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The Joy of Small Projects

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Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#91

Post by yifanl »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #60
floucky wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I ran a blog for over a decade, with comments open. A typical post would get 10 to 30 real comments and tons of spam that got filtered out. Why was this such a disastrous choice? I enjoyed having the site and with the exception of a couple of heated arguments in the comments, and spam, it was never a concern at all. Even the spam was very minor inconvenience since the filters caught pretty much all of it. Many of my…

Aren't you implicitly betting on yourself not to succeed though? There's some cutoff of eyeballs where moderation becomes painful, and it's a pretty steep pain.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#92

Post by patoroco »

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…

Oh, it’s a great tip. As many of us, I’ve started a lot of projects, invested in creating auth processes, to suddenly get bored from the project and abandon it. Result: 0 users. 1 failure.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#93

Post by knighthack »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #66

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.

This is fascinating! How do you decide what note in a particular key/harmony to voice lead with (e.g. 3rds/7ths)?

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#94

Post by levmiseri »

Welteam wrote: post #83
levmiseri wrote: post #15

One such simple project for me was https://kvak.io . A weekend crafting for a need I had and couldn't find anyone offering - a simple online notepad where I can share the note by just copying the url and the 'sharee' continues writing. The process itself is indeed very fulfilling and joyful.

https://cryptpad.fr/ should have everything you needed. Open source and end to end encrypted.

This couldn't be further away from what I really wanted. Way too much friction, lots of features and noisy UI... I'm sure it has its target audience, but it isn't for me.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#95

Post by tetsusaiga »

levmiseri wrote: post #15

One such simple project for me was https://kvak.io . A weekend crafting for a need I had and couldn't find anyone offering - a simple online notepad where I can share the note by just copying the url and the 'sharee' continues writing. The process itself is indeed very fulfilling and joyful.

This is great— I have envisioned and even considered making this exact thing myself before. I'll definitely be using this, thank you.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#96

Post by cjohnson318 »

knighthack wrote: post #93
cjohnson318 wrote: post #66

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.

This is fascinating! How do you decide what note in a particular key/harmony to voice lead with (e.g. 3rds/7ths)?

It's very simple. First reduce the requirements: ignore the melody. Then iterate through the inversions of a chord in closed position, and pick the one with the smallest "distance" from the previous chord.

Using that strategy, you can pick different chord voicing templates, like drop-2 or quartal. An even better method would be to move the "hands" up the keyboard after a tonic chord, that way you don't end up in the low registers too quickly, since jazz harmony tends to go down in 4ths a good bit.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#97

Post by eternityforest »

selestify wrote: post #69
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?

KaithemAutomation(It's on Github), which is an automation system in vaguely the same genre as HASS and OpenHAB, but aimed at minimizing SD card wear, and allowing for doing unusual things with audio.

I still do often wonder if I should just look into moving to HASS and what it would take to port all the stuff I use though....

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#98

Post by drBonkers »

levmiseri wrote: post #38
drBonkers wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be even more amazing if it could display your partner's edits in real-time.

Agreed! I'm planning to update it in a few weeks with additional features including real-time 'multiplayer'.

I'd love that. I'll come back to your account in a month to see if you've posted any updates.

I found this [1] that has multiplayer. However, I prefer how yours automatically redirects to a generated URL.

[1] https://dotpad.vercel.app/

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#100

Post by [deleted] »

not-my-account wrote: post #16

This is great. The fact that there is an incredibly low marginal cost for software projects has been on the front of my mind for a while. Compared to working on something mechanical or electrical, you can get from "fuzzy idea" to "workable-ish code" with incredibly low cost in time and money. I've learned a lot about browsers, for example, chugging away at a little toy website[0] with a buddy. I know it is simple, bu…

[deleted]
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