Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#191

Post by foxfired » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:04 AM UTC

Ah man, am I too late?

I had an idea to create a website that shows you how much sugar is in a product. I was too excited and bought the domain name:

https://sugarglot.com

The domain name stayed dormant for 6 months, until the quarantine. I created a minimal working product with no design but it works.

This product already exists in the market. But all apps fail at nailing two main problems.

1 - Seamless fast search.

2 - Graphically conveying the sugar measure.

The first one is what I really worked on, to make it fast and intuitive. Still needs improvements. The second one is still a work in progress since I am no designer.

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#192

Post by collyw » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:06 AM UTC

Quarantine has made me realise how little free time I actually have. I am supposed to be doing a basic database for a friends lab. It's turning out to be mainly a data validation and cleaning project. Without a cycle to work, a cycle back from work to split up my day I have really little motivation to sit more hours coding after I have cooked dinner and eaten. I should get on with it though.

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#193

Post by zhte415 » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:09 AM UTC

Building a rabbit hutch and nice area for running with protection against predatory birds.

Working with a friend who went back to the farm three years ago - for context at 40 he's the youngest person in the village - on local country cooking, sustainable farming, and promoting the area as an attractive break-away resort to breathe some prosperity into what is a really quite sustenance area.

And of course my non-side project that I decided to dive in to at exactly the worst time in a decade. Oh well. But optimistic on that.

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#194

Post by potatofarmer45 » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:10 AM UTC

I found a free espresso machine on craigslist (Gaggia Classic). It was old, rusty and "wasn't working". Spent time researching the model, took it apart and de-rusted and cleaned every part. Now it makes delicious coffee. Totally worth it

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#195

Post by johnmarinelli » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:13 AM UTC

I've been working on an audiovisual project that gets data directly from Ableton Live and feeds it into my THREE.js app. You can see a couple of demos here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9k1pv6hhGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxj8g_Y1BtA

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#196

Post by toyg » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:14 AM UTC

I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you.

More seriously, I'm trying to get in the habit of not talking about any side project I've not shipped yet, since when I "announce" them in advance I end up not shipping anything. Turns out this might actually have a basis in science, as recent studies allege that the brain "discharges" some energy/motivation when one talks about future plans.

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#197

Post by iraldir » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:15 AM UTC

Creating a SAAS that works sort of like a trello board to organise your travels, with each "ticket" being a Stay, a transport or an activity ("visiting the old street"). Get easy access to the location of everything you're about to do, and with the card system it's easy to reorganise your holiday on the go if you realise rain is going to ruin a prepared activity.

Almost finished the MVP, one more 3 days weekend and that should be it.

Next.js + Mongodb + Auth0 + Stripe + TailwindCSS

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#198

Post by r0b05 » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:17 AM UTC

I am getting to know the local birds, growing 2 plants and learning machine learning. Soon, hopefully, I will start building some side apps using ml and maybe teach it to the birds.

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#199

Post by mcjiggerlog » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:17 AM UTC

I built an emoji picker for linux - https://github.com/tom-james-watson/emote.

I was frustrated there didn't seem to be any decent desktop-agnostic solutions that work in all apps, so I decided to give it a go myself.

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#200

Post by mcv » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:18 AM UTC

I work from home, teach my kids, and play EU4 to relax[0]. That's pretty much all my life is, at the moment.

My 11 year old son has decided we wants to make a table for his younger brother, so that might turn into a side project for me. If I'm lucky it turns into a side project for our carpenter neighbour instead.

[0] Yesterday after a disappointing job offer, I declared war on everybody.