Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

I have been tracking my expenses for last 5 years. Almost everything has been accounted for. I made an app to make it easier to do that. I'm not a fan of giving access to apps like Mint and YNAB was complicated for what I wanted. I manually enter my data in the app and it optionally backs up data to my Google Drive in a Sheet. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ramitsuri....

I'm working on a garden.

I moved into a house late last fall, so I actually have some space to do so. This scratches multiple itches for me.

Itch the first: I've missed having a vegetable garden since I moved out of my parent's place and into apartment life years ago. While a small garden plot can't wholly replace the need to go to the grocery store for fruits and vegetables due to the inherent seasonality of growing food at small scale, it's damn hard to beat truly fresh fruits and vegetables that were picked not an hour before they landed on your plate. And any surplus left when the growing season is over can be preserved and stored for the winter.

Itch the second: It's _my_ creation, not my father's with which I am merely helping. When living with my parents, my father had his way that he'd like to lay the garden out. Granting that a man who grew up in a rural agricultural community probably knows a thing or about vegetable gardening, watching how he did stuff did always leave me wondering if there wasn't room for improvement. Since this is my garden, I can make my own experiments and decisions on how the garden is to be arranged, and what vegetables I want to grow (e.g dad loves beets; I do not). I've been reading about companion planting, and am eager to try things like growing corn and beans together, or growing chives near my peppers and tomatoes to keep aphids away (seriously, fuck aphids).

Itch the third: It lets me develop useful skills outside of my career in tech. While I have no delusions about quitting being a sys/net admin and going and becoming a farmer, I do think it's important to nurture useful skills outside one's main career.

Itch the fourth: I have something to automate with tech. Gardens do need to be watered. Under-watering will limit your yield, but over-watering is also harmful to both the garden and the wider ecosystem of one's immediate area. There's a goldilocks-zone when it comes to watering, and the just-right amount of water depends on a number of things: what you're growing, your climate, the soil, etc. There is a real danger that before the close of summer, the garden bed will have an automatic, multi-zone drip irrigation system, complete with soil-moisture sensors, controlled by a Raspberry Pi or similar SBC.

During April I built a loft bed frame out of framing lumber. I can post about that too if any of you are interested.

- Wrote the documentation and put online Supply, an e-commerce site with Gumroad integration built with Jekyll and Tachyons: https://supply.templates.supply/about/. Repo: https://github.com/YJPL/Supply

- Putting together a leporello book

- Drawing colouring book(s) for kids and adults

- Not a side project per se, but learned how to work in SketchUp & Storyboard Pro

Not a project since I am still working full time and vacation is still a little while away, but me and my buddy will be saving the world of Divinity 2 together, while trying to stream it using OBS ( so far I am happy with it ).

It feels oddly cheap to list it, but here it goes https://www.twitch.tv/ample_llama

I am making new habits and routines effortless (or at least way more effortless). I've been repurposing a writing app I threw together for myself years ago, now using it every morning to remain consistent in my routine and track performance.