Ask HN: What is your side project for 2018?

One of the features is called 'Lightbox' where you can draw overtop a picture and follow steps of a tutorial. Another feature would be to help artists find resources related to your niche with 'LinkKit'.

Right now its very old code and I've been working on a much cleaner update during the past year. So, once its ready I'll do the show 'Show HN' thing for feedback.

Here's a taste of the old code.

Lightbox http://artjutsu.com/lightbox/canvas/Default.aspx?q=3

LinkKit http://artjutsu.com/beta/linkkit.aspx

I'm using ArangoDB (https://www.arangodb.com/) to store ideas as collections of nodes, where the properties and details of those ideas (or objects) can be connected to eachother. The properties can be simple descriptions of the node, or documents such as html, pdf, or images.

Im doing this because my memory is terrible (ADHD), and I want to make a system that lets me take notes and record ideas in a way thats more... organic in the way that I think about things. I also tend to use a lot of documentation from the web, and have no way of sorting it other than through bookmarks. Being able to pull webpages off of the internet and reference them within notes is a powerful tool, I have found.

I'm excited for the project for a lot of reasons, but what excites me the most is what I can do once I have this personal database filled out enough. I will essentially have a graph based model of what is typically floating around my head, like a network of thoughts, interconnected by both objective and subjective properties. I aim to use this database to build a sort of personal assistant, personalized for the user.

I think that this is something that we are kind of missing today, where a lot of our interactions come from the internet, this ephemeral space where you can't exactly organize everything that you see and interact with. As an example, imagine that you saw a neat article about cancer research that you wanted to tell someone about later. You send the URL to your database server where it is downloaded, parsed, tagged, and linked to other articles or notes that you may have (this would start out being manual, but I hope to automate it). Once that info is in the database, you can have it recalled through either a direct request for that record, or through implicit actions such as looking for scientific papers in the database and narrowing it down to the one you want.

I have nothing to show for the project so far, it still in it's infancy, but I really think that this is something that will be useful to people, if at the least just myself.