Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Now that everyone is working remotely, it's much harder to get to know your teammates. I built https://gettoknowapp.com as a Slack bot extension that sends you 1 question every M/W/F and posts it to a dedicated #answers channel. The whole app is contained within Slack - you can view people's past answers, upvote/like them, and the real fun is just seeing what your friends/coworkers had to say that you didn't expect about their answers.

I had used apps like Donut before and they felt oddly pushy and impersonal; you join a room and Donut will randomly select people to chat. Have you ever been in one of those arrangements? Extremely awkward openers. I wanted the questions to serve as a fun icebreaker to help people naturally discover interests together.

Oh and of course the tech. It's all built on Elixir. I run one web server and one database server and that's it. I already have about 100 communities spanning about 4000 people so in terms of message/event processing it is completely seamless...one of my favorite things about Elixir. Most interactions are processed in measure of microseconds rather than milliseconds. This makes for a real-time experience in Slack and is such a joy to work with. I also contribute to the Elixir-Slack open source project which has been fun working with as well.

I hope to incorporate more user feedback as it grows but so far it's been a great tool for teams in lockdown as they ramp up new people and want to quickly build them into their teams' culture.

I've been focusing on re-making my various Web party games into a more unified platform at https://jklm.fun/

The previous iterations were built years ago using CoffeeScript, Grunt/Gulp, Jade, Stylus, etc. This time around, I went for vanilla HTML/JS/CSS, no transpilation, no bundler, no build step at all (and no frameworks). It's been a joy. I'm using the TypeScript compiler in VS Code for sanity checking and might add some JSDoc to leverage the type checks even, but for now it's quite nice as is.

I've also enjoyed building up a Discord community for it all, got almost a thousand people in there now and it's a lot of fun interacting on a daily basis.

As a solo-developer I’ve been nurturing an Electron app named Label LIVE. I spent most of April adding a feature to render multi-label “sheets” (think Avery/ULINE labels) as multi-page PDFs. It’s been really fun, because each label on the sheet can have unique data (from a spreadsheet, a serial number, a barcode, etc) so the end result feels ... pretty awesome.

A side-affect of all this PDF works is that my app now supports all system printers (inkjet/laser) including fancy color label printers from Epson, Primera, Afinia, etc.

Printing labels has always been a total pain, especially on Mac. My goal is to make label printing an enjoyable process for both Windows and Mac users. Check it out at https://label.live

This, and my partner is 8.99 months pregnant with our 2nd child!

I haven't done any project, but would love to contribute in some project. Any open source i could start with...

I created a web console for AWS to overcome one of my major frustrations with the original one: being able to see resources from multiple regions from view.

https://daintree.app/#/about

Of course the AWS console is enormous, and this is just a side project with some resources - not interested in replace the original one, just being able to monitor resources from all the regions we deploy in :-) WIP of course, and I am not a frontend developer, so be gentle :-D