Ask HN: What are your side projects? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your side projects?

63 pointskmccarth112 comments

Hey all,

My name is Kevin and I write for BostInnovation, a Boston-based innovation publication.

I am organizing a piece about interesting side projects.

If you are currently working on a side project and would like to be consider for inclusion in the piece, please leave a brief description of your side project(s), a link (if you have one) as well as the best method to contact you if follow-up is required.

Thanks!

EDIT: here is the URL to BostInnovation: http://bostinnovation.com/. Here is the URL to our programming section: http://bostinnovation.com/tag/programming/

EDIT (x2): I loosely define a side project as something you work on but you do not spend most of your time doing so. The focus of the side project is of no concern to me just yet. If there is a way to group the responses by type of side project, I will probably do so in subsequent pieces. (ex, "Gaming-based side projects" or "Javascript-based side projects".)

View on HN

This is probably OT, but I want to share: my side project this time is something completely different. I choose to stop writing code in my spare time and instead do something else.

My special side project is to finish the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc in 2012.

I never ran before. I started my training the end of summer 2010, and I am really positive about making it by next year :)

http://www.ultratrailmb.com/

Absolutely awesome. Have fun!

In a similar vein, I'm riding my bike across Canada this summer: http://bybike.ca/

A lot of fun to you as well!

I am sure you will collect a lot of wonderful memories on that bike tour.

Lately I've been writing a client for TeleHash, a protocol which provides addressing, subscription and NAT traversal for p2p apps. The protocol itself is still being fleshed out and the existing clients are only prototypes so I'm aiming to create a solid reference client and test suite.

https://github.com/jamii/erl-telehash

http://scattered-thoughts.net/all?tag=telehash&abridge=t...

http://telehash.org

TeleHash was originally created for use in the Locker project, which I also contribute to. Locker gathers data from all manner of services and websites (gmail, IMAP, XMPP, facebook, wordpress, twitter etc) and stores it on your own machine so you can access all your data from a uniform interface without having to trust an external site. In the future Locker will expand this with apps providing search, visualization and data mining.

https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/02/singly-locker-project-teleh...

My latest side project is http://laserey.es, a webapp that you drag photo's onto, finds your eyes and draws lasers from them. There's an email and twitter on that site for contact :)

still loving this project. both my FB and Twitter account have laser eyes.

Thanks :) I have so many things I still want to add! Alas, the time for side projects is always limited.

I have a daily email "learn something new every day" newsletter, at http://dlewis.net/nik -- facts like carrot used to be purple, Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service on the day he was shot, there's an island of hyper-poisonous snakes off the coast of Brazil.

4,000 subscribers. Contact info off the URL :)

This newsletter is fantastic. I heard about it a few weeks ago and have passed it on to many friends who are also enjoying it. Highly recommended.

Kevin, you should probably search HN for "rate" (from "rate my ...") and for "show" (from "Show HN: ...") to discover recent projects. Also, if you could be a bit more clear on your definition of "side project" versus front, back, top, bottom or any other type of project, it might prove helpful (i.e. are you looking for startup projects? hobby projects? ...).

thanks jcr, will do.

As opposed to a front project or a back project, a side project is one that someone works on outside of their main job/project. A main job/project is one that someone puts most of their time into.

Does this help?

Not really. I should have been more clear rather than try to be humorous. With a name like BostInnovation (and no url for your site?), it makes me wonder what kinds of innovations you're looking for?

Some of the people working on "projects" here on HN do it full time (in addition to doing other full time / paid work), and what they are doing is innovative. Some of the good stuff may not quite qualify as a "side project," well, at least it might not in the eyes of the people doing them.

good points, jcr. check my edits on the original post

In my spare time, I'm working on a game library for Processing that I call Laser Sea Destruction ( http://abielinski.com/lsd ). It's got some fancy features I wish Processing had by default. It's still in development, so there's only 1 working demo, and you have to download the package to see it.

Email is in profile :)

I released this iPhone app few months ago - JustRemindIt - http://justremindit.com. It's an app to send voice call based reminders to your friends, clients and yourself. Just type the reminder message and date, and our service will call a desired person at a scheduled time.

Many businesses and individuals use this app on daily basis. The iPhone app already makes decent money, but I'm more excited about the upcoming Web application, which is specially targeted for small service and professional businesses. I'll be releasing this web app very soon.

This is my first side project, which solves a real problem, makes decent money, and growing slowly but steadily. You can reach me at aditya at justremindit dot com.

I am starting a UX newsletter at http://www.uxready.com/ . Currently, I am collecting feedback from friends on what kind of news they'd like to receive. Once the subscribed number reaches 100 I will start sending it.

Interesting, I subscribed.

Signed up. I'd like to see interesting content on data-driven design (split testing etc)

1. A Business Intelligence/Data Warehouse that sits on top of all of my gmail data.

2. A utility that turns a spreadsheet into a web app.

3. An app that turns my Hacker News comments into an ebook.

4. A bridge hand dissector that helps intermediate players become expert players.

> A bridge hand dissector that helps intermediate players become expert players.

Do you know Fred Gitelman, the creator of Bridge Base? If not and you'd like an introduction, please ping me.

I don't know him, and I may take you up on your offer. Thanks, raganwald.

I loved this excerpt from his wikipedia entry:

"Gitelman is sometimes recognized for his creativity at the bridge table. In one tournament he discarded an Ace, as a signal to his partner to not lead that suit. His partner didn't, but led the remaining logical suit which Gitelman, being void, ruffed."

If that had been written about me, it probably would have been more like:

"edw519 is sometimes recognized for his lack of patience at the bridge table. In one tournament he discarded an Ace, as a signal to his partner to not lead that suit. When his partner led that suit anyway, edw519 threw his cards at him and was 86'ed from the tournament for life."

Hooray for Boston! As another commenter said, it's nice to see some Boston action. I moved here in July and am loving the start-up scene here.

I released Zen To Done App last fall (http://zentodoneapp.com), which is a to-do list manager based on Leo Babauta's Zen To Done. It's a simple app that allows you to define a few major tasks for the week and then fit in all the little tasks around them.

Also working on a wine management system that my father wants but no link for that...yet.

Email is in profile.

I'm building something of a portfolio project in my spare time. Something to show to potential employers and myself that I have the ability to make a robust web application.

It is called http://www.selfcompete.com and, even though I'm doing it as a learning experience, I think it has the potential that it could gain some users because it's a lot of fun to use. It is a web app that provides a way to measure (and kind of brag about) your personal bests. I wrote up a blog post explaining a little more of the idea behind it : http://dashdingo.org/post/4273080092/what-is-self-compete

You can contact me through the email address in my profile or twitter, where I have the same username.

1. Gourmaide - http://www.gourmaide.com - iPad recipe app that aims to be different by rethinking the way recipes are presented in the tablet era.

2. The Daily Dealist - http://www.thedailydealist.com - A social deal aggregator site that's gaining some early traction.

3. Bouncy Tags - http://www.bouncytags.com - Some would say it's from a bygone era of start pages but I find it quite helpful. Add bookmarks by tags and access them from anywhere (even mobile). Links that you use more frequently gain prominence over time. Use invite code "letmein" here: http://www.bouncytags.com/signup

private.txt http://privacytxt.org Mostly it's me trying to get people to adopt this. =) Completely aware their is a W3 standard that tried to accomplish, somewhat, what privacy.txt is trying to do.

4jc.in http://4jc.in My person code deployment site. Mostly for web side stuff like JavaScript and CSS that I regularly use.

DuctMail http://ductmail.com Email reminder system that is simple to use. Again, created to scratch a personal itch.

The Wish Cloud http://thewishcloud.com Basically, everything you never knew you wanted. Socialized wish lists. Still a long way to go on this one, but making progress.

Here's a screenshot of http://privacytxt.org from my Firefox 4 on Linux: http://i.imgur.com/awcJy.png

http://i.imgur.com/wqka8.png

That's what I see on mine (FF4 on Linux as well), so I really have no clue why it's exploding like that for you. Sorry =(

http://takeastand.com.ng/

It is aimed at getting people to PUBLICLY state their position in the forthcoming Nigerian elections and know the position friends have taken.

It can be applied to other issues. e.g referendums af any kind.

my email is in my profile.

1. OISC VM - A "One Instruction Set CPU" virtual machine and assembler. - http://simonpstevens.com/projects/oiscvm

2. Web Gallery Processor - An ASP.Net MVC project that builds image galleries from folders of images - http://simonpstevens.com/Projects/WebGalleryProcessor

3. Ph-Air Hockey - An air hockey game for Windows Phone 7 - http://simonpstevens.com/Projects/PhAirHockey

+ some other smaller stuff from time to time - http://simonpstevens.com/projects

Regarding #1, I wrote an implementation of that in BASH back at uni in 2003 http://mishima.warwickcompsoc.co.uk/sopl_stripped.sh

It's ancient code now, but I'm still proud of it - and reminising over this was how my girlfriend and I got together!

It's just a really interesting concept I think. Every now and then I start trying to read enough hardware stuff to build a real one. Never actually get anything built though.

Working on a Kindle and Nook ebook lending site in my spare time: http://www.booklends.com

Unfortunately nobody can log in today, as I'm making a few changes following a sternly worded letter from Amazon ;-)

Hi, my side project is a simple and useful mobile application.

Let’s meet Dawg, your new friend. Simple application making social life easier than ever before. Now you can seamlessly connect your social life at Facebook and Twitter in one place. Get updates on the go, and glance over them - even if you get disconnected from the Internet! .Dawg helps you stay social with your tweets, updates, photos and videos in a single application. Let’s gear up to explore your social network easy way with Dawg.

Currently available for android , try it today http://bit.ly/gakCmT and give your valuable feedback.

I'm currently working on a clone of an SNES game from 1995: https://github.com/sharpobject/panel-attack

This probably isn't the kind of project you're looking for though ;(

I created http://fuelog.com a couple few years ago to (to steal jasonlotito's phrase) scratch a personal itch.

I had a dumb phone (razr) for way too long and wanted to be able to log gas station fill-ups via SMS. When I was introduced to Twitter, I realized the natural connection and built the site.

It took a lot longer to build than expected, but I'm really glad I followed through from concept to publicly-available site. I haven't touched it in at least a year, so I'm pretty sure the Twitter API is broken. If I had it to do over again, I'd have used GAE (python) instead of raw PHP.

My side-project is a job search engine that works by crawling company websites to build up the job database. In addition to letting people do the standard search based on keywords, I've also added the ability to filter job search results with other meaningful metrics like: the size of the company, companies that have won employer awards (eg. Best Places to Work), restricting the job search to only .edu, .net, .com sites, etc.

The site is at http://www.neekanee.com

My email is in my profile.

Warning: PDOStatement::execute() [pdostatement.execute]: SQLSTATE[HY093]: Invalid parameter number: no parameters were bound in /home/thayton/webapps/htdocs/common.php on line 298

Yeah, it's still pretty rough right now but I still thought I'd mention it. Put in the state (NY in your case) along with the city and you'll get back the results you were looking for. Or, just hit search with no location specified and you can drill down by state/city/company/job-listing

I'm a college student, but I've been intermittently working on a couple of HTML5 games.

One is a simple version of the puzzle game Sokoban. http://sokobanjs.com.

The other is a bit unusual, it's sort of an interactive chatroom plus level editor, inspired by the DOS games ZZT and Megazeux. Still in very early stages. Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/pjdR9.png

I live in Northampton, MA, though I visit Boston frequently. My e-mail is in my profile.

Working on a project that attempts to integrate e-commerce sales with content in the same sort of way that comic books used to sell novelty items in the back pages. http://humanminute.com/ Store portion at http://humanminute.com/store and http://humanminute.com/store/grid

Currently a rather failed project but still kicking around ideas.

A structured todo app for startup/business/management guys to have only limited number of tasks occupying mindshare at a moment. This is to prevent the OMG-what-do-I-do-next-to-grow-my-startup feeling while starting the day. It categorizes tasks broadly into: getting more customers, retaining existing customers and making sure company stuff is taken care of (hiring, raising funding, office, meals, holidays, etc.)

Needless to say, it is my most used app now (yep, I use it even more than VWO :)

I have built two sites so far as side projects to learn Django/Python, the first one I started is http://hatzillion.com a place to buy hats. I have some python scripts that run daily to get the latest deals on hats from different web sites (only 3 for now, more to come). The second project is http://10ThingsAbout.me inspired by a post on this site about threewords.me.

In my free time I've been fixing up some code for the in-house music management/playback software at my alma mater's radio station. (plug: Song selection is controllable by website visitors, http://wvtc.net ). Though I'm probably going to leave that project to the current students once I finish the bit I'm on right now (I felt I should replace this part for them, its some bad perl I wrote as a sophomore).

Contact info is in my profile.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.zemariamm.wicked

An Android app to help you find cool new music (uses several APIs: EchoNest, SoundCloud and others)

http://www.directball.com

An Android and iPhone app that streams videos from football games

http://apps.facebook.com/itooner

A Facebook app to create comic strips from funny situations :D

I'm really excited about html5 & javascript for game development. My current game and learning project is "Last Man Standing: A Zombie Apocalypse"

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/165110/lastmanstanding/index.html

Accelerometerated (iOS 4.2+) (my favourite version)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/165110/lmsazpa/index.html

I'm currently working on a custom written Photoblog hashed out in PHP using the Codeigniter framework. Photography is a just a hobby of mine and I refuse to use services like Flickr to share photos; for some reason it just don't sit right with me.

I've also been working on a website that indexes and categorizes usenet NZB files.

Both projects haven't been launched and are currently at a standstill because of wedding planning. :)

Sorry I couldn't have been more help.

A flash card wiki. very early stage, for now it helps my daughter learn to write her french verbs. http://jfno-questions.appspot.com/ A hotel locator, booking directly on the maps. Mature and not developing anymore, maintenance is a 1 hour a month thing max. http://www.seeyourhotel.com

contact in my HN profile

Hi Kevin! You already know about this one since you're a subscriber :), but would love to have my side project Hacker Newsletter (http://www.hackernewsletter.com) included. Also, I make a point of collecting the best side-projects each week in a specific section of the newsletter so if you look through the archives you will find a lot more.

At first, I didn't notice the larger part of the page is an image and was rather confused. I think you should make that more prominent.

Thanks for the feedback and will do. I'm currently doing some a/b testing on the design.

A little site to help university/high school students speculate what they need on exams to get a certain grade in the course, or vice versa: http://calcmymarks.appspot.com/

Really just a hobby, something created out of my nervousness when preparing for exams, but I've gotten some good usage from people at my university.

Have you checked out the iPhone app, Grades 2? Same concept but a lot more powerful in terms of the other features.

I have had one of mine up for a little while now.

Faveone - http://faveone.com - A this or that site which is fun to waste some time on :)

My other side project I have been hacking at for a while now is Had That Beer, http://www.hadthatbeer.com It is a beer check list app

Not up yet, but it is getting there :)

http://mogade.com provides free services for game developers (leaderboard, achievements...) Wrote it largely because I believe in gaming, and I wanted something real to push my knowledge of Rails.

Been a little sidetracked with work on mongly.com lately and a few other things, but I still consider mogade.com my main project.

email in profile

I've been working on GobiCab, a super easy way to find someone to share a cab with, on the side for a few months. It's actually homegrown here in Boston and we're working on partnerships with Logan airport and the City of Boston to help with distribution.

You can learn more here: http://www.gobicab.com

I run an all volunteer, international response search and rescue team on the side. Http://www.1srg.org. Dkovar at gmail

Just released mine not long ago, it's an interactive video library using HTML5 video and canvases:

http://www.cacophonyjs.com/

Realized my main projects are taking all my time so I finally put it out minus much of a launch just so it's public and open for others to use :)

You can contact me at john.luxford at gmail.

A social bookmarking site, with Twitter's follow model and auto-tagging search: http://imi-imi.appspot.com/

An Omegle / Chat Roulette clone, but that works over Google Talk: http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/

http://www.tweethit.com => Tracks the most popular products on Twitter

And the library that came into light while developing TweetHit => https://github.com/ocanbascil/Performance-AppEngine

I'm experimenting with a sort of personal "infopanel" as a side project.

The idea is to gather your bookmarks, notes and todos in one place in a drag and drop panel.

http://trackpanel.net

It's still quite rough and unfinished though, and I'm not sure if this is the best way of organizing this sort of data.

I'm more of a data science wanna be than a developer, so I tend to analyze data. It's a lot of screen scraping, data munging, statistical modeling, and data visualization.

I'm always looking for data to analyze, to shoot me an email if you need something.

I'd like to get into GUI development and am working on learning that at the moment.

Markdown mixtape creator using pastie sites So far just tinypaste...

http://tinypaste.com/f13a1a -> http://texttape.heroku.com/f13a1a

Mainly because I love netlabels but.. Protip: don't forget your dropbox..

Full time undergrad student.

Side projects: http://seizethedayapp.com - simple to-do iPhone app with reminders http://hackerfollow.com - "Twitterizes" Hacker News, allowing you to follow users

The to-do app looks cool but $3.99? :)

http://socialcens.us is a side project I've been working on a little. It is a pretty simple app that aggregates a bunch of data from all of your facebook friends and gives you a nice report. Also, a nice excuse to use Mongodb.

Very cool, I've been thinking of doing something similar. Mix this with ThinkUp and it could be quite a nice tool.

Thanks! That's an interesting idea, I'll have play around with ThinkUp a little bit and figure out how they can be integrated together

I'm a full-time applied math student and tutor, but in my spare time I work on http://www.getachiever.com. I've wanted to build a service and business for a few years but only started work about a year ago.

Django Weekly. It's a newsletter with interesting Django articles, code, and job vacancies. It grew explosively in the first few weeks in January, but the growth has levelled off at around +10 signups/week.

http://djangoweek.ly/

This is my technology side-project: the ongoing work with servers, software, design, writing, and learning to keep Fight Aging! and its mailing list running as a one-person operation:

http://www.fightaging.org/

http://popify.me for creating coupons for websites and social networks. It's also a great tool for measuring users curiosity. We have some more in the oven, but focusing mostly on the main thingg.

Do we have to be based in Boston?

nope

Okay, cool. My side project is Curious Reef: Exploratory social learning: http://curiousreef.com/

The most active class right now is this one: http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...

http://dropdo.com - a file uploader/viewer that aims to let people view your file right on the web without having to download it and open it up in a dedicated program.

Best method of contact: hello@dropdo.com

Currently creating an FP PHP framework for my own projects, designed for performance over everything else.

Also just finishing up a CSS framework for adaptive screen resolutions, including the ability to show/hide elements based on particular resolutions.

Just launched this with a friend http://www.tradetools.me it's a simple little service to allow developers to share their computer setup and the tools they use on their machine.

Currently my side project is taking two college classes at night. While it won't make me rich in the short term, I know it will pay off in the future.

I'm only able to do two classes at the moment since I work 50+ hrs a week in the office.

I run a consulting company, on the side Im working on www.triviatise.com which is a platform which helps advertisers get users to remember their message by giving away prizes when users answer questions about the message.

I built http://urlminder.appspot.com as a way of tracking the dozens on domain names I have between work and other side projects. My email is in my profile.

http://openpoll.us is a platform that will allow people to vote and comment on state and federal legislation. It will launch some time this summer.

I've been working on niche ecommerce sites. It seems like an interesting area. If you can get 10,000 visits a month who are highly targeted you should in theory be able to make decent revenue.

Interesting. I have been doing something similar with services with excellent results.

Analytics for academic library proxy servers allowing libraries to determine what resources their patrons are using even if the publisher does not provide that data.

For what it's worth, I'm in Boston too.

My side project is http://freeciv.net - a HTML5 web based strategy game. Contact information in Hacker News profile.

Working on a startup job aggregator that crawls curated startup job pages. http://www.startupshiring.com

One of my side projects is http://7courses.com a dead simple recipe manager to replace traditional recipe boxes.

My current side project is an online homebrewing beer log with recipe sharing. http://ibrewedit.com/

Very cool. I'm similarly working on homebrewr.com (nothing there now) -- more focus on the tools to build recipes and track brews.

Thanks! I've been working on it for a few months now. I'm hoping to have an open alpha to a handful of people by the end of April.

Best of luck!

We've made http://www.prdct.io as a side project, where you can predict the future.

Working on a list/ranking creation/curation project -- http://www.rankoro.us/.

Javascript-based side project http://instamapsearch.com

http://rrrewind.com a wayback machine for collective trends.

Very cool - I'm working on a similar project showing current trending content: http://trendn.com

Trendn is also cool. How do yo determine what is trending?

Thanks! Still a work in progress but the scoring is based on social sharing data as well as how long ago it was determined to be trending. Social sharing data includes facebook (likes, comments, shares), tweets including the URL, diggs, votes on reddit, delicious bookmarks, HN (points, comments), and a few other metrics.

Currently working on a lispy python dialect (python-compatible, with lispy macros). Will be published soon.

Everything on https://zetabee.com is my side-project.

http://showbomber.com

A youtube/nyc concert listing mash-up site.

https://github.com/wsxiaoys/carc/

I work on: http://pepbot.com

It's an intelligent temp mail provider

I am actually looking for a good new project. I have been learning Python/Django and I love it.

You should contact me, email in my profile :)

Take a look at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358871 TLDR: Write a platform where developers with running but under-advertized sites team up with marketing folks and share the profits.

If you do, please let me know :-)

A search engine and bookmark system for HN - I've been learning about search engines lately.

Developing a site for problem solving games.

Best method: send email to gba.director@gmail.com

As someone who lives in Boston, Cool site! (its always so frustrating that San Francisco gets all the cool things haha)

I while ago I wrote a web app for keeping track of the items in your kitchen. I also wrote a web crawler/search algorithm for matching recipes to those items. It worked great, but I found the process of adding items to your inventory was tedious so i put it down for a few months.

Recently I picked it back up, and I'm now solving the problem by developing an android (if it works there will be an iphone client too) client. The goal is to have users take a picture of the item, which will automatically be uploaded, and a description will be found through machine intelligence. Thanks to (http://www.iqengines.com/) who just let me into their alpha, I have a lot of confidence this is going to solve the issue!

To see all these people doing all sorts of creative stuff here brings figurative tears to my eyes :) . Here's my humble contribution:

- http://projectilo.com/ A project sharing site

- http://askaround.me/ A local Q&A

- http://pubcentral.net/ For scientific publications

- http://igni.gr/ Classifieds

- http://mapifier.com/ Local directory & q&a

My main job is facebook apps.

I'm going to build a bulk Whois service that responds in well structured JSON to privately license to people. I'm working on another project that needs access to that data so I need to build it anyways, and I'm sure a dozen or two people would like access as well.

I'm planning on using Sinatra and Redis for it too, so yay.

bash-modules - various additional modules for bash: http://trac.assembla.com/bash-modules/

image segmentation - put your coins, stamps, labels on contrast background (orange, turquoise, etc.), scan it, then let script to remove background and extract each image: http://vlisivka.pp.ua/uk/node/76

SPM (source package manager) - meta-meta-programming system, with goal to automatically create and keep up to date large and complex programming systems.

(no name) - complex ajax apps which are independent from back-end, e.g. same AJAX frontend works fine without backend (with sample data), or with couchdb, PHP, java, perl, javascript, etc. backends. (evently + couchapp)

etc.

http://hockeybias.com

It is a curated hockey news site with a UI similar to the Drudge Report and with archiving similar to Dave Winer's Scripting News. Love any feedback!

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