Ask HN: What is your side project for 2017? - forgottenacc57
======
bharani_m
Simple "email this link to me" service.

If I find something interesting, I want to be able to click a button (chrome
extension/bookmarklet) that will extract the text from that page, format it
nicely and email it to me (preferably to a separate Gmail label).

I can then read it from my email client (iOS/Android email app) during my
commute.

I don't want the overhead of a complete app like Evernote or Pocket.

~~~
Havoc
Readability does that - well sorta. It sends it to your Kindle.

~~~
angrydev
Readability is no longer available.

See [https://www.readability.com/](https://www.readability.com/)

~~~
Havoc
Damn that sucks. Pity - used to work well.

------
NumberCruncher
I want to make party/board games using smartphones as the game controller
(similar to fibbage) and use this as motivation to learn elixir and phoenix
together with a frontend framework (maybe elm). I tried to do this with python
but I have problems with thinking in objects so I will go with functional
programming.

------
jeffclark
I believe that people want help finding "smart home" devices that will work
well with the existing equipment in their home, and that they would pay good
money for that because buying the wrong equipment is a frustrating (and
expensive) mistake.

I'm building a way to help you pick the connected equipment that will work
best for your home, based on what you want to control, how you want to control
it, and the equipment that already exists in your house.

For example, I've got an Ecobee3 thermostat, Lutron Caseta lights, a
SmartThings hub and an Echo Dot. My system will tell you the best connected
door lock for your home that will work with that setup.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Just one suggestion, can you offer information on device security also? A
collection of devices may work well together, but if I was buying a smart home
device I'd want to be informed of any security issues as they're discovered.
The escalations in DDoS size that we saw in 2016 were supposedly driven by a
high number of insecure smart home/IoT devices, I'd like to do what I can to
stop this becoming a trend.

~~~
ryanlol
>The escalations in DDoS size that we saw in 2016 were supposedly driven by a
high number of insecure smart home/IoT devices, I'd like to do what I can to
stop this becoming a trend.

Primarily driven by home routers, not IoT devices.

~~~
ZenoArrow
>"Primarily driven by home routers, not IoT devices."

It's IoT devices too. Here's an example of an IoT device with subpar security
discovered in the past couple of days:

[http://hackaday.com/2017/01/02/owl-insecure-internet-of-
ener...](http://hackaday.com/2017/01/02/owl-insecure-internet-of-energy-
monitors/)

------
hokkos
What I hope to do :

build a ESP8266 opened door detector (or try it with rust with a RTL8710
[https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5lfpnk/rust_on_rtl871...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5lfpnk/rust_on_rtl8710_running_freertos/)
)

build a ROS robot with SLAM using a 3D cam :
[http://www.ros.org/](http://www.ros.org/)

build a multicopter :
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Multicopter](https://www.reddit.com/r/Multicopter)

------
drakonka
I am still plugging away on my snail simulation. Motivation comes and goes,
but if I try to work on anything else I just go back to wanting to work on
snails.

~~~
eschutte2
I love that you have a snail project that's moving at a... measured pace. What
exactly are you simulating?

EDIT: Never mind, Googled for "snail simulation" and found an old comment of
yours explaining it. Looks cool!

------
webmaven
I am branching out from full-stack web design & development to some deeper
backend topics especially Machine Learning. There is a steep learning curve
that will keep me busy for a while.

The _specific_ project I'll be applying these skills toward is a bit more
nebulous, but I'm particularly interested in generative systems for text and
images.

------
letientai299
"Auto Table of Content" userscript/addons[0].

I believe any article longer than 3 pages should have a table of contents. If
readers feel bored, they can look into the TOC, jump to other section to find
something fun. But most of they don't have one. So I make it my self. This's
inspired by this Firefox addon[1] (no longer maintained).

[0]: [https://github.com/letientai299/userscript-auto-
toc](https://github.com/letientai299/userscript-auto-toc)

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/table-of-
cont...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/table-of-contents/)

Edit: Add newline between links.

------
bartvanH
I want to build a set of tools to build a full private cloud on bare metal
with zero single points of failure. Essentially a full replacement of Fuel and
Openstack.

I've already started on a full multi master dhcp server to assign ip adresses
to hosts and instances.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Sounds good. Would it be something like Triton?

[http://www.infoworld.com/article/2900832/virtualization/joye...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/2900832/virtualization/joyents-
no-vm-docker-host-deploys-containers-on-bare-metal.html)

[https://www.joyent.com/triton](https://www.joyent.com/triton)

~~~
bartvanH
Tbh it's been a while since I looked into Triton, but it should operate in the
same "feed it hardware and run virtual machines" space. I might experiment
with running the components on top of smartos because of all the niceness that
brings (i.e. crossbow, dtrace and zfs), but for now I’m building on top of
Ubuntu.

------
SFJulie
My life.

Making better bread, cider, and delete all my open source projects.

Creating the first post-luddites anti computer guerilla movement.

Oh, and since I am bored of all the terrorism laws that results in our
countries converging to soviet unions mood, I will also make pirate parties
spike water with recreational harmless drugs so people stop look like scared
zombies and give them a smile back on their face.

Then in 2018 we make a fun revolution with no casualties, and we all live
happily ever after.

I become a dictator edicts every one have the responsibility of leading their
life make the country a democracy and retire after a day in Corsica because
this place is amazing and life to short to take yourself seriously.

------
krapp
I probably shouldn't share these because they're nowhere near worth sharing
yet but...whatever. I can come back in a year and see whether or not I
actually finished this time.

\- A HN-like forum written in Hack[0], mostly for self education and to teach
myself how to work with Vagrant.

\- Actually finish a game in the pseudoframework[1] I (mostly finished) in
C++.

[0][https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/basedforum](https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/basedforum)

[1][https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/sdl_framework](https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/sdl_framework)

------
cyphar
This isn't a "side project" (I'm not going to make money from it, and it's
also something that I work on at my job), but I've been working on umoci[1]
which is a way to create and manipulate OCI container images. At (open)SUSE
we're planning on using it to create container images inside the Open Build
Service. I've also got a few ideas about RPM distribution of OCI images that
I'm quite excited about, and hopefully I'll have some code that works soon.

[1]: [https://github.com/cyphar/umoci](https://github.com/cyphar/umoci)

~~~
atmosx
This sounds interesting but the use case seems very specific to your internal
infratstruture and tooling.

Can you elaborate a bit on use cases?

~~~
cyphar
> This sounds interesting but the use case seems very specific to your
> internal infratstruture and tooling.

This is actually also part of the openSUSE project[1], and it's all free
software. The Open Build Service[2] supports several package formats and
distributions (Arch Linux's PKGBUILD, Fedora/RedHat's RPMs, openSUSE/SUSE's
RPMs, Debian/Ubuntu's debs).

> Can you elaborate a bit on use cases?

Currently at SUSE we're working on a new product for running Kubernetes on top
of our distribution. One of the important pieces is building and distributing
official SUSE images (as well as customers distributing images). But this code
will be a part of the public Open Build Service instance, so everyone will be
able to use it. And SUSE customers will also be able to use to to create their
own images.

Effectively the "cool thing" is that you can create OCI images without needing
to use something like Docker -- it's all just modifying a root filesystem and
umoci will generate the diff layers for you.

I'm also working on distributing OCI images through RPMs, which may end up
being a really cool way of distributing images (because all of SUSE's tooling
is built to work with RPMs).

[1]: [http://openbuildservice.org/](http://openbuildservice.org/) [2]:
[https://build.opensuse.org/](https://build.opensuse.org/)

------
Balgair
Re-write history a fair bit.

By this I mean that much of history is amazingly cool and interesting, yet no-
one really reads about it or learns it. Yet I can talk to pretty much any
hipster on the street and they'll know all about the Ents and Elves of Tolkein
or the Andals and First Men of GRR. History should be more like that then, I
figure.

So, lets put some Griffon-mounted Calvary into the Bleeding Kansas era, some
dragons into Waterloo, and some brain-slugs into the Mongols. Maybe that'll
spice up the history lessons a bit and make then more worth reading by the
average citizen.

------
Hoasi
A wordless webcomic: [http://silent-comics.com](http://silent-comics.com)

------
netman21
I am going to write a novel. Does that count?

------
eric003
[https://bolagslistan.nu](https://bolagslistan.nu) \- Delivers a list each
month of all the recently registered companies in Sweden. You get information
on what they do, where they are located, and so on, and I'm building a tool
around this information to make it easy for people to search by industry,
region, etc. And yes, I have customers! :)

~~~
xcubic
Out of curiosity, how do you get the data?

------
silvaben
Write a book on Vue.js.

I have been working with Vue for the last 3 months and it has been a very
pleasant and rewarding experience. While Vue's official guide is a wonderful
resource, I feel that it doesn't delve into topics like Vuex, VueRouter,
interacting with an existing API, integrating Vue into your existing project
(Rails, Node.js etc) etc.

I have started writing a small book that starts off with a gentle introduction
to Vue.js and then walks the readers through building a complete SPA (Single
Page Application) similar to Reddit/Twitter.

This year, I want to spend the first couple of months finishing this book.

For those interested, I have created a small subscription form -
[http://eepurl.com/cvUk5D](http://eepurl.com/cvUk5D). You can add your email
here to get notified when I launch this book and also get access to the early
release.

~~~
basdp
You have been working with something for 3 months and you think you are
proficient enough to warrant writing a book about it?

~~~
silvaben
Yes, I have shipped a production ready application that uses Vue.js
extensively.

Also, this book is an attempt to cement my own understanding of Vue. I don't
think there is anything wrong with that.

~~~
basdp
Well, if you are making clear that you are just a little bit less
unexperienced as the target audience, there is nothing wrong... But if you are
going to charge money...

------
leroman
A framework which makes it easy to manage- scraping, crawling, job
orchestration. It build on top of a special "data as code" declarative
language. Have been working on it for years as a side project, now taking time
off from consulting to make it usable for my other side project ideas.

------
plankton_sb
[http://laptophits.com](http://laptophits.com) \- it had great response here
on HN, unfortunately few days later I got an email from Amazon, that they
reject my associates application, as my site lacks unique content :(. Now I'm
working on more specification based filtering options, then will try to add
keyword filters (to quickly find for example most recommended'linux laptops')
and figure out what should I add to pass Amazon Associates review.

I also started my personal blog today at
[http://mdoliwa.com](http://mdoliwa.com) with 30 days blogging challange :).

~~~
wineisfine
For Amazon: just apply with another, more content-related blog (for example,
your personal blog). And once you're "in" you just add to laptophits.com to it
as well. They only vet for initial accounts.

I have an old site that's been making good money of amazon affiliate (for 5-7
years now). I re-applied with that same site, with another, new, affiliate
account, and it got rejected. So their whole approval procedure seems quite
arbitrary.

------
danielskogly
[https://wishy.gift/](https://wishy.gift/) \- a wishlist web app that we
launched a bit too close to Christmas to be of use to anyone. We got just
about 90 users at the moment, and have gotten lots of good feedback and
feature requests.

Friends and family I've talked to found it really useful for the Christmas
shopping, and my SO showed me the wishlist of a friend of hers - which had
loads of items added to it - and almost every single item was checked off.

There's some stuff we're going to add, but our main issue is finding out how
to market it, and explain the service in a good way.

------
pedrokost
1\. Last year I built a sports' klub listing website [1] which shows where you
can train different sports on a map in Slovenia. The most challenging part is
keeping the data up to date. This year, it's going to be about automating it
fully, such that it can operate with almost no supervision, by means for
crawling and automatic emailing klub owners to confirm the validity of the
data.

2\. Something based on hardware -- still thinking what to do with my
Raspeberry 3.

[1] [http://www.zatresi.si/](http://www.zatresi.si/)

------
monkeydust
Setting up a QA outsourcing business on the side with a few friends. Software
is everywhere and performing more critical functions as years go by. QA where
I work (large US software company) is an afterthought, the developers and
business guys provide quality assurance cover but of course things do slip
through the net occasionally and cost of those events can be high. We looked
at outsourcing QA years back and will probably again. I can see more
organisations doing this. Challenge will be running this as a side project.

------
woolly
A site for people to discover running groups in their local area

------
jorgtron
[https://www.containable.co](https://www.containable.co)

A ready-to-deploy PostgreSQL Docker image automagically maintained by experts

~~~
jorgtron
Key highlights:

\- Simple, automated backups of your production databases

\- We keep your database secure with automatic security updates

\- Monitor your DB with a nice UI

\- Avoid vendor lock-in: Containable makes it easy to migrate between
different cloud services (or local setups)

------
k__
Multiple things...

Blogging, in the hope I have stuff to say people are interested in.

Maybe going to more meetups, but I don't know about this yet, most meetups are
boring.

Doing more cardio in hopes of better endurance.

Getting rid of the fat-part of my 13kg gains I got last year. hopefully it
will be more muscle than I fear, haha.

Software wise, I don't know. My girlfriends sometimes have nice app ideas,
which I then build for them as a sideproject, but this often just takes 2-4
days.

------
tmaly
I am hoping to finish up a new version of my food dishes by location project
[https://bestfoodnearme.com](https://bestfoodnearme.com) I decided to teach
myself Go while I wrote it. The original database was a combination of redis
and boltdb. I am moving things to postgresql and for the frontend bourbon.io

It has been a slow process, but I am keeping at it little by little.

------
vitoralmeida
I'm working on Android app that is as a reader of the old John Carmack . plan
files. Probably going to release it in January on Google Play.

~~~
vitoralmeida
Ok, it is now available on Google Play:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitoralmei...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitoralmeida.jcplanreader)

------
jpobst
[https://communiroo.com](https://communiroo.com) \- I created a mobile app and
wanted a single, easy-to-set-up site to direct users to for bug reports,
feature requests, forums, and support, but I couldn't find one.

I built Communiroo to provide a community site for apps and services that can
be set up in just a few clicks.

------
vbsteven
I want to learn C and I have two projects on my mind that I will use for
experimenting with the language:

1\. a cli spotify controller (control spotify through mpris and consuming the
REST api for search/playlist related commands)

2\. a cli GTD tool. I have some experience porting OmniFocus to Android (in
Java) and I want to use what I learned from that to build my own GTD tool.

------
drzaiusx11
A Retron-5-like game console for playing physical Atari 2600, Colecovision and
Intellivision cartridges based on a ROM-dumper I wrote:
[https://github.com/drzaiusx11/WiringVCS](https://github.com/drzaiusx11/WiringVCS)

------
jasim
You get three designs for the same website - one for mobile, one for tablet,
and one for desktop. Now you have to combine all that into a single set of
HTML and CSS using Flexbox and media queries. My project for 2017 is to
automate all that. My product is in this space, so it might turn out to be a
full-time project as well!

------
herbst
I kind of side project fulltime now, so i plan to create a few actually. In
the next days i may finish a travel destination site (boring i know, buts its
super useful to me :) and there is a flight suggestion thingy that does not
get out of my mind i may start next. Scratching my own itches there as well.

------
300
I am writing a book on Vim [1] for a while now, so it's going to be my main
side project in the first months of 2017.

[1] A crappy page about the book: [http://jovicailic.org/mastering-vim-
quickly/](http://jovicailic.org/mastering-vim-quickly/)

~~~
powmonk
As a piece of constructive criticism (as it seems like maybe English isn't
your first language) using gendered words like "guys" can seem a little bit
sexist or at least exclusionary. You don't want to put women off reading your
book just with the blurb :)

~~~
ZenoArrow
What word would you suggest in its place? As a native English speaker I can't
think of something similar which is both gender neutral and casual without
being quirky (I'd use 'peeps' in conversations with friends, but not in
marketing text).

~~~
TomasSedovic
I use "folks" and some people like "y'all" (iirc the Recurse Center took that
as their "guys" replacement). Not sure how quirky that is for you though.

------
siscia
rediSQL[1] which is a module that embed SQLite into Redis.

It is a fun way to go back to low level C code, I started to kinda miss it
after years of high level languages...

Right now it only use redis as connectivity layer but I want to make it way
more integrated into redis, I want to replicate keys on both redis and inside
sqlite in order to have the best of both world (and make some interesting
tradeoff between speed and memory), here[2] the proposal if you would like to
contribute.

[1]:
[https://github.com/RedBeardLab/rediSQL](https://github.com/RedBeardLab/rediSQL)

[2]:
[https://github.com/RedBeardLab/rediSQL/issues/12](https://github.com/RedBeardLab/rediSQL/issues/12)

------
gabemart
Continuing to work on [http://asoftmurmur.com](http://asoftmurmur.com)

I've been working on an iOS app for a while that is due to launch in the next
couple of weeks, after a long period of having no time to work on the project

~~~
nailer
Just wanted to say I love 'A Soft Murmur' and have been using it at work for
years. Programming music is good, but still has track changes, whereas ASM
gets me in the zone quicker.

------
eg312
I plan to add support for styles, more export formats and 'save as audiobook'
to: [https://github.com/alexadam/save-as-
ebook](https://github.com/alexadam/save-as-ebook)

------
geuis
Still working on some minor issues before launching, but Iridium is a tool to
help for vocal artists to practice.

[https://github.com/geuis/iridium-vocal](https://github.com/geuis/iridium-
vocal)

------
powmonk
As I'm in the process of learning java: 1\. A cli podcatcher daemon for linux
2\. An infinite runner game for mobile 3\. A recipe app for mobile

Possibly not in that order. None of these will set the world on fire, but I
think they'll be good practice.

------
pbnjay
An automatic time tracker. I've tried it a few times over the years but it's
always been too complicated... I think I've finally found a way to make it
simple enough to get a few people to use regularly.

------
jypepin
I want to learn more about 1. machine learning / AI and/or 2. how to make
basic video games (not using software like unity etc. but actually writing
code)

If anyone has good resources/books for either, please share :)

------
monty5811
Continue to work on apostello - "sms for your church" \-
[https://github.com/monty5811/apostello](https://github.com/monty5811/apostello)

------
hahla
Looking to add a few more features and update the design on [https://tomato-
timer.com](https://tomato-timer.com) \- shoot me an email if anyone would like
to help!

------
j-antonso
Simple, good looking website w/ quizzes to help me learn and be less ignorant
about the world around me (country names, religions, languages, current
events, history, etc.)

------
vmattos
A youtube channel focused on teaching distributed programming in a simple way

I have already sketched some videos explaining consensus algorithms and the
byzantine generals problem (yeah, I'm a Lamport fanboy)

------
dhbradshaw
Current toy: Voice input for personal statistics. "Alexa, set pullups to 20."
Then Alexa or Siri or Google update the named statistic with a time stamp and
optionally trigger a webhook.

------
savitas
[https://spe.savitas.net](https://spe.savitas.net)

[https://sdi.savitas.net](https://sdi.savitas.net)

~~~
savitas
to clarify, migrating spe->sdi. We have about 450 registered users on spe from
all over the world since Feb of last year.

Our two features now on top are the international address forms and
international payments for the SDI site.

------
wordpressdev
Progressing from Intermediate to Serious Python and planning to build some
side project to reflect the skills learned. Looking into MongoDB, AWS, ML,
Bots.

------
kasbah
I'll be doing a lot of work on my registry for open hardware electronics
projects.

[https://kitnic.it](https://kitnic.it)

------
elalaouifaris
I would like to build a learning platform to cover the basic features of
moodle using Phoenix, to learn both web development and functional
programming.

------
flakron
I'm building an appointment management system (simple stuff), and will be
trying my luck selling it in codecanyon. (fingers crossed)

------
elalaouifaris
I would like to build a moodle like learning site using Phoenix (Elixir), to
teach myself web development using a functional language.

------
alkio
Rulebased messaging web app for a multiplayer war boardgame (Bobby Lee
multiplayer variant applied to EastFront/EuroFront II).

------
freetonik
A small programming/computer science dictionary with lots of links to related
resources (videos, blogs, articles, etc).

------
nithinr6
I'm working on one of those standup bots that would then use the data to
automatically update PM services like Trello.

------
mzitelli
This year I want to dive into Machine Learning, so to do it I plan to create
tools using RNNs to extract data from the web.

------
013
Learn C and assembly, get better at OSDev.

And start up a small VPS provider that will (at least) break even every month.
(Any tips?)

------
tehwebguy
Fixing YouTube subscriptions.

(YouTubers say they are broken, YouTube says they aren't)

~~~
ploggingdev
How do you plan to solve this problem? Will it be a paid solution?

------
max_
1\. Photo sharing platform

2\. An Investment portfolio management platform.

~~~
fratlas
What kind of platform?

~~~
zump
If it works, he won't tell you.

------
pvitz
An ESG and an ALM model in Racket.

------
Findeton
A lightfield video player. :)

------
unmole
A Lisp interpreter in Go.

------
richardboegli
At least one VR Game.

Some other Apps.

Vauge ;)

