
Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on? - ericthegoodking
It would be interesting to include:<p>-Technology used<p>-Statistics<p>-History
======
snide
I wanted a static site generator that could have a CMS so that I could pass
the sites over to friends or clients so they could update it. Essentially, a
not-terrible Wordpress that wasn't blog centric and bloated.

[http://www.webhook.com](http://www.webhook.com)

I built it over the summer, funded it through Kickstarter and have slowly been
building a nice little client base of recurring revenue. The code itself is
open source so it's self-hostable and free, but we provide a quick one-line
deploy hosted solution as well.

Probably the most fun bit has been trying to just remove the barrier of
troublesome local installation for these kinds of things. Usually people go
with PHP because you can just run it everywhere, but that still requires
setting up apache/mysql somewhere. We use Firebase and Node, so were able to
get the entire package installed through a downloadable app. I _think_ we
probably have the fasted installation available for this kind of thing.

I work on it mostly full-time, then design client sites with it on the side.

~~~
Khao
This is really awesome! I looked quickly at your self-hosting guide and I was
wondering is the only option to deploy the static website Google Cloud
Storage? I would like to setup webhook on a Heroku with free-tier dynos and
deploy to AWS because those are the services I already use and love. If it's
not possible, do you think I could fork your project and integrate AWS
deployment somewhat easily?

~~~
snide
The reason we went with GCS is because AWS limits you to 100 static sites
(buckets). That's a block for our hosted solution.

The code is MIT, so do with it what you want. May be a little bit more
complicated then just switching out the build layer, but if you can get
something working that's configurable, feel free to send in a PR.

------
abemassry
A quick and easy way to send files from the command line.

[https://wsend.net](https://wsend.net)

Tech Used: Bash, Node

Statistics: 612 users, 7 paying customers

History: I started working on this in Jan 2013, I wanted a quick way to send
files from the command line and get a URL. I later found after building this
backend, I, or anyone could expand upon it in many ways

[https://github.com/abemassry/wsend](https://github.com/abemassry/wsend)

[https://github.com/abemassry/wsend-gpg](https://github.com/abemassry/wsend-
gpg)

[https://github.com/abemassry/wsend-twitter-
card](https://github.com/abemassry/wsend-twitter-card)

A little more about how it was built is in this post

[http://abemassry.com/blog/2014/02/14/building-
wsend/](http://abemassry.com/blog/2014/02/14/building-wsend/)

I have some more ideas as well, if anyone has any ideas or wants to work on
this with me I would definitely be down for it.

~~~
fdik
Interesting – do you know sendfile? [http://fex.rus.uni-
stuttgart.de/saft/](http://fex.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/saft/)

------
Blahah
I've been developing the stack for The ContentMine
([http://contentmine.org](http://contentmine.org)). In the next month or so,
we will start scraping the entire scientific literature as it is published
each day, and processing it through our 'fact extraction' pipeline.

Done so far:

\- I've defined a JSON format for declarative web scrapers (ScraperJSON:
[https://github.com/ContentMine/scraperJSON](https://github.com/ContentMine/scraperJSON))

\- made a Node library for web scraping with ScraperJSON scrapers (thresher:
[https://github.com/ContentMine/thresher](https://github.com/ContentMine/thresher))

\- as well as a command-line client (quickscrape:
[https://github.com/ContentMine/quickscrape](https://github.com/ContentMine/quickscrape))

\- and a small library of ScraperJSON scrapers for scientific publishers that
is about to start expanding rapidly ([https://github.com/ContentMine/journal-
scrapers](https://github.com/ContentMine/journal-scrapers)).

Next step is to build the web interface that will let people compose data
mining pipelines. Imagine something like:

\- "give me a feed of all the articles in journals with 'Cancer' in the title
that use HeLa cells in their methods"

\- "alert me when a new paper comes out that mentions species X alongside a
geographical reference"

\- "find all the papers that mention my software in the methods but don't cite
me"

~~~
struct
I've long thought about doing this with arXiv to determine if you could
extract results and synthesize answers to questions. Is anything like that
part of the goals for The ContentMine?

~~~
Blahah
Yes. We're trying to build the toolset so that the end product is not
predetermined, but that we empower people to make whatever they can imagine.
In about 6 months time it should be relatively easy to implement your idea on
top of what we build. arXiv will of course be included :)

------
stevetjoa
A collection of IPython notebooks for music information retrieval (MIR). Work
in progress: [https://github.com/stevetjoa/stanford-
mir](https://github.com/stevetjoa/stanford-mir)

We began using these as instructional material at a summer workshop on MIR at
CCRMA, Stanford [[https://ccrma.stanford.edu/workshops/music-information-
retri...](https://ccrma.stanford.edu/workshops/music-information-retrieval-
mir)]. For many years, we used Matlab, but we decided it was finally time to
move over to Python. The GitHub repo includes a Vagrantfile that allows you to
use Vagrant to provision a Virtualbox VM with all the audio libraries
preloaded.

For included technologies, see the Vagrant box website:
[https://vagrantcloud.com/stevetjoa/boxes/stanford-
mir/versio...](https://vagrantcloud.com/stevetjoa/boxes/stanford-mir/versions)

Your feedback, including pull requests and issues (and stars!), are most
welcome.

------
chton
Aside from my startup (which fills most of my evenings), my side projects
never pan out. They're never completed, or end up being too difficult to
complete. I consider them learning opportunities more than marketable
projects.

Currently, I'm way out of my comfort zone: I'm on the way to build a proof of
concept for an optical computer. No simulations, real hardware. My hope is
that I can build a few passive logic gates, and go from there. Without a
shadow of a doubt, I'll fail. There are a million factors I didn't consider or
underestimate, and my knowledge of things like laser physics and optics is
marginal at best. But I'm learning a lot from it, which is the main goal. I
also just want to see if it can't be done. From what I could gather, there is
far too little serious research being done into the whole field. If all else
fails, at least I'll know why that is.

And hey, any side project where you get to play with lasers on your kitchen
table has got to be a good one, right?

------
mkremer90
I'm currently working on Kobra, a realtime collaborative code editor, mostly
during my lunch breaks.

[https://Kobra.io](https://Kobra.io)

Tech Used: AngularJS, Firebase, Firepad, EasyRTC

Statistics: Just broke 700 registered users and 5000 file collaborated on.
Have made a little over $2000 from 125 people going Pro.

History: I started back in December, but gave up too soon. I've since
relaunched it as a smaller product and am super happy with how it's been
received. Here's some blog posts about my journey. Please let me know if you
have any questions for me!

[https://mattkremer.com/how-i-got-2200-pre-signups-for-my-
saa...](https://mattkremer.com/how-i-got-2200-pre-signups-for-my-saas-
in-2-weeks-then-failed-hard/)

[https://mattkremer.com/how-i-made-2033-in-4-days-while-
valid...](https://mattkremer.com/how-i-made-2033-in-4-days-while-validating-
my-side-project/)

~~~
bnb
This is really god damn cool. Totally going to start using this every time I
talk about code on my social networks. Thanks a ton.

~~~
mkremer90
Thanks bnb! It's much appreciated :) Shoot me an email if you want to chat
with me about it: matt@mattkremer.com

------
hunt
I got tired of the existing tiling window managers and their lack of
documentation, so I made my own that behaves like vim. It's called howm and
can be found here:

[https://github.com/HarveyHunt/howm](https://github.com/HarveyHunt/howm)

There was a thread on HN about it a while ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8241978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8241978)),
I have fixed a lot of the issues since then, most notably:

    
    
      - Moving away from needing to recompile every time you change an option is _nearly_ done.
    
      - Howm can now be scripted by sending commands over a UNIX socket.
    
      - I have split howm into multiple source files (I will merge this tonight when I have finished the docs).
    
      - I added some nice gifs to the documentation.

------
cruppstahl
hamsterdb [http://hamsterdb.com](http://hamsterdb.com)

a embedded key-value database with storage structures and algorithms similar
to column store databases. basically you can create your own column store
database in your application.

Right now i'm busy making the next release, and writing a research paper about
database compression.

~~~
Ixiaus
This sounds very interesting and I've been wanting to do something similar in
Haskell.

------
augustflanagan
[https://cronitor.io](https://cronitor.io)

It's a simple monitoring service for cron and other scheduled jobs (also works
well for heartbeat monitoring).

It was launched on HN a couple months ago. We've been slowly improving our
keyword rankings on a few key terms, and are finally to the point where we are
consistently signing up new users everyday.

We've also been surprised to see the users who upgrade to paid accounts are
split pretty evenly between the $6.99 plan and the $19.99. Our pre-launch
guess was that it would be a 90/10 split on those plans.

~~~
mikegioia
I think the service is a cool idea, but you have people running cURL requests
in a crontab? Heaven forbid something is wonky with the DNS, or your service
gets compromised, or any number of things and that machine is basically 100%
owned! Convenience or not, I don't think I could ever bring myself to commit
that crime.

~~~
encoderer
A curl protip is to specify a timeout with -m. An important detail, to be
sure.

------
alexbilbie
I've been learning Swift and am working on two different apps:

\- A London Bus app that improves discovery of potential locations you can get
to easily (instead of just routing from your current location to somewhere
specific)

\- A London Underground app that does smarter routing around problems on the
network and is designed for "power users"

I'm also looking at the potential of opening a community cooperative run
greengrocers near where I live because I really struggle to get fresh, quality
and cheap vegetables both in the area, around where I work and on my commute
to and from work.

------
krapp
\- I decided to throw a pile of my stalled projects together and build a forum
framework for PHP. Almost all current forums in PHP are pretty terrible,
bloated, and non-modular, so I thought why not have a framework which is
designed for building forums, imageboards, comment systems, etc?

stats: none, technology: currently Slim Framework and Composer, and that's
about it. history: started it about a week ago.

\- A threaded link aggregator. I posted it in these threads a couple of times,
but it's been offline for a while for a complete rewrite. The basic gist is,
you post a link, and you can open a 'thread' of outbound links from the page
as well, with the idea of easily being able to follow a trail of references to
an original source and discover a greater, context-specific set of links for a
subject. I've rewritten it completely at least three times. If anyone is
interested, the scraper I wrote for it is here:
[https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug](https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug).
I have no idea when it will be worth showing to anyone.

stats: nobody, technology: Laravel 4, history: been working on it for about a
year.

\- Rewriting a school project from last semester (a project manager in C#)
into something decent.

stats: none, technology: C#, sqlite, history: haven't touched it in a while,
because it turns out pasting stuff into a text file in Notepad++ is way
easier.

------
buttscicles
I've just began working in [https://spate.io](https://spate.io) again.

There are no statistics to show yet as nobody is using it, but I'm hoping I
can change that soon.

The API and the website are two separate Flask apps whilst the websocket
server is implemented using node. For now the API and the websocket component
communicate using redis' pubsub functionality for the MVP stage, but I have a
vague suspicion this will have to be the first thing to change eventually.
Will have to test.

~~~
Khao
I like your website and what you're offering is really cool but I think it
would be better if you specified how you much it costs or if there are any
limits. I understand it's in beta and maybe you don't have pricing figured out
yet, but as a potential user, I'd like to know more before signing up. "Create
a free account" with no pricing page is scary. It tells the potential user
nothing. I'd rather have "Free while in beta" with an explanation of future
plans/pricing and limits. Otherwise, it looks really neat.

~~~
buttscicles
Thanks for the comments!

Definitely agree, I've felt the same way on other sites. Pricing is the next
thing on my list to do actually, will hopefully get that figured out this
weekend.

------
sphildreth
I am building [https://www.rdrbot.com](https://www.rdrbot.com) using:

* ASP.NET MVC 5, Knockoutjs, Momentjs, jQuery and Bootstrap

* Azure Websites, Azure SQL, Azure DocumentDB, Azure Caching

* OAuth 2 providers (Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft Live)

The idea is to make a site that aggregates multiple sources into one so I can
try to keep up with RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Right now its somewhat a
glorified RSS reader. I dunno if I will ever monetize it, something I just
wanted to make.

------
atko
I'm working on a new model of how online discussion is done by developing a
new monetizing strategy which shares ad revenue with users who bring original
and quality content to the board. In essence, insightful comments which spark
meaningful discussion are rewarded with real money (or an option to gift that
money to a charity or another user).

[https://whoaverse.com](https://whoaverse.com)

Built mostly on .NET stack.

------
juanre
I build and sell high-resolution posters of the sky at

[http://greaterskies.com](http://greaterskies.com)

I've been at it for some years now, and it's been featured here a couple of
times. The backend (astronomical computations and generation of the PDF) I
implemented in Common Lisp. It's still tiny: I get around 20 visits a day,
sell around a poster a day, and can't figure out how to make it grow.

~~~
jrmiii
If you're converting 5% of new visitors into customers, you're already doing
well - setup some paid search on long-tail terms. Unique anniversary gifts,
unique birthday gifts for outdoorsy folk, etc.

------
ihatehandles
Active with:

([http://tractionengine.co](http://tractionengine.co)) A small SaaS for
publishers/websites that want their direct ad sales automated (window
shopping, purchasing, serving). Runs on a subdomain or root of your liking,
branding plus). Works with several payment gateways (we no touch your money),
allows real time previewing of slots, publishers can customize the look, texts
and wording on the site, got an API, plays with DFP etc. Growth so far is
strictly word of mouth (hence no attention to the marketing site), caught the
attention of some massive publishers hoping on now. Paying customers. 0
hours/week for most weeks. [AngularJS/FatFree/GoLang] About 8/9 months in.

A news aggregator engine in python for anyone to build their news aggregator
upon. Scores using social media vitality, hits & age. Example user
[http://www.topnews.co.zw](http://www.topnews.co.zw) [Python(flask)] Runs well
on Heroku. Work on it here and there (by span of months)

More brewing...

------
lynaghk
Full rewrite of The Weathertron iOS app
([http://theweathertron.com/](http://theweathertron.com/)) from Angular.js +
ClojureScript to React.js + ClojureScript.

The original Weathertron is still runnin' happily for about 40,000 iOS users
from a single $5/month Digital Ocean VPS (backend server is written in
Clojure).

The motivation for the full rewrite is React.js and the latest Android OS
inclusion of a decent WebKit. React's virtual DOM makes rendering more
efficient than Angular.js on slower devices and the recent WebKit supports all
of the responsive CSS we used in the original iOS version.

Since I don't carry a smartphone at all, I also recently released a free
Weathertron Google Chrome extension so that I could use the app myself:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/weathertron/jljkok...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/weathertron/jljkokagfomhfahkliblkggbiilcppnb)

~~~
Xephyrous
Are you using React.js directly through JS interop, or something like Om or
Reagent to wrap it? What is your opinion of the various options available for
React.js in ClojureScript?

------
marcofiset
So many things, that I have yet to finish:

* A toy programming language of my own. Been working on it on and off (but mosty off) for the past 2 years. Every couple of months or so, I will go on for a couple of days to add a few features (last additions were functions and if conditions). I have learned a ton while doing this project, mostly about programming language implementation. My ultimate goal in this project is compiling the language to brainfuck. Useless I know, but a very good learning experience. Using C# for the initial version, but will transition to a bootstrapped compiler when the language is mature enough.

* I recently started playing with Event Sourcing, and I'm writing a PHP library for it.

* A collaborative, real-time todo app using Laravel and Ratchet for the real-time stuff. PHP.

* Some time ago, I inherited the maintenance of Testify.php, a simple PHP unit testing framework. I had great plans for it, but never came around to execute them. Maybe someday.

------
davegaeddert
Our company has had a side project going for the last couple months called
Beluga. It's a simple, straight-forward task sharing iOS app for small teams.
We just made it free today for a limited time, have been getting some awesome
traction so far.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beluga-shared-
tasks./id83683...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beluga-shared-
tasks./id836830314?mt=8)

Technology: Django, AngularJS, django-tastypie, Mandrill, iOS (obviously)

Statistics: Almost 300 new users so far today...

History: We built this to satisfy a need for ourselves, instead of sending
each other texts and Hangout messages all day with small tasks, we decided it
could make for a really simple app that could do exactly what we want and
nothing more. Turns out it's also great for sharing to-dos with your
significant other...

------
axemclion
I am working on a project that lets you monitor your web page or hybrid's apps
rendering performance

\- [http://github.com/axemclion/browser-
perf](http://github.com/axemclion/browser-perf). To quickly test your website,
check out
[http://www.perfmonkey.com/#/trynow](http://www.perfmonkey.com/#/trynow)

You can use the metrics from this tool to find out which CSS or JS make a
webage janky, which action caused multiple paints, etc.

Completely written in Node, can run as a node module and a CLI.

You can get graphs like this -
[http://nparashuram.com/perfslides/perfjankie](http://nparashuram.com/perfslides/perfjankie).

\- Based on Chromium's perf framework, needed a way to monitor performance
everytime I deploy a site, automatically.

------
wnm
I am working on a newsletter for remote work opportunities. As a developer you
can sign up, and (will be able to) set some filters like what technologies you
are interested in, salary, if you want to work full or parttime, what time
zone you are in etc... As soon as a company submits a job which matches your
criterea (and only then) you will receive a mail.

right now a simple mailchimp form is up on
[http://remoteworknewsletter.com](http://remoteworknewsletter.com), and the
full version with all filters will be up soon.

I wrote about how i launched the idea on HN a while back:
[http://blog.remoteworknewsletter.com/2014/10/15/how-to-
valdi...](http://blog.remoteworknewsletter.com/2014/10/15/how-to-valdiate-an-
idea-on-hacker-news/)

------
dochtman
Still working on a Python-like systems programming language (Rust-like memory
management -- no GC, compiler in Python targeting LLVM IR).

In my march towards getting exceptions working (using Intel's Itanium
exception ABI), I'm currently hacking on option types and memory management.
In particular, trying to figure out how to sensibly insert destructor calls
for expiring owned pointers. So far, I clean up just before "return" nodes,
but this doesn't do the right thing (a) in the face of reassignments (old
object stays alive), and consequently (b) in longer-running loops. I think I
can do sufficiently smart liveness analsysis, but I haven't figured out a
clean algorithm yet.

Code is still private for now, while I do some more experimentation to see if
I can get things to work.

------
retrogradeMT
I'm working on a simple web app that allows construction companies to send
estimates and invoices by email and text and get paid immediately by cc or
ach. \- laravel, twilio, balanced payments \- About 70% done \- Started this
project in Sept, work on it for about 15 - 20 hours a week.

------
rememberlenny
Public Artfound: The single largest collection of geotagged graffiti/street
art

[http://publicart.io](http://publicart.io)

\- Rails backend API and iOS app frontend

\- Nearly 500k images added monthly

\- This is the current iteration for a 16 week research project of
graffiti/street art related software projects

~~~
sahara
I like this idea and wanted to make it (or something approximating it) myself,
but I got hung up on the concern that a location-centric "Who's getting up in
$CITY?" webapp would, after achieving some traction, turn it into a useful
tool to facilitate the citation/arrest of some of my favorite artists and
writers.

On one hand, all of these pieces already show up on Instagram nearly
instantaneously, usually geotagged or at least in identifiable locations. But
I just couldn't shake the feeling that collating that data might have
unintended consequences.

------
hanula
Few things:

\- [http://wwwino.pl](http://wwwino.pl) \- wine search engine for Polish
market. [Python/Pyramid/ElasticSearch]

\- [http://betafrontpage.com/](http://betafrontpage.com/) \- Startup
frontpages easily browse lots of startups and gather ideas for your own
product/startup. [Python/Pyramid/Docker]

\- [https://thingr.com/](https://thingr.com/) \- Collaborative Knowledge
Organizer. Early stage.
[Python/Pyramid/PostgreSQL/ElasticSearch/Celery/MicroServices/Docker/NLTK]

\- Python microservice framework. A work in progress on small personal-use
framework to run micro services that help in everyday life/work.

Everything actually first announced here right now.

------
aepearson
I love threads like this - so inspiring. At the same time, reminds me how much
of a lazy ass I am. I have like 10 side projects that I have about 0.005%
complete right now. Any advice for a guy like me? (besides, "stop being a lazy
ass", I already know that...haha)

~~~
franksup2
I've had the same problem too. Focus on one project and work on it at least 30
minutes every day. It will be much easier to get motivation once you'll see
progress

~~~
aepearson
Makes sense - 30 min a day is manageable for sure. It's just a matter of
actually sticking to it. (I realize how ridiculous I sound right now)

But I think you are quite right about finding motivation with visible
progress.

I better get crackin!

~~~
jevyjevjevs
Maybe try to release something VERY early and collect feedback from people.
That way you know EXACTLY what to focus on because people will use it.
Motivation level: Awesome!

------
fdik
Actually because I'm in kind of sabbatical, my current side project is my main
one: pretty Easy privacy, [http://pep-project.org](http://pep-project.org) –
no one pays me for that. The thing I'm hacking now is a preview app for
Android based on K-9.

I'm continuing my work of research in language theory, modeling theory and
automation of software development, see
[http://fdik.org/yml](http://fdik.org/yml) and
[http://fdik.org/pyPEG](http://fdik.org/pyPEG) Today I'm working on Intrinsic,
a language with variable syntax while runtime. pyPEG is the prototype of the
Parser Framework for that.

------
davegaeddert
I've been working on a site called Sibbell
([http://sibbell.com/](http://sibbell.com/)).

At the core, the idea was to provide a way to get notified when GitHub
projects you use (star or watch) publish new releases. Keeping you in the know
when features get added or that bug that's about to kill your Monday gets
fixed. Seems like something GitHub would do, but the only way you can get
notified about releases through GitHub is to 'watch' a repo and then you get
notified for every issue, comment, pull request, etc.. Got some pretty good
reception on HN and have some major improvements and additions coming in the
next week or so.

Technology: Django, Celery, GitHub API

~~~
sashagim
Sounds like a great idea, and you built a great landing page, imho! But what
is sib in sibbell.com? gitbell is available!

------
minhajuddin
Working on [http://www.websrvr.in/](http://www.websrvr.in/) . An app which
lets you host websites using dropbox. Just create a new folder in your dropbox
to create a website.

Technologies used: Rails, Go, Node.js, Beanstalk, Postgresql, Redis, Nginx

I have created more than 10 content management systems in the past and every
time I create one, I have to write code for a web host. I hope this is the
final webhost, it compresses and minifies your html/js/css and also has plans
to handle other preprocessors (markdown, less, coffescript etc,.)

I have been chipping away at the code for the last 4 months and it has been
very rewarding.

------
dllthomas
I'm currently working full time on building a funding platform for FLO works
at Snowdrift.coop

The backend is Haskell using Yesod. The front-end is not very interesting so
far - we're sticking with progressive enhancement for a host of reasons, and
haven't focused much on enhancing yet.

We don't get a tremendous amount of traffic yet, as we're not launched.
There's a lot of writing and discussion on the site, though. Been working on
it - mostly part time - for about two years now, with deep involvement of one
non-technical co-founder, and on-and-off involvement of varying depth from
others.

We're aiming to be launched by the end of the year.

------
revx
I've wanted to get back into drawing web comics for a while. I also love DMing
(Leading D&D games) so I decided to combine the two into a crowdsourced
adventure comic with Reddit-style voting.

[http://omnomzom.com](http://omnomzom.com) It's a LAM(PHP) stack on
DigitalOcean, nothing fancy. I specifically kept it simple so that I could get
it out the door. Even though the tech behind it isn't anything amazing or
useful I'm having a lot of fun drawing comics and seeing what people come up
with!

The site (and my drawing skills) are still very in beta - only 21 users so
far, mostly my friends & family.

------
zorbo
So many things.. but mostly working on these right now

* A tool that generates Markdown API docs from Python files

* A whitebox system scanner that reveals problems with your server configuration. Not your average blackbox security scanner.

* A lightweight service bus without all the enterprise and java around it. It's basically a bunch of connectors that receive or poll for incoming events (rss feeds, email, trello, XMLRPC/SOAP/REST requests), maps it, filters it and then sends it out again. I'll be using this on something like a Raspberry Pie to do some home automation and such. Main goals are that it should be super easy to add new rules, connectors, etc.

------
captn3m0
I've been working on a todo app that is powered by Slack (slack.com, the
service). It identifies slack @mentions and #channel names and allows you to
search by them. New items are created directly from chat.

I built it because nobody on our team likes to use Redmine issues, because its
so bloated. Slack is adored by our team, so it made sense to connect the two
dots together.

Tech: I wrote the prototype in PHP+Parse.com as backend. Realized parse was
too slow, and then shifted to Rails+postgres.

Its called Roy, and is available at
[https://github.com/captn3m0/roy](https://github.com/captn3m0/roy)

------
PhrosTT
[http://juicytracks.com/](http://juicytracks.com/)

A 'front page' of manually curated songs (good for coding to). I hope to begin
playing with ML to identify tastemakers and improve track rankings (but first
I need some users).

It was pure Bacbone but now switched to a React views with Backbone router &
models for data syncing. Backend is Express + Mongo.

Listens are tracked with extreme granularity using Socket.io so I can
differentiate between songs with an average listen time of 20 seconds vs. 2
minutes.

No real stats. Just recently got it to a decent point. Need to sex up the UI
and branding next.

------
ankurpatel
I have been working on a reminder site which can send email, text message,
voiced phone call and physical mailed postcard reminder at a schedule time on
recurring basis or one time ad hoc basis like a broadcast. The site is called
HelloReminder - [https://www.helloreminder.com](https://www.helloreminder.com)

There is also an open source Swift project that I am actively maintaining on
github. It is a port of Underscorejs which gives helpful utility methods
useful when programming in Swift. The project is on github -
github.com/ankurp/Dollar.swift

~~~
rev_bird
This looks like a really cool setup. My only constructive thought: It'd be
really nice to have an option for text messages that was lower-powered than
$10/month for 100 of them. I could never come up with three reminders per day,
every day, that I'd want to get texted about, but if there were some option
for ~10 a month – say, for birthdays and when a bunch of my bills are due –
I'd be all over it. I just couldn't pay the same amount I pay Dropbox for 1 TB
of storage in exchange for 90 text messages I'd never use.

------
drinchev
I'm working on a shell tool for managing tinydns + git + Apache + daemontools.

Long story short. It's a nice frontend written in Perl that parses your
configuration files and based on templates modifies them.

So this gives you the opportunity to do :

    
    
        server-tools repo add https://github.com/any/repo.git --domain www.new-site.com --site html --site-home path/to/public
    

which will clone git repo, add www.new-site.com as a domain for this server (
modify tinydns config ) and create a new vhost for apache that has a root
path/to/public.

------
th0br0
Exploring real-time geospatial relationships between data.

Tech: Kafka, Apache Camel, Storm.

Recently started as part of the hackzurich hackathon; essentially: easy access
to geo-analytics using existing datasets. Quite similar to the ArcGIS Server
(with pluggable Geo-data feeds) in theory.

Demo from the hackathon:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2TkuzsUG9U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2TkuzsUG9U)
(in this version: map tweets with mentions to origin + destination, analyse
for sentiment -> show sentiment towards a certain area)

~~~
rememberlenny
Anything I can try using? rememberlenny @ gmail if there is. I'd like to try
with graffiti.

~~~
th0br0
graffiti? and not yet; but soon-ish. I'll shoot you an email once things get
there.

------
chuhnk
I wrote [http://scridx.com](http://scridx.com) a screenplay search engine on
christmas last year. It's doing a decent amount of daily traffic. Go server
backed by Elasticsearch running on a $5/month VPS. 300 daily uniques at the
moment. I've been interested in screenwriting for a long time and that really
starts with reading screenplays. All the websites out there were really
horrible, I felt like writers had really been neglected in the digital age.

------
davidcunha
I launched [http://paasifier.co](http://paasifier.co) last month. It's a open
platform where developers can find the best Platform-as-a-Service for their
apps by selecting runtime (Java, Ruby, Go, etc.) and database (MySQL, MongoDB,
etc.). In the first days I got more than 1K visits and I'm trying to monetize
it by using affliate marketing for PaaS Providers. The platform was built with
Rails + PostgreSQL

~~~
juicejerry
Nice work. Could you share some ideas, for a small site like yours, how did
you market it at the beginning to get your first 1K visits, how much effort
have you put into marketing?

------
Ixiaus
Build a web-app (and soon mobile apps) for emacs' org-mode.

    
    
      - Haskell
      - No stats, still building
      - Fed up w/ such an excellent tool being so unusable on
        anything but Emacs (prevents non-emacs users from
        collaborating).
    

Relevant hackage link for those interested:
[http://hackage.haskell.org/package/orgmode-
parse](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/orgmode-parse)

------
dmarlow
I wanted a way to be able to use SMS to control apps and devices around me.
So, I built [http://www.getsmscmd.com/](http://www.getsmscmd.com/) using .NET
on Azure, Twilio and an MQTT broker.

Some more info:
[https://github.com/dmarlow/Sms2Mqtt](https://github.com/dmarlow/Sms2Mqtt)

[http://dmarlow.github.io/](http://dmarlow.github.io/)

~~~
Khao
I would suggest you disable the auto-playing video on your website, it's
really annoying when a website does this, especially since it's so far down
the page that I couldn't figure out the source of the music at first!

~~~
dmarlow
Sorry about that. You're absolutely right. Looks like the pages gets the last
command sent. Someone had issued a "play" command and caused other pages to
also get that command upon loading.

------
franksup2
I am working on an iPad application that generate Apple Watch applications
through a "Drag and Drop" interface.

Current prototype use Objective-c and Parse.

Since programmation is no magic, I always wondered if I could create an engine
that generate native application on the fly. I built a quick prototype
containing a tableview filled from an API with a detail page.

It worked so well that I am now working night and weekends to build a complete
engine and a builder.

------
ericmarcos
I'm woking on a AI/NLP interface to connect enterprises to customers through
whatsapp and other messaging apps.

I'm using Python/Django and Yowsup (a python lib that reverse engineered
whatsapp's protocol) with PostgreSQL/Redis.

I wonder what you guys think about building a company around this idea. I have
a prototype and a couple of customers, so the market is there, but I don't
know if whatsapp could sue me or something.

~~~
BjoernKW
I wouldn't worry so much about WhatsApp suing you. If they don't like what
you're doing (or others for that matter) they can more just change their
protocol.

The problem with building a company around such a solution rather is this: Is
there a market? Sure, having a machine automatically answer customer requests
is a nice parlour trick but what's the benefit for the customer?

Just saving money on call centre agents? Or does the software actually solve a
real problem in a novel way that can't be tackled using existing solutions?

~~~
ericmarcos
I don't think whatsapp will change their protocol too much, as they'll break
millions of clients installed in old phones.

The benefit for the company looks obvious to me: save money on call centre /
community management. Deliver a service to millions of mobile users without
requiring them to download your app (just adding a phone number to the
agenda).

The benefit for the end-user: having a conversational interface with a system
is probably the lowest barrier entry to that system for a human. Everybody
knows how to chat using whatsapp, but not everybody knows (nor is willing to
learn) how to use your "user-friendly" GUI.

------
edsiper2
1\. Monkey HTTP Server: scalable HTTP server for Linux

    
    
       http://monkey-project.com
       http://github.com/monkey/monkey
    

2\. Duda I/O: web services framework to build scalable services (in C
Language)

    
    
       http://duda.io
       http://github.com/monkey/duda
    

3\. Pi-Cloud: free cloud for Raspberry Pi's:

    
    
       http://pi-cloud.monkey.io

------
enjoy-your-stay
I'm currently working on a Database Forms designer for Linux.

It started off as a small side project to see how easily I could get a quick
n' dirty db app put together on gtk, but it's kinda taken on a life of its own
and grown to something a lot more than I first intended.

I'm just starting to add Python scripting support now.

But I am enjoying it.

gtk and Objective C

[http://www.data-forms-action.com](http://www.data-forms-action.com)

------
nutmeg
[http://stationgenius.com/](http://stationgenius.com/)

Find local radio stations and talk radio programs using your phone.

A friend who travels for work quite a bit likes to listen to local radio
stations for weather and other information. So we built this to easily find
stations wherever you are.

\- Using Flask, Postgres+PostGIS, jQuery, and Bootstrap

\- Still at a very early stage. Appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks!

------
kremdela
My team built a spin off project to create an office directory / floor plan
for your small business / co-working space.
[http://www.floorplan.io/](http://www.floorplan.io/)

Tech-stack wise it's not all that interesting, but we've seen it help a lot of
small companies on-board people / meet their coworkers more easily, so that's
been fun.

~~~
aepearson
What a great idea - I wish every employer did this. A secret of mine : I
always carry a notebook at work, when I start a new job I have made a habit of
sketching the floor plan myself and labeling it with names and positions of
the people I meet. This has helped me tremendously... I gotta say this seems
like a tool that businesses NEED to make new hires more comfortable.

------
struct
I work on GoLearn as a side project. It's a general-purpose machine learning
library written in Go.

[https://github.com/sjwhitworth/golearn](https://github.com/sjwhitworth/golearn)

I started it because I wanted to revise some data mining algorithms, I've
since moved on to an unrelated career, but I'm still truly addicted to
contributing...

------
nyddle
I'm crafting a time tracking app for Google Drive,
[https://whathaveidone.today](https://whathaveidone.today).

Stack: Python/Flask + MongoDB Statistics: 60 signups, 1000 pageviews so far.
History: my friend came up with an idea and I coded it as it seemed like a
couple of evenings (it turned couple of weeks actually).

------
takinola
Handy.js ([http://handyjs.org](http://handyjs.org)) - a simple template for
nodejs apps

I started playing around with nodejs about 18 months ago and I decided to put
all the common functionality of all my projects (user management, cron,
backup, content management, etc) into one package that I could maintain
separately.

It is built with

Node.js Redis MySQL

~~~
eonw
ive checked out handy a few times, very cool!

------
dejv
Notation Training [http://notationtraining.com](http://notationtraining.com)

Sinatra app running on Linode server + heavy use of VexFlow
([https://github.com/0xfe/vexflow](https://github.com/0xfe/vexflow)).

It is up and running for few years now, getting around 200 - 300 users a day.

------
fogleman
I've been working on a chess engine. It can already whoop me.

[https://github.com/fogleman/Chess](https://github.com/fogleman/Chess)

It's written in C and implements the Universal Chess Interface (UCI) so it
works with most chess GUIs. I've had it playing on FICS some as a guest named
GuestEngine.

------
tylermac1
Building an advanced hockey statistics web tool in Meteor.

More of an excuse to learn Meteor than to really make something too useful.

~~~
Khao
The best way to learn a new language or framework is to do something you enjoy
doing in my opinion. It'll make everything much more fun for you and even
then, you never know if it could evolve into a bigger project even if it
started from something that was just for fun.

~~~
tylermac1
Exactly my reasoning. I love hockey so it's much more fun to me than building
the canonical todo-app, etc.

------
scragg
Realms Wiki: [http://realms.io](http://realms.io) \- Git based Markdown wiki
inspired by Gollum with side by side preview like Ghost/Stackeditor. Also
support for collaboration via Firepad/TogetherJS

Backend: Python, Flask, Dulwich Frontend/Editor: Bootstrap 3, Handlebars, Ace

------
bjoe_lewis
I've been working on
[http://vanitypro.herokuapp.com](http://vanitypro.herokuapp.com)

The easiest way to announce new stuff and updates to users/customers of
webapps.

Something like what Intercom does, but simpler, better and easier.

P.S: What's live now is a working v0.001 MVP. More to come, yet.

------
ssiddharth
I've been working on a little quizzing SaaS:
[http://jquizzy.com](http://jquizzy.com)

Tech: Laravel on HHVM + Postgres plus a lot of little things.

History: Did a soft launch of the beta sometime ago on HN. No comments here
but drove a bunch of traffic and feedback so I'm iterating.

~~~
hpagey
I am really interested in idea of online quizzes. Do you need any help? If
yes, how would i contact you?

~~~
ssiddharth
sid at ssiddharth dot com or sid at jquizzy dot com. Thanks!

------
rivolaks
Dependency Monitor - [https://depmonitor.com/](https://depmonitor.com/) \-
notifies you of new releases of Python, Ruby and Node.js packages

Built with Python and Django with the goal of scratching my own itch of
getting passive notifications for various packages I use.

------
fnsa
A lightweight (SPV) bitcoin client. mac/linux/bsd.

[https://github.com/bit-c/bitc](https://github.com/bit-c/bitc)
[http://imgur.com/pRLs1ps](http://imgur.com/pRLs1ps)

Just beginning an ios app based on that, a block browser.

------
maresca
Flocal : [http://goflocal.com](http://goflocal.com) \- Craigslist meets Tinder

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flocal/id894416534?mt=8&uo=4](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flocal/id894416534?mt=8&uo=4)

------
startup_life_
A fully customizable dashboard, like geckoboard, new relic, etc. They all fall
short on building an actually useful tool for monitoring (they look pretty,
but that's about it). I plan on having it be open source soon as I believe the
market for something like this is too full.

------
kanakiyajay
[http://frontb.in/](http://frontb.in/) | Modern Pastebin for the Front End
Developer.

Technology: SPA, Node-js, MongoDB

Statistics: About 300 Pageviews a Day

History: Needed a simple way for jsonlint, jshint, pastebin, compressing,
remove whitespace basically a quick tools for the web developer

------
azrealus
[http://literakiapp.com](http://literakiapp.com) | scrabble like words mobile
game (iOS / Android) for polish market.

Technology: Phonegap, Node.js, Backbone.js

Statistics: 100 - 150 new users sign daily / 500 active players daily.

------
hackhowtofaq
[http://www.passiveincomeaid.com/](http://www.passiveincomeaid.com/)

I am trying to organize all here and there posts with passive/semipassive side
projects.

I am adding new content from threads like this, so keep them coming ;)

------
bennyg
Writing and recording an album.

------
lhnz
Spokes

[http://spokesapp.co](http://spokesapp.co)

It's coffee networking with a twist and I should be launching towards the end
of the year.

Sign-up now and I'll let you know as soon as the beta starts.

Tech used: Swift, Node.JS, Koa.js, Neo4j.

~~~
aepearson
I REALLY like this idea. There are a number of times that I've wished
something like this was out there (but not so meetup-esque). Is this planned
to be a global/national/local type deal or what?

Also, just FYI, I had to resize my screen to make the submit clickable.

~~~
lhnz
I'm planning to launch in London for an early private beta, but when I launch
publicly I will launch globally (well, at least the US + UK as they're both
english speaking) as it seems uncomfortable to launch a product online and
then also have to gate it substantially.

Thanks for the tip RE: submit button - what browser + OS was that? I've only
been testing on OSX so far!

------
Randgalt
[http://nirmataoss.github.io/workflow/](http://nirmataoss.github.io/workflow/)

A ZooKeeper and Curator based distributed workflow management library that
enables distributed task workflows.

------
chinedufn
Learn how to dance using slow motion and/or looped sections of videos. Using
angularjs and html5, working on a Go backend api -
[http://loopdago.com](http://loopdago.com)

------
seiyak
I've been working on a web crawler for a while. Once it's done,I'll start
building a web search engine based on the crawler. It's not been in public
yet.

I use C,OpenMPI,Pthread,Valgrind on Linux.

------
fedosov
[http://psprices.com/](http://psprices.com/) | Sony Playstation PSN prices and
discounts aggregator/alerting service

\- Django/MySQL/Bootstrap/Knockout

\- 1k visits a day

------
diasp
Problem: PGP isn't usable!

Now my grandma can send encrypted messages with
[https://encrypt.to](https://encrypt.to)

* Technology Rails, JS, HTML, CSS

* Statistics 1452 messages successfully delivered

~~~
elsamuko
That's a great idea and execution. I'd consider a "Show HN"-posting on its
own, so it won't get buried.

I'd add a captcha though to reduce potential misuse.

------
eli_gottlieb
My primary "thing" right now is a conference paper. On the side, I'm trying to
work through a whole bloody lot of textbooks.

------
cmollis
Building an iOS video calling proof of concept using tokbox and pubnub.

Building a breathalyzer using my Pi and grove board (w tr grove gas sensor)

------
matt_lo
I built [https://learnfrontend.com](https://learnfrontend.com) as an effort
for me to A) teach people front-end development and B) to quit my consultant
job so I can focus on making a difference in people's lives. The site features
a news aggregate, videos, articles, goals, and interactive training platform.

The site is built on Symfony 2.5, PHP 5.5.x, Postgres, AngularJS 1.2.x, and
SCSS. I use Jenkins for CI, Doctrine2 as the ORM, Redis for session I/O,
Composer/Bower for dependency resolution, GitHub for documents, tickets, code
reviews (pull requests to my self). HAProxy is on standby for the need to load
balance and I have a job on Jenkins to scale up and down to a box if needed.
I'm currently adding a Docker/Vagrant setup to I can easily manage dev
environments (I don't think I'll do the same for production, we'll see).
Stripe handles payments, I bought some cheap SSL cert (Stripe handles PCI info
outside the server I/O). New Relic is used to monitor both QA, production and
my jenkins deploy box. DNS is handled by GoDaddy. I have a Cron handling the
news aggregate refresh, diff logic to populate new articles to a mobile
curator app I built, and an approve/deny system that determines which articles
are allowed to be propagated to the users. Videos are hosted through a third
party service and assets internally are handled stored through S3 with
CloudFront URL signing assets.

Although it just released, I have received a large amount of important
feedback thats going to dramatically change the site. This includes offering
more to the user for free, create more interactive components (my writing is
too boring / too technical), and improve the marketing (showing the actual
tools). I have some POCs in the works for a simulated IDE on edge
Chrome/Firefox (uses WebWorkers to observe stackoverflow-able code w/o
crashing browser, ScalaJS and Angular port on ScalaJS as MVC frontend; the
experience is very much a level up from CodeAcademy's IDE-tutorial).

I'm also in a transitionary period where I want to build the new tools and
reconstruct the existing ones in Scala (using Play as the framework). I have
more time than before since I saved a significant amount of money to pursue
this (I built v1 part time, 30 hours a week for 6 weeks with 30k lines of code
added). The force behind this decision is I want more experience with
functional programming while leveraging what I know already (JVM / Java).

One of the critical experiences I've had was actually materializing an idea
and shipping it. Failing fast and often is an important strategy that's
working for me after launching v1.

 _TL;DR_ : Built an e-learning site. I learned from failures. Building next
version thats going to be rainbows and shit (thats the plan at least).

------
jamesbrewer
Use the search box at the bottom of the page. This question has been asked way
too many times.

~~~
Ad_Nauseam
I think its good having this kind of thread at some period of time. People
build things everytime, its nice to see and share them.

