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Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?

101 points| chdaniel | 5 years ago | reply

It's been ~one year since the first lockdowns started. What are you working on now?

I'll start: I'm building PriceUnlock, a tool that will help you find the best pricing for your SaaS product. I'll post more in the comments so as to not hijack the post's description!

238 comments

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[+] knoebber|5 years ago|reply
Dotfilehub: https://dotfilehub.com

I've always found various solutions that use git for sharing configuration files cumbersome. I set out to make my own simple version control system, and a lightweight web application where I can browse and edit them remotely. The main idea is that paths are aliased to simple names, so I can say `dotfile pull i3` and it will install https://dotfilehub.com/knoebber/i3 to ~/.config/i3/config

Overall the project is stable and I use it daily for all sorts of miscellaneous files.

[+] RileyJames|5 years ago|reply
Pretty cool. The kind of thing I’d never look for, but now want to explore.

I’ve seen some awesome looking terminals / setups while watching programming demos / tutorials.

I would totally try their setup if they had a link to it via your site.

Likewise, any sort of preview / screen shot on your site would be awesome.

Well executed thus far.

[+] chdaniel|5 years ago|reply
Would love to comment with feedback but I'm not techincal enough to use it! Sounds like a time-saver though. Do you have any plan with Dotfilehub? Sell it as a product, keep it free, accept donations if it becomes widely used...?
[+] dgski|5 years ago|reply
Great idea! I feel the personal configuration space is ripe for innovation.
[+] shanecleveland|5 years ago|reply
I filled my own need with https://howsyourblank.com.

I have a minor, but chronic medical condition I am trying to get in check, and I just wanted something incredibly simple to identify good and bad days. I was inspired by "year in pixels" calendars.

And I took the opportunity to try out Userbase[0] and build something with a secure backend and no tracking, considering the potentially sensitive nature of it.

No plans for monetization at the moment. I could see adding more features such as tracking multiple data points, stats, correlations, notes, etc., and creating a premium version. I would need more users and feedback.

[0]https://userbase.com

[+] perilunar|5 years ago|reply
I think this needs a demo page/account showing how it looks. Looks interesting, but I don't want to create account just to see how it works.
[+] hopesthoughts|5 years ago|reply
this would be great for headache and sleep tracking, both of which I need.
[+] pronouncedjerry|5 years ago|reply
great job! you took a problem, came up with a solution, and executed it very well.
[+] chrisdalke|5 years ago|reply
Most recently I built https://www.timelineify.com/ - Spotify messes with the order of albums & singles, making it difficult to hear an artist's works in the order they were released. Timelineify generates a chronological playlist of an artist's entire discography with a few clicks!

I was interested in playing around with the Spotify API and this was a narrowly-scoped problem I personally had and could solve in a single weekend. I'm happy with the results, about 500 users have logged in and created a playlist.

[+] asaddhamani|5 years ago|reply
Crestify: https://www.crestify.com

It is a bookmarking app with:

- Full text search

- Permanent Archives (Private WYSIWYG and archive.org)

- Full text search on browsing history

- Save all your open tabs in 1 click

- Chrome (and family), Firefox extensions

- Reader Mode

- Fully open source codebase BSD licensed

- SaaS & Self-hostable

- And more...

Use coupon code HN to get 50% off your subscription.

I used to keep running into issues where I remember reading something somewhere on the internet but would forget where I read it.

I have tabs open for documentation, github, PM tools, cloud storage, AWS, localhost, etc. It becomes a mess, especially when working on multiple projects, and adds cognitive load.

I've used many bookmarking services. Pinboard can save tabs but the full text search doesn't support SPA sites and the product has stopped evolving. Raindrop is beautiful, but it can't save the browsing history or tabs. The permanent copy they both save is what their server sees, not what I see in my browser.

I wanted a swiss-army knife of bookmarking tools that does it all so I can keep everything in one place, and that's what I've made.

PS: I built this around 5 years ago to scratch my own itch and learn Flask, I'm working on finding the target audience that would pay for something like this. Can anyone help me there?

[+] antomeie|5 years ago|reply
Last fall, during covid-19, I started working on an app to use my iPhone as a webcam for my Mac. I had some interest in it, so I recently released it publicly last month.

There are similar apps out there, but to my knowledge my app is the only one that is both 100% free and supports 1080p @ 30 FPS.

Hope any of you find it useful: https://webcamplus.app

[+] FractalHQ|5 years ago|reply
I love you for this. I was pulling my hair out trying to hack something together using the crappy apps out there for it. Can’t believe it’s not a native feature. Excited to try this and send it to some friends facing similar issues!
[+] Jugurtha|5 years ago|reply
Cool. Are you aware of something similar but Android--> Ubuntu ?
[+] 908B64B197|5 years ago|reply
Does the iOS app speaks a known protocol over USB?
[+] dstik|5 years ago|reply
We're building Circles for Zoom (https://www.circlesforzoom.com) - to give you more control over your Zoom calls.

It's a fully native MacOS app (swift, not electron/etc) built on top of the Zoom SDK that transforms meeting participants into moveable/resizable circles on your screen and offers additional power tools to get your desktop back and have more control over your meeting experience.

It's just two of us now, working as fast as we can and listening to user feedback to drive priorities on our roadmap.

It's free to use - we would love to hear feedback from anyone willing to give it a shot!

[+] aryamansharda|5 years ago|reply
Awesome Viewer for GitHub's Awesome Lists: http://awesome.digitalbunker.dev/

I've been working on a viewer for Github's Awesome lists to make them more useable. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm close.

With most of the lists being text based, it was hard to know if the repo it linked to was still being maintained and popular enough to safely use in personal projects.

Now anyone that uses my project can easily visualize all of the repos and query them to find projects that are still actively maintained.

[+] kristintynski|5 years ago|reply
HTTPS://PDAP.IO a nonprofit with the goal of scraping and making accessible county level police data. With this data aggregated and made available, policing the police will be more possible.
[+] kureikain|5 years ago|reply
I'm working on https://hanami.run an email forwarding service.

I tried to build it in open https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hanami and plan to blog more about my journey on https://hanami.run/blog.

I started this because I want to make send and receive email easier once I bought a domain.

I also want to give my wife and me has some kind of mail alias so both of us can receive email(kids information, hospital etc).

Right now, I'm working hard to add Disposable email feature and add team access.

[+] taphangum|5 years ago|reply
https://planflow.dev - The easiest way to PLAN your website or mobile app.

It tries to make planning a website or mobile app as close as possible to the pen and paper experience.

It does this in a simple but (from my, and the experience of those who have tested it out) very effective and engaging way.

I share a bit more about how this is done here: https://simpleprogrammer.com/information-architecture-develo....

[+] 600frogs|5 years ago|reply
FYI - the landing page tells me nothing about what it is you're selling, and "Why PlanFlow" leads to "Access Denied". I don't want to give away my email if I've no idea what it is I'm signing up for.

Plus some bugs you might want to be aware of - the "Coming Soon" floating labels are pretty off-centre on the links, and the hamburger menu when the browser is in portrait is nearly unusable and splits the "Sign Up - Free" button in half. This is on Safari on a Mac.

[+] arwhatever|5 years ago|reply
Sieve: https://sievejobs.com

Software Development Job Search with metadata to allow developers to filter jobs by any facet that Software Developers could want:

- Interview Style - Open Seating vs. anything better. - Pay Rate - Work Hours Expectation - Automated Productivity Monitoring/Surveillance

Of course hiring managers would be reluctant to divulge so much; I'm currently working to attract enough (free!) Software Developer/Job Seeker profiles that hiring managers will be more or less compelled to post on the site.

[+] mnembrini|5 years ago|reply
A Csv editor/viewer in Rust using druid. Very early stage, but the goal is to open large files (1 GB and over) easily and have some good filtering / sorting options. Excel stops at a certain amount of rows, LibreOffice is ok but slow and other editors I looked are not cross platform I know you can just import a Csv into a sql DB but it can be finicky it can take some time to map the columns, filter out invalid data etc. This can and should be all be automated
[+] amir734jj|5 years ago|reply
I work at a large financial company and every day we have a ansible job to get CSV file that's >1GB and move it to our shared drive. It's very idiot way of moving files but there are tons of companies still using this approach.

Then someone somewhere in India needs to make sure the job ran successfully by attempting to open that CSV file and doing a smoke testing.

I'm looking forward to this!

[+] nojito|5 years ago|reply
Excel can trivially handle hundreds of millions of rows.

Using powerquery and power pivot

[+] winrid|5 years ago|reply
I've been building FastComments: https://fastcomments.com

For the past year or so.

I'm also building an MMO game, and you can read the technical details/build thread here: https://jvm-gaming.org/t/tdworld-development-thread/69948/10...

[+] chdaniel|5 years ago|reply
Oh wow I love it! Love the simplicity of installation — it's definitely a trend that's going up lately, but I'm surprised to see that, since Stripe made it mainstream back in the previous decade, it's... not very very common to have products that are installable with a code embed

1) Can you talk a bit more (to a non-technical person) about how the code embed works

2) As a suggestion, I think you'd do well in no/low-code communities or products. Webflow is a tool I use so I believe it'd be a success there, since the average Webflow user doesn't know how to code advanced stuff, but they know Webflow has a 'code embed' where they can slap a few lines (i.e. Fastcomments' snippet) and stuff works

[+] ptm|5 years ago|reply
I have been working on SceneRadar.

This tool displays you timestamped alerts (nudity, sex, violence or gore). So if you plan to watch a film with your child, your parents or other conservative relatives - you know when the danger scenes are going to hit you.

Since I watched lots of films during the lockdown, I thought this would be a good use of time.

https://sceneradar.com/

[+] illwrks|5 years ago|reply
This is a great idea! Are you doing it manually or scraping subs for keywords etc?
[+] ecesena|5 years ago|reply
MultiPreview: https://multipreview.com

Create sharable links with different images, so you can share the same article multiple times, e.g. on twitter keeping your feed nice and clean.

For those interested in the details, it renders an html page with custom metatags and immediately redirects to the target. Redirect happens in js, so crawlers actually display our metatags vs the target ones. It's just a hack I've tested a while ago, a couple marketer friends liked it and so I decided to make it into a micro SaaS.

If you want to try it out, I recommend to have a blog post handy. (also, credit card are disabled, but I like to keep the landing page "final".)

[+] chdaniel|5 years ago|reply
Ohh, kinda like Seth Godin's blog! If you share any of his blog posts, there's a rotation of pics that come up in Twitter's preview. Did I get it right?

P.S: Feedback for feedback, if you're down? https://bychgroup.com/price-unlock/

[+] j4yav|5 years ago|reply
I’m a bit late here, but I’m building AsyncGo (https://asyncgo.com) to be an async communication tool, replacing (Zoom) meetings and Slack for situations where collaboration doesn’t have to be real-time, which is quite a lot of the time.

I think the world is better when you give people more flexibility about when and from where the can collaborate with each other - I saw it in action at GitLab when I was working there - and I hope this makes a difference for people.

[+] nicbou|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/nicbou/timeline

Something that displays your personal history on a timeline: photos, geolocation, social media, searches, browsing history, transactions, chats etc.

My goal was to have a repository of my personal data that isn't controlled by a third party. I can use it as a much more contextual diary, and as a way to locate things in time (e.g. purchases, motorcycle maintenance). It's both interesting and useful.

It's inspired by my travel diaries, Google History, my photo stream, and the notebook that sits on my desk.

It's live since a while, but I'm still working on adding new sources of data.

Theres also https://github.com/nicbou/homeserver, my personal streaming service. It's in production since a few years. Recently, I added a watch party mode (WebSockets!) and updated the reencoding logic to waste less disk space.

[+] denysvitali|5 years ago|reply
A StackOverflow / Discourse alternative: https://github.com/denysvitali/dev-portal-frontend https://github.com/denysvitali/dev-portal

Porting Linux to the Surface Pro X (and failing doing that due to my lack of kernel experience): http://github.com/denysvitali/surface-pro-x-linux/

Creating a Microsoft Teams library + client (WIP): https://github.com/fossteams/teams-api

Unfortunately my free time is quite limited :(