Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Not a side project, per se, but I've finally picked up the guitar again.

I've been a musician for going on 20 years, mainly piano but I like to collect the ability to noodle on instruments. When I was around 13 I broke my left forearm and it healed in a way that limits the rotation of my wrist quite a bit. This makes playing guitar rather difficult and at the time I started to consider branching out from piano there were a bunch of factors that made me give up on being able to play guitar. I was gigging as a piano player for 10-12 hours a week, while also going to school for piano and CS I started to develop tendonitis and trying to play guitar made it a lot worse, so I quit. I'm now in a place where I can take care of my arm (and I have actual healthcare) so I started back up again.

I guess HN is cool with self-promotion, so here's a jam I made with a looper pedal after about 2 weeks. I call it "More Theory Than Experience"

https://youtu.be/_beFK_j-Dk8

I've been making progress with my art project. I made an attachment for my 3d printer to turn it into a pen plotter. And then wrote a bunch of code to turn an image into a stylized CMYK pen drawing. https://youtu.be/Vxd-ndoMD1o

Taking my master's thesis project and turning it into a Analytics SaaS for Social Networks. My master's thesis[1] was a generic model for social capital based on Engagement and results in metrics of engagement and influence in a social network. For testing this out I built a social network[2] for sharing preprint and published papers. I am now generalising the metric calculating backend and providing it as a an API+Dashboards for other social networks who want to understand their network structure and identify members who enjoy a lot of attention, those who might not be popular across the entire network but enjoy a cult like status amongst their followers and people who participate the most on the network.

[1] https://goodwill.zense.co.in/resources/6203_Gratia__Computin...

[2] https://goodwill.zense.co.in/

I've made some good progress on my Dashboard project [1] during the quarantine. Currently I'm (re-)writing the tests from enzyme to react-testing-library.

I've also decided to redesign my Bookmarks app [2] recently - it's now one of my few designs that I'm really happy with :)

[1] https://dashboard.darekkay.com/

[2] https://darekkay.com/static-marks/

Building a weightlifting workout tracker, as a mobile PWA: https://www.liftosaur.com

There're a lot of apps that are either focused on one weightlifting routine (like 5x5 StrongLifts or Five3One) - they do nice job leading you through the routine, but if you want to try another one, you basically need another app. And if you want to create a custom routine, you're out of luck. There're also generic ones, like Strong or Jefit, but it's hard to make them follow some specific routine, increasing and decreasing weights automatically, changing exercises when necessary, etc.

I thought - how hard would it be to create a platform, that'd support many routines, and you'd choose any, and have a consistent UI across them you got used to?

Another thing I wanted to see - how hard it is to create a PWA app that is nice to use, and what features are still lacking there (compared to native experience).

The app is already in a usable shape, I use it 3 times a week, though it only has one working routine now. It's written in Preact/Redux/TypeScript.

It's a surprisingly pleasant experience to have a personal project like that, and slowly build it in your own pace, working on features you care, that would actually help you in your workouts. I found myself sometimes working on it til late night, being in that "flow", like in the beginning of my career, having so much fun, and returning back the joy of coding!