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

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721–730 of 960 posts

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

#721

My day job. Personal projects get a little more heart, but "success" to me is usually intrinsic, not extrinsic. I'm probably a little weird when it comes to motivating factors, but not alone.

Have you considered using "will the skills I hone here help me with my side projects?" as a way to decide which job to apply for? I don't have enough data to say it's a good idea, but so far I'm liking it.

I'm doing/have done this!

I took my current job (in communications) in order to get better at outreach, marketing, etc. for when I work for myself since that's what I was the weakest at as a freelancer. I'm also interested in tech ethics so I took a job in politics so I could become more familiar with how the sausage is made.

Now I'm looking for a swe job so I can get more experience working in teams of devs since most of the tech work I've done has been solo work.

I'll let you know how it worked out in 10 years?

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

#722

I've been working on a project that aggregates data for every public transport provider in the country (Slovenia) and presents it as a simple API, along with an application to find rides with as few clicks as possible (without having to check every provider's website). This has involved tiring meetings with city officials convincing them to give us access to the data and writing scraping bots where they weren't convi…

I too have been working on public transit for my city in the US and several smaller cities that I visit that tend to get ignored by the big apps.

Most of these cities have real time data, but it is from a 3rd party vendor that either tries to lock up the data or has a terrible app.

For example, the one for Steamboat Springs Colorado, a small little ski town, uses a 3rd party vendor for real time tracking information. But the app from that third party vendor is slow and frustrating. On top of that, it is a single app that supports 30+ small cities. If you search for "Steamboat Springs transit or bus" in the app store, that vendor's app doesn't even come up. As a tourist, no one has any idea that an app even exists for their public transit.

I wrote an opensource app that supports multiple real time vendors backends which I can whitelabel for different cities.

https://gotransitapp.com/

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

#723
post #48
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like this flow chart someone shared on Facebook recently: https://scontent-ort2-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/273415552...

It is a lot like that and I want to find a better resolution for it. I don't want ideas to stop, I've had times where I've looked at a game system that I've built and had no idea what to do next. That's also horrible. Having a new idea shouldn't just have me building some new thing from scratch either. Working out how to navigate that tightrope when you are the client and it's not just solve this problem is one I'm s…

I wish I had a higher-res version, to ... Maybe I'll just draw it later :)

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

#726
I've been working on a side project that aggregates state gov't survey data on lakes/ponds (currently just one state) that includes water quality, depth, size, fish species, invasive plants, etc and allows me to search it and see it on a map. I use it to find good remote fishing spots for species I want to target. So far it has worked great and I've only shared it with a few fellow anglers.

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

#727

https://getgumball.com My wife and I started an online/offline shop last year. When our very first orders came in, it was the best feeling ever! I wanted some kind of celebration device that would turn on and play some celebrating music each time this happened. So I started learning IoT / hardware and build a cool retro-looking police light that I can plug into our WooCommerce/Shopify/Zapier accounts (or really anyth…

Will you support Amazon sales?

Yes, at least via websites like Zapier, integromat etc. I haven't looked at it yet, but I'm sure it's very possible to do it natively from Amazon via webhooks too. So I'd say 95% yes!

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

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't ripgrep (rg) better than ag, performance-wise?

it is, but a) they don't care if it succeeds or not, b) there's a new faster grep-alike every couple of years, and c) there are diminishing returns from these performance enhancements. so if you're enjoying ag, more power to you. btw my own "idc if it succeeds or not" is forkfreshness.com, a system to surface active downstream forks of otherwise dormant projects. if you've got a project you want to use, but it seems…

oh this is brilliant, I've often had to really dig into github to find out this information!

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

#730

https://marketcapvsmarketcap.com/ - it's a project I made to learn more about the static page generation (SSG) mode of Next.js If it's useful to people that's just an added bonus, but it was just a way to learn the development and CI/CD aspect of SSG The idea is that I pre-create hundred of thousands of pages at build time - all the pages can be seen here: https://marketcapvsmarketcap.com/sitemap.xml

You haven't explained how it works at all

I am just using Next.js SSG mode: https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/static-html-export to generate a lot of pages based on a template and data fetched from a thrid-party API
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