Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

Dude! I’m in!

I work as a data analyst at a FAANG and what I love most about my job are the data visualization aspects. I really enjoy constantly revisiting and refining charts and dashboards until I’m satisfied with them.

That being said I’m able to spend very little time working on visually appealing content and instead I’m usually buried in SQL. So in my free time I like to publish visuals (leveraging whatever data visualization platforms peaked my interest that week) on my site thriftythoughts.io which focuses on bringing additional insight to financial independence and the FI/RE movement. It has quite a few subscribers but I started it with the intention of it being a creative outlet- not a means for revenue.

I'm working on https://github.com/uberswe/beubo - It's a CMS similar to Wordpress but written in Go. It's still very early and it has a lot of bugs but what will make it powerful is plugins and themes. Performance is the biggest difference between Wordpress, plugins will most likely use RPC/gRPC which means they could be written in any language.

I'm mostly writing it for use with my own projects like https://tournify.io but it would be awesome if a few others found it useful too. It's a nice way for me to practice my Go programming skills.

I wrote a meal scheduler - https://gitlab.com/dustin-space/meal-scheduler. It tracks ingredients we have at home, it has a database of recipes, it knows where we can buy ingredients online (for delivery).

It schedules meals for my shared household. I can give it a request like: "next week I want to cook 4 vegetarian meals with 3 portions, and 1 vegan meal for 8 people for big shared dinner, and I want It thinks for a bit with a planner (implemented in Minizinc - https://www.minizinc.org/ - with OR-Tools for a solver), and out pops a plan, like: "OK, you need to check you still have 500 g of potatoes, ..., then buy 1 kg of carrots, 1 liter of coconut milk, and here's links for the online store; I also checked those ingredients in stock; I also need cayenne pepper, you'll have to get it yourself because I don't know how to get it online".

The planner can understand things like "there's risotto rice, jasmine rice, arborio rice, etc.; some recipes ask for specific type of rice but some recipes are OK with any kind of rice". And there's more things I plan to support in the future, like ingredients that allow "use this ingredient or this other ingredient", or optional ingredients.

When we get a plan, we then check we have all the needed stock, and if we don't, we update the stock and replan. And when it's done, it generates an ICS file with calendar entries we add to our shared calendar ("today we're cooking gnocchi with pesto for 4 people, here's link to the recipe"). It also generates stickers, which you print on sticker paper, and you put them on the ingredients that will be needed to cook. The stickers ensure someone doesn't accidentally eat too much of them before we need them.

It's given us a lot of utility for our household. It lets us make tasty fancy meals without the toil of planning. It's quite rough around the edges - no fancy UI, lots of "you have to enter this textproto here and there's next to no validation". But I'm slowly improving it in my spare time to make it more convenient and useful for us.

Right now, the published part of it is not useful, it only includes like 8 recipes that we manually entered. But I'm trying to design it so that it can eventually be a platform, and ideally easy-ish to use for households.

https://noben.org/boomdeck/ - Boomdeck a skeuomorphic music player for macOS, tailored how I wanted it to be!