Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

A media list. It is just a list of movies and mp3s with their metadata (id3 tags) and hash values. The output is just a html table that allows sorting and filtering with a hyperlink to play the media in the browser. Convenient for playing home media on the phone.

Threw together a toothbrush timer for my kids. Just used the svelte repl:

https://svelte.dev/repl/5a7f676868044bbba2ff3c7a64062066?ver...

On mobile you’ll need to kit the “output” button

Made a simple arithmetic drill generator for my youngest, who was struggling at the time. It had a bit of record keeping about it which encouraged a bit of competition and made it interesting to her and her friends.

At work, most of our deployment pipelines are something along the lines of "get some credentials, call a remote API and wait for it to say it's done". Occasionally, they also have "download this large binary from S3 and upload it somewhere else". Because these are in our CI, they are blocking steps that consume our builder resources.

We use Buildkite, so I changed their agent to run as lambda function, and used their eventbridge integration to trigger the lambdas. We saved about 15% of our CI costs by not using our 32 core build machines to call ecs wait-services, and freed up said machines to be able to run more often.

I needed to test the impact of a product we were developing on the air temperature distribution of a room (it really is warmer at the ceiling) so over the course of a weekend I strung up 27 OneWire temperature sensors in 9 strings of 3 from the ceiling of my living room and wrote a script running on an mBed microcontroller (like an Arduino) that would poll the OneWire bus every 30 seconds and send the responses back to my laptop which would then record the data in a CSV for me to graph once the test was done. This also required me to make a OneWire library from the OneWire spec as back then there was no public implementation for running on an mBed.

This test data formed the backbone of that company for the better part of a decade as it clearly showed when our product was running the temperature at the ceiling (across the whole room) reduced by 2degC and at the mid point of the room (head when sat in a sofa height) it rose by 2degC.

Our product acted as a destratifier and the test rig to prove it took me from Friday evening to Sunday night to make as I was working elsewhere at the time.