
This year in side projects - typpo
http://www.ianww.com/blog/2014/12/30/this-year-in-side-projects-2014/
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avidas
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...](http://www.ianww.com/blog/blog/2013/12/31/my-year-in-side-projects/)

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.

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

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thomasfromcdnjs
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/](http://thomasdav.is/2014-side-
projects/)

~~~
WoodenChair
You guys both inspired me to write my own:
[http://www.observationalhazard.com/2014/12/my-2014-in-
side-p...](http://www.observationalhazard.com/2014/12/my-2014-in-side-
projects.html)

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jgh
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

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charlieirish
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...](http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/bootstrappers-2014-year-
review/)

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ChrisNorstrom
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.

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esusatyo
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.

~~~
readme
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/.

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

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evanb
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.

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shanecleveland
Good takeaway:

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

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tonglil
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?

~~~
utuxia
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.

~~~
kaeawc
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.

~~~
mod
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.

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

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

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sonny9
This is quite amazing. Something i plan to pursue in 2015. A 24 Side Projects
Challenge

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avd74
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?

