Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

It would be interesting to include:

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I wanted a static site generator that could have a CMS so that I could pass the sites over to friends or clients so they could update it. Essentially, a not-terrible Wordpress that wasn't blog centric and bloated.

http://www.webhook.com

I built it over the summer, funded it through Kickstarter and have slowly been building a nice little client base of recurring revenue. The code itself is open source so it's self-hostable and free, but we provide a quick one-line deploy hosted solution as well.

Probably the most fun bit has been trying to just remove the barrier of troublesome local installation for these kinds of things. Usually people go with PHP because you can just run it everywhere, but that still requires setting up apache/mysql somewhere. We use Firebase and Node, so were able to get the entire package installed through a downloadable app. I think we probably have the fasted installation available for this kind of thing.

I work on it mostly full-time, then design client sites with it on the side.

This is fucking cool as shit. Thank you so much for posting it--will definitely be trying to use it in the future.

This is really awesome! I looked quickly at your self-hosting guide and I was wondering is the only option to deploy the static website Google Cloud Storage? I would like to setup webhook on a Heroku with free-tier dynos and deploy to AWS because those are the services I already use and love. If it's not possible, do you think I could fork your project and integrate AWS deployment somewhat easily?

The reason we went with GCS is because AWS limits you to 100 static sites (buckets). That's a block for our hosted solution.

The code is MIT, so do with it what you want. May be a little bit more complicated then just switching out the build layer, but if you can get something working that's configurable, feel free to send in a PR.

A quick and easy way to send files from the command line.

https://wsend.net

Tech Used: Bash, Node

Statistics: 612 users, 7 paying customers

History: I started working on this in Jan 2013, I wanted a quick way to send files from the command line and get a URL. I later found after building this backend, I, or anyone could expand upon it in many ways

https://github.com/abemassry/wsend

https://github.com/abemassry/wsend-gpg

https://github.com/abemassry/wsend-twitter-card

A little more about how it was built is in this post

http://abemassry.com/blog/2014/02/14/building-wsend/

I have some more ideas as well, if anyone has any ideas or wants to work on this with me I would definitely be down for it.

Just logged in to say wsend is one of my favorite "do want thing well" tool.

Interesting – do you know sendfile? http://fex.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/saft/

I've been developing the stack for The ContentMine (http://contentmine.org). In the next month or so, we will start scraping the entire scientific literature as it is published each day, and processing it through our 'fact extraction' pipeline.

Done so far:

- I've defined a JSON format for declarative web scrapers (ScraperJSON: https://github.com/ContentMine/scraperJSON)

- made a Node library for web scraping with ScraperJSON scrapers (thresher: https://github.com/ContentMine/thresher)

- as well as a command-line client (quickscrape: https://github.com/ContentMine/quickscrape)

- and a small library of ScraperJSON scrapers for scientific publishers that is about to start expanding rapidly (https://github.com/ContentMine/journal-scrapers).

Next step is to build the web interface that will let people compose data mining pipelines. Imagine something like:

- "give me a feed of all the articles in journals with 'Cancer' in the title that use HeLa cells in their methods"

- "alert me when a new paper comes out that mentions species X alongside a geographical reference"

- "find all the papers that mention my software in the methods but don't cite me"

I've long thought about doing this with arXiv to determine if you could extract results and synthesize answers to questions. Is anything like that part of the goals for The ContentMine?

Yes. We're trying to build the toolset so that the end product is not predetermined, but that we empower people to make whatever they can imagine. In about 6 months time it should be relatively easy to implement your idea on top of what we build. arXiv will of course be included :)

A collection of IPython notebooks for music information retrieval (MIR). Work in progress: https://github.com/stevetjoa/stanford-mir

We began using these as instructional material at a summer workshop on MIR at CCRMA, Stanford [https://ccrma.stanford.edu/workshops/music-information-retri...]. For many years, we used Matlab, but we decided it was finally time to move over to Python. The GitHub repo includes a Vagrantfile that allows you to use Vagrant to provision a Virtualbox VM with all the audio libraries preloaded.

For included technologies, see the Vagrant box website: https://vagrantcloud.com/stevetjoa/boxes/stanford-mir/versio...

Your feedback, including pull requests and issues (and stars!), are most welcome.

Aside from my startup (which fills most of my evenings), my side projects never pan out. They're never completed, or end up being too difficult to complete. I consider them learning opportunities more than marketable projects.

Currently, I'm way out of my comfort zone: I'm on the way to build a proof of concept for an optical computer. No simulations, real hardware. My hope is that I can build a few passive logic gates, and go from there. Without a shadow of a doubt, I'll fail. There are a million factors I didn't consider or underestimate, and my knowledge of things like laser physics and optics is marginal at best. But I'm learning a lot from it, which is the main goal. I also just want to see if it can't be done. From what I could gather, there is far too little serious research being done into the whole field. If all else fails, at least I'll know why that is.

And hey, any side project where you get to play with lasers on your kitchen table has got to be a good one, right?

I'm currently working on Kobra, a realtime collaborative code editor, mostly during my lunch breaks.

https://Kobra.io

Tech Used: AngularJS, Firebase, Firepad, EasyRTC

Statistics: Just broke 700 registered users and 5000 file collaborated on. Have made a little over $2000 from 125 people going Pro.

History: I started back in December, but gave up too soon. I've since relaunched it as a smaller product and am super happy with how it's been received. Here's some blog posts about my journey. Please let me know if you have any questions for me!

https://mattkremer.com/how-i-got-2200-pre-signups-for-my-saa...

https://mattkremer.com/how-i-made-2033-in-4-days-while-valid...

This is really god damn cool. Totally going to start using this every time I talk about code on my social networks. Thanks a ton.

Thanks bnb! It's much appreciated :) Shoot me an email if you want to chat with me about it: matt@mattkremer.com

Dude - this is sweet. Like codeshare...but better. Thanks for sharing with us!

> To celebrate us not getting a YC interview

I loled

Gotta make something out of it, lol. :)

I got tired of the existing tiling window managers and their lack of documentation, so I made my own that behaves like vim. It's called howm and can be found here:

https://github.com/HarveyHunt/howm

There was a thread on HN about it a while ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8241978), I have fixed a lot of the issues since then, most notably:

  - Moving away from needing to recompile every time you change an option is _nearly_ done.

  - Howm can now be scripted by sending commands over a UNIX socket.

  - I have split howm into multiple source files (I will merge this tonight when I have finished the docs).

  - I added some nice gifs to the documentation.

hamsterdb http://hamsterdb.com

a embedded key-value database with storage structures and algorithms similar to column store databases. basically you can create your own column store database in your application.

Right now i'm busy making the next release, and writing a research paper about database compression.

This sounds very interesting and I've been wanting to do something similar in Haskell.

https://cronitor.io

It's a simple monitoring service for cron and other scheduled jobs (also works well for heartbeat monitoring).

It was launched on HN a couple months ago. We've been slowly improving our keyword rankings on a few key terms, and are finally to the point where we are consistently signing up new users everyday.

We've also been surprised to see the users who upgrade to paid accounts are split pretty evenly between the $6.99 plan and the $19.99. Our pre-launch guess was that it would be a 90/10 split on those plans.

I think the service is a cool idea, but you have people running cURL requests in a crontab? Heaven forbid something is wonky with the DNS, or your service gets compromised, or any number of things and that machine is basically 100% owned! Convenience or not, I don't think I could ever bring myself to commit that crime.

A curl protip is to specify a timeout with -m. An important detail, to be sure.

I've been learning Swift and am working on two different apps:

- A London Bus app that improves discovery of potential locations you can get to easily (instead of just routing from your current location to somewhere specific)

- A London Underground app that does smarter routing around problems on the network and is designed for "power users"

I'm also looking at the potential of opening a community cooperative run greengrocers near where I live because I really struggle to get fresh, quality and cheap vegetables both in the area, around where I work and on my commute to and from work.

- I decided to throw a pile of my stalled projects together and build a forum framework for PHP. Almost all current forums in PHP are pretty terrible, bloated, and non-modular, so I thought why not have a framework which is designed for building forums, imageboards, comment systems, etc?

stats: none, technology: currently Slim Framework and Composer, and that's about it. history: started it about a week ago.

- A threaded link aggregator. I posted it in these threads a couple of times, but it's been offline for a while for a complete rewrite. The basic gist is, you post a link, and you can open a 'thread' of outbound links from the page as well, with the idea of easily being able to follow a trail of references to an original source and discover a greater, context-specific set of links for a subject. I've rewritten it completely at least three times. If anyone is interested, the scraper I wrote for it is here: https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug. I have no idea when it will be worth showing to anyone.

stats: nobody, technology: Laravel 4, history: been working on it for about a year.

- Rewriting a school project from last semester (a project manager in C#) into something decent.

stats: none, technology: C#, sqlite, history: haven't touched it in a while, because it turns out pasting stuff into a text file in Notepad++ is way easier.

I've just began working in https://spate.io again.

There are no statistics to show yet as nobody is using it, but I'm hoping I can change that soon.

The API and the website are two separate Flask apps whilst the websocket server is implemented using node. For now the API and the websocket component communicate using redis' pubsub functionality for the MVP stage, but I have a vague suspicion this will have to be the first thing to change eventually. Will have to test.

I like your website and what you're offering is really cool but I think it would be better if you specified how you much it costs or if there are any limits. I understand it's in beta and maybe you don't have pricing figured out yet, but as a potential user, I'd like to know more before signing up. "Create a free account" with no pricing page is scary. It tells the potential user nothing. I'd rather have "Free while in beta" with an explanation of future plans/pricing and limits. Otherwise, it looks really neat.

Thanks for the comments!

Definitely agree, I've felt the same way on other sites. Pricing is the next thing on my list to do actually, will hopefully get that figured out this weekend.

I am building https://www.rdrbot.com using:

* ASP.NET MVC 5, Knockoutjs, Momentjs, jQuery and Bootstrap

* Azure Websites, Azure SQL, Azure DocumentDB, Azure Caching

* OAuth 2 providers (Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft Live)

The idea is to make a site that aggregates multiple sources into one so I can try to keep up with RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Right now its somewhat a glorified RSS reader. I dunno if I will ever monetize it, something I just wanted to make.

I'm working on a new model of how online discussion is done by developing a new monetizing strategy which shares ad revenue with users who bring original and quality content to the board. In essence, insightful comments which spark meaningful discussion are rewarded with real money (or an option to gift that money to a charity or another user).

https://whoaverse.com

Built mostly on .NET stack.

I build and sell high-resolution posters of the sky at

http://greaterskies.com

I've been at it for some years now, and it's been featured here a couple of times. The backend (astronomical computations and generation of the PDF) I implemented in Common Lisp. It's still tiny: I get around 20 visits a day, sell around a poster a day, and can't figure out how to make it grow.

If you're converting 5% of new visitors into customers, you're already doing well - setup some paid search on long-tail terms. Unique anniversary gifts, unique birthday gifts for outdoorsy folk, etc.

Active with:

(http://tractionengine.co) A small SaaS for publishers/websites that want their direct ad sales automated (window shopping, purchasing, serving). Runs on a subdomain or root of your liking, branding plus). Works with several payment gateways (we no touch your money), allows real time previewing of slots, publishers can customize the look, texts and wording on the site, got an API, plays with DFP etc. Growth so far is strictly word of mouth (hence no attention to the marketing site), caught the attention of some massive publishers hoping on now. Paying customers. 0 hours/week for most weeks. [AngularJS/FatFree/GoLang] About 8/9 months in.

A news aggregator engine in python for anyone to build their news aggregator upon. Scores using social media vitality, hits & age. Example user http://www.topnews.co.zw [Python(flask)] Runs well on Heroku. Work on it here and there (by span of months)

More brewing...

Full rewrite of The Weathertron iOS app (http://theweathertron.com/) from Angular.js + ClojureScript to React.js + ClojureScript.

The original Weathertron is still runnin' happily for about 40,000 iOS users from a single $5/month Digital Ocean VPS (backend server is written in Clojure).

The motivation for the full rewrite is React.js and the latest Android OS inclusion of a decent WebKit. React's virtual DOM makes rendering more efficient than Angular.js on slower devices and the recent WebKit supports all of the responsive CSS we used in the original iOS version.

Since I don't carry a smartphone at all, I also recently released a free Weathertron Google Chrome extension so that I could use the app myself: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/weathertron/jljkok...

Are you using React.js directly through JS interop, or something like Om or Reagent to wrap it? What is your opinion of the various options available for React.js in ClojureScript?

So many things, that I have yet to finish:

* A toy programming language of my own. Been working on it on and off (but mosty off) for the past 2 years. Every couple of months or so, I will go on for a couple of days to add a few features (last additions were functions and if conditions). I have learned a ton while doing this project, mostly about programming language implementation. My ultimate goal in this project is compiling the language to brainfuck. Useless I know, but a very good learning experience. Using C# for the initial version, but will transition to a bootstrapped compiler when the language is mature enough.

* I recently started playing with Event Sourcing, and I'm writing a PHP library for it.

* A collaborative, real-time todo app using Laravel and Ratchet for the real-time stuff. PHP.

* Some time ago, I inherited the maintenance of Testify.php, a simple PHP unit testing framework. I had great plans for it, but never came around to execute them. Maybe someday.

Our company has had a side project going for the last couple months called Beluga. It's a simple, straight-forward task sharing iOS app for small teams. We just made it free today for a limited time, have been getting some awesome traction so far.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beluga-shared-tasks./id83683...

Technology: Django, AngularJS, django-tastypie, Mandrill, iOS (obviously)

Statistics: Almost 300 new users so far today...

History: We built this to satisfy a need for ourselves, instead of sending each other texts and Hangout messages all day with small tasks, we decided it could make for a really simple app that could do exactly what we want and nothing more. Turns out it's also great for sharing to-dos with your significant other...

I am working on a project that lets you monitor your web page or hybrid's apps rendering performance

- http://github.com/axemclion/browser-perf. To quickly test your website, check out http://www.perfmonkey.com/#/trynow

You can use the metrics from this tool to find out which CSS or JS make a webage janky, which action caused multiple paints, etc.

Completely written in Node, can run as a node module and a CLI.

You can get graphs like this - http://nparashuram.com/perfslides/perfjankie.

- Based on Chromium's perf framework, needed a way to monitor performance everytime I deploy a site, automatically.

I am working on a newsletter for remote work opportunities. As a developer you can sign up, and (will be able to) set some filters like what technologies you are interested in, salary, if you want to work full or parttime, what time zone you are in etc... As soon as a company submits a job which matches your criterea (and only then) you will receive a mail.

right now a simple mailchimp form is up on http://remoteworknewsletter.com, and the full version with all filters will be up soon.

I wrote about how i launched the idea on HN a while back: http://blog.remoteworknewsletter.com/2014/10/15/how-to-valdi...

Still working on a Python-like systems programming language (Rust-like memory management -- no GC, compiler in Python targeting LLVM IR).

In my march towards getting exceptions working (using Intel's Itanium exception ABI), I'm currently hacking on option types and memory management. In particular, trying to figure out how to sensibly insert destructor calls for expiring owned pointers. So far, I clean up just before "return" nodes, but this doesn't do the right thing (a) in the face of reassignments (old object stays alive), and consequently (b) in longer-running loops. I think I can do sufficiently smart liveness analsysis, but I haven't figured out a clean algorithm yet.

Code is still private for now, while I do some more experimentation to see if I can get things to work.

I'm working on a simple web app that allows construction companies to send estimates and invoices by email and text and get paid immediately by cc or ach. - laravel, twilio, balanced payments - About 70% done - Started this project in Sept, work on it for about 15 - 20 hours a week.

Public Artfound: The single largest collection of geotagged graffiti/street art

http://publicart.io

- Rails backend API and iOS app frontend

- Nearly 500k images added monthly

- This is the current iteration for a 16 week research project of graffiti/street art related software projects

I like this idea and wanted to make it (or something approximating it) myself, but I got hung up on the concern that a location-centric "Who's getting up in $CITY?" webapp would, after achieving some traction, turn it into a useful tool to facilitate the citation/arrest of some of my favorite artists and writers.

On one hand, all of these pieces already show up on Instagram nearly instantaneously, usually geotagged or at least in identifiable locations. But I just couldn't shake the feeling that collating that data might have unintended consequences.

Few things:

- http://wwwino.pl - wine search engine for Polish market. [Python/Pyramid/ElasticSearch]

- http://betafrontpage.com/ - Startup frontpages easily browse lots of startups and gather ideas for your own product/startup. [Python/Pyramid/Docker]

- https://thingr.com/ - Collaborative Knowledge Organizer. Early stage. [Python/Pyramid/PostgreSQL/ElasticSearch/Celery/MicroServices/Docker/NLTK]

- Python microservice framework. A work in progress on small personal-use framework to run micro services that help in everyday life/work.

Everything actually first announced here right now.

I love threads like this - so inspiring. At the same time, reminds me how much of a lazy ass I am. I have like 10 side projects that I have about 0.005% complete right now. Any advice for a guy like me? (besides, "stop being a lazy ass", I already know that...haha)

>Any advice for a guy like me?

I kind of have the same problem, but I find I get a lot further if I just pick one thing and run with it for a while.

I've had the same problem too. Focus on one project and work on it at least 30 minutes every day. It will be much easier to get motivation once you'll see progress

Makes sense - 30 min a day is manageable for sure. It's just a matter of actually sticking to it. (I realize how ridiculous I sound right now)

But I think you are quite right about finding motivation with visible progress.

I better get crackin!

Maybe try to release something VERY early and collect feedback from people. That way you know EXACTLY what to focus on because people will use it. Motivation level: Awesome!

Actually because I'm in kind of sabbatical, my current side project is my main one: pretty Easy privacy, http://pep-project.org – no one pays me for that. The thing I'm hacking now is a preview app for Android based on K-9.

I'm continuing my work of research in language theory, modeling theory and automation of software development, see http://fdik.org/yml and http://fdik.org/pyPEG Today I'm working on Intrinsic, a language with variable syntax while runtime. pyPEG is the prototype of the Parser Framework for that.

I've been working on a site called Sibbell (http://sibbell.com/).

At the core, the idea was to provide a way to get notified when GitHub projects you use (star or watch) publish new releases. Keeping you in the know when features get added or that bug that's about to kill your Monday gets fixed. Seems like something GitHub would do, but the only way you can get notified about releases through GitHub is to 'watch' a repo and then you get notified for every issue, comment, pull request, etc.. Got some pretty good reception on HN and have some major improvements and additions coming in the next week or so.

Technology: Django, Celery, GitHub API

Sounds like a great idea, and you built a great landing page, imho! But what is sib in sibbell.com? gitbell is available!

Working on http://www.websrvr.in/ . An app which lets you host websites using dropbox. Just create a new folder in your dropbox to create a website.

Technologies used: Rails, Go, Node.js, Beanstalk, Postgresql, Redis, Nginx

I have created more than 10 content management systems in the past and every time I create one, I have to write code for a web host. I hope this is the final webhost, it compresses and minifies your html/js/css and also has plans to handle other preprocessors (markdown, less, coffescript etc,.)

I have been chipping away at the code for the last 4 months and it has been very rewarding.

I'm currently working full time on building a funding platform for FLO works at Snowdrift.coop

The backend is Haskell using Yesod. The front-end is not very interesting so far - we're sticking with progressive enhancement for a host of reasons, and haven't focused much on enhancing yet.

We don't get a tremendous amount of traffic yet, as we're not launched. There's a lot of writing and discussion on the site, though. Been working on it - mostly part time - for about two years now, with deep involvement of one non-technical co-founder, and on-and-off involvement of varying depth from others.

We're aiming to be launched by the end of the year.

I've wanted to get back into drawing web comics for a while. I also love DMing (Leading D&D games) so I decided to combine the two into a crowdsourced adventure comic with Reddit-style voting.

http://omnomzom.com It's a LAM(PHP) stack on DigitalOcean, nothing fancy. I specifically kept it simple so that I could get it out the door. Even though the tech behind it isn't anything amazing or useful I'm having a lot of fun drawing comics and seeing what people come up with!

The site (and my drawing skills) are still very in beta - only 21 users so far, mostly my friends & family.

So many things.. but mostly working on these right now

* A tool that generates Markdown API docs from Python files

* A whitebox system scanner that reveals problems with your server configuration. Not your average blackbox security scanner.

* A lightweight service bus without all the enterprise and java around it. It's basically a bunch of connectors that receive or poll for incoming events (rss feeds, email, trello, XMLRPC/SOAP/REST requests), maps it, filters it and then sends it out again. I'll be using this on something like a Raspberry Pie to do some home automation and such. Main goals are that it should be super easy to add new rules, connectors, etc.

I've been working on a todo app that is powered by Slack (slack.com, the service). It identifies slack @mentions and #channel names and allows you to search by them. New items are created directly from chat.

I built it because nobody on our team likes to use Redmine issues, because its so bloated. Slack is adored by our team, so it made sense to connect the two dots together.

Tech: I wrote the prototype in PHP+Parse.com as backend. Realized parse was too slow, and then shifted to Rails+postgres.

Its called Roy, and is available at https://github.com/captn3m0/roy

http://juicytracks.com/

A 'front page' of manually curated songs (good for coding to). I hope to begin playing with ML to identify tastemakers and improve track rankings (but first I need some users).

It was pure Bacbone but now switched to a React views with Backbone router & models for data syncing. Backend is Express + Mongo.

Listens are tracked with extreme granularity using Socket.io so I can differentiate between songs with an average listen time of 20 seconds vs. 2 minutes.

No real stats. Just recently got it to a decent point. Need to sex up the UI and branding next.

I have been working on a reminder site which can send email, text message, voiced phone call and physical mailed postcard reminder at a schedule time on recurring basis or one time ad hoc basis like a broadcast. The site is called HelloReminder - https://www.helloreminder.com

There is also an open source Swift project that I am actively maintaining on github. It is a port of Underscorejs which gives helpful utility methods useful when programming in Swift. The project is on github - github.com/ankurp/Dollar.swift

This looks like a really cool setup. My only constructive thought: It'd be really nice to have an option for text messages that was lower-powered than $10/month for 100 of them. I could never come up with three reminders per day, every day, that I'd want to get texted about, but if there were some option for ~10 a month – say, for birthdays and when a bunch of my bills are due – I'd be all over it. I just couldn't pay the same amount I pay Dropbox for 1 TB of storage in exchange for 90 text messages I'd never use.

I'm working on a shell tool for managing tinydns + git + Apache + daemontools.

Long story short. It's a nice frontend written in Perl that parses your configuration files and based on templates modifies them.

So this gives you the opportunity to do :

    server-tools repo add https://github.com/any/repo.git --domain www.new-site.com --site html --site-home path/to/public

which will clone git repo, add www.new-site.com as a domain for this server ( modify tinydns config ) and create a new vhost for apache that has a root path/to/public.

Exploring real-time geospatial relationships between data.

Tech: Kafka, Apache Camel, Storm.

Recently started as part of the hackzurich hackathon; essentially: easy access to geo-analytics using existing datasets. Quite similar to the ArcGIS Server (with pluggable Geo-data feeds) in theory.

Demo from the hackathon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2TkuzsUG9U (in this version: map tweets with mentions to origin + destination, analyse for sentiment -> show sentiment towards a certain area)

Anything I can try using? rememberlenny @ gmail if there is. I'd like to try with graffiti.

graffiti? and not yet; but soon-ish. I'll shoot you an email once things get there.

I wrote http://scridx.com a screenplay search engine on christmas last year. It's doing a decent amount of daily traffic. Go server backed by Elasticsearch running on a $5/month VPS. 300 daily uniques at the moment. I've been interested in screenwriting for a long time and that really starts with reading screenplays. All the websites out there were really horrible, I felt like writers had really been neglected in the digital age.

I launched http://paasifier.co last month. It's a open platform where developers can find the best Platform-as-a-Service for their apps by selecting runtime (Java, Ruby, Go, etc.) and database (MySQL, MongoDB, etc.). In the first days I got more than 1K visits and I'm trying to monetize it by using affliate marketing for PaaS Providers. The platform was built with Rails + PostgreSQL

Nice work. Could you share some ideas, for a small site like yours, how did you market it at the beginning to get your first 1K visits, how much effort have you put into marketing?

Build a web-app (and soon mobile apps) for emacs' org-mode.

  - Haskell
  - No stats, still building
  - Fed up w/ such an excellent tool being so unusable on
    anything but Emacs (prevents non-emacs users from
    collaborating).

Relevant hackage link for those interested: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/orgmode-parse

I wanted a way to be able to use SMS to control apps and devices around me. So, I built http://www.getsmscmd.com/ using .NET on Azure, Twilio and an MQTT broker.

Some more info: https://github.com/dmarlow/Sms2Mqtt

http://dmarlow.github.io/

I would suggest you disable the auto-playing video on your website, it's really annoying when a website does this, especially since it's so far down the page that I couldn't figure out the source of the music at first!

Sorry about that. You're absolutely right. Looks like the pages gets the last command sent. Someone had issued a "play" command and caused other pages to also get that command upon loading.

I am working on an iPad application that generate Apple Watch applications through a "Drag and Drop" interface.

Current prototype use Objective-c and Parse.

Since programmation is no magic, I always wondered if I could create an engine that generate native application on the fly. I built a quick prototype containing a tableview filled from an API with a detail page.

It worked so well that I am now working night and weekends to build a complete engine and a builder.

I'm woking on a AI/NLP interface to connect enterprises to customers through whatsapp and other messaging apps.

I'm using Python/Django and Yowsup (a python lib that reverse engineered whatsapp's protocol) with PostgreSQL/Redis.

I wonder what you guys think about building a company around this idea. I have a prototype and a couple of customers, so the market is there, but I don't know if whatsapp could sue me or something.

I wouldn't worry so much about WhatsApp suing you. If they don't like what you're doing (or others for that matter) they can more just change their protocol.

The problem with building a company around such a solution rather is this: Is there a market? Sure, having a machine automatically answer customer requests is a nice parlour trick but what's the benefit for the customer?

Just saving money on call centre agents? Or does the software actually solve a real problem in a novel way that can't be tackled using existing solutions?

I don't think whatsapp will change their protocol too much, as they'll break millions of clients installed in old phones.

The benefit for the company looks obvious to me: save money on call centre / community management. Deliver a service to millions of mobile users without requiring them to download your app (just adding a phone number to the agenda).

The benefit for the end-user: having a conversational interface with a system is probably the lowest barrier entry to that system for a human. Everybody knows how to chat using whatsapp, but not everybody knows (nor is willing to learn) how to use your "user-friendly" GUI.

This is very interesting idea. I met two realtors last week who use whatsapp to answer questions from current and potential clients. My gut instinct is there is definitely a market for it. How do I contact you ?

ericmarcos.p at gmail

1. Monkey HTTP Server: scalable HTTP server for Linux

   http://monkey-project.com
   http://github.com/monkey/monkey

2. Duda I/O: web services framework to build scalable services (in C Language)

   http://duda.io
   http://github.com/monkey/duda

3. Pi-Cloud: free cloud for Raspberry Pi's:

   http://pi-cloud.monkey.io

I'm currently working on a Database Forms designer for Linux.

It started off as a small side project to see how easily I could get a quick n' dirty db app put together on gtk, but it's kinda taken on a life of its own and grown to something a lot more than I first intended.

I'm just starting to add Python scripting support now.

But I am enjoying it.

gtk and Objective C

http://www.data-forms-action.com

http://stationgenius.com/

Find local radio stations and talk radio programs using your phone.

A friend who travels for work quite a bit likes to listen to local radio stations for weather and other information. So we built this to easily find stations wherever you are.

- Using Flask, Postgres+PostGIS, jQuery, and Bootstrap

- Still at a very early stage. Appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks!

My team built a spin off project to create an office directory / floor plan for your small business / co-working space. http://www.floorplan.io/

Tech-stack wise it's not all that interesting, but we've seen it help a lot of small companies on-board people / meet their coworkers more easily, so that's been fun.

What a great idea - I wish every employer did this. A secret of mine : I always carry a notebook at work, when I start a new job I have made a habit of sketching the floor plan myself and labeling it with names and positions of the people I meet. This has helped me tremendously... I gotta say this seems like a tool that businesses NEED to make new hires more comfortable.

I work on GoLearn as a side project. It's a general-purpose machine learning library written in Go.

https://github.com/sjwhitworth/golearn

I started it because I wanted to revise some data mining algorithms, I've since moved on to an unrelated career, but I'm still truly addicted to contributing...

I'm crafting a time tracking app for Google Drive, https://whathaveidone.today.

Stack: Python/Flask + MongoDB Statistics: 60 signups, 1000 pageviews so far. History: my friend came up with an idea and I coded it as it seemed like a couple of evenings (it turned couple of weeks actually).

Handy.js (http://handyjs.org) - a simple template for nodejs apps

I started playing around with nodejs about 18 months ago and I decided to put all the common functionality of all my projects (user management, cron, backup, content management, etc) into one package that I could maintain separately.

It is built with

Node.js Redis MySQL

ive checked out handy a few times, very cool!

Notation Training http://notationtraining.com

Sinatra app running on Linode server + heavy use of VexFlow (https://github.com/0xfe/vexflow).

It is up and running for few years now, getting around 200 - 300 users a day.

I've been working on a chess engine. It can already whoop me.

https://github.com/fogleman/Chess

It's written in C and implements the Universal Chess Interface (UCI) so it works with most chess GUIs. I've had it playing on FICS some as a guest named GuestEngine.

Building an advanced hockey statistics web tool in Meteor.

More of an excuse to learn Meteor than to really make something too useful.

The best way to learn a new language or framework is to do something you enjoy doing in my opinion. It'll make everything much more fun for you and even then, you never know if it could evolve into a bigger project even if it started from something that was just for fun.

Exactly my reasoning. I love hockey so it's much more fun to me than building the canonical todo-app, etc.

Realms Wiki: http://realms.io - Git based Markdown wiki inspired by Gollum with side by side preview like Ghost/Stackeditor. Also support for collaboration via Firepad/TogetherJS

Backend: Python, Flask, Dulwich Frontend/Editor: Bootstrap 3, Handlebars, Ace

I've been working on http://vanitypro.herokuapp.com

The easiest way to announce new stuff and updates to users/customers of webapps.

Something like what Intercom does, but simpler, better and easier.

P.S: What's live now is a working v0.001 MVP. More to come, yet.

I've been working on a little quizzing SaaS: http://jquizzy.com

Tech: Laravel on HHVM + Postgres plus a lot of little things.

History: Did a soft launch of the beta sometime ago on HN. No comments here but drove a bunch of traffic and feedback so I'm iterating.

I am really interested in idea of online quizzes. Do you need any help? If yes, how would i contact you?

sid at ssiddharth dot com or sid at jquizzy dot com. Thanks!

Dependency Monitor - https://depmonitor.com/ - notifies you of new releases of Python, Ruby and Node.js packages

Built with Python and Django with the goal of scratching my own itch of getting passive notifications for various packages I use.

A lightweight (SPV) bitcoin client. mac/linux/bsd.

https://github.com/bit-c/bitc http://imgur.com/pRLs1ps

Just beginning an ios app based on that, a block browser.

Flocal : http://goflocal.com - Craigslist meets Tinder

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flocal/id894416534?mt=8&uo=4

A fully customizable dashboard, like geckoboard, new relic, etc. They all fall short on building an actually useful tool for monitoring (they look pretty, but that's about it). I plan on having it be open source soon as I believe the market for something like this is too full.

http://frontb.in/ | Modern Pastebin for the Front End Developer.

Technology: SPA, Node-js, MongoDB

Statistics: About 300 Pageviews a Day

History: Needed a simple way for jsonlint, jshint, pastebin, compressing, remove whitespace basically a quick tools for the web developer

http://literakiapp.com | scrabble like words mobile game (iOS / Android) for polish market.

Technology: Phonegap, Node.js, Backbone.js

Statistics: 100 - 150 new users sign daily / 500 active players daily.

http://www.passiveincomeaid.com/

I am trying to organize all here and there posts with passive/semipassive side projects.

I am adding new content from threads like this, so keep them coming ;)

Writing and recording an album.

Spokes

http://spokesapp.co

It's coffee networking with a twist and I should be launching towards the end of the year.

Sign-up now and I'll let you know as soon as the beta starts.

Tech used: Swift, Node.JS, Koa.js, Neo4j.

I REALLY like this idea. There are a number of times that I've wished something like this was out there (but not so meetup-esque). Is this planned to be a global/national/local type deal or what?

Also, just FYI, I had to resize my screen to make the submit clickable.

I'm planning to launch in London for an early private beta, but when I launch publicly I will launch globally (well, at least the US + UK as they're both english speaking) as it seems uncomfortable to launch a product online and then also have to gate it substantially.

Thanks for the tip RE: submit button - what browser + OS was that? I've only been testing on OSX so far!

http://nirmataoss.github.io/workflow/

A ZooKeeper and Curator based distributed workflow management library that enables distributed task workflows.

Learn how to dance using slow motion and/or looped sections of videos. Using angularjs and html5, working on a Go backend api - http://loopdago.com

I've been working on a web crawler for a while. Once it's done,I'll start building a web search engine based on the crawler. It's not been in public yet.

I use C,OpenMPI,Pthread,Valgrind on Linux.

http://psprices.com/ | Sony Playstation PSN prices and discounts aggregator/alerting service

- Django/MySQL/Bootstrap/Knockout

- 1k visits a day

Problem: PGP isn't usable!

Now my grandma can send encrypted messages with https://encrypt.to

* Technology Rails, JS, HTML, CSS

* Statistics 1452 messages successfully delivered

That's a great idea and execution. I'd consider a "Show HN"-posting on its own, so it won't get buried.

I'd add a captcha though to reduce potential misuse.

My primary "thing" right now is a conference paper. On the side, I'm trying to work through a whole bloody lot of textbooks.

Building an iOS video calling proof of concept using tokbox and pubnub.

Building a breathalyzer using my Pi and grove board (w tr grove gas sensor)

I built https://learnfrontend.com as an effort for me to A) teach people front-end development and B) to quit my consultant job so I can focus on making a difference in people's lives. The site features a news aggregate, videos, articles, goals, and interactive training platform.

The site is built on Symfony 2.5, PHP 5.5.x, Postgres, AngularJS 1.2.x, and SCSS. I use Jenkins for CI, Doctrine2 as the ORM, Redis for session I/O, Composer/Bower for dependency resolution, GitHub for documents, tickets, code reviews (pull requests to my self). HAProxy is on standby for the need to load balance and I have a job on Jenkins to scale up and down to a box if needed. I'm currently adding a Docker/Vagrant setup to I can easily manage dev environments (I don't think I'll do the same for production, we'll see). Stripe handles payments, I bought some cheap SSL cert (Stripe handles PCI info outside the server I/O). New Relic is used to monitor both QA, production and my jenkins deploy box. DNS is handled by GoDaddy. I have a Cron handling the news aggregate refresh, diff logic to populate new articles to a mobile curator app I built, and an approve/deny system that determines which articles are allowed to be propagated to the users. Videos are hosted through a third party service and assets internally are handled stored through S3 with CloudFront URL signing assets.

Although it just released, I have received a large amount of important feedback thats going to dramatically change the site. This includes offering more to the user for free, create more interactive components (my writing is too boring / too technical), and improve the marketing (showing the actual tools). I have some POCs in the works for a simulated IDE on edge Chrome/Firefox (uses WebWorkers to observe stackoverflow-able code w/o crashing browser, ScalaJS and Angular port on ScalaJS as MVC frontend; the experience is very much a level up from CodeAcademy's IDE-tutorial).

I'm also in a transitionary period where I want to build the new tools and reconstruct the existing ones in Scala (using Play as the framework). I have more time than before since I saved a significant amount of money to pursue this (I built v1 part time, 30 hours a week for 6 weeks with 30k lines of code added). The force behind this decision is I want more experience with functional programming while leveraging what I know already (JVM / Java).

One of the critical experiences I've had was actually materializing an idea and shipping it. Failing fast and often is an important strategy that's working for me after launching v1.

TL;DR: Built an e-learning site. I learned from failures. Building next version thats going to be rainbows and shit (thats the plan at least).

Use the search box at the bottom of the page. This question has been asked way too many times.

I don't see any posts about this in the last month - that's quite a while in the hobby project world.

I think its good having this kind of thread at some period of time. People build things everytime, its nice to see and share them.

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