Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

57 points by ericthegoodking ↗ HN
It would be interesting to include:

-Technology used

-Statistics

-History

123 comments

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Use the search box at the bottom of the page. This question has been asked way too many times.
I don't see any posts about this in the last month - that's quite a while in the hobby project world.
I think its good having this kind of thread at some period of time. People build things everytime, its nice to see and share them.
Building an iOS video calling proof of concept using tokbox and pubnub.

Building a breathalyzer using my Pi and grove board (w tr grove gas sensor)

Building an advanced hockey statistics web tool in Meteor.

More of an excuse to learn Meteor than to really make something too useful.

The best way to learn a new language or framework is to do something you enjoy doing in my opinion. It'll make everything much more fun for you and even then, you never know if it could evolve into a bigger project even if it started from something that was just for fun.
Exactly my reasoning. I love hockey so it's much more fun to me than building the canonical todo-app, etc.
Build a web-app (and soon mobile apps) for emacs' org-mode.

  - Haskell
  - No stats, still building
  - Fed up w/ such an excellent tool being so unusable on
    anything but Emacs (prevents non-emacs users from
    collaborating).
Relevant hackage link for those interested: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/orgmode-parse
I got tired of the existing tiling window managers and their lack of documentation, so I made my own that behaves like vim. It's called howm and can be found here:

https://github.com/HarveyHunt/howm

There was a thread on HN about it a while ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8241978), I have fixed a lot of the issues since then, most notably:

  - Moving away from needing to recompile every time you change an option is _nearly_ done.

  - Howm can now be scripted by sending commands over a UNIX socket.

  - I have split howm into multiple source files (I will merge this tonight when I have finished the docs).

  - I added some nice gifs to the documentation.
Dependency Monitor - https://depmonitor.com/ - notifies you of new releases of Python, Ruby and Node.js packages

Built with Python and Django with the goal of scratching my own itch of getting passive notifications for various packages I use.

I've been learning Swift and am working on two different apps:

- A London Bus app that improves discovery of potential locations you can get to easily (instead of just routing from your current location to somewhere specific)

- A London Underground app that does smarter routing around problems on the network and is designed for "power users"

I'm also looking at the potential of opening a community cooperative run greengrocers near where I live because I really struggle to get fresh, quality and cheap vegetables both in the area, around where I work and on my commute to and from work.

I've been learning Swift and am working on two different apps:

- A London Bus app that improves discovery of potential locations you can get to easily (instead of just routing from your current location to somewhere specific)

- A London Underground app that does smarter routing around problems on the network and is designed for "power users"

- I'm looking at the potential of opening a community cooperative run greengrocers near where I live because I really struggle to get fresh, quality and cheap vegetables both in the area, around where I work and on my commute to and from work.

So many things.. but mostly working on these right now

* A tool that generates Markdown API docs from Python files

* A whitebox system scanner that reveals problems with your server configuration. Not your average blackbox security scanner.

* A lightweight service bus without all the enterprise and java around it. It's basically a bunch of connectors that receive or poll for incoming events (rss feeds, email, trello, XMLRPC/SOAP/REST requests), maps it, filters it and then sends it out again. I'll be using this on something like a Raspberry Pie to do some home automation and such. Main goals are that it should be super easy to add new rules, connectors, etc.

I've been working on a chess engine. It can already whoop me.

https://github.com/fogleman/Chess

It's written in C and implements the Universal Chess Interface (UCI) so it works with most chess GUIs. I've had it playing on FICS some as a guest named GuestEngine.

I am working on a newsletter for remote work opportunities. As a developer you can sign up, and (will be able to) set some filters like what technologies you are interested in, salary, if you want to work full or parttime, what time zone you are in etc... As soon as a company submits a job which matches your criterea (and only then) you will receive a mail.

right now a simple mailchimp form is up on http://remoteworknewsletter.com, and the full version with all filters will be up soon.

I wrote about how i launched the idea on HN a while back: http://blog.remoteworknewsletter.com/2014/10/15/how-to-valdi...

Learn how to dance using slow motion and/or looped sections of videos. Using angularjs and html5, working on a Go backend api - http://loopdago.com
Realms Wiki: http://realms.io - Git based Markdown wiki inspired by Gollum with side by side preview like Ghost/Stackeditor. Also support for collaboration via Firepad/TogetherJS

Backend: Python, Flask, Dulwich Frontend/Editor: Bootstrap 3, Handlebars, Ace

Full rewrite of The Weathertron iOS app (http://theweathertron.com/) from Angular.js + ClojureScript to React.js + ClojureScript.

The original Weathertron is still runnin' happily for about 40,000 iOS users from a single $5/month Digital Ocean VPS (backend server is written in Clojure).

The motivation for the full rewrite is React.js and the latest Android OS inclusion of a decent WebKit. React's virtual DOM makes rendering more efficient than Angular.js on slower devices and the recent WebKit supports all of the responsive CSS we used in the original iOS version.

Since I don't carry a smartphone at all, I also recently released a free Weathertron Google Chrome extension so that I could use the app myself: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/weathertron/jljkok...

Are you using React.js directly through JS interop, or something like Om or Reagent to wrap it? What is your opinion of the various options available for React.js in ClojureScript?
I've been working on a web crawler for a while. Once it's done,I'll start building a web search engine based on the crawler. It's not been in public yet.

I use C,OpenMPI,Pthread,Valgrind on Linux.

http://frontb.in/ | Modern Pastebin for the Front End Developer.

Technology: SPA, Node-js, MongoDB

Statistics: About 300 Pageviews a Day

History: Needed a simple way for jsonlint, jshint, pastebin, compressing, remove whitespace basically a quick tools for the web developer

Writing and recording an album.
I'm woking on a AI/NLP interface to connect enterprises to customers through whatsapp and other messaging apps.

I'm using Python/Django and Yowsup (a python lib that reverse engineered whatsapp's protocol) with PostgreSQL/Redis.

I wonder what you guys think about building a company around this idea. I have a prototype and a couple of customers, so the market is there, but I don't know if whatsapp could sue me or something.

I wouldn't worry so much about WhatsApp suing you. If they don't like what you're doing (or others for that matter) they can more just change their protocol.

The problem with building a company around such a solution rather is this: Is there a market? Sure, having a machine automatically answer customer requests is a nice parlour trick but what's the benefit for the customer?

Just saving money on call centre agents? Or does the software actually solve a real problem in a novel way that can't be tackled using existing solutions?

I don't think whatsapp will change their protocol too much, as they'll break millions of clients installed in old phones.

The benefit for the company looks obvious to me: save money on call centre / community management. Deliver a service to millions of mobile users without requiring them to download your app (just adding a phone number to the agenda).

The benefit for the end-user: having a conversational interface with a system is probably the lowest barrier entry to that system for a human. Everybody knows how to chat using whatsapp, but not everybody knows (nor is willing to learn) how to use your "user-friendly" GUI.

This is very interesting idea. I met two realtors last week who use whatsapp to answer questions from current and potential clients. My gut instinct is there is definitely a market for it. How do I contact you ?
I wanted a static site generator that could have a CMS so that I could pass the sites over to friends or clients so they could update it. Essentially, a not-terrible Wordpress that wasn't blog centric and bloated.

http://www.webhook.com

I built it over the summer, funded it through Kickstarter and have slowly been building a nice little client base of recurring revenue. The code itself is open source so it's self-hostable and free, but we provide a quick one-line deploy hosted solution as well.

Probably the most fun bit has been trying to just remove the barrier of troublesome local installation for these kinds of things. Usually people go with PHP because you can just run it everywhere, but that still requires setting up apache/mysql somewhere. We use Firebase and Node, so were able to get the entire package installed through a downloadable app. I think we probably have the fasted installation available for this kind of thing.

I work on it mostly full-time, then design client sites with it on the side.

This is fucking cool as shit. Thank you so much for posting it--will definitely be trying to use it in the future.
This is really awesome! I looked quickly at your self-hosting guide and I was wondering is the only option to deploy the static website Google Cloud Storage? I would like to setup webhook on a Heroku with free-tier dynos and deploy to AWS because those are the services I already use and love. If it's not possible, do you think I could fork your project and integrate AWS deployment somewhat easily?
The reason we went with GCS is because AWS limits you to 100 static sites (buckets). That's a block for our hosted solution.

The code is MIT, so do with it what you want. May be a little bit more complicated then just switching out the build layer, but if you can get something working that's configurable, feel free to send in a PR.

1. Monkey HTTP Server: scalable HTTP server for Linux

   http://monkey-project.com
   http://github.com/monkey/monkey
2. Duda I/O: web services framework to build scalable services (in C Language)

   http://duda.io
   http://github.com/monkey/duda
3. Pi-Cloud: free cloud for Raspberry Pi's:

   http://pi-cloud.monkey.io
I've been working on a little quizzing SaaS: http://jquizzy.com

Tech: Laravel on HHVM + Postgres plus a lot of little things.

History: Did a soft launch of the beta sometime ago on HN. No comments here but drove a bunch of traffic and feedback so I'm iterating.

I am really interested in idea of online quizzes. Do you need any help? If yes, how would i contact you?
sid at ssiddharth dot com or sid at jquizzy dot com. Thanks!
Still working on a Python-like systems programming language (Rust-like memory management -- no GC, compiler in Python targeting LLVM IR).

In my march towards getting exceptions working (using Intel's Itanium exception ABI), I'm currently hacking on option types and memory management. In particular, trying to figure out how to sensibly insert destructor calls for expiring owned pointers. So far, I clean up just before "return" nodes, but this doesn't do the right thing (a) in the face of reassignments (old object stays alive), and consequently (b) in longer-running loops. I think I can do sufficiently smart liveness analsysis, but I haven't figured out a clean algorithm yet.

Code is still private for now, while I do some more experimentation to see if I can get things to work.

I'm currently working on Kobra, a realtime collaborative code editor, mostly during my lunch breaks.

https://Kobra.io

Tech Used: AngularJS, Firebase, Firepad, EasyRTC

Statistics: Just broke 700 registered users and 5000 file collaborated on. Have made a little over $2000 from 125 people going Pro.

History: I started back in December, but gave up too soon. I've since relaunched it as a smaller product and am super happy with how it's been received. Here's some blog posts about my journey. Please let me know if you have any questions for me!

https://mattkremer.com/how-i-got-2200-pre-signups-for-my-saa...

https://mattkremer.com/how-i-made-2033-in-4-days-while-valid...

This is really god damn cool. Totally going to start using this every time I talk about code on my social networks. Thanks a ton.
Thanks bnb! It's much appreciated :) Shoot me an email if you want to chat with me about it: matt@mattkremer.com
Dude - this is sweet. Like codeshare...but better. Thanks for sharing with us!
> To celebrate us not getting a YC interview

I loled

Gotta make something out of it, lol. :)