Ask HN: What is your side project for 2017? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your side project for 2017?

59 pointsforgottenacc57113 comments

Simple "email this link to me" service.

If I find something interesting, I want to be able to click a button (chrome extension/bookmarklet) that will extract the text from that page, format it nicely and email it to me (preferably to a separate Gmail label).

I can then read it from my email client (iOS/Android email app) during my commute.

I don't want the overhead of a complete app like Evernote or Pocket.

This sounds like something i would use.

Second, that I would use this.

Sounds similar to Safari in Reader mode on Mac.

I'm working on something like this at the moment, but it's on hold while I finish something else.

Google Inbox allows you to do exactly this by saving links in your inbox through a sharing intent on Android or a Chrome extension on desktop.

Is this an extra intent that you have to install separately? I just installed inbox again and couldn't see it.

Readability does that - well sorta. It sends it to your Kindle.

Readability is no longer available.

See https://www.readability.com/

Damn that sucks. Pity - used to work well.

Instapaper and its app does this, been using it for many years now.

How is this any different from Pocket? Yes, it's a third party app instead of email, but does exactly what you need.

Loved this idea - started building such a service as my first side-project for 2017.

I want to make party/board games using smartphones as the game controller (similar to fibbage) and use this as motivation to learn elixir and phoenix together with a frontend framework (maybe elm). I tried to do this with python but I have problems with thinking in objects so I will go with functional programming.

I believe that people want help finding "smart home" devices that will work well with the existing equipment in their home, and that they would pay good money for that because buying the wrong equipment is a frustrating (and expensive) mistake.

I'm building a way to help you pick the connected equipment that will work best for your home, based on what you want to control, how you want to control it, and the equipment that already exists in your house.

For example, I've got an Ecobee3 thermostat, Lutron Caseta lights, a SmartThings hub and an Echo Dot. My system will tell you the best connected door lock for your home that will work with that setup.

Just one suggestion, can you offer information on device security also? A collection of devices may work well together, but if I was buying a smart home device I'd want to be informed of any security issues as they're discovered. The escalations in DDoS size that we saw in 2016 were supposedly driven by a high number of insecure smart home/IoT devices, I'd like to do what I can to stop this becoming a trend.

That's a great idea.

Do you have any devices in your house, yet?

Thank you. Any IoT devices? Not yet.

>The escalations in DDoS size that we saw in 2016 were supposedly driven by a high number of insecure smart home/IoT devices, I'd like to do what I can to stop this becoming a trend.

Primarily driven by home routers, not IoT devices.

>"Primarily driven by home routers, not IoT devices."

It's IoT devices too. Here's an example of an IoT device with subpar security discovered in the past couple of days:

http://hackaday.com/2017/01/02/owl-insecure-internet-of-ener...

What I hope to do :

build a ESP8266 opened door detector (or try it with rust with a RTL8710 https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5lfpnk/rust_on_rtl871... )

build a ROS robot with SLAM using a 3D cam : http://www.ros.org/

build a multicopter : https://www.reddit.com/r/Multicopter

I am still plugging away on my snail simulation. Motivation comes and goes, but if I try to work on anything else I just go back to wanting to work on snails.

I love that you have a snail project that's moving at a... measured pace. What exactly are you simulating?

EDIT: Never mind, Googled for "snail simulation" and found an old comment of yours explaining it. Looks cool!

I am branching out from full-stack web design & development to some deeper backend topics especially Machine Learning. There is a steep learning curve that will keep me busy for a while.

The specific project I'll be applying these skills toward is a bit more nebulous, but I'm particularly interested in generative systems for text and images.

"Auto Table of Content" userscript/addons[0].

I believe any article longer than 3 pages should have a table of contents. If readers feel bored, they can look into the TOC, jump to other section to find something fun. But most of they don't have one. So I make it my self. This's inspired by this Firefox addon[1] (no longer maintained).

[0]: https://github.com/letientai299/userscript-auto-toc

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/table-of-cont...

Edit: Add newline between links.

I want to build a set of tools to build a full private cloud on bare metal with zero single points of failure. Essentially a full replacement of Fuel and Openstack.

I've already started on a full multi master dhcp server to assign ip adresses to hosts and instances.

Sounds good. Would it be something like Triton?

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2900832/virtualization/joye...

https://www.joyent.com/triton

Tbh it's been a while since I looked into Triton, but it should operate in the same "feed it hardware and run virtual machines" space. I might experiment with running the components on top of smartos because of all the niceness that brings (i.e. crossbow, dtrace and zfs), but for now I’m building on top of Ubuntu.

well please make it so that it's truly easy to install. And I mean REALLY easy. I have tried at least 10 cloud solutions and I havent managed to successfully install any of them. The best one yet was tectonic but their error messages were too non-existent or vague at the end and the emphasis here is on non-existent.

Yes! I've been thinking of ways to do this, and the idea on top of my list is a live usb image that asks for stuff like network parameters, then configures the live image as a 90% functional node from which the first real host can be pxe booted. After the first host(s) have been installed the admin should be able to reboot the live host and add it to the cluster for real.

Right now i have a running Openstack cluster with Fuel for deploying new nodes over pxe. It works ok-ish, but it has some strange glitches every now and then. nothing production critical going wrong, but it still doesn't inspire confidence in me.

Yes I think your idea sounds very convenient, I basically just want to type the IPs of my machines in somewhere and the rest should be explained to me on screen. If SSH cant be established, tell me why. If i didnt set up ipxbe properly or at all, tell me why (heck, even tell me how you got that information ala 'we tried establishing an ssh connection with ssh@184.4882.1 -v but it resulted in this error log: '. Any other connection problems, tell me why. Generate all the SSL certs automatically, I dont want to type in any commands myself. I dont care if it's a test SSL setup but frankly I dont understand why these tutorials always give me test SSL certs. Just generate something that makes sense for production or tell me what I need and why for production. If you think that my nodes should have DNS names, go start some internal DNS server for me and set it up in the background for me. I dont get why I should have to do any of that stuff myself. At the end there should be a screen where all the configs were saved down to in a textual format, so I can have a look at what was done, which processes were started and which ports are now open, what the firewall looks like. For example CoreOS I believe has some cloudconfig stuff and I dont want to figure that file format out myself but I still want to see it after it's been generated. I like magic but I also like to see what it actually did / is doing.

Personally i don't even want to care about the IPs of the physical machines, just put together a box, plug power and network in (given a properly configured switch) and boot it up from the rest of the cluster.

in the "boot up first box" scenario you should be able to enter all subnets you allocate to the cloud like "my wan range is 15.26.37.0/24, router at .1" And "for the host management network i want you to use 10.67.0.0/16 with router at 10.67.0.1" from there on you should be able to plug in and boot up machines. Just be careful to not plug in a laptop that boots from the network :P

Basically my philosophy is sane defaults, some magic where i know i wouldn't want to care, and introspection everywhere.

Have you seen MAAS (Metal as a Service) from Canonical? Paired with Juju, it's fairly easy to deploy OpenStack on metal servers...

Yes i have, and i'm running MAAS on a colocated box as well to install ubuntu on virtual machines. But when you pair it with Juju the licensing becomes a bit expensive as far as i remember, So that's the layer I’m working on to replace first.

My life.

Making better bread, cider, and delete all my open source projects.

Creating the first post-luddites anti computer guerilla movement.

Oh, and since I am bored of all the terrorism laws that results in our countries converging to soviet unions mood, I will also make pirate parties spike water with recreational harmless drugs so people stop look like scared zombies and give them a smile back on their face.

Then in 2018 we make a fun revolution with no casualties, and we all live happily ever after.

I become a dictator edicts every one have the responsibility of leading their life make the country a democracy and retire after a day in Corsica because this place is amazing and life to short to take yourself seriously.

I probably shouldn't share these because they're nowhere near worth sharing yet but...whatever. I can come back in a year and see whether or not I actually finished this time.

- A HN-like forum written in Hack[0], mostly for self education and to teach myself how to work with Vagrant.

- Actually finish a game in the pseudoframework[1] I (mostly finished) in C++.

[0]https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/basedforum

[1]https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/sdl_framework

This isn't a "side project" (I'm not going to make money from it, and it's also something that I work on at my job), but I've been working on umoci[1] which is a way to create and manipulate OCI container images. At (open)SUSE we're planning on using it to create container images inside the Open Build Service. I've also got a few ideas about RPM distribution of OCI images that I'm quite excited about, and hopefully I'll have some code that works soon.

[1]: https://github.com/cyphar/umoci

This sounds interesting but the use case seems very specific to your internal infratstruture and tooling.

Can you elaborate a bit on use cases?

> This sounds interesting but the use case seems very specific to your internal infratstruture and tooling.

This is actually also part of the openSUSE project[1], and it's all free software. The Open Build Service[2] supports several package formats and distributions (Arch Linux's PKGBUILD, Fedora/RedHat's RPMs, openSUSE/SUSE's RPMs, Debian/Ubuntu's debs).

> Can you elaborate a bit on use cases?

Currently at SUSE we're working on a new product for running Kubernetes on top of our distribution. One of the important pieces is building and distributing official SUSE images (as well as customers distributing images). But this code will be a part of the public Open Build Service instance, so everyone will be able to use it. And SUSE customers will also be able to use to to create their own images.

Effectively the "cool thing" is that you can create OCI images without needing to use something like Docker -- it's all just modifying a root filesystem and umoci will generate the diff layers for you.

I'm also working on distributing OCI images through RPMs, which may end up being a really cool way of distributing images (because all of SUSE's tooling is built to work with RPMs).

[1]: http://openbuildservice.org/ [2]: https://build.opensuse.org/

Re-write history a fair bit.

By this I mean that much of history is amazingly cool and interesting, yet no-one really reads about it or learns it. Yet I can talk to pretty much any hipster on the street and they'll know all about the Ents and Elves of Tolkein or the Andals and First Men of GRR. History should be more like that then, I figure.

So, lets put some Griffon-mounted Calvary into the Bleeding Kansas era, some dragons into Waterloo, and some brain-slugs into the Mongols. Maybe that'll spice up the history lessons a bit and make then more worth reading by the average citizen.

A wordless webcomic: http://silent-comics.com

I am going to write a novel. Does that count?

https://bolagslistan.nu - Delivers a list each month of all the recently registered companies in Sweden. You get information on what they do, where they are located, and so on, and I'm building a tool around this information to make it easy for people to search by industry, region, etc. And yes, I have customers! :)

Out of curiosity, how do you get the data?

Write a book on Vue.js.

I have been working with Vue for the last 3 months and it has been a very pleasant and rewarding experience. While Vue's official guide is a wonderful resource, I feel that it doesn't delve into topics like Vuex, VueRouter, interacting with an existing API, integrating Vue into your existing project (Rails, Node.js etc) etc.

I have started writing a small book that starts off with a gentle introduction to Vue.js and then walks the readers through building a complete SPA (Single Page Application) similar to Reddit/Twitter.

This year, I want to spend the first couple of months finishing this book.

For those interested, I have created a small subscription form - http://eepurl.com/cvUk5D. You can add your email here to get notified when I launch this book and also get access to the early release.

You have been working with something for 3 months and you think you are proficient enough to warrant writing a book about it?

Yes, I have shipped a production ready application that uses Vue.js extensively.

Also, this book is an attempt to cement my own understanding of Vue. I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

Well, if you are making clear that you are just a little bit less unexperienced as the target audience, there is nothing wrong... But if you are going to charge money...

A framework which makes it easy to manage- scraping, crawling, job orchestration. It build on top of a special "data as code" declarative language. Have been working on it for years as a side project, now taking time off from consulting to make it usable for my other side project ideas.

http://laptophits.com - it had great response here on HN, unfortunately few days later I got an email from Amazon, that they reject my associates application, as my site lacks unique content :(. Now I'm working on more specification based filtering options, then will try to add keyword filters (to quickly find for example most recommended'linux laptops') and figure out what should I add to pass Amazon Associates review.

I also started my personal blog today at http://mdoliwa.com with 30 days blogging challange :).

I went down the same path thinking that I could make a better selling platform (more relevant filtering) for a subset of items sold by Amazon and other retailers. I also was rejected for not having unique content. Other affiliate sites had no problem granting my applications. I'd be very interested to see how you modify your site to get accepted! Hope all goes well!

For Amazon: just apply with another, more content-related blog (for example, your personal blog). And once you're "in" you just add to laptophits.com to it as well. They only vet for initial accounts.

I have an old site that's been making good money of amazon affiliate (for 5-7 years now). I re-applied with that same site, with another, new, affiliate account, and it got rejected. So their whole approval procedure seems quite arbitrary.

https://wishy.gift/ - a wishlist web app that we launched a bit too close to Christmas to be of use to anyone. We got just about 90 users at the moment, and have gotten lots of good feedback and feature requests.

Friends and family I've talked to found it really useful for the Christmas shopping, and my SO showed me the wishlist of a friend of hers - which had loads of items added to it - and almost every single item was checked off.

There's some stuff we're going to add, but our main issue is finding out how to market it, and explain the service in a good way.

1. Last year I built a sports' klub listing website [1] which shows where you can train different sports on a map in Slovenia. The most challenging part is keeping the data up to date. This year, it's going to be about automating it fully, such that it can operate with almost no supervision, by means for crawling and automatic emailing klub owners to confirm the validity of the data.

2. Something based on hardware -- still thinking what to do with my Raspeberry 3.

[1] http://www.zatresi.si/

Setting up a QA outsourcing business on the side with a few friends. Software is everywhere and performing more critical functions as years go by. QA where I work (large US software company) is an afterthought, the developers and business guys provide quality assurance cover but of course things do slip through the net occasionally and cost of those events can be high. We looked at outsourcing QA years back and will probably again. I can see more organisations doing this. Challenge will be running this as a side project.

A site for people to discover running groups in their local area

https://www.containable.co

A ready-to-deploy PostgreSQL Docker image automagically maintained by experts

Key highlights:

- Simple, automated backups of your production databases

- We keep your database secure with automatic security updates

- Monitor your DB with a nice UI

- Avoid vendor lock-in: Containable makes it easy to migrate between different cloud services (or local setups)

Multiple things...

Blogging, in the hope I have stuff to say people are interested in.

Maybe going to more meetups, but I don't know about this yet, most meetups are boring.

Doing more cardio in hopes of better endurance.

Getting rid of the fat-part of my 13kg gains I got last year. hopefully it will be more muscle than I fear, haha.

Software wise, I don't know. My girlfriends sometimes have nice app ideas, which I then build for them as a sideproject, but this often just takes 2-4 days.

I am hoping to finish up a new version of my food dishes by location project https://bestfoodnearme.com I decided to teach myself Go while I wrote it. The original database was a combination of redis and boltdb. I am moving things to postgresql and for the frontend bourbon.io

It has been a slow process, but I am keeping at it little by little.

I'm working on Android app that is as a reader of the old John Carmack . plan files. Probably going to release it in January on Google Play.

Ok, it is now available on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitoralmei...

https://communiroo.com - I created a mobile app and wanted a single, easy-to-set-up site to direct users to for bug reports, feature requests, forums, and support, but I couldn't find one.

I built Communiroo to provide a community site for apps and services that can be set up in just a few clicks.

I want to learn C and I have two projects on my mind that I will use for experimenting with the language:

1. a cli spotify controller (control spotify through mpris and consuming the REST api for search/playlist related commands)

2. a cli GTD tool. I have some experience porting OmniFocus to Android (in Java) and I want to use what I learned from that to build my own GTD tool.

A Retron-5-like game console for playing physical Atari 2600, Colecovision and Intellivision cartridges based on a ROM-dumper I wrote: https://github.com/drzaiusx11/WiringVCS

You get three designs for the same website - one for mobile, one for tablet, and one for desktop. Now you have to combine all that into a single set of HTML and CSS using Flexbox and media queries. My project for 2017 is to automate all that. My product is in this space, so it might turn out to be a full-time project as well!

I kind of side project fulltime now, so i plan to create a few actually. In the next days i may finish a travel destination site (boring i know, buts its super useful to me :) and there is a flight suggestion thingy that does not get out of my mind i may start next. Scratching my own itches there as well.

I am writing a book on Vim [1] for a while now, so it's going to be my main side project in the first months of 2017.

[1] A crappy page about the book: http://jovicailic.org/mastering-vim-quickly/

As a piece of constructive criticism (as it seems like maybe English isn't your first language) using gendered words like "guys" can seem a little bit sexist or at least exclusionary. You don't want to put women off reading your book just with the blurb :)

What word would you suggest in its place? As a native English speaker I can't think of something similar which is both gender neutral and casual without being quirky (I'd use 'peeps' in conversations with friends, but not in marketing text).

I use "folks" and some people like "y'all" (iirc the Recurse Center took that as their "guys" replacement). Not sure how quirky that is for you though.

What's wrong with 'people'?

You're right, English isn't my first language. Thanks for the tip!

I'll keep an eye on your book though. I've been meaning to learn vim properly for a long time.

The word "guys" isn't so gendered in 2017 as it might have been 50 years ago. Far more importantly, though, gendered advertisements have had thousands of years of success. Don't insult or belittle any demographic, but keep in mind that it's entirely possible that many different sales pages targeting different demographics is the long-term solution.

For a first trial though, I'd narrow to a laser tight focus and pick one person you believe the book will most serve and write all your copy as if you were talking only to that one person. After you get uptake, expand.

It is a lot more neutral these days, you're not wrong but context is an important part of it.

I'm not a radical feminist or anything, I just think in tech it's quite important to be inclusionary at every given opportunity and every level. The male-only culture we've fostered in the tech industry is becoming poisonous. And nowadays it only takes one person outside of your laser-focused demographic to write the right [insert social media format] that gets your book seen. Especially if you don't have the budget/time/inclination to re-write copy.

Wasn't the context "guys who are convinced it will take them months to reach proficiency"? I could easily see a different person upset if it were "gals who are convinced it will take them months to reach proficiency", which indicates ambiguity in the context.

My point was that from a standpoint of odds of success, you're much better off with focused marketing and getting a strong response from a small group than by getting a weak response from a big group. I.e., see if anyone wants the thing at all and then focus on having a broad target to your marketing.

I agree 100% on being inclusive and am no fan of a culture where it's okay to exclude people from events or education based on their gender, race or other demographic identity. That said, lightly throwing around accusations of someone or thing being "___ist" devalues the terms and polarizes people who would otherwise be on the same page (and likely tipped last US elections).

I don't think I've accused anyone of being anything. I've pointed out some context to someone who's not fluent and may not have been aware of that context.

rediSQL[1] which is a module that embed SQLite into Redis.

It is a fun way to go back to low level C code, I started to kinda miss it after years of high level languages...

Right now it only use redis as connectivity layer but I want to make it way more integrated into redis, I want to replicate keys on both redis and inside sqlite in order to have the best of both world (and make some interesting tradeoff between speed and memory), here[2] the proposal if you would like to contribute.

[1]: https://github.com/RedBeardLab/rediSQL

[2]: https://github.com/RedBeardLab/rediSQL/issues/12

Continuing to work on http://asoftmurmur.com

I've been working on an iOS app for a while that is due to launch in the next couple of weeks, after a long period of having no time to work on the project

Just wanted to say I love 'A Soft Murmur' and have been using it at work for years. Programming music is good, but still has track changes, whereas ASM gets me in the zone quicker.

I plan to add support for styles, more export formats and 'save as audiobook' to: https://github.com/alexadam/save-as-ebook

Still working on some minor issues before launching, but Iridium is a tool to help for vocal artists to practice.

https://github.com/geuis/iridium-vocal

As I'm in the process of learning java: 1. A cli podcatcher daemon for linux 2. An infinite runner game for mobile 3. A recipe app for mobile

Possibly not in that order. None of these will set the world on fire, but I think they'll be good practice.

An automatic time tracker. I've tried it a few times over the years but it's always been too complicated... I think I've finally found a way to make it simple enough to get a few people to use regularly.

I want to learn more about 1. machine learning / AI and/or 2. how to make basic video games (not using software like unity etc. but actually writing code)

If anyone has good resources/books for either, please share :)

Continue to work on apostello - "sms for your church" - https://github.com/monty5811/apostello

Looking to add a few more features and update the design on https://tomato-timer.com - shoot me an email if anyone would like to help!

Simple, good looking website w/ quizzes to help me learn and be less ignorant about the world around me (country names, religions, languages, current events, history, etc.)

A youtube channel focused on teaching distributed programming in a simple way

I have already sketched some videos explaining consensus algorithms and the byzantine generals problem (yeah, I'm a Lamport fanboy)

Current toy: Voice input for personal statistics. "Alexa, set pullups to 20." Then Alexa or Siri or Google update the named statistic with a time stamp and optionally trigger a webhook.

https://spe.savitas.net

https://sdi.savitas.net

to clarify, migrating spe->sdi. We have about 450 registered users on spe from all over the world since Feb of last year.

Our two features now on top are the international address forms and international payments for the SDI site.

Progressing from Intermediate to Serious Python and planning to build some side project to reflect the skills learned. Looking into MongoDB, AWS, ML, Bots.

I'll be doing a lot of work on my registry for open hardware electronics projects.

https://kitnic.it

I would like to build a learning platform to cover the basic features of moodle using Phoenix, to learn both web development and functional programming.

I'm building an appointment management system (simple stuff), and will be trying my luck selling it in codecanyon. (fingers crossed)

I would like to build a moodle like learning site using Phoenix (Elixir), to teach myself web development using a functional language.

Rulebased messaging web app for a multiplayer war boardgame (Bobby Lee multiplayer variant applied to EastFront/EuroFront II).

A small programming/computer science dictionary with lots of links to related resources (videos, blogs, articles, etc).

I'm working on one of those standup bots that would then use the data to automatically update PM services like Trello.

This year I want to dive into Machine Learning, so to do it I plan to create tools using RNNs to extract data from the web.

Learn C and assembly, get better at OSDev.

And start up a small VPS provider that will (at least) break even every month. (Any tips?)

Fixing YouTube subscriptions.

(YouTubers say they are broken, YouTube says they aren't)

How do you plan to solve this problem? Will it be a paid solution?

1. Photo sharing platform

2. An Investment portfolio management platform.

What kind of platform?

If it works, he won't tell you.

Photo sharing :P

An ESG and an ALM model in Racket.

A lightfield video player. :)

A Lisp interpreter in Go.

At least one VR Game.

Some other Apps.

Vauge ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com