
Ask HN: What are some good back end website ideas? - maceurt
I have to program a final project for my ap computer science class and I have programmed some websites before, front and backend, but I don&#x27;t really have any ideas.<p>I have looked around online, but most often the suggestion is something boring like a twitter clone, instagram clone, etc.<p>Preferably it would be something that is more backend intensive, because that is what I will be graded on, but I am open to any suggestions. Thank you!
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greenyouse
These might be too difficult but just for fun here are some ideas for mostly
backend.

 _Personal Music Tracker_ \- You can get new music ideas by scraping content
from a community radio station playlist like KCMP
([https://www.thecurrent.org/playlist](https://www.thecurrent.org/playlist)).
Run it against a personal database of songs you already know and have the
system send you a daily/weekly/monthly list of songs you haven't heard. It's
fun to build.

 _Phone Proxy_ \- Set up a disposable number for yourself on Twilio that will
proxy incoming calls against a whitelist of approved numbers. You could do
Twilio Studio to build an IVR that prompts the caller to press one to route
the call. If they stay on the line you could do fun stuff like transfer to an
It's Lenny server or something. It's not difficult to program and will teach
you about some phone technology.

 _IoT Blog Reader_ \- Follow blogs that you like and have them read to you via
common IoT devices like Alexa/Google Home. Like an RSS reader but built for
speech. Use an RSS reader to pull articles, run transcriptions of the articles
with trained ML TTS models, and store the data with SQL. De-dupe the
transcriptions based on URL. Use pre configured ML models for text to speech
like AWS Polly or GCP Wavenet. Probably way too hard...

 _TextToSpeech for books_ \- Upload a book. Get emailed the audio
transcription. Use pre trained ML models for TTS conversion. Maybe use a SASS
company like mailgun for the email part so you can just focus on extracting
text from different file formats? Could start with plain text files initially.

 _Story Point Estimation_ \- Use ML (or basic statistics) to estimate how long
JIRA tasks or projects will take to complete. Use a general corpus of data to
train an ML model, then feed it a team's data so it can adapt accordingly.
There are some whitepapers on it like
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.00489.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.00489.pdf)
but you could look around for easier statistics algorithms to use instead so
it's easier to build.

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w4tson
How about real time collaborative tool? Like a simple text editor that
multiple can edit at once. You could easily expand this if happened to solve
it with time left over

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mozillas
You could try making something like BuiltWith
[https://builtwith.com/ycombinator.com](https://builtwith.com/ycombinator.com).
They have a fairly simple front-end(nothing happening in real-time) and you
could offer stats about the top 10K Alexa websites, which makes a project look
better than having some dummy data, I think.

I also remember about a side project that involves by crawling HN and
displaying the most mentioned books in the comments. I think the author was
making a bit of money by having a link to Amazon for each book(and using an
affiliate code). You could do something similar but for popular Wikipedia
articles for example. Or you could use Reddit as a source and instead of
searching for popular books to search for sneakers or music.

Of course, I don't know if these ideas are too simple or too complicated,
interesting or not for you and the person who will give you a grade.

~~~
maceurt
Yes, this could be cool does not seem too simple or too hard.

On a related note a lot of different comments seem to be mentioning scraping
some sort of data from a website on a continual basis. Would I just create a
script that is attached to an extra worker that would send its data to the
actual database that would in turn be read by the web server? Or would I want
to just have the web server itself get the data and write to the database?

~~~
mozillas
A couple of years ago I wrote a feed reader which would check every hour for
new items in a few hundreds feeds. This script was running on a $5/mo
server(initially it ran of an old laptop I had for easier debugging) and it
would post the the new data to the database located on the website server. So
I was using two machines, one for the crawler and one for the website, and two
databases too I think. The one for the feed crawler was very simple with only
the list of urls and the latest item url, so I don't show it again. That was
the theory, at least, feeds are a bit more complicated in real life.

That's what I did, but I might have had different requirements. If you don't
have a lot to crawl and you don't have to do it very often(once a week or
less), you can probably space out the requests enough so that the server
doesn't feel it. It helps a lot if you use some caching as well for the
website itself in this case. I think it depends a lot on the requirements of
the project. But using two machines is safer I think, although it might
complicate things a bit.

Keep in mind that there's probably better technical advice out there than
mine. I'm a hobbyist developer.

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acesubido
A Web UI where you can click a button that says "Launch VM" given CPU/RAM/Disk
requirements, after a few minutes it returns to you SSH credentials.

Don't use cloud services. Literally, spin up a VirtualBox VM from where the
web server is also hosted. Bonus points if you can spin up a VM from another
web server.

~~~
maceurt
Can I do this on Heroku?

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AlphaWeaver
I think this might be a great time when you can take something simple and
overengineer it!

When I was a little younger than your age, I made a whole "virtual currency"
that could be moved around by typing numbers into text boxes, just to get some
experience using PHP and MySQL. It didn't ever do anything useful, but it was
a fun exercise, and more importantly: the fact that I was pursuing one of _my
own ideas_ made me more interested in working hard on it.

So my advice would be to pick something simple you like, and then apply all
the principles you've learned to it, even if it doesn't always make the most
sense. This is just a learning project, so my guess is that some regular rules
don't apply!

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Adamantcheese
How about a game like chess or checkers or go that you play against an AI?

~~~
maceurt
I programmed a chess game for my final for last semester lol. I might just
program an AI for it, and submit that as my final, because my teacher said we
can add on to our last final and do that for our next final. Do you know any
books on chess AI or AI in general that are good?

