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The Joy of Small Projects

schroer.ca

101–103 of 103 posts

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#101
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty easy to run into truble with user accounts due to privacy regulations like Europe's GDPR. This stuff is definitly not fun in a side project.

For a small project, I would simply ignore the GDPR. The likelihood of getting fined for a tiny project is too small vs. killing it by overcomplicating it.

Where I can, I'll sidestep GDPR (and CCPA and Australian Privacy Act and whatever) problems by explicitly avoiding collecting data that might fall foul of that.

Make "user accounts" effectively anonymous. Don't collect email addresses or phone numbers or names. Just use cookies with GUIDs or autogenerated username like the default Reddit ones (without allowing people to put their own name or other PII in). Maybe let the user keep refreshing until they get a random username they don't hate, but it'll end up being something like "Abrasive-teapot-86" and never $walletName or $emailAddress. If you need to let people move accounts between devices/browsers, let them grab their GUID and call it "secret account key" and tell them never to share it. Also let them know there's no such thing as "resetting their password" and to store that secret account key if they want to be able to recover a "lost" account.

You can't _always_ get away with that. But if you can, it saves a lot of headaches.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#102
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My goal was never to get a Tim Ferriss-sized audience. It was primarily for personal expression at the beginning and then gradually grew over time.

The blog was the 2nd largest in its niche and lead to me making a TON of friends, one of whom I was later best man for at his wedding. I also ended up getting sweat equity in a business and learning a ton due to that blog. Moderating comments was little to no burden and even if its traffic were 10x more, moderation would still have been a trivial task.

It was a huge success in terms of ROI from my perspective. Having accounts and user-generated content on that site wasn't "betting on myself not to succeed". It enriched my life.

Re: The Joy of Small Projects

#103
A small project [1] that I use often on projects and teaching is a text-based ERD editor. Being text-based means I can write it with minimal tooling (with vim or vscode) and in git-friendly format. Since the students (and myself) requested more functions, I keep enhancing it occupationally but it is already useful since day-1 :)

I think the key motivation is being able to see the actual users (ideally also being the active user yousrelf)

https://erd.surge.sh/

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