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The Joy of Small Projects

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Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#61

Post by dbrueck »

cersa8 wrote: post #22

For me it works best to start a project in such a way that it is easy to get back to. Fully expecting and embracing getting bored and leaving it gathering dust for a while. For this to work I have docs folder with a todo.txt, architecture.txt, questions.txt and features.txt. I push it early to a private gitlab repo and use a language like TypeScript that makes it easy to come back to and make changes without fear of…

Yes! I keep a per-project journal file in each project's repo and it's so helpful when you end up having to take an unexpected break to bringing yourself back up to speed on why you made certain decisions or what the overall status was.

Something that also really helps is anytime I'm wrapping up a session on a project, the last thing I do before committing changes to git is to make a list of the next half dozen baby steps to complete. Without this, sometimes I'll come back to a project but only have limited time and I waste it trying to remember where I was, so a little hint from the past saying "jump in right here next time" is very handy.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#62

Post by simonw »

yurivish wrote: post #42
simonw wrote: post #28

One tip I've picked up from experience: avoid projects that have user accounts. If your project has user accounts, you'll get users who you have to take responsibility for. Then it's not a side-project any more, it's a part-time job. These days I much prefer side projects which have no user accounts at all (like https://www.niche-museums.com/ ) or that are open source tools where the end user installs and uses the so…

That's really interesting! Could you say more about the job-like aspects of having users? Do you have advice on infrastructure that could be built to make the job easier? I'm currently working on my first-ever side project with user accounts, and now I'm wondering what I'm in for. :-)

For me it's about the moral responsibility. If people are trusting your site with their data, you have an obligation to keep it running, and to keep it secure. This is a big responsibility! Especially since over the long-term the vast majority of projects eventually cease to exist.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#64

Post by [deleted] »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #59
simonw wrote: post #28

One tip I've picked up from experience: avoid projects that have user accounts. If your project has user accounts, you'll get users who you have to take responsibility for. Then it's not a side-project any more, it's a part-time job. These days I much prefer side projects which have no user accounts at all (like https://www.niche-museums.com/ ) or that are open source tools where the end user installs and uses the so…

Unless you're living in a place that really heavily regulates the web, I don't think you need to fear having user accounts in hobby projects. I've built dozens if not hundreds of hobby projects that had accounts. This includes a blog I ran from 2005-2017, flash games in 2010-2011, an ear-trainer for recognizing relative pitches, a couple of apps that do things with photos, half a dozen language learning apps and all…

[deleted]

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#65

Post by aquarin »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #58
exdsq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but if you have user accounts you suddenly have legal responsibilities (in Europe) to follow GDPR rules etc…

The easy solution there is to just ban European users if it's just a hobby project and your concerned about that. Probably not the solution that GDPR would prefer.

And if your users are Europeans?

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#66

Post by cjohnson318 »

I was between clients for a few weeks and I wrote some apps for practicing musical scale patterns in different keys, and something to automate voice leading from chord to chord. Best three or four weeks in the last few years.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#67

Post by [deleted] »

floucky wrote: post #34
simonw wrote: post #28

One tip I've picked up from experience: avoid projects that have user accounts. If your project has user accounts, you'll get users who you have to take responsibility for. Then it's not a side-project any more, it's a part-time job. These days I much prefer side projects which have no user accounts at all (like https://www.niche-museums.com/ ) or that are open source tools where the end user installs and uses the so…

Especially if these users can share content, then you need to do moderation and hooo boy, you don't want to do that.

[deleted]

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#69

Post by selestify »

eternityforest wrote: post #24

Trouble is... I don't think I could build anything that I'd actually have a use for in less than 1-3 months, except for extremely ad hoc things that you can't really predict in advance, like a file convert and rename script. I can think of 4 projects on my own, lifetime total, that I would consider ready for a "Version 1.0.0" tag, and far more that regret ever spending time on, some that required more time on top of…

What was the megaproject?

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#70

Post by randomsilence »

ransom1538 wrote: post #30

My last projects were controversial. lol. Finished it in 3?ish days. Ruby/Rails/mysql. The elevator pitch: "You place your github project on the site, you rate atleast 5 people's github project, people will view and rate your github project ". It was a fun way to view rando github projects and share feedback. Github security reached out. Banned. All accounts locked. Creepy lawyer emails. Threats. Then i remembered we…

HN makes sense because votes shouldn't decide about the value of a comment. That's why the votes are hidden. You would destroy threads where people reply to your 'bad' comments.

Github on the other hand doesn't make sense at all. People participate voluntarily. Which infringement did the lawyers bring up?

This is still such a nice idea. Have you considered relaunching it with gitlab and sourcehut?

*edit: You have pitched your project differently: "Show HN: Give and Get more GitHub stars" [1]

That's ranking manipulation. No social network can tolerate that. I would restart the project and keep the ranking on my site. People will still benefit because their projects get known. Additionally, they will receive genuine stars from the people who discovered and liked their projects.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17593827

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