What's your quarantine side project?
I saw this on HN and thought it would be a great question to ask here as well.
Has the quarantine changed your project you're working on? Did you scrap it or postpone it for something else, maybe it's inspired you to be more heads down working on it? Regardless, I'd love to hear what you all are working on.
I can honestly say it's provided me some added some steam behind my side project and we were able to push an MVP live!
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I've decided to learn more about AI as I have a fairly extensive background in chatbots & gaming.
I'd like to make characters in games more realistic through more realistic conversations & actions.
This is really cool, what have you been using to teach yourself?
Err... I can code so generally it’s a case of set a goal, break it down into small steps, and solve problems as they come up.
I’m currently reading unity / ai development and focusing on azure ai components for leverage.
It’s fun 😊👍
I started writing a children book. Three stories that I tell my son every once in a while, that I made up to teach him some life values. 😊 I am looking for an illustrator at the moment, which is the tricky part.
I am a developer meanwhile.
Finding a good illustrator can be tough, have you settled on a style? Depending on what you are looking for I might be able to point you in the right direction!
That's great, I'd really appreciate help.
How can I reach you?
I’m building an Excel to SQL desktop app.
Like a lot of people I have time on my hands, and I can’t always be ‘in’ my main app. Sometimes I need to unwind, and I love building desktop software, so this app is me unwinding.
I’ve been contracting for years, and in almost every company I work for I encounter difficulties with business analysts wanting to apply updates to databases. Being analysts, they use Excel, and then pass that Excel file on to the dev team to update a SQL database.
The Excel files are often populated with incorrect data, inconsistent fields, spelling mistakes and such. So I wanted an easy way to take that Excel file, load it, select columns to work with, apply conditions to those columns, and then produce a line or script of SQL per valid row in the Excel file, populated with data from the file.
It’s complete as of yesterday, and I’ll be releasing it into a black void on my blog over the weekend. No one will want it but me, but I enjoyed building it.
Now back to my main app…
Hah, I ran into similar problems in my previous company! In the finance space, people use Excel a lot.
I ended up building an Excel Importer microservice API. You can also check out my blog about this.
What's your blog address? Would definitely love to connect and chat about this.
Interesting read there Junji. I like your approach. It's a bit more complex than my own, which is still dealing with CSV files. Sounds like you're encountering different use cases too.
I'll be pushing my version 1 out there probably tomorrow over at https://darrendevitt.com/, and I'd be interested in any feedback you might have.
Understandable, it can be cathartic to build passion projects like this. Also, don't be so sure it'll disappear, throw it up on HN, maybe there are others who need the same thing and it'll take off!
I do intend to put it out there and spread the word once it's released. Like you said, you never know what can strike a chord. There is a lot to be said for building something without commercial intent - it frees you up to just build and let the chips fall where they will.
This quarantine I decided to restrain myself from starting a new side project (many of you might agree that we've got too many abandoned projects) and just pick one from the abandoned queue.
My pick: http://seriesreminder.net It was going to be the first choice when you wanted a new series recommended or just wanted to see which tv shows will air this week.
It was still using Rails 5 and Sprockets so I had to make the proper upgrades (including migration to Webpacker) and revamped the design using React and MaterialUI. I wrote an article about it https://medium.com/@cionescu1/how-to-use-react-components-in-active-admin-184ff63b378d
My only goal moving forward is to find the sweet spot (not really MVP, but a nicely working state) where I can go back to just ignoring this project again
Your medium post is 404ing for me ):
Breathing new life into an abandoned project is always nice, gives you a chance to reflect and ponder what was I thinking when I built this the first time hahaha.
Fixed that 😁
I used my time to build a full-stack SaaS with Landing Page, Docs, Dashboard, API, Integrations all by my self.
upstamps.com was born. A Feature Flag Management Platform to separate code from different environments and projects.
It is phenomenal
This is amazing, congrats! Definitely going to check this out some more as we get further along :)
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Build all the landing page with react and bootstrap CSS, the animations I am using React Lottie with this Illustrations
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Building an editor that helps you with copywriting, and I love copywriting!
https://targetaudience.app
This is rather sexy, going to try this out!
Haha thanks😜 Let me know what you think of it🙏🏼
I created a mini website builder for social bios in 40 days on top of working full time at my main dev job. It was a mission, but launched now 🤘
Check it out - https://space.bio
Working on another now... the grind must continue!
this is super smart, its like linktree on steroids!
thanks!
I launched affTable.com, a collection of SaaS affiliate programs. Since many people are laid off, they may be able to make some money if they have the time to create some content like tutorials, reviews, podcasts, etc.
Just put a link in your content. If your readers make an order via your referral links, you take a slice, a monthly recurring commission for a long time.
Nice work. Do you have traffic for this site yet?
Yes, about a thousand after launched for a month.
I launched a newsletter Git Better to help devs to learn more about Git. I'm covering tricks, tips and advanced topics of Git here.
Exciting, there's always room to git better ;) You have a new subscriber!
cool :)
I'm building Panelscout - https://www.panelscout.com/. It's an onboarding tool for web developers and agencies to help them understand a project's scope and importantly their client's design preferences.
It can be pretty frustrating when you're trying to figure out what style/design a new clients want and they just keep saying they're not sure, or coming back with 'no not that' when you mock up a design. PanelScout should keep that to a minimum.
Super exciting, back in my agency days scope creep was the bane of my existence... Glad to hear you are building something to solve that!
The whole reason I'm here is because of the quarantine actually. After everyone froze hiring I got sick of looking. I've also had time to binge the IH podcast which has been inspiring. I'm launching my second product this month!
Awesome, I can't wait to see what you are building!
I ended up spending much more time working on open source projects. It's a pretty challenging market right now, so I decided to spend more time working on free & open source projects like Shynet instead of, say, Lensant.
That's really cool! I really respect the model of open-sourcing your core project and building on top of it. It's an easy way to prove it out and let other's see how well it works.
Interestingly I stopped my side projects and went on to create other covid related projects to help people. Could be down to a combo of boredom, wanting to help out in any way, and gaps emerging that I could plug. Ended up making like 5 projects in slightly over a month!
Very impressive!
I created https://fruitionsite.com, a free, open source toolkit for building websites with Notion. You get pretty URL slugs, custom domain, and a whole bunch of other features.
I hacked it together in a weekend, put up the marketing site (using Fruition, oh so meta) and shared it in Notion's Facebook group and subreddit, without any expectations that it would go anywhere.
The response has been incredible. 11000 people have checked it out since. It ended up on the Product Hunt newsletter [1]. People are making YouTube videos [2] about it. Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks [3] shared it too.
The biggest lesson for me was just launch it. There were many more things I wanted to add. But I decided to share it publicly before it was perfect. Now I have users who can give me real feedback rather than me pretending I know what people want.
[1] https://www.producthunt.com/newsletter/4717
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw0x54PzCaI
[3] https://css-tricks.com/notion-powered-websites/
The idea of the quarantine side project came in the second week of the quarantine, while editing some photos in Photoshop. It's an IOS and Android app that allows you to put between 2-4 photos and clone yourself.
https://clonemeapp.com/
TuneMeet.com, it's a website where you can get matched and chat with people who are listening to the same song right now
I've never really known anyone who have a similar music taste as I do. I'll definitely be on the lookout.
I am building an online tool which will help lazy people (like me) to do the content marketing for their businesses. I find it very time consuming and decided to solve this problem. Progressing steadily, for now.
I might also pickup a some new skills and dive into some long-lost hobbies, haha.
I am pretty sure the abundant time given to us right now due to quarantine and lockdowns, will not be back in future, anytime soon.
This sounds super useful, like yourself I also want to focus on building. A lot of the time marketing your platform feels more difficult than building it.
What hobbies are you picking up? I've started working out again and that's been great for my health mentally and physically.
I am glad you found it useful. I would love it if you can join the beta. While I am not picking any new hobbies, I am getting back to old hobbies such as reading books/articles around my area of interests, sketching and drawing because I love to do it :)
Great, Exercising is really important. I have tried many times to start exercising but I end up doing stretching only 😅
When building our last product we made a big mistake that we didn't listen to our customers enough.
Then last year we build a product using no code to track the feedback of customers and it helped a lot. ( It won Product Hunt makers festival tools for teams ). Later talking to other founders we found this as a common mistake. Hence we build this ground up a platform to collect feedback from customers. Please give it a try. https://www.featuremonkey.com/
Oooh this is exciting, I'm all about open discussions around feedback!
I'll check it our for sure :)
Building a social network for musicians as part of my bachelor thesis.
Interesting, I'm not a musician but have many friends who are. I'll keep a eye out for this :)
I created a new blog https://litfellow.com/best-gaming-laptops-under-300/ about laptops and tech and still working on it and planning to make it something big
This is a great question. I invested some time in creating a video course & launched it in 20 days. Got some sales as well.
Do check it out: https://gum.co/aZmeh
Have started taking feedback & will be working on a new course as well. Looking at this as a passive income.
I'm working on writing cleaning guides and reviewing cleaning products over at Onedesk
For me my recent side project/s are, uhh...coronavirus related 🤦🏼♂️ I got involved in tracking the data early, from late January started tracking the daily % changes in confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, and the death rates.
I also started a small food delivery service, but ceased that after only a few weeks due to food shortages.
Recently just this weekend I built a small tool for a timeline on the main coronavirus events.
scrapingdog.com
I launched BackToSQL.com. Going to teach a course about SQL!
Pivoting SugarKubes to a machine learning marketplace, which, ironically (if it works) is what I started with 2 years ago haha.
I started a blog about business ideas sometime back. The past few days, I have been working on a long-form post. Aiming for 25,000 to begin with, and if I still feel motivated, want to go up to 50,000.
But this is not unusual. A lot of business and marketing sites have such really long-form articles. Just the first one for me.
I've been working on codesnippetsearch.net, an AI powered code search tool. Initially it started out as a submission to the Github CodeSearchNet challenge, but I decided to make it into a full-blown web app :)
I started a journal business on shopify. For ~2 years i have been using a paper notebook for my journalling and planning/organizing. During this time, I have also been meditating and studying stoic philosophy. As the months went by i slowly improved my process to include lessons from meditation and stoicism and i always wanted to share with people, but i never knew how. When CV19 hit, i started looking around at how i could share this notebook electronically, as i thought it would be very useful during these hard times... By some random act of chance, i found a shopify app (LuluExpress) that allows you to print on demand. Thus, my project was born. you can go check it out at dailygrow.co and on instagram at @dailygrowco . Welcome all thoughts, comments, and perspectives!
Here's the HN link in case people haven't seen it. Over 2000 comments! Some really interesting ideas here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170881
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