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

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

#3

Post by superasn »

The reason I'm asking this question is because I realized something recently. I've been a programmer all my life. I used to love programming in Delphi, VB :P, Perl, PHP, Javascript, etc since school. I created all sorts of stupid things like Winamp plugins[1], Graphics software[2], Games, etc. It was programming just because i liked making the computer do things for me.

But then somewhere along the line my projects started making me money and then I start reading all these marketing books and my perception changed. Now if I'm creating a site I'm usually more focused on SEO, list building and crippling my software so that I can extract more money from my users. I am making more money but the joy of doing it is gone. I feel bored writing software and generally browse HN and reddit and generally force myself to work.

Maybe it's time to go back to the basics and work on stuff just for sheer joy of doing it :D

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2008/09/27/songrefernce-turns-your-mp...

[2] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/extreme-article-marketing-conve...

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

#4

Post by wheresvic1 »

I recently created Ewolo, it's a web based workout tracker optimized for mobile as well - https://ewolo.fitness

I did it mostly because the existing solutions were horrible and I thought that it would also be a great way to learn redux. The front-end is also open-sourced :)

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

#5

Post by thecolorblue »

wheresvic1 wrote: post #4

I recently created Ewolo, it's a web based workout tracker optimized for mobile as well - https://ewolo.fitness I did it mostly because the existing solutions were horrible and I thought that it would also be a great way to learn redux. The front-end is also open-sourced :)

If you think about it, isn't all front end open source? :)

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

#6

Post by atomashpolskiy »

Yes, I've developed a full-featured BitTorrent library in Java: https://github.com/atomashpolskiy/bt/blob/master/README.md#-... . It was very warmly received by HN folks

It was VERY surprising for me to find out that one of the most popular programming languages offers little variety in terms of BT libs/clients. For a long time, if one needed advanced options like DHT or protocol encryption, his only choice would be jlibtorrent (JNI wrapper for the well-known C++ library). Well, not anymore :)

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

#7

Post by pgsandstrom »

I like to create small tools that are optimized for me and my families use case. For example we used Google Keep for shopping lists, but I found it too bloaty and slow. So I created bös.se (it got SSR and websockets, wohooo!)

http://xn--bs-fka.se/test-note

It's fun to just care about your own needs when developing. For me it becomes work when I get feature requests that I don't like myself, but I implement them to appease others.

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

#9

Post by Usu »

https://gitnotifier.io

I created it because I was annoyed with the lack of notifications provided by GitHub for some events like new people following you or starring/forking your projects. A lot of people are now using it and that makes me happy even though I'm losing money by keeping it online.

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

#10

Post by nikivi »

I am working on a community curated search engine to learn anything most optimally :

https://learn-anything.xyz/

Everything is open source and is MIT licensed, both the search engine and the entire database it searches over.

There are however many things that we can still do to take this idea further. Hopefully more people join to help us with that. :)

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