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

I made and maintain https://transparentmetric.com/

I find it fascinating watching the changes made to news articles over time. It lets you get into the mind of the various journalists and editors at different news organisations and see how they react to things. I just wish I had more time to develop it further.

It doesn't have to be a full project, right? Do random drive-by PR-requests to open-source projects count?

A few months ago I ended up scratching an optimisation itch for weeks, trying to figure out ways to make the lz-string[0][1] library faster and smaller. Near the end I went a bit nuts with trying out what works, methinks (nested trees built out of arrays and such), but I had a lot of fun.

It's not even my library, nor did my PR request get accepted/rejected yet. It did however make the compression up to 2x to 10x faster, depending on how well the data compresses.

And hey, I now have an intuitive understanding of LZ compression that I never thought I'd have!

Since a few days I've been working on writing a component for idyll[2] that lets you embed p5js sketches[3]. Progress here[4][5].

[0] http://pieroxy.net/blog/pages/lz-string/index.html

[1] https://github.com/pieroxy/lz-string/pull/98

[2] https://idyll-lang.github.io/

[3] https://p5js.org/

[4] https://github.com/idyll-lang/idyll/issues/117

[5] https://jobleonard.github.io/idyll-p5/

I created https://donaldsbizarreadventure.com/ because I always wanted to be a game developer.

https://github.com/bcruddy/taco - a create-react-app + redux + express boilerplate. It currently grabs pricing data for BTC, ETH, and LTC and I mostly put it together for myself about a month ago.

https://github.com/bcruddy/GramLikeCam - my Panthers' fan friends seem to enjoy it. Initially I wanted to write a bot that would grab new instagram posts from Cam Newton and translate the weird characters he uses into plain english and post it as the first comment but ended up going pretty much the opposite direction.

https://github.com/bcruddy/tumbo - a very unpolished ascii video chat to play with websockets and string compression, I'll occasionally check out the website and see someone live streaming a day in the office.

I built a website which offers real-time statistics for Philadelphia's Regional Rail train system: https://www.septastats.com/

This lets public transit passengers answer questions like:

- "My train is getting later and later, is it actually moving?"

- "My train is getting later and later, has it actually STARTED its journey?" (sometimes the answer is "no", sadly)

- "Is it just my train, or are many trains running late?"

- "What was the on-time performance of this train like yesterday? 2 days ago? 7 days ago?" (Some trains tend to be chronically late)

It may come as a surprise that the backend of the system is actually not a database, but Splunk (http://www.splunk.com). DBs are nice, but Splunk is fantastic when it comes to data analytics and reporting.

I'm currently waiting for Splunk to make some of their machine learning modules available for free so that I can start pulling in weather data, train the machine learning component against both that and the train data, and use that to predict the likelihood of any given train becoming late.