All of my side projects are technically failures because I cannot release them. I have worked in software for a few decades, and all of the companies have IP assignment clauses in their non-negotiable employment agreements that specify that any project I do, even on my own time and with my own equipment belongs to them. There’s no point to releasing something that will be seized by court order if it becomes profitable.
Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?
121–130 of 223 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?
#122Launched https://www.easydatatransform.com earlier this year. It has sold some licenses and I wouldn't call it a failure yet, but the visit to download ratio is low compared to my other 2 commercial products. Not sure why. I'm pretty sure the traffic is targeted, I am solving a real problem and the website explains what it does. Any feedback would be welcome!
I'm curios to know what are your other two commercial products since EasyDataTransform looks useful.
Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the early planning stages of doing something somewhat similar for motorcycle riders (which I am one), you feed it your commute route, typical times and it then sends you a summary of the next days commute (or ride) including interpreting the forecast in the context of a motorcycle (i.e. gust delta against base wind speed, temps below 0 in the preceeding 12hrs, estimated windchill at 40mph, 50mph, 60mph and sug…
My wife and I took a road trip to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, USA for our honeymoon in 2002. We were passing through a storm along I90 in South Dakota when we later realized we drove between 2 tornados. Since then I've wished that Google Maps would add a road trip weather option given that it predicts roughly where you'll be and when for possibly the next 10 hours in a drive.
I built something like this awhile ago (http://weather.basementserver.org/) as an afternoon hobby project. I'm shocked that Google hasn't added this feature yet!
Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?
#124First I'll explain what I mean by "failed". I'm not shutting down or ceasing development. But since I have a previous side project that never became profitable, I made an agreement with my wife that if I didn't get 10 paid users in February, I'd de-emphasize this project and focus on other things. So far I have 2 paid users, and they're both people I know. It's pretty obvious February won't see 10 paid users. Now the…
I like the idea of modelling of reasoning.
I don't see enough examples to see full power of the tool.
> I think a prose comment isn't enough to explain my reasoning
Why didn't you put it in format of your tool?
Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?
#125First I'll explain what I mean by "failed". I'm not shutting down or ceasing development. But since I have a previous side project that never became profitable, I made an agreement with my wife that if I didn't get 10 paid users in February, I'd de-emphasize this project and focus on other things. So far I have 2 paid users, and they're both people I know. It's pretty obvious February won't see 10 paid users. Now the…
I like the idea of modelling of reasoning. I don't see enough examples to see full power of the tool. > I think a prose comment isn't enough to explain my reasoning Why didn't you put it in format of your tool?
Yeah, maybe I need to give people more examples.
Here's the first non-trivial one I made: https://en.howtruthful.com/o/nuclear_power_is_a_crucial_comp...
Here's one related to pg's most recent essay: https://en.howtruthful.com/o/essays_that_endeavor_to_be_pers...
Why didn't I put this long comment in the format of the tool? I thought in this case the logical structure of what I was saying was obvious.
Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do German libraries not email reminders? Also I usually shy away from projects that can be replaced with a “hey Siri”—if people aren’t already taking the 5 seconds to set a reminder, they probably don’t care that much.
Some send email reminders and some do not. But I primarily wrote it because of a library that sends reminders. I borrowed books there, did not set a reminder myself, since they always send reminders, and then they did not send reminders. "We had a mail server failure", and then I had to pay 60€, because they cannot maintain their servers properly. And it has more features. It also renews the books automatically to ex…
Whoa. German libraries don’t mess around with the late fees I guess.
Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?
#127Failed project: The Daily Wordpress Reference[1]
I wanted to give an easy way for people to learn the intimidating WordPress API[2], bit by bit, every morning, in their email.
It failed because monetization was an afterthought. Even though it gathered a steady 1100 subscribers (daily emails) at the end (for about 6 months), I was unable to make a buck with ads (Amazon books related to wordpress).
Now I'm on my way for another failure with my online course on WordPress plugin development[3]. This one, I think I failed because I'm not a public figure in WP development so it's harder for people to trust me, and (related reason) I don't have much reach on social networks.
[1] https://www.juliendesrosiers.com/2012/03/10/the-daily-wordpr...
Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?
#128https://repominder.com sends release reminders for your open source projects. It works by monitoring the diff between your development branch and how you release (eg tags or another branch). It works well for me and one other power user, but hasn't grown beyond that. My guess is it's just a failure of marketing -- I make lots of these projects that scratch an itch and then just hope people will find them. At least it…
Where do you run the vps?
I've moved everything to https://buyvm.net after trying a bunch of cheaper providers. They've been good to me for the ~two years I've been using them: no outages and quick support.
If you end up liking them, here's my affiliate link: https://my.frantech.ca/aff.php?aff=3397
Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?
#129I made https://www.hackersubscribe.com as a way to get email notifications when certain people post/comment on Hacker News. So I get an email with patio11, Patrick Collison, or Alan Kay posts. When I first made it, I submitted a Show HN thread, but got zero response.
Add in a list of interesting people you would recommend on the site.
I never thought about actually paying attention to who posts on HN, only what's posted. It seems obvious now that you've mentioned it.
Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?
#130Launched https://www.easydatatransform.com earlier this year. It has sold some licenses and I wouldn't call it a failure yet, but the visit to download ratio is low compared to my other 2 commercial products. Not sure why. I'm pretty sure the traffic is targeted, I am solving a real problem and the website explains what it does. Any feedback would be welcome!
In a recent job, I was a software engineer who worked with the data science people in an "analytics" group.
A big PITA for us was the data we'd get from various sources (vendors/clients/whomever). Oh, there's a rando string in a "number" field in row 9,100,500, huh, that sucks.
You can't always build the validation into your ETL pipeline for various reasons. Or it fails the whole file (b/c the data science folks built it that way really aren't that experienced at handling exceptions in the file loads, etc)
Anyway that rambling is trying to lead up to me saying that there's a chasm between your supposed target market (marketers, BSAs, scientists) and the engineers/devs etc that could probably use some better tools for CSV/JSON munging.
Excel is terrible at this job. What I often did was load the csv into sqlite to and then ran queries on the data to figure out how many records were horked. Or if it was a process we were testing, to verify that we had the right data or a good approximation. That works for csv, but with JSON, it's even harder.
Anyway, I'm just not sure that your target market knows to look for a tool like this or would really know what to do with it. On the other hand, an engineer might look at this tool as too down level.
- No cli options - No api?
I think there's a market for tools to help "data plumbers", software devs, engineers, support personal, etc. There's all kinds of application consultants/support etc that are moving data between systems for migrations, upgrades, custom exports, etc.