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Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

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231–240 of 587 posts

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#231

I built https://sslping.com/ to help monitor website TLS/SSL security and certificates. It has 300 users and checks almost 7000 servers every day for TLS problems. It's a little like SSLlabs server test, only much faster (5 seconds instead of 2 minutes), plus the tests are recurring every day, and you receive the diff if any. It's always been a joy to receive thank you emails from users, or adding new features for us…

Thank you for this! I have a post-it note for sideproject ideas and wanted to build exact system. I'm glad you already built it :) Also glad I found out about it before building it myself.

It's good to hear! Feel free to use it and tell me if you have any suggestions, or anything really

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#232
I built a super lightweight web app to draw on images. It targets mainly cheap android phones that don't have storage for a proper app. It's called https://minimage.tk, and I use it all the time to annotate screenshots now. It was a nice pet project to build a progressive web app in full vanilla.

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#234
I have a bit of a obsession with the Lisbon Metro, even though I don't use it very often. I started by building this:

https://github.com/gbl08ma/disturbancesmlx

This started as more of a statistics page for the service interruptions published by the Metro on their website, which I scrape. The slight tongue-in-cheekiness of my website, which opens up with a large text saying something like "XX days since the last disturbance", where XX is usually a single-digit number, made it become mildly popular (at least in terms of what I'm used to).

This particular subway system doesn't operate on a fixed schedule and doesn't show the ETA for the next train outside of the platforms nor on any app or website. (Google thinks there's a schedule, but they've been fooled.) They also don't publish usage stats for each station, which would be of great interest to everyone who likes daydreaming of expansions, network reorganization and the like. Furthermore, I read and heard multiple reports of delays and interruptions that never made their way to the website. So I decided to build a Android app to unobtrusively crowd-source data and communicate the service status back to the users...

https://github.com/gbl08ma/underlx

...and the very ambitious goal is to, one day, be able to calculate train positions and ETAs based on real-time data reported by the smartphones of people riding the subway. Pretty much "Waze for the Lisbon Metro".

Yeah, I've put months of work into this and there's absolutely no business plan; it perpetually feels 5% complete. But it's been fun putting together my second Android app, playing around with Postgres (after many years using MySQL), designing the REST API and writing the server in Go. I plan to use this big project as my sandbox for experimenting with machine learning and other AI techniques, as well as data analytics and visualization. There's already a small but extremely interested group of users, which really motivates me to keep working on this.

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#235
I work on Empires Mod, a 10 year old real time strategy and first person shooter hybrid. It's playable for free and still has an active playerbase. It's very satisfying to fix bugs that have been around for more than 5 years.

We're currently looking for someone that can do UX design, if you're interested in making an impact on a live game send me a message.

https://empiresmod.com

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#239

A friend and I run https://www.brewnotice.com It started as a project for us and a handful of friends, now we have around 2,000 users. All running on a $5 / mo Digital Ocean server. We're not planning to ever charge for it. Right now it's just fun to work on, and it gets us into a handful of beer events. Win win!

That looks very nifty.

I sometimes browse untappd to find people reviewing beers in pubs to see what's probably on tap, but that seems to require going to each specific pubs page on the app to check what might be on.

So your site looks very handy! (I'm in the UK though alas so I assume I can't use your app?)

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#240

I created Juicebox, which lets you listen to youtube/soundcloud songs with other people: https://www.juicebox.dj/ I have made no money off of this. In fact, I've probably paid hundreds in hosting/domain fees. But I love what I've built so far and use it everyday with my friends. Please check it out, I'd love to hear any feedback!

This is random but I saw you on reddit, great product!
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