This year in side projects | Hacker News Reader

This year in side projects

ianww.com

136 pointstyppo21 comments

The last year's page link is throwing a 404 error. http://www.ianww.com/blog/blog/2013/12/31/my-year-in-side-pr...

Great side projects btw, if you don't mind me asking, how to do choose to allocate time amongst side projects and keep yourself focused? It seems that with side projects, one challenge is to avoid the trap of too many interesting ones to start working on.

That URL has /blog twice. Remove one and you're ok

Awesome work, I'm going to message you later about how to get into the space industry!

Was inspired by your blog post to do my own for 2014 -> http://thomasdav.is/2014-side-projects/

You guys both inspired me to write my own: http://www.observationalhazard.com/2014/12/my-2014-in-side-p...

Are these all really side projects? It seems like he'd be working full time on his "side projects" - or not doing much else besides working, i guess

There's a good roundup of Side-Projects in Review for 2014. Nathan Barry, Brennan Dunn et al. are featured:

http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/bootstrappers-2014-year-r...

Wow. You've inspired me to work on more side projects in 2015. I'm fascinated by AdDetector. And your Inflation app has seriously made me consider investing my money so it doesn't lose its value. You should consider placing ad links to investment opportunities on the inflation app. Seriously put an affiliate ad to eTrade or Scott Trade or some Bank CD Rates or something.

Sorry to be this guy, but how much are you earning from your side projects? And also how do you know which side projects to work on?

I've done a few side projects before and it hardly earns me any money (< $500 revenue per year). It really destroys my motivation when the cost of hosting/etc are even higher than my revenue.

After digging around OP's site for a minute, it seems he created a really cool database of all the asteroids in the known universe which was acquired by a company that is actually planning to mine asteroids.

I can't imagine what kind of money they paid him for it, but I bet it was /astronomical/.

I bet the payout was out of this world. And that the data is light years ahead of the competition.

I wrote a small bash wrapper for textbelt and use it to notify me when big jobs are done, via

     (execute huge computing job) && textmessage job is done.

It's been extremely useful in terms of reducing the number of brain cycles checking in on jobs take up.

Good takeaway:

"Opportunities have a way of appearing when you build lots of stuff"

How does TextBelt send messages to carrier's emails? Don't carriers usually charge for that? If not, what's the point of using a service like Twillio?

Textbelt uses email-to-SMS to send texts for free. The downside is that for some carriers the texts may appear to come from an email address. Delivery is theoretically unreliable, especially outside the US, because most but not all providers have these email gateways.

As a result I would recommend Twilio for actual businesses, but Textbelt is great for personal stuff and other limited use cases. There are many businesses and monitoring solutions that use Textbelt though. It just depends on your needs.

Twilio is more complete and supports a lot more carriers and doesn't look like it came from an email address.

TextBelt is pretty sweet though if you want basic messaging.

Textbelt uses sendmail under the hood and keeps a list of carrier email domains. So you're actually sending emails to 5552328491@att.com. Depending on the carrier, those text messages look a bit weird.

I checked the source to see what it's doing, and it actually is sending the text to every provider that has an email-to-text address, and therefore probably ignoring the returned failure emails.

It's amazing how many projects you have made in year. How much time do you put into your side projects?

I think the post gives the wrong impression that I work nonstop. I write very little code for Textbelt, Asterank, and Inflation nowadays as they are in maintenance mode (bugfixes, minor features, SEO tweaks, responding to pull requests). Textbelt in particular has benefitted from open source contributions.

Some of the projects are deceptively small. For example, core logic for Asteroid Viewer is less than 200 lines, AdDetector less than 80 [1][2]. I would be surprised if I wrote more than 5k lines of real code this year on the side or more than 10 hrs/wk average, though I tend to work in bursts, not uniformly throughout the year.

[1] https://github.com/typpo/ast3d/blob/master/main.js [2] https://github.com/typpo/ad-detector/blob/master/src/inject....

This is quite amazing. Something i plan to pursue in 2015. A 24 Side Projects Challenge

awesome stuff! you say that you are no longer working on adDetector "due to potential conflicts with my full-time job". I see you work for Google. Can you elaborate on why the conflict?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com