Ask HN: What were your personal favorite personal/side projects? - gravy
======
Regardsyjc
I started playing my first fps game in college and learned how to get really
good at it. It was cool to learn about esports from people who played in the
first tournaments for games like Unreal Tournament. In my experience, everyone
at a certain stage had a similar level of mechanical skill but they did not
have the same level of interpersonal ability or management/strategy skills. It
was interesting to see the dynamics and the people who could pick out the
weakest link of a team and exploit it to win the match. We played CTF pickup
games where teams were always changed so you could learn everyone's strengths
and weaknesses, as well as keep it interesting. But even in a quick CTF match,
these players would easily be able to ID the weakest link and exploit it
within minutes.

It also taught me about skill level. Even though everyone I played with was at
the top 1%, there were still people on a whole new level. I used to play with
people that now play professionally. The game I played had a small competitive
community, a lot from TF2. As a new player, I was used to being wrecked on a
daily basis but I still remember to this day how hard my gaming dreams were
destroyed by one player. You could practice for hours every day but there were
players that could just log on and be practically godlike. There was no
contest. Even though I decreased my kill speed to under a second, their kill
speed was .1 second and I was probably never ever going to achieve that ever.
Thanks surefour.

I have never ever experienced as much adrenaline again as I did during those
days. The fast paced game play and level of communication and coordination was
amazing. It was probably like crack. I guess I sort of found it again in
entrepreneurship. It will never be as fast and as easily rewarding but what
makes a great esports team and a great business team is the same.

------
ccantana
Probably TechLoaf ([https://TechLoaf.io](https://TechLoaf.io)).

It’s a satirical tech newsletter that I write with a few close friends who are
successful founders/executives/investors.

It’s been very cathartic to poke fun of all that’s nutty about the tech world.

~~~
rayalez
Wow, this is really good! Subscribed.

------
dparen12
It was weirdly satisfying to create an emacs package
([https://github.com/dp12/parrot](https://github.com/dp12/parrot)) that shows
the party parrot from Slack gyrating in the mode line.

A somewhat useless feature, but it partially redeems itself by offering a
"rotate-text" function.

Now I'm anxiously waiting for vim users to port it, as vim users are wont to
do. I do expect the resulting plugin will be called something like vip for
"very important parrot."

~~~
quickthrower2
Love it. I discovered the party parrot today for the first time.

------
accrual
I was an AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) user for many years. I started in the
early 2000s on dial-up and made friends and learned about the Internet. It
factored into my technology career today.

As a side project I developed an AIM clone with Node.js and web sockets, using
original bitmaps and sounds. One can choose fonts, colors, and buddy icons
just like the source.

I ran a server over TLS with a few friends for a while. It was a lot of fun
and I am proud of it.

------
seanwilson
I wrote [https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/), a Chrome
extension that tests multiple pages at a time for SEO, speed and security best
practices.

It's been really satisfying seeing something I built being helpful for others
when I originally started it for personal use to speed up testing and
development.

------
buboard
i was particularly into building 3d worlds with opensimulator for a time and i
built a directory for them because there was absolutely no way to find other
people online ([http://opensimworld.com](http://opensimworld.com)). It grew to
a fun community over time that i still maintain. Then i built a farming game
on top of it which eventually became an open source project thanks to
contributors who came out of the blue
([https://satyrfarm.github.io](https://satyrfarm.github.io)).

Another fun project was a cryptocoin price directory that looked for coins
that are "pumping" every few minutes
([https://coinzaa.com](https://coinzaa.com)), but unfortunately my bank forced
me to shut it down.

