Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

It's a tool for elementary school teachers to create ten-frames, a common way to visualize the base-ten system in K-2 math curriculums. I want to make it simple for teachers to create their own resources.

I've made some examples here: https://observablehq.com/collection/@declann/calculang

Some tooling work for visualizations and for showing the workings will be released in the next weeks.

There are no positive money flows; I've spent many years experimenting, developing, and now 1 year after a public release the twitter page where I make announcements has 24 followers: https://twitter.com/calculang

I'm a modelling consultant - I work with numbers, I think they should be simple, but they are disjointed across systems and entities and programming languages and spreadsheets. The friction accumulates everywhere: to get a simple result, to follow the workings, to do any analysis, to share one or the other. calculang can consolidate calculations/numbers and is also a tool for transparency, understanding, and education.

I haven't done introductory documentation beyond the technical README which I think is vague (feedback accepted), and I plan to do a Show HN introduction to the community when I fix key snags: documentation among them.

For me the project is rewarding on many levels. In my client work - mostly financial sector - there is usually limited scope to take a really fresh perspective. There are no restraints here, it is useful to broaden my interests and thoughts in modelling, visualization, and wider more-grounded things like education and transparency, and I also get to be enthusiastic about a project that's tangible and simple at its core. In other words, plenty of positive flows besides the direct $ number :)

It's something like the Unity Hub or JetBrains Toolbox but intended to be used with Adventure Game Studio. I do more adventure game studio work, but I really wanted to get the toolbox working good. The idea is to have both a command line and gui application so you can use the GUI application but also use the command line version to set up ags in a CI environment and also in the future to do other things, so it would have some worker functionality too, similar to how game maker can dispatch build/signing to a macOS computer if you are using Game Maker from a Windows machine in the same network.