Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

mike.zwobble.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 195 posts

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#91

Post by tyree731 »

georgeburdell wrote: post #87

As a dev at a large company, I'm wondering how the author went about open sourcing the side project. My employment contract stipulates that anything I write for work is owned by the company. This company wouldn't have any motivation to let me open source the work I do, which in my case does not go into any product. The reason I ask is that I have written, as part of my day job, a scientific library in C# that doesn't…

At my firm you can request that side projects not be subject to the company’s copyright agreement. The firm’s market is fairly specific, so most requests get approved.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#92

Post by agumonkey »

akudha wrote: post #90
agumonkey wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

old people are a special demographics (I encounter a few of them regularly, for IT reasons or not) the obvious fields in the list: - education - healthcare - justice someone on HN showed an app for people to find good workers for home rework, this kind of stuff could be tremendously useful, and more generally the organization layer of society is very lacking. This also match the issues at the courthouse, basically ma…

Physically challenged people are another group that could use a lot of help. One of my friends has cerebral palsy, until I met her, I had zero idea about the problems they face. These groups of people aren’t served because there is not much money in it :(

I'd gladly help people with those issues. I'm gonna seek them (no idea why I never thought about that).

The reason I put elders aside is that their motivations and emotions are very different from younger people. There are lot of fear, loneliness driving their need for help, and often they don't really want to own the knowledge, it's more a little bit of emotional support; which is cool, but not as motivating as, say, a younger handicapped person, who has more skin in the game.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#93

Post by Lorean »

tyree731 wrote: post #91
georgeburdell wrote: post #87

As a dev at a large company, I'm wondering how the author went about open sourcing the side project. My employment contract stipulates that anything I write for work is owned by the company. This company wouldn't have any motivation to let me open source the work I do, which in my case does not go into any product. The reason I ask is that I have written, as part of my day job, a scientific library in C# that doesn't…

At my firm you can request that side projects not be subject to the company’s copyright agreement. The firm’s market is fairly specific, so most requests get approved.

I'm afraid it's difficult to call something written "as part of their day job" a side project.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#94

Post by semireg »

A few months ago my tiny side project blossomed into a 6-figure income stream. It’s an electron app that designs and prints labels.

Users import spreadsheet data and generate barcodes. Since I have a customer base and a target market, I’ve had every one of my mentors tell me I need to stop writing features and work more on marketing and analytics. But it’s not as fun!

Instead, I find myself up late at night working on USB weight scale integration for grocer/farm labeling kiosk. I’m looking for beta testers that have a need for such a thing.

Check it out at https://label.live

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#95

Post by woranl »

Client side document rendering has a lot of potential. There is currently no open source library that can render docx file as nice as mammoth. There are some commercial libraries that rely on WASM, but they are generally bloated and you can’t read their source.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#96

Post by akudha »

agumonkey wrote: post #92
akudha wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physically challenged people are another group that could use a lot of help. One of my friends has cerebral palsy, until I met her, I had zero idea about the problems they face. These groups of people aren’t served because there is not much money in it :(

I'd gladly help people with those issues. I'm gonna seek them (no idea why I never thought about that). The reason I put elders aside is that their motivations and emotions are very different from younger people. There are lot of fear, loneliness driving their need for help, and often they don't really want to own the knowledge, it's more a little bit of emotional support; which is cool, but not as motivating as, say…

There was a language website that connected old people with youngsters who want to learn languages. They practice their language skills and help the old people with loneliness. This is a very good idea.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#98

Post by yunohn »

DrOctagon wrote: post #39
musingsole wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your story and mammoth's origin story really highlight how the Sisyphean corporate world is seemingly at odds -- or at least tangential -- to progress.

In the interest of full disclosure it was a government org. Your point still stands though.

> government org

Governments and corporates function incredibly similarly.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#99

Post by alien_ »

tmp65535 wrote: post #20

Similarly, I've been writing respectable software for decades but I'm fairly certain that my most widely used piece of software, by a wide margin, is a mildly pornographic app ( http://driftwheeler.com ) This app, published in 2017, has a continuously growing population of users from all over the world. I get email every day asking whether soft1 is the only server, thanking me, suggesting improvements, etc. It's iron…

It's just a numbers game. The total number of people who consume porn is probably many orders of magnitude larger than the audience of your respectable software, so even if you're tapping into a very small niche of porn consumers, it can be enough to overtake your other software.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#100

Post by high_byte »

logotype wrote: post #49

I work in finance. About 5 years ago I started building a FIX library on my spare time, out of curiosity. Over the years it has been countless fin tech start-ups as well as big companies reaching out to me about the library, suggesting fixes and features. Since then I have long lost the interest in the technology which enables connectivity to financial exchanges to automate trades, but I keep working on the library f…

if you want to erase billions and stop the richness just remove the library, or better yet add a typo :D
Post reply on HN