Ask HN: What side projects are you working on? - ericthegoodking
======
japhyr
This is the first time I am mentioning this publicly, but I have been working
on Educator News. It's a clone of HN for the education profession.

It's been attempted before, and was well received. The people who made it
previously were not programmers, so when it immediately outgrew the platform
on which it was built, it disappeared. I think I can do it right. :)

I am planning a soft launch this weekend. After working out any immediate
bugs, I will do a Show HN.

~~~
krapp
Sounds nice. Are you using the original HN code?

~~~
japhyr
No, I'm building it in Django. I have been looking for a well-defined project
to build, and this ended up being a perfect project. It's inspired by HN, and
to everyone here it's a clone of HN, but most educators who end up using the
site will probably never know HN exists.

It's a completely open project, and if things go well I'm going to write a
Django tutorial based on building EN. I'm going to write the tutorial as part
of another project I started this year,
[http://introtopython.org](http://introtopython.org). It's been a busy year.
:)

------
kohanz
Automated NBA game recaps with more context than your typical boxscore.

Note: I am not a web developer, so this project has been mainly to teach
myself a new technology (Rails, primarily). It is very much a work in
progress. Also, clearly, I am not a designer and am not really sweating that
for now.

[http://recappd.com/games/2014/2/24](http://recappd.com/games/2014/2/24)

~~~
sehr
Site seems to be down.

But when you're finished, hawk this on /r/nba. Lots of devoted fans there, and
contributions are very much appreciated.

~~~
kohanz
Thanks for the feedback! It's running on a single droplet on DigitalOcean, so
my guess is it can't handle even the slight amount of traffic I'm getting from
this HN post. Beyond server-side caching, I think my code is fairly non-
optimal.

If anyone has any tips for serving up a site like this with limited resources,
feel free to teach me.

~~~
sehr
I don't know if you're aware, but the community section of Digital Ocean has
some informative articles on stuff like this, there was actually one posted
today about scaling Ruby on Rails applications.

Either way, it's a good problem to have!

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community](https://www.digitalocean.com/community)

~~~
kohanz
Thanks for the link, I will definitely take a look at that. I have found some
of those articles to be useful, although external blog posts and gists have
proved just as valuable. One recent accomplishment was automating deployment
to a single command with Capistrano. Took me a lot longer to set that up than
it probably should have, but feels great now :)

------
joeld42
I made a 3D flappy-bird inspired game: "Droppyship".
[https://itunes.apple.com/app/droppyship/id820172550](https://itunes.apple.com/app/droppyship/id820172550)
Finishing up a quick update this weekend to add gamecenter and ios7 controller
support, but I don't know if I'll take it much further.

------
maresca
[http://lottolane.com](http://lottolane.com)

LottoLane is a lottery pool management tool. It will handle email
invites/reminders, payment tracking, sharing pics of tickets, and more. It
will take care of everything involved in a lottery pool except for buying
tickets.

~~~
AznHisoka
that's funny 'cause i would actually play the lotto (esp. those scratch off
games) if buying a ticket was as easy as clicking a button, or sending an
email. A daily email with the results of the lotto would be great too.

~~~
maresca
Here's a site that sells lotto tickets online:

[https://www.lottoland.com/en](https://www.lottoland.com/en)

Legality of doing something like this is questionable. Plus, there's the issue
of trusting the site if the ticket hits the jackpot. I believe they have
people that physically go to convenience stores to buy the tickets for you.

I do have some ideas of how to facilitate playing in pools without having to
be geographically close to the pool manager. But, overall, the pool manager
should be someone you know.

------
strick
[http://www.yearloop.com/](http://www.yearloop.com/)

Each day it sends me an email with pictures from 1 yr ago, 2 yrs ago, etc. It
is powered by Dropbox. Beta testing now if you want to join in for free!

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stephancoral
I'm downloading all of Project Gutenberg and gonna run a markov chain text
generator on it and see what works of genius it produces (inspired by the King
James Programming post yesterday).

I think it'd be cool to have a site that lets people input sources and then it
displays output from the generator. Need to do some more reading on markov
models and see what improvements I can make to Barrucadu's code

------
pkinsky
A twitter clone with a fully nonblocking Play framework/Redis backend and a
angularjs frontend that communicate (almost) exclusively by websocket. It's
nothing that hasn't been done before, but it's a chance to play around with
some new tools.

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allyant
I am working on a (to be, hopefully) open source support ticket system based
on Laravel and Bootstrap (So easily themeable). The primary feature is that it
works with, not against other ticketing systems. For example I can 'push' a
ticket to github or bitbucket. I also want to try and integrate email, so that
sending an email to a support mailbox will automatically create a ticket. It
would be nice to also have an API for web sites to use, so support tickets
will also be created on errors on the production servers.

Just in the initial planning stages but it would work well in my workflow.

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aboodman
The web UI for Camlistore: [http://camlistore.org/](http://camlistore.org/)

    
    
      - video overview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvjeIZgykiA
      - early web UI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvjeIZgykiA#t=24m5s
    

It's written in a combination of React and Closure. It's a single page app
that doesn't care about IE<9\. I get to use workers, blobs, transforms, svg,
flexbox, typed arrays...

Oh, and everything in the UI live-updates automatically as a side-effect of
using React + Web Sockets.

So much fun. You should come contribute.

------
ashraful
[http://hackerlunch.com](http://hackerlunch.com)

I'm working on Hacker Lunch, which lets you meet up and have lunch with
another hacker in your area.

Launched a super rough MVP only for hackers in San Francisco, you can try it
at [http://hackerlunch.com](http://hackerlunch.com)

A few people tried it out and had a pretty fun experience, so I hope more
people try it out.

I plan on building this out fully into a mobile app, so the process is a bit
more natural and instantaneous.

~~~
bradhe
Dang! Not available in my area! I tried in Portland, OR. I'm super in to this
idea.

~~~
ashraful
I'll add more cities soon. I wanted to try out the idea in one city first -
and SF seemed like the logical choice.

------
implicit_none
[http://www.lessonwell.com](http://www.lessonwell.com)

([https://github.com/qdonnellan/lessonwell](https://github.com/qdonnellan/lessonwell))

the current task: refactoring my code to incorporate new things I've learned,
namely: TDD and knockoutjs + json API. After 2 years of self learning python,
I'm looking to transition from teaching into development and am hoping to use
this project to showcase what I've learned!

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krapp
eh... I keep telling myself I should have a side project ready the next time
one of these threads shows up, but it never is.

[http://precis.gopagoda.com/url/http://www.reddit.com/r/progr...](http://precis.gopagoda.com/url/http://www.reddit.com/r/programming)

I'm playing around with creating feeds from metadata - specifically, building
feeds with 'expanding' views which build trees from the outbound links on
pages. The reason the url is appended there is the thing doesn't even have any
caching - but just add a url to the form at the top or tack it on like so and
it should build the feed out of whatever.

The [+] links should expand the feed. Unless they don't. Because it sometimes
doesn't. When it does though it's nice.

Also trying to get dynamic rss to work but unless the dynos at pagodabox are
really spinning this can be insanely slow:

[http://precis.gopagoda.com/rss/http://www.reddit.com/r/progr...](http://precis.gopagoda.com/rss/http://www.reddit.com/r/programming)

But yeah... someday i'll get my crap together enough to make it into something
worth something.

Also I have a hnlike forum i'm building in laravel - it mostly works but it
isn't online. Maybe next time.

------
tomek_zemla
Designing and prototyping an elegant bookmark manager. I find existing
solutions clumsy in their functionality and ugly on top of it. The inspiration
comes from the design world. Think about the look of table of contents in a
beautiful art book or signage and navigation in a modern library building. I
would like to have my hundreds of links presented with minimal elegance and
modern information design functionality...

------
thearn4
Trying to give Julia a far shot. My current scientific computing stack is
Python+numpy+scipy+matplotlib, with wrapped C and Fortran where needed.

Also, I wrote a fast numpy implementation of Conway's game of life yesterday,
for the heck of it. [https://github.com/thearn/game-of-
life](https://github.com/thearn/game-of-life)

------
csbrooks
[http://u8this.com](http://u8this.com)

Food diary site, mostly done as a learning experience, and because I wanted
it. Blog post about how I made it here:
[http://chris.brooks6.com/2014/02/19/side-
project-u8thiscom/](http://chris.brooks6.com/2014/02/19/side-
project-u8thiscom/)

------
springogeek
Building a media management and streaming server for my local network, in
javascript with node.js, along with an android app, so I can organise my music
and listen to it at home from my phone :)

All these components exist, but its an exercise in software design, as well as
learning both about Android and Javascript.

------
PhrosTT
A music discovery site: [http://tuned.io](http://tuned.io)

SoundCloud API + Node + Backbone + MongoDB

Intend to use it as a learning platform for a lot of data analytics / machine
learning. Grouping similar users, identifying tastemakers, etc.

Currently it's a lot of electronic, no-vocals, coding music.

------
lessmilk
I'm currently making one new HTML5 game per week. My project was recently on
the front page of HN.

You can play my games are learn more about the project (tutorials, etc.) on my
website: [http://www.lessmilk.com](http://www.lessmilk.com)

------
jwcrux
I'm currently working on an open-source phishing toolkit written in Go and
AngularJS called gophish ([http://github.com/jordan-
wright/gophish](http://github.com/jordan-wright/gophish)).

------
harrisreynolds
SimpleGym - SaaS product for CrossFit Gyms
([http://www.simplegym.co](http://www.simplegym.co)). Rails-based web
application that includes a jQuery mobile UI for phones.

~~~
ericthegoodking
Great site I hope it becomes a success for you. Their is some spelling mistake
tho, isnt Philisophy supposed to be Philosophy?

------
stevekemp
Mulling over the idea of remote system administration as service:

[http://remote-sysadmin.com/](http://remote-sysadmin.com/)

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ingend88
Hacker News newsletter with daily top 5 posts.
[http://top5hn.launchrock.co](http://top5hn.launchrock.co)

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fixerfrasse
Programming language, as if there were not enough of them :)

~~~
codemonkeymike
Are you writing the compiler in assembly language or some other high level
language(c,C--, Python...)

------
gosu
Lockfree OS kernel. Give it a couple weeks.

~~~
papaf
How do you even start writing something like that?

~~~
gosu
Well, I'd done a small kernel for a class. Later, I wrote a lockfree malloc
and realized that large lockfree programs are actually pretty managable, and
that was the start. It's generally just a matter of designing around simple
data structures (which are the only ones you can really do lockfree) and a
repetition of some key tricks like refcounting, generation counting, and type-
stable memory. Writing the data structures and primitives was tough, but
otherwise you don't have to worry about locking and things come out quite
neatly as a result.

