Ask HN: Your admittedly useless side projects?
What were some side projects of yours that you deep down knew nobody would deem very valuable yet kept spending quite some time on?
And do you regret those endeavours?
And do you regret those endeavours?
Naturally, I then released these two albums to the world, where they have sold roughly 0 copies. This doesn't bother me, though; that was never the point. It is, in essence, a long-term elaborate "performance art" piece, that is intended for my own amusement, and possibly my daughter's amusement, once she gets old enough to "get" the joke. In the immediate time, I get value out of seeing her enjoy playing instruments and making sounds. And I'm giving her the experience of making music, in whatever way she sees fit, before she ever gets taught a bunch of nonsense about what ways are OK and not OK to make music through more formal training.
Any project that naturally holds your interest, is probably worth pursuing, regardless of the overall value to humanity. At least for a little bit. Because you're generally going to walk away with knowledge you didn't have prior to starting it, and benefits you wouldn't have predicted had you not gone down the path at all.
Oh yeah, also; don't take advice from me. I make horrible choices, then I commit to them.
The second one: https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-first-annual-report-of/...
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31504720
2. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
We live in interesting times, it seems.
I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but it feels good to get that off my chest
Now I can peacefully forget these bookmarks!
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."
I tried shaarli, but soon after I tried to build something myself, and I created share-links.
It's an open-source Django app that you can self-host, and that lets you store (and share!) links, titles, descriptions, and tags. Then it display them in a nice way (for me : not much css, a simple page with no js).
It took some dozen hours to get to the point where it's really usable, and it still have problems now (comments are not moderated, I just realized that you can't add a description in links or tags, but I will fix this soonTM).
Here's the link of the repo: https://gitlab.com/sodimel/share-links/
One cool feature is to set your browser homepage to the url that loads a random page : each day I get a cool article to read/concept to discover! (here's my own instance random link url: https://links.l3m.in/en/random/)
That's my useless side project (because shaarli already exist and it's way more mature).
Another goal is to be able to retrieve links with ease. I haven't added all the tags on my links yet since I lack time (1800+ right now and counting!), but I should be able to retrieve this cool article about Python decorators, or the article from the cheapskatesguide.org that inform us that bluedwarf.top is launched :P
I really hope that one day there will be multiple share-links instances that will allow people to find interesting links, and then when they thought that they have found all the cool content they discover that there's more websites containing hundreds of fresh or old links leading to even more interesting content!
If you can then direct your search engine to discover content from this archive I would perhaps more often (re)stumble upon this neat discontinued blog that's stuck 5 levels deep in my folder structure.
Share-links on the other hand can convert the page content into a pdf file using weasyprint [2].
I tag mine instead... and I read them first (before bookmarking)
e.g. Let's say that I find a book interesting. I go to '~/fun/read/read.md' paste the URL, delete the bookmark and forget about it.
Here the most useless project: https://wikipedia-changes.com/ Get a chart how often an article on wikipedia is changed.
Or few others:
https://quiz-app-maker.com/ // Create an quiz app (ios and android) by an excel sheet of questions
https://github.com/berti92/mega_calendar // calendar plugin for redmine
https://one-folder.com/ // A whole dms
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.devbert.cam... // Camping log, where you can create stories about your holidays. Buggy to be fair...
https://release-notifier.com/ // Get notified when a new release on github is released
In an upcoming mixtape the intro track has been on YouTube for 3 weeks and has received only 3 plays. I want this project to unearth such classic electronic tracks and get them out to a wider audience. I can’t see myself ever stopping this project or ever regretting the time spent.
Yet, I treat each project as if it is a Fortune 50 corporate initiative; with ultra-high-quality code, reams of documentation, full test suites and/or harnesses, etc.
I do it, because the occasional project that I do, that matters, benefits from the habits I establish. I've been working on one of those, for the last couple of years (closed source, so I can't link). It's coming along great.
Here's links to much of my work: https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#browse-away
It was very specific - a database/API of YouTube videos and metadata for a YouTube group, the Yogscast.
It ended up being used as the backend data for a viewer-controlled cinema that let users vote on and pick videos to watch during livestream downtime to keep the audience engaged during a charity drive.
Can't take much credit, of course the actual video playing code was the meat and potatoes of the operation during downtime and the actual stream content during the daytime, but it was vaguely involved in raising millions for charity haha
Regrets none, only reason it's not still about is that it turns out YouTube don't like you making a database of YT videos that you allow others to access, they killed my API key eventually
1. Mototripper - live streams my location when I'm on a long distance adventure motorcycle trip so my kid knows I'm still alive and moving. (e.g. <https://www.mototripper.app/track/~knobbies> - a trip through Finland, Sweden, and Norway I took a couple weeks ago.) Built with Sveltekit.
2. Vatinator - an app to apply OCR to Estonian receipts to claim VAT reimbursement. Built with NextJS.
Geiger Tube-->ESP32-->MQTT-->Raspberry Pi-->Node Red-->InfluxDB-->Grafana
Regret? Nah, I learned a lot and it's a great conversation piece.
The UX is pretty terrible, honestly. But I thought I could get away with it since I didn't expect anyone to sign up.
I also built https://sudokurace.io based on an idea my wife and I shared while talking. We talked about it for years and I finally decided to build it, only for us to play it for a day or two and now we never really touch it.
It had a user base of like 3-4 russian ternary computing enthusiasts, dunno if it still even compiles. Fun project though.
As with all of my projects (even those that bring value to others), I do them for myself so as long as I find value in them I'll keep putting time on them. No regrets.
I kinda find my writing funny, very mathematically rigorous and ambitious. http://tunguska.sourceforge.net/docs.html Not really sure who I thought the audience would be.
All the tools allow to "crop" an image, but not really extract all regions.
Ended up making PhotoCutter[1]. It is totally useless for everyone except a few.
Well done
It would be cool to enhance this site so that it takes a PDF with multiple pages and allow you to do the same for that. But that's probably a lot of work compared to uploading a single picture file!
I also learned a lot of new tech from such useless projects in the past, but that is just a nice little extra, just like with the other ones
Today, it has integrations for Paypal, Etsy, Shopify, DHL and HBCI (no more copy and paste, finally) and basically covers the whole order cycle with minimal fuss and gives her a quick way to publish new products which she does a lot as fabrics come in / get sold out.
I guess that's not that useless but of course it simply can not be worth the time I spent on it.
Yet, I don't regret doing it in the least because for me it literally is a labor of love. Plus, I learned a lot doing it and I can go down crazy paths like this one time I made an android app to cut out the background of her product photos. Didn't turn out to be useful in the end but eventually I did use OpenCV via JavaCV for something else in the software.
Currently I am in the process of rewriting it in Kotlin / Multiplatform (JVM+JS) and again, I'm learning a lot and making the software a lot sleeker and more functional. That's not going to be worth it either, I am sure.
Anyway, I wish I had day job were I was in constant contact with users to built them something of tangible utility and value.
https://github.com/nicbou/timeline
It serves no purpose, but somehow it attracted one contributor.
It's pointless on purpose. It's the thing I work on when I want to forget about work, and build purely for myself.
A game that teaches you how financial decisions impact your life but it's turned into more of a nostalgia trip for Windows XP users
https://www.github.com/marssaxman/ozette
I had no expectation that anyone else would ever use it, but it suited me just fine, and I used it every day for years, both at work and on my other personal projects. It's still one of the first things I install on a new machine.
https://dannstockton.com/icebreakers/
https://dannstockton.com/ml-meeting-notes/
https://dannstockton.com/new-music-archive/
https://dannstockton.com/thisjesusdoesnotexist/
All of them are single-page apps, all of them are jokes started by a conversation with a friend. No ragrets.
The end purpose was initially to enable homebrew game development but, with the prices these boxes are fetching on the used market, I know nobody is ever going to bother. Moreover, as far as reverse engineering existing games goes, the most interesting parts (i.e. the copy protection) have already been figured out two decades ago and most of the games are perfectly playable through emulation. Still, reverse engineering an unknown platform that isn't too serious about security is fun and rewarding.
But my 68k emulator has more spark.
And you?
Given that I refuse to pay the $3 per month for access due to strong disagreements that I have, politically, with ownership of the newspaper, I decided to build a "paywall bypass" solution as a side project. The solution involved building a small server app that acts as a proxy between my browser and their site. It parses out the HTML representation of the articles, which their paywall script at runtime first obfuscates, then removes from the DOM. This solution, naturally, also avoids my browser loading and requesting a whole collection of third-party trackers and ads - since I'm not "rendering" their entire site, simply scraping relevant portions of the HTML.
The kicker: I pay $5 a month to host this on a DigitalOcean droplet.
I regret nothing.
naywall.com
This is my profile https://pegao.co/@zakokor
I have an off-and-on side project for fun. I have invested a ridiculous amount of time and some considerable money in my yard and my house just because those things make it much more pleasant to be here. I fiddle with cooking and we all eat the results but clearly I don't have marketable skills. I buy and play friggin' games . . . what a waste!
Why would I regret the things I do for enjoyment or better quality of life? For myself and others?
Some regrets, but it's fun.
This project helped one of my consulting client 5x their development velocity.
I had been working at GitLab, pre-pandemic, for several years and I saw how writing things down was almost like a super power to enable async work. If you start with time zone distributed teams, writing things down in issues/docs just becomes the natural way of working. I also saw that lots of other companies didn't really get it - and there was a leap of faith required to try it, because it didn't logically follow that if you write things down more you can have less meetings.
My idea was to build something that provided a really natural place to write things down, and I built and tried to sell AsyncGo as a place for making decisions in a written way. You'd set a topic, a context, and a due date, and then the magic would happen. In theory. The problem I had was that I couldn't find anyone to take the leap and try it. Companies who were interested in async already had some similar process, and the ones who really needed help writing things down didn't get it and I never found a way to communicate it to them clearly.
In the end I shut down the hosted version and put an MIT license on it. I don't regret it exactly, I learned a lot making it, but I wish it had helped more people. There's other stuff out there now that's sort of similar, and it seems they are struggling a bit as well, so I don't think the market was really there (yet). Now I'm working on a collaboration app for regular people/teams who want to get better at making videos/streams (https://www.synura.com) and I hope to apply a lot of the lessons there.
https://github.com/bjesus/muxile lets me continue my tmux session on the phone, bridging the two over WebSockets. How many people use tmux extensively AND want to continue on the phone? Not much i guess...
https://github.com/bjesus/callibella is my way to sync my personal calendar to my work calendar without revealing my personal entries. It's very useful for me but less needed if your personal calendar is Google because i heard they have their own integration.
https://github.com/bjesus/air is my AwesomeWM based Interface to my PostmarketOS Kobo e-reader. Linux on your e-reader isn't a huge market share to begin with...
https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Nations-Shaped-Todays-Economy...
- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Som/ Parser, code model, navigable browser and VM for the SOM Smalltalk dialect
- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Simula A Simula 67 parser written in C++ and Qt
- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Algol60 A parser and code editor with syntax coloring for Algol 60 written in Qt
> do you regret those endeavours?
No, not in any way; the projects were very entertaining and gave me valuable insights.
The market is very small.
Needless to say, I’ve barely read most of the books that I’ve compiled, so it sometimes feels like wasted effort.
However, I’ve since put a lot of the learnings from these projects to use, such as while building pystitcher[1].
I thought this would interest music teachers, and I implemented specific deatures for them. -- Typically, music students like/love learning to play their instrument (or else they quit), but hate sight reading.
I talked to a couple of teachers: they are polite, don't express objections, but don't engage, don't call back and don't use it.
I did a ShowHN that gathered 11 upvotes. From that came a couple of users, including one who seems extremely motivated.
So all in all this has one serious user. Better than nothing! I certainly don't regret it.
[0] babeloop.com
I have a few PHS data cards I can use with vintage computers, and a few PHS telephones that are hooked up to a VoIP line so I can use them as a cordless phone.
My favorite device I own is the DoCoMo Eggy, which I helped showcase in a recent video from Cathode Ray Dude[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Handy-phone_System [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g3afPmSnbY&t=2850s
Allows anyone to create geocaching-like adventures controlled by server-side Lua scripting. Neat features are multiplayer support, some included widgets to quickly build a UI (see[1]) and a time travel debugger to fix errors. I knew there was probably no real way to make money from that, but it was fun to build. Unfortunately reception by the big geocaching portals was mostly to no allow linking to it IIRC, so there was also no way to gain any traction at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The hardware is a very fancy synth with a bunch of oscillators that are all tuned relative & symmetrically to each other and you can control the “spread” of the tunings at the same time you adjust the core pitch. Think of the THX sound, or the entire The Social Network soundtrack.
Actually haven’t built it in a while, should redo it in the newest swift(ui) as an exercise.
Edit: no regrets. Nobody cares but me & that’s fine.
Transpiler: https://gitlab.com/thexa4/kos-kpp
It's a better experience than sending her the links directly.
A literal computational environment & DSL for interaction with DOM elements. I don't regret it, because I explored a lot in the process: DOM, Canvas & WebExtensions APIs, parser generators, some JS tooling, gained general code organization skills.
Not useless but at this point I'm just slowly losing money on it. I find weather data fascinating though, so it's a labor of love.
Wordle helper that I threw together over a few weekends. Stick in the day’s solution and your guesses and it’ll tell you how many valid words remain after each guess.
My first stab at anything webdev after years of embedded development. Definitely worth it, LiveView is neat
Link = https://PretzelBox.cc.
https://github.com/sandreas/tone
I thought there are not enough taggers out there, so I'm gonna make my own, with blackjack and hook(er)s!
Was ultra hard getting it into farmers hands but ultra fun to code. Based on satellite data
I recently rewrote it to learn svelte. No joking, I prob refresh it 10+ times/day since when I built it back in 2016. And I'm pretty confident I'm the only user.
I regret it, I feel like I should have developed something more profitable.
I have zero regrets, gave me lots of experience with open source and the community
https://newsola.com - Google News as a treemap
So rather unlikely to ever financially pay off in any meaningful way beyond being interesting
The most advanced video I was able to create is this datamoshed version of Carpenter Brut - Turbo Killer clip : https://streamable.com/7d9h4b. I'm particularly proud/pleased with the transition at the 2:00 minute mark. It still a long way from what I would want to be able to accomplish (as the moshing is still pretty random and looks good only by "chance"), but I'm pretty happy with my progress overall.
My long term goal for it would be able to create moshing of music video clips, and sync the glitching to the beat/structure of the music (using Spotify Audio Analysis feature [0][1]).
As a sidenote, a tool I discovered and has been a godsend into tinkering with video codecs is FFglitch[2]. It's a fork of FFmpeg with the ability to directly access and modify internal MPEG2/4 values (such as the Motion Vectors, macroblocks, DCT coefficient, etc). Compared to other datamoshing techniques (such as corrupting AVI files with random data, manual key frames deletion, etc) it's order of magnitudes more advanced and precise, allowing you to precisely and purposefully influence the codec, instead of randomly breaking it and seeing what sticks. However its downside is that you have to have a solid grasp of the inner workings of those codecs to achieve anything.
Finally, for anyone looking for a good resource to get an understanding of Video Encoding, I highly recommend this[3] github repo as a starting point. It contains a good description of the workings, as well as an amazing references list.
[0]: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
[1]: https://spotify-audio-analysis.glitch.me/
[3]: https://github.com/leandromoreira/digital_video_introduction
No regrets, I learnt a lot and had fun messing with it for a while.
Each project had valuable lessons (both business and code/architecture) that carried over into the next one. So far I've built:
- bill splitting service (2017)
I spent days agonising over which new framework to use (this was late 2017 after all), eventually learned to just use the tools I knew (react, node, postgres). I didn't really care about the problem space, so shut it down.
- jobs aggregator (2017/2018)
I learned that implementation is meaningless to the user if you're not delivering value. I wanted to copy remoteok.io and make it serverless (effectively free to serve traffic), I didn't realise existing sites provided value via their traffic. The reason StackOverflow can charge as much as it did is the millions of page views per month it receives, creating value for its job posters.
- appointment scheduler (2018)
I built an appointment scheduler, had no real means of attracting users, shut it down.
- room booking service (2018)
Spin-off of the previous idea, but for meeting rooms. Tried to build the whole thing using Google APIs, eventually got stung by API limitations, gave up (learned not to rely on other's APIs without understanding their limits first).
- graphql API monitoring service (2018/2019)
Traction again, couldn't find users (tried in-person sales for the first time, too).
- site speed monitoring service (2019/2020)
Essentially running google lighthouse as a service. had some users, but fixing all the edge cases around chrome/puppeteer/lighthouse across super slow websites was a total pain.
- uptime monitoring service (2021-current)
Doesn't seem to be as useless as the other projects. Has bought me the MacBook Air M1 I'm typing this comment on now.
Rewrote my old graphql API monitoring service from scratch to monitor APIs, websites and web apps, seems to be going well so far. Planning on adding features for incident management. Content marketing/word of mouth brings in the users.
If you want the long story across several articles:
- 2018: https://maxrozen.com/2018-review-starting-an-internet-busine...
- 2019: https://maxrozen.com/2019-further-reflections-trying-to-star...
I'll definitely check it out!
The headlines frequently make no sense and often have grammatical issues. Yet a couple of times a month someone (often a boomer) interacts with the tweets.
Their confusion bring me immense joy.