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Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#981
I'm on hiatus on my main project due to the virus. I came up with https://unirender.io in my spare time.

It does prerendering of React/Vue/etc SPA similar to https://prerender.com. It functions as a cdn however, so it is a simple dns change instead on integrating it into a server.

It's not as fast as I would like and it's not really tested either. It's gonna be free for a long while. I keep meaning to clean it up a bit more so I can publish it on github

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#985
A non Electron desktop app for Gotify. It uses Dot Net Core and AvaloniaUI to support all 3 platforms. Looking for Mac testers as I don't have one and honestly feedback/bug reports. It works fine for me atm. Not sure what else people would want.

https://github.com/ajmcateer/GotifyDesktop

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#986
Late to the party but never mind. I always wanted to read and write more, but creating such high-value habits are very hard to come by. In this lockdown, I decided to do something about that.

I read five pages from a book that interests me every day and then write about my interpretation.

To build a good reading and writing habit, I built a static blog using JAMStack technologies.

https://5pagesaday.com/

I used Hugo to make a static site and Netlify functions to call Google Book API, Forestry dot io to write my book blurbs every day. I integrated Amazon ads to implement related book recommendations. I use netlify to host and Github actions for CI/CD. It's a PWA out of the box and supports Google AMP.

The cool part is when writing a book experience, I provide the book ISBN, and my netlify function would go and grab book cover gif, description, author name from Google Book API automatically :-)

I am really pleased. I will start reading and writing from the coming Monday.

Wish me luck and follow me to encourage. I will open-source my Hugo theme which I named ”Morning Pages” and my blog on Github later this week. Cheers

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#987
Trying to learn frontend so I can make myself a better to-do list/calendar app. I'm a robotics engineer so I have no idea what I'm doing, but it's fun. Due to executive dysfunction, I tend not to have a very good idea of how long it'll take me to finish anything longer than about a day's work (so I assume it "won't take that long", which fuels dangerous amounts of procrastination), so my concept was that each task gets broken down into subtasks that are small enough that I can estimate time for them. These time estimates then get propagated to the root task, and leaf-level tasks can be dragged and dropped into today's calendar (with other events pulled in from Google Calendar so I don't accidentally double-book myself). On the task itself I'll be able to record how much time (in pomodoros) it actually took to complete; in addition to tracking how I actually spent my time, hopefully this will help calibrate my future time estimates.

I also finished knitting a sweater -- my second overall, and first time not working from a pattern. I had to redo the yoke three times (the torso and front/back panels of the yoke are lace, so I wanted to integrate the decreases in the lace pattern), but I'm really satisfied with what I ended up with.

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#989
Late to the party but still want to share!

I created https://fruitionsite.com, a free, open source toolkit for building websites with Notion. You get pretty URL slugs, custom domain, and a whole bunch of other features.

I hacked it together in a weekend, put up the marketing site (using Fruition, oh so meta) and shared it in Notion's Facebook group and subreddit, without any expectations that it would go anywhere.

The response has been incredible. 11000 people have checked it out since. It ended up on the Product Hunt newsletter [1]. People are making YouTube videos [2] about it. Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks [3] shared it too.

The biggest lesson for me was just launch it. There were many more things I wanted to add. But I decided to share it publicly before it was perfect. Now I have users who can give me real feedback rather than me pretending I know what people want.

[1] https://www.producthunt.com/newsletter/4717

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw0x54PzCaI

[3] https://css-tricks.com/notion-powered-websites/

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