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Ask HN: Your admittedly useless side projects?

74 points by yscodes ↗ HN
What were some side projects of yours that you deep down knew nobody would deem very valuable yet kept spending quite some time on?

And do you regret those endeavours?

123 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] thread
ggeorgovassilis
Ah, the "hall of shame" HN thead I have been waiting for! Too many to recount here, but the one I probably sunk in most time was fauxjsp [1], a dev-friendly reimplementation of java server pages. I don't regret spending time on the project because it was fun, it was time I couldn't/wouldn't have spent on anyting better and I learned a bit about software architecture.

And you?

[1] https://github.com/ggeorgovassilis/fauxjsp

rozenmd
I've spent the last four years now trying to start a business on the Internet (working on ideas roughly two hours per day before work).

Each project had valuable lessons (both business and code/architecture) that carried over into the next one. So far I've built:

- bill splitting service (2017)

I spent days agonising over which new framework to use (this was late 2017 after all), eventually learned to just use the tools I knew (react, node, postgres). I didn't really care about the problem space, so shut it down.

- jobs aggregator (2017/2018)

I learned that implementation is meaningless to the user if you're not delivering value. I wanted to copy remoteok.io and make it serverless (effectively free to serve traffic), I didn't realise existing sites provided value via their traffic. The reason StackOverflow can charge as much as it did is the millions of page views per month it receives, creating value for its job posters.

- appointment scheduler (2018)

I built an appointment scheduler, had no real means of attracting users, shut it down.

- room booking service (2018)

Spin-off of the previous idea, but for meeting rooms. Tried to build the whole thing using Google APIs, eventually got stung by API limitations, gave up (learned not to rely on other's APIs without understanding their limits first).

- graphql API monitoring service (2018/2019)

Traction again, couldn't find users (tried in-person sales for the first time, too).

- site speed monitoring service (2019/2020)

Essentially running google lighthouse as a service. had some users, but fixing all the edge cases around chrome/puppeteer/lighthouse across super slow websites was a total pain.

- uptime monitoring service (2021-current)

Doesn't seem to be as useless as the other projects. Has bought me the MacBook Air M1 I'm typing this comment on now.

Rewrote my old graphql API monitoring service from scratch to monitor APIs, websites and web apps, seems to be going well so far. Planning on adding features for incident management. Content marketing/word of mouth brings in the users.

If you want the long story across several articles:

- 2018: https://maxrozen.com/2018-review-starting-an-internet-busine...

- 2019: https://maxrozen.com/2019-further-reflections-trying-to-star...

- 2020: https://maxrozen.com/indiehacking-3-year-review

- 2021: https://maxrozen.com/2021-strangers-paid-my-macbook

pinehqcom
I considered building something similar OnlineOrNot for many years now since I needed to validation of e.g. json.

I'll definitely check it out!

toxicFork
I am trying to make a quantum computer with lasers, mirrors, filters and prisms.

Some regrets, but it's fun.

corobo
Oddly enough my least valuable project was my most successful (so far, I hope!). It was a tinker project while I was learning Laravel, no target market at all.

It was very specific - a database/API of YouTube videos and metadata for a YouTube group, the Yogscast.

It ended up being used as the backend data for a viewer-controlled cinema that let users vote on and pick videos to watch during livestream downtime to keep the audience engaged during a charity drive.

Can't take much credit, of course the actual video playing code was the meat and potatoes of the operation during downtime and the actual stream content during the daytime, but it was vaguely involved in raising millions for charity haha

Regrets none, only reason it's not still about is that it turns out YouTube don't like you making a database of YT videos that you allow others to access, they killed my API key eventually

somethingor
Interesting! YogsCinema still runs every day during “offline” hours on twitch.tv/yogscast, I wonder what’s backing it now
corobo
I would imagine they call the YouTube API directly now. The reason it didn't in the first place is it went from random idea to implemented in about 12 hours originally (h/t Akhawais!)
sandreas
Yet another cross platform command line audio tagger in c# - now scriptable / hackable with javascript:

https://github.com/sandreas/tone

I thought there are not enough taggers out there, so I'm gonna make my own, with blackjack and hook(er)s!

throwoutway
I collect bookmarks of things I want to read, but inevitably will never have time to read. Sometimes I go back and look and the webpage domain is expired, or the page 404s. But I still meticulously folder and tune my bookmarks

I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but it feels good to get that off my chest

tbassetto
I feel seen. I have bookmarks folders named “To Read $NUMBER” from 10 years ago. Why do they end by a number? Because I create a new folder every time the previous one feels overwhelming.
arethuza
I think that needs to be coupled to something implementing Douglas Adams idea of an Electric Monk:

"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."

sodimel
I did the same for a while, but it was a mess (700+ unsorted bookmarks on my main computer, 100s more on others).

I tried shaarli, but soon after I tried to build something myself, and I created share-links.

It's an open-source Django app that you can self-host, and that lets you store (and share!) links, titles, descriptions, and tags. Then it display them in a nice way (for me : not much css, a simple page with no js).

It took some dozen hours to get to the point where it's really usable, and it still have problems now (comments are not moderated, I just realized that you can't add a description in links or tags, but I will fix this soonTM).

Here's the link of the repo: https://gitlab.com/sodimel/share-links/

One cool feature is to set your browser homepage to the url that loads a random page : each day I get a cool article to read/concept to discover! (here's my own instance random link url: https://links.l3m.in/en/random/)

That's my useless side project (because shaarli already exist and it's way more mature).

hdjjhhvvhga
Nice! Doesn't solve the core problem though: we almost never go back to read these hundreds of bookmarked websites.
sodimel
The almost is the interesting part here, since it's not "never" anymore :P

Another goal is to be able to retrieve links with ease. I haven't added all the tags on my links yet since I lack time (1800+ right now and counting!), but I should be able to retrieve this cool article about Python decorators, or the article from the cheapskatesguide.org that inform us that bluedwarf.top is launched :P

I really hope that one day there will be multiple share-links instances that will allow people to find interesting links, and then when they thought that they have found all the cool content they discover that there's more websites containing hundreds of fresh or old links leading to even more interesting content!

RGamma
If websites were downloadable like a (versioned) document you could create your own offline bookmark web (archive), which would be neat. I guess scraping could help with getting the contents to disk, but it would probably be kinda broken.

If you can then direct your search engine to discover content from this archive I would perhaps more often (re)stumble upon this neat discontinued blog that's stuck 5 levels deep in my folder structure.

Pakdef
> I still meticulously folder and tune my bookmarks

I tag mine instead... and I read them first (before bookmarking)

lobocinza
From time to time (~6 months) I review all of them. Quickly delete most, make effort to process the rest and save the 'few' that I will not take an immediate action on a topical markdown note.

e.g. Let's say that I find a book interesting. I go to '~/fun/read/read.md' paste the URL, delete the bookmark and forget about it.

synu
I made an async work collaboration app: https://github.com/async-go/asyncgo

I had been working at GitLab, pre-pandemic, for several years and I saw how writing things down was almost like a super power to enable async work. If you start with time zone distributed teams, writing things down in issues/docs just becomes the natural way of working. I also saw that lots of other companies didn't really get it - and there was a leap of faith required to try it, because it didn't logically follow that if you write things down more you can have less meetings.

My idea was to build something that provided a really natural place to write things down, and I built and tried to sell AsyncGo as a place for making decisions in a written way. You'd set a topic, a context, and a due date, and then the magic would happen. In theory. The problem I had was that I couldn't find anyone to take the leap and try it. Companies who were interested in async already had some similar process, and the ones who really needed help writing things down didn't get it and I never found a way to communicate it to them clearly.

In the end I shut down the hosted version and put an MIT license on it. I don't regret it exactly, I learned a lot making it, but I wish it had helped more people. There's other stuff out there now that's sort of similar, and it seems they are struggling a bit as well, so I don't think the market was really there (yet). Now I'm working on a collaboration app for regular people/teams who want to get better at making videos/streams (https://www.synura.com) and I hope to apply a lot of the lessons there.

jhealy
pgredis - A server that talks the redis protocol to clients, and stores all data in a postgres database.

No regrets, I learnt a lot and had fun messing with it for a while.

https://github.com/yob/pgredis

kiru_io
I wanted to "cut" multiple regions from an image.

All the tools allow to "crop" an image, but not really extract all regions.

Ended up making PhotoCutter[1]. It is totally useless for everyone except a few.

[1] https://photocutter.kiru.io/

landmark3
I don't need it but I like it...and sometimes that's all you need for it to become popular :)

Well done

als0
Cool site, nice one. There's potential to save a lot of time when going back and forth between cropping tools. One of my usual workflows is reading big PDFs and I want to pick out the parts that are relevant to me. I could use a highlighter, but that wouldn't filter out the rest of the document, so I typically use a screenshot tool to grab specific areas and save them as pictures. But it can only make one screenshot at a time, which is a lot of overhead.

It would be cool to enhance this site so that it takes a PDF with multiple pages and allow you to do the same for that. But that's probably a lot of work compared to uploading a single picture file!

kiru_io
Great idea! I will consider that in the future (could be even useful for me)
klntsky
You can make it into a nice product. Just make the state save-able (including comments) and share-able by a link. Would be a good tool for designers & their customers to quickly leave some comments.
kiru_io
aaah, I haven't considered that! Thanks for the idea!
BTBurke
I have a couple apps that only I use or are used by a handful of friends. For hobby projects, I never regret building things that I think are useful but I can't be assed to try to market them to others.

1. Mototripper - live streams my location when I'm on a long distance adventure motorcycle trip so my kid knows I'm still alive and moving. (e.g. <https://www.mototripper.app/track/~knobbies> - a trip through Finland, Sweden, and Norway I took a couple weeks ago.) Built with Sveltekit.

2. Vatinator - an app to apply OCR to Estonian receipts to claim VAT reimbursement. Built with NextJS.

adamius
Pdp 11 emulator. It has become the coding equivalent of a bonsai garden in some ways. Everything is there in miniature.

But my 68k emulator has more spark.

0xCAP
I have a cron job which once a week spams my work chat telling my colleagues who haven't switched to neovim that they are losers.
yunohn
Upvoted for pure hilarity. Thanks for the chuckle!
abatilo
I built https://catstories.ai

The UX is pretty terrible, honestly. But I thought I could get away with it since I didn't expect anyone to sign up.

I also built https://sudokurace.io based on an idea my wife and I shared while talking. We talked about it for years and I finally decided to build it, only for us to play it for a day or two and now we never really touch it.

yscodes
Did anyone eventually end up signing up at catstories.ai?
thexa4
I've spent way too much time implementing a transpiler and bash like shell that makes programming my ships in Kerbal Space Program easier. The self-hosted version is almost done. I'd probably do it again though, way too much fun to see your spaceships autonomously do things.

Transpiler: https://gitlab.com/thexa4/kos-kpp

OS: https://gitlab.com/thexa4/kosos

notakio
I have a three year old daughter. In her three years of life, I have recorded hours and hours of high quality audio of her. I've also encouraged her to bang on keyboards and drum pads and guitars, and recorded all of that, as well. I then took that material and chopped it, mutilated it, sequenced and mixed it, and released two albums of what I'm calling "classic industrial music", all under a pretend band name, with the credited musicians being my daughter, and our teenaged dog, who is also featured on many of the recordings.

Naturally, I then released these two albums to the world, where they have sold roughly 0 copies. This doesn't bother me, though; that was never the point. It is, in essence, a long-term elaborate "performance art" piece, that is intended for my own amusement, and possibly my daughter's amusement, once she gets old enough to "get" the joke. In the immediate time, I get value out of seeing her enjoy playing instruments and making sounds. And I'm giving her the experience of making music, in whatever way she sees fit, before she ever gets taught a bunch of nonsense about what ways are OK and not OK to make music through more formal training.

Any project that naturally holds your interest, is probably worth pursuing, regardless of the overall value to humanity. At least for a little bit. Because you're generally going to walk away with knowledge you didn't have prior to starting it, and benefits you wouldn't have predicted had you not gone down the path at all.

Oh yeah, also; don't take advice from me. I make horrible choices, then I commit to them.

hailpixel
You can't just share this and then not linked to the project. Bandcamp please!
notakio
The first one: https://music.apple.com/us/album/3n69r9x105706/1468162713

The second one: https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-first-annual-report-of/...

eyelidlessness
This is awesome! I bought both. I’m betting you’ll see a good spike in sales today.
notakio
I'm rich beyond my wildest dreams! Thank you, both from me and on behalf of my daughter.
gryfft
Per our gentleman's agreement [1] will you be donating $20 of that to Planned Parenthood?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31504720

2. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

notakio
You have vastly overestimated how much money that one sale will net me, but I will be donating twenty dollars of other origin to Planned Parenthood, as agreed upon.
withinboredom
You should release it in other regions as well. It’s not available in the NL, for example.
ungamedplayer
I built a little system that measures many of my systems and alerts me of anomalies or systems approaching limits via telegram. Kinda dumb in all, so very customized but saves me time and effort.

I regret it, I feel like I should have developed something more profitable.

yoavm
I have plenty of ultra niche projects and I never regretted working on any of them. On the contrary - i use them daily and it brings me much joy. Here are three:

https://github.com/bjesus/muxile lets me continue my tmux session on the phone, bridging the two over WebSockets. How many people use tmux extensively AND want to continue on the phone? Not much i guess...

https://github.com/bjesus/callibella is my way to sync my personal calendar to my work calendar without revealing my personal entries. It's very useful for me but less needed if your personal calendar is Google because i heard they have their own integration.

https://github.com/bjesus/air is my AwesomeWM based Interface to my PostmarketOS Kobo e-reader. Linux on your e-reader isn't a huge market share to begin with...

ceejayoz
I’m spending way too much money and time making light up skis for next winter. Bluetooth control from my phone, gyroscope to make them react to my carving, etc.
marginalia_nu
This one is one of mine from way back in the day, a 6502-based ternary computer emulator with an assembler, a simple operating system, and a compiler for a dialect of C adapted to base 3: http://tunguska.sourceforge.net/

It had a user base of like 3-4 russian ternary computing enthusiasts, dunno if it still even compiles. Fun project though.

As with all of my projects (even those that bring value to others), I do them for myself so as long as I find value in them I'll keep putting time on them. No regrets.

I kinda find my writing funny, very mathematically rigorous and ambitious. http://tunguska.sourceforge.net/docs.html Not really sure who I thought the audience would be.

dividuum
https://geolua.com

Allows anyone to create geocaching-like adventures controlled by server-side Lua scripting. Neat features are multiplayer support, some included widgets to quickly build a UI (see[1]) and a time travel debugger to fix errors. I knew there was probably no real way to make money from that, but it was fun to build. Unfortunately reception by the big geocaching portals was mostly to no allow linking to it IIRC, so there was also no way to gain any traction at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] https://geolua.com/adventure/all-widgets-demo-132