Show HN: I'm 15 and made a bedtime calculator with React JavaScript

> I can't shake the idea anymore that we all fell for clever marketing, here, instead of that we're presumed to be looking at an aspiring, young developer's plea for recognition

Marketing play is doubtless; whether the age is genuine or not is a coin toss—as tends to be with affiliate sites, developers go out of their way to avoid referencing a real persona.

It’s entirely possible that it was built by a teenager, but then a stronger accomplishment to advertise would’ve been “I have developed an affiliate marketing site at 15 years old”.

And he would be wrong. But probably, hopefully, also not entirely serious.

Hey kid, welcome to the club. Career software person here.

Here's some unsolicited advice for improvements:

* Focus relentlessly on the calculator experience. Why am I pressing "calculate"? What are some ways you could rework it so that I can give quicker input and get more meaningful output? Your goal should be to reduce friction. Maybe let me type in the time in addition to having the android-style clock widget. Definitely show me a series of clocks as I'm updating the picker as I change the time. It's important to let your users play so that they can intuit about the concepts. Also, maybe show extra times for oversleep/undersleep, but accented in such a way that the user knows they're not healthy choices. Maybe include "in x minutes" with the times too. Maybe start the page with the current time + 8 hours selected, showing the live updating output.

* Bury all the sleep health and science stuff. It's probably great for SEO, but the star of the show here is the calculator widget. If anything, maybe instead have a short promotional video that explains the science/health stuff briefly and explains what the calculator does.

* This would be more useful on my phone, possibly as a native widget. And it would be useful paired with an alarm clock. I'd really like an app (ideally with a widget) that shows me wakeup times based on the current time and lets me quickly set alarms. I always check my phone right before I go to sleep anyway, so it would be easy to click a widget and get proper alarms set. You're probably going to need to learn React Native at some point anyway, might as well do it now.

Take this simple calculator, polish it to absolute perfection, give it away for free, and promote it wherever you can. Having one successful app at your age, even if you don't make a dime, will open up so much opportunity for you that it's 100% worth it.

Also, it's super hard to get software "right", and it's a drifting target. Look at how much Apple and Google have changed their basic Clock apps over the years. I think doing everything perfectly is usually terrible advice, but at your age and with the simplicity of this project, it's worth trying to be a perfectionist. You'll learn that everything is a lot harder than it looks and that you should be terrified of software development :)

Side rant: OP led with "I'm 15", which makes sense, and this wouldn't have frontpaged without that context. I understand that touches a nerve with people who believe the frontpage should be 100% dictated by objective merits. If this place gets overrun with industrious 15 year olds trying to show off their projects to an audience, well, we could have worse problems than that.

Lately I can’t help wondering how emergence of aggregating platforms like YouTube (your video is in the same place as “500 Funniest Fails 2020”) or Spotify (your song appears next to generated muzak by fake artists) and arrival of mobile devices (your work, no matter how special to you, can be absorbed by someone sitting on a toilet) are shifting the context in which art is perceived and affecting the art itself.

It's not quite the same thing, but on your comment about the platform affecting the art, you might find this dicussion about music interesting: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/28/18642978/music-streaming-...

> One of the main things that has changed is how people are getting paid, and it’s is affecting how songs are being written. In the past, you used to get paid if you sold an album or a single. In 1995, we had songs that were coming in at four minutes and 30 seconds. Today, songs are down to three minutes and 42 seconds, because of the difference in how artists are getting paid now. Instead of getting paid by physical sales, you’re getting paid in a stream, which only counts if someone listens to 30 seconds of a song. It actually makes sense if you can have more songs streamed at a time, which means that you want to pack your album full of much shorter songs. So if you have an album like Drake’s Scorpion, which is a really long double album coming in at almost 90 minutes, he’s got a ton of really short songs on there, because he gets paid for every song you listen to, whether or not you listen to the whole album.

> Not only are songs getting shorter, but the way artists are introducing their songs is changing. Gone is the era of long intros that sort of slowly get you into the song. Today, we are not only seeing songs getting shorter, but there is a sort of a new song structure that we’ve observed that we’ve called the pop overture, where basically a song, at the very beginning, will play a hint of the chorus in the first five to 10 seconds so that the hook is in your ear, hoping that you’ll stick around till about 30 seconds in when the full chorus eventually comes in.