creating something like this for my own personal use to follow a bunch of YouTube channels.

Would you consider making visited links a different color? That would vastly improve the experience for me, since I could see at a glance which content I have not viewed yet, if any.

tofukid
Yes, that’s a good idea. I will ship that out tomorrow.
[dead] mzmoen
What stack are you using for this? Looks great
ogou
I recently made a Twitter bot that posts a daily random photo from my 13+ year archive of phone photos. A novel feature is auto generation of hashtags using the Imagga image recognition API to analyze the image. The hashtags are not always accurate but building the bot was an interesting learning experience.

https://mobile.twitter.com/phonefotos

DarrenDev
SmartEdit Biz -- an editing Add-In for Word and PowerPoint for business users to help in editing documents. It looks for things like excessive use of jargon and buzz words, word and phrase repetition, terminology inconsistencies and formatting issues.

It's a sister product to my existing creative writing Add-In but with a different focus and feature set.

Only a sign-up form exists at this time, but the creative writing Add-In gives a good indication of how it will work.

https://www.smart-edit.com/

Daegalus
Slowly plugging away at a resurrection of a very old MMO. writing the server software from scratch as the original was lost to time and life. Got client source and some server files so just reconstructing the server in Go.
MonortYp
I love this idea, I’ll add it to the back burner and probably forget about it.
ehnto
What game is it?
nicbou
That timeline thing [0]. It puts all sorts of personal data on a timeline, producing a rich personal diary with photos, files, conversations, social media posts, geolocation, transactions etc. It's a way to back up and browse the data I generate.

It's kinda crazy that a few companies already hold this much data about you. Building this made me rethink of how I interact with those companies.

[0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline

kinos
I've been cleaning my house, and binging old anime like dragon ball and sailor moon. Aside from that, dabbling in tabletop game design. Usually card focused role-playing.