Ask HN: Share your side project and your motivation
Tell HackerNews what you're building on the side and why you're building it.
What a lot of people don't seem to realize is that getting your dream job might be one to two connections away from you. Getting a referral for an interview at a company makes you 9 times more likely to get the job than someone who just applies. A lot of people think quantity is the answer to applications and interviews, but I believe its actually quality that counts. Our tool creates relations between your applications, contacts, and companies, helping you create relational pipelines and connections to the right opportunities.
The website is still in beta right now, but hoping to get a v2 version with better content and more automation. Right now, the user still has to do a lot of manual entry, which has led to some drop-off. Happy to answer questions or hear feedback!
JSON BinPack comes from my research at University of Oxford trying to solve the problem of expensive cellular network data transfer in the context of the Internet of Things. The results are pretty good based on the benchmark research I published: https://benchmark.sourcemeta.com.
The idea is that if you build an IoT product that is deployed to remote locations (the middle of the sea, a remote farm, etc) and sends data back to central servers over cellular networks, then JSON BinPack would allow you to potentially save a lot of money.
I published a JS-based proof-of-concept and I'm now working on a production-ready C++ implementation.
Dissertation link: https://www.jviotti.com/assets/dissertation.pdf
Motivation:
In my experience, figuring out and understanding the requirements of technical business apps, e.g. a pharma batch record, is the hardest part of software development. Therefore, I want to introduce a concept of a UI draft, which is a middle ground between the business needs and the end-user software interface.
I decided to pursue this project because it's something that can easily be expanded to include everything (sports, shopping, podcasts, news, videos, coupons, etc) in a natural way, and I managed to find an (imo) awesome domain name. The website has seen long pauses due to difficulties in joining Microsoft Advertising, but I've had better luck with Google, so started working on it again. I'd love to team up with somebody good at marketing, and a developer that's interested in building iOS/Android browsers and Chrome/Firefox extensions since it's very difficult (and sometimes even impossible) to change the default search engine.
I started with my own uptime monitoring as the data source, but will be adding other providers over time (like pingdom, site24x7, etc)
I built it because I'm tired of status pages that say everything is fine when the entire website doesn't load.
Motivation is: I always wanted it and it was fun to build. I since learned Kotlin (for the Android client), Swift (for the iOS client), and React (for the web client). It's awesome to learn so many technologies. Fun!
The motivation was mostly around learning game design, which got out of control trying 3D mechanics to see if an alternative to 'infinity-scroll' was possible.
[1]https://slowcial.notion.site/slowcial/A-Group-Chat-3D-Websit...
Serve your site/blog and sell courses with self hosted server. I wanted to add paid course to my existing site that i was hosting on github and self hosted versions i found were too complex to manage i needed something with minimal operational overhead so i created simple server.