Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

In the 1980s I got a lot of mileage out of the open source OPS5 expert system tool, porting it to my Xerox 1108 and eventually to the product ExperOPS5, and used it in house for prototyping.

My one weekend project: while my wife was out of town with the kids for a weekend, I manually converted about 4500 lines of Common Lisp code to MIT Scheme, and it worked after a few hours of debugging.

Another weekend project: I used my company’s time sharing system to write a very simple Chess program in FORTRAN in one weekend. It didn’t quite play a legal game, no en passant capture. Several months later when I purchased serial number 71 Apple II, I ported the code to Apple Basic, which only took a few hours. Apple distributed that little hack with their Apple II demo program cassette tape.

I had access to a Windows server VM at a previous job that was commissioned for a piece of work. The actual work was then stopped, but the IT folks never decommissioned the VM so I had a nice little server on the local network to play around with. It didn't have Internet access so I was somewhat limited in what I could do with it.

I ended up building a hacky internal IIS/PHP web app (I guess these days one would call it an SPA) that hooked into the company's Active Directory that showed a nice little page of people in our "business unit", with their names, pictures, employee grade (analyst/consultant/manager etc.) and subteam -- basically any bit of info I could get from a user's Active Directory profile.

It used Datatables (https://datatables.net/) for a simple text-based table view and Isotope (https://isotope.metafizzy.co/) for a card-based grid view that you could quickly toggle between.

I called it the "Book of Faces" and announced it to my team at a team social event, and it took off massively beause it was way more performant, simpler, and just much less painful to use than using the clunky corporate intranet app to check user profiles.

Word spread outside of my team and I started getting requests from various other teams to set up similar pages for them as well, which I was only too happy to oblige. This spurred me on to refactor it to make it as simple as possible to set up new team pages.

This silly thing boosted my profile a ridiculous amount within the company, just because I'd left a small footer "emailto" link that people could use to get in touch with suggestions/bugs.

I maintained it as a side project and surreptitious internal app for about 6 years until I left the org, after which I handed it over to someone else. Last I heard though, internal IT finally caught wind of it, and in what I suppose is a "progressive for its kind" response, spoke to the users of the various pages and built a corporate-ised version of the same thing.

A decade-plus of working in tech and data, and that IIS-PHP-JS monstrosity is still one of the bits of work I'm most proud of!

I think my favourite weekend project I've built was an image transformer plugin for Craft CMS. The popular (and only) free image plugin had been deprecated and the author was only going to continue supporting their paid version so I hacked together an Imgix-inspired plugin called Jitter[0] over the weekend. It's not very popular but I like it and use it frequently.

While it's not a very interesting project it's my favourite because of what happened after I published it. While I was at work I noticed the plugin was installed on one of our new client's websites. I went to my boss and asked him if he installed the plugin and what he thought about it. He said he did and it was better than . AFAIK they're still using it years later and I don't think they ever realized it's my plugin.

[0]: https://github.com/codewithkyle/craft-jitter

That’s cute!

I may use this! Thanks for sharing