Ask HN: What were your personal favorite personal/side projects?

I started playing my first fps game in college and learned how to get really good at it. It was cool to learn about esports from people who played in the first tournaments for games like Unreal Tournament. In my experience, everyone at a certain stage had a similar level of mechanical skill but they did not have the same level of interpersonal ability or management/strategy skills. It was interesting to see the dynamics and the people who could pick out the weakest link of a team and exploit it to win the match. We played CTF pickup games where teams were always changed so you could learn everyone's strengths and weaknesses, as well as keep it interesting. But even in a quick CTF match, these players would easily be able to ID the weakest link and exploit it within minutes.

It also taught me about skill level. Even though everyone I played with was at the top 1%, there were still people on a whole new level. I used to play with people that now play professionally. The game I played had a small competitive community, a lot from TF2. As a new player, I was used to being wrecked on a daily basis but I still remember to this day how hard my gaming dreams were destroyed by one player. You could practice for hours every day but there were players that could just log on and be practically godlike. There was no contest. Even though I decreased my kill speed to under a second, their kill speed was .1 second and I was probably never ever going to achieve that ever. Thanks surefour.

I have never ever experienced as much adrenaline again as I did during those days. The fast paced game play and level of communication and coordination was amazing. It was probably like crack. I guess I sort of found it again in entrepreneurship. It will never be as fast and as easily rewarding but what makes a great esports team and a great business team is the same.

Probably TechLoaf (https://TechLoaf.io).

It’s a satirical tech newsletter that I write with a few close friends who are successful founders/executives/investors.

It’s been very cathartic to poke fun of all that’s nutty about the tech world.

It was weirdly satisfying to create an emacs package (https://github.com/dp12/parrot) that shows the party parrot from Slack gyrating in the mode line.

A somewhat useless feature, but it partially redeems itself by offering a "rotate-text" function.

Now I'm anxiously waiting for vim users to port it, as vim users are wont to do. I do expect the resulting plugin will be called something like vip for "very important parrot."

I was an AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) user for many years. I started in the early 2000s on dial-up and made friends and learned about the Internet. It factored into my technology career today.

As a side project I developed an AIM clone with Node.js and web sockets, using original bitmaps and sounds. One can choose fonts, colors, and buddy icons just like the source.

I ran a server over TLS with a few friends for a while. It was a lot of fun and I am proud of it.

I wrote https://www.checkbot.io/, a Chrome extension that tests multiple pages at a time for SEO, speed and security best practices.

It's been really satisfying seeing something I built being helpful for others when I originally started it for personal use to speed up testing and development.

i was particularly into building 3d worlds with opensimulator for a time and i built a directory for them because there was absolutely no way to find other people online (http://opensimworld.com). It grew to a fun community over time that i still maintain. Then i built a farming game on top of it which eventually became an open source project thanks to contributors who came out of the blue (https://satyrfarm.github.io).

Another fun project was a cryptocoin price directory that looked for coins that are "pumping" every few minutes (https://coinzaa.com), but unfortunately my bank forced me to shut it down.