Propose HN: Screenshot Saturday

We talk a lot about ideas and there is "Show HN" for when you reach a somewhat working state, but what about in between? There seem to be many people struggling with motivation to continue on their side projects, so how about having a weekly post where you can post a progress screenshot?

The concept is based on Reddit's "screenshot saturday" meant for indie game devs. For example the most recent one is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/22tpar/screenshot_saturday_166_better_than_pax/

So if you like the idea, please post a screenshot and a few words of explanation on what you have been working on for the past week.

Cool idea!

Isomer, an isometric graphics library for HTML5 canvas.

Screenshot: https://cloudup.com/ca2TeFocl6F

I'm _almost_ ready to release. I've been working on the docs here (http://jdan.github.io/isomer/), but the code is still private.

Nice. Some large hi-res photos showing the design would be awesome.

Used the free trial of After Effects and a rotating display stand to make a spinning video of them: http://www.namechopsticks.com/static/chopsticks.mp4

I was thinking of using them as a moving background, but that didn't seem to work out on iOS as it won't autoplay videos. Was fun though.

I wasn't aware /r/gamedev invented Screenshot Saturday, but I do know it's very popular among all game developers[0]. I like the idea of a similar weekly tradition for HN. Weekly feedback is great motivation, and the ideas that come out of here are often superb. That being said, screenshots are not the best format for every progress report. It works well for game developers because such a large part of games is visual, but that's not the case for a lot of things hackers might be working on. Something like "Side Project Saturday[1]" would work much better.

Another problem is agreeing on who would post these weekly threads. If something semi-official wasn't decided on people may race to be the first to post every Saturday because of the guaranteed karma, which would lead to threads starting at pessimal times. While the optimal time would be 9 AM EST[2] for maximum exposure, people might be posting the second it turns midnight (or even earlier), which would lead to empty threads and ultimately the death of the tradition. Perhaps a novelty account could be created just for the sake of posting these threads with no affiliation to anyone in it's bio, in the same way there's the user "whoshiring"[3].

To follow the rules of this thread: This week I've been working on my Snapchat Marketing SaaS app. I recently lost a lot of my backend work, so rather than immediately rewrite the code I lost I'm focusing on the frontend part to keep my morale high. Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/d3La9td.png

Edit: Oh yeah, I also forked "HN Special" and added the ability to save posts for later: https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/hn-special/pull/58#issuec...

[0] https://twitter.com/search?q=screenshotsaturday

[1] It even follows the "S" formation!

[2] http://nathanael.hevenet.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring