HN Explorer

Ask HN: What did you build in March?

117 points by amoore ↗ HN
I've enjoyed reading these in the past, and I think some folks who have recently built or launched something have enjoyed the brief publicity and chance to get some early feedback.

So, If you built or launched something in March, let us know, and maybe even show it off with a link.

146 comments

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IanDrake
Virtual dog fighting - http://PuppyShowdown.com - OK, more like puppy pillow fighting.

It's still rough around the edges and buggy, but I should have an update ready tonight or tomorrow to smooth things out.

shpen
I really wanted to use it, but I gave up as soon as soon as I realized that Facebook is the only way to log in. Not everyone will trust your website, and requiring Facebook limits the number of users you will receive.
IanDrake
Yeah, I understand that. I've gone back and forth on it a bit. When I complete my vision for the site there's going to be a lot of fun features that depend on your social graph, so I decided it's worth it.

The one thing I tried to avoid was asking for too many permission. The site only asks for basic permissions + your email address.

rfurmani
It's been a good month: I'm about to launch http://workwolf.com : an online marketplace for parttime and odd jobs (which, for various reasons, I feel just does not exist)

I've also had a number of conversations recently on the state of academic publishing and how it can be improved, so I put together a reddit-based interface to the arxiv pre-print server, where hopefully people can now discuss up and coming papers and let the cream naturally rise to the top: http://arxaliv.org/

I'm also a developer on http://lmfdb.org/ but that's a rather technical site for research mathematicians.

par
I started a blog in March, http://devcodehack.com

Working on a better RSS reader at the moment, hoping to launch it in April.

there
I released Pushover, a mobile notification service with clients for Android and iOS.

https://pushover.net/

How I built it: http://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/03/16/on_building_pushover/

jurre
Very cool project and I enjoyed reading your notes. I'm going to look into using this for the project I'm currently working on.
kaolinite
there, wow. Really nice service. I will get your Android app in a few days time. It would make me more confident in your service however if you could open-source the server software, and allow the client to connect to other servers. As there's no monthly charge, as far as I'm aware this shouldn't affect you negatively, but your call of course :-)
pbjorklund
I built my first complete rails app interacting with a remote API. http://www.tweepsmanager.com and then I put the repo up on github https://github.com/pbjorklund/Tweepsmanager for everyone to see and judge.

Some day im going to come back to it and walk through the commit history and see if I ever made any progress in my rails skillset.

It's one of those everlasting work-in-progress projects, right now I'm not sure what functionality I want to provide. Right now im thinking about collecting data and drawing some conclusions. But that will probably be another app.

It also made me realize that something like Sinatra + backbone would be a better fit. So I guess thats something atleast.

rwmj
In libguestfs (part of our open source virtualization tools suite):

- the ability to mount VM filesystems on the host via the API, which was a huge amount of work for a fairly small gain, mainly wrangling FUSE (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/libguestfs-mount-local...)

- a way to make it easier to use libguestfs from Linux distros other than our primary ones (ie. other than Fedora, Debian): http://libguestfs.org/download/binaries/appliance/

So two deceptive features that are small, but involved a huge amount of work and wrangling behind the scenes, particularly the first one. Made much harder by the primary requirement to write most things in C.

aantix
A platform for content creation with Mechanical Turk (e.g. stories, discussions, question/answers). Here are some screenshots :

http://imgur.com/a/RGirp#0

If anyone has a fresh startup/website that needs content to get it off the ground, I can be of assistance.

I am the creator of the Rails/Mechanical Turk integration gem Turkee ( http://www.github.com/aantix/turkee ), and am an expert with Mechanical Turk and content creation. Drop me a line if you'd like to see a demo, jim.jones1@gmail.com . I do contract work on the side and live in San Francisco.

gravitronic
Ported my app DJPad to Playbook (it outsold Android and WebOS immediately). No port for iOS as they already have really great dj apps that are much more mature than mine.
jazzychad
I built a Posterous export tool that backs-up all your Posterous data (posts, images, video, audio) after the Twitter acquisition announcement.

http://exportmyposts.com/

How I built it: http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/03/21/launching-exportmyposts...

bootload
"... If you are looking for a free solution, you can read the Posterous API documentation to create your own backups. ..."

Love this, because the pain point costs way more than the cost of your service.