Ask HN: Admittedly Useless Side Projects?

• Shiori

  58 8,780 8.5 Go

  Simple bookmark manager built with Go

  

Just today I set this up for exactly this problem https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori

• fauxjsp

  2 6 10.0 Java

  JSP implementation with fast page reloads that uses an interpreter rather than a compiler

Ah, the "hall of shame" HN thead I have been waiting for! Too many to recount here, but the one I probably sunk in most time was fauxjsp [1], a dev-friendly reimplementation of java server pages. I don't regret spending time on the project because it was fun, it was time I couldn't/wouldn't have spent on anyting better and I learned a bit about software architecture.

And you?

[1] https://github.com/ggeorgovassilis/fauxjsp

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io featured

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• tone

  15 381 4.2 C#

  tone is a cross platform audio tagger and metadata editor to dump and modify metadata for a wide variety of formats, including mp3, m4b, flac and more. It has no dependencies and can be downloaded as single binary for Windows, macOS, Linux and other common platforms.

Yet another cross platform command line audio tagger in c# - now scriptable / hackable:

https://github.com/sandreas/tone

I thought there are not enough taggers out there, so I'm gonna make my own, with blackjack and hook(er)s!

• asyncgo

  2 11 0.0 Ruby

  AsyncGo is a collaboration app designed around async/remote team communication.

  

I made an async work collaboration app: https://github.com/async-go/asyncgo

I had been working at GitLab, pre-pandemic, for several years and I saw how writing things down was almost like a super power to enable async work. If you start with time zone distributed teams, writing things down in issues/docs just becomes the natural way of working. I also saw that lots of companies didn't really get it - and there was a leap of faith required to try it, because it didn't logically follow that if you write things down more you can have less meetings.

My idea was to build something that provided a really natural place to write things down, and I built and tried to sell AsyncGo as a place for making decisions in a written way. You'd set a topic, a context, and a due date, and then the magic would happen. In theory. The problem I had was that I couldn't find anyone to take the leap and try it. Companies who were interested in async already had some similar process, and the ones who needed it didn't get it and I never found a way to communicate it clearly.

In the end I shut down the hosted version and put an MIT license on it. I don't regret it exactly, I learned a lot making it, but I wish it had helped more people. There's other stuff out there now that's sort of similar, and it seems they are struggling a bit as well, so I don't think the market was really there (yet).

• pgredis

  1 13 10.0 Go

  Redis in front, postgresql out back

pgredis - A server that talks the redis protocol to clients, and stores all data in a postgres database.

No regrets, I learnt a lot and had fun messing with it for a while.

https://github.com/yob/pgredis

• share-links

  6 - -

I did the same for a while, but it was a mess (700+ unsorted bookmarks on my main computer, 100s more on others).

I tried shaarli, but soon after I tried to build something myself, and I created share-links.

It's an open-source Django app that you can self-host, and that lets you store (and share!) links, titles, descriptions, and tags. Then it display them in a nice way (for me : not much css, a simple page with no js).

It took some dozen of hours to get to the point where it's really usable, and it still have problems now (comments are not moderated, I just realized that you can't add a description in links or tags, but I will fix this soonTM).

Here's the link of the repo: https://gitlab.com/sodimel/share-links/

One cool feature is to set your browser homepage to the url that loads a random page : each day I get a cool article to read/concept to discover!

That's my useless side project (because shaarli already exist and it's way more mature).

• kos-kpp

  1 - -

I've spent way too much time implementing a transpiler and bash like shell that makes programming my ships in Kerbal Space Program easier. The self-hosted version is almost done. I'd probably do it again though, way too much fun to see your spaceships autonomously do things.

Transpiler: https://gitlab.com/thexa4/kos-kpp

OS: https://gitlab.com/thexa4/kosos

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• kosos

  1 - -

I've spent way too much time implementing a transpiler and bash like shell that makes programming my ships in Kerbal Space Program easier. The self-hosted version is almost done. I'd probably do it again though, way too much fun to see your spaceships autonomously do things.

Transpiler: https://gitlab.com/thexa4/kos-kpp

OS: https://gitlab.com/thexa4/kosos

• muxile

  4 91 1.2 Shell

  Putting tmux on your mobile - Muxile is a tmux plugin that lets you control a running tmux session with your phone, no app needed.

I have plenty of ultra niche projects and I never regretted working on any of them. On the contrary - i use them daily and it brings me much joy. Here are three:

https://github.com/bjesus/muxile lets me continue my tmux session on the phone, bridging the two over WebSockets. How many people use tmux extensively AND want to continue on the phone? Not much i guess...

https://github.com/bjesus/callibella is my way to sync my personal calendar to my work calendar without revealing my personal entries. It's very useful for me but less needed if your personal calendar is Google because i heard they have their own integration.

https://github.com/bjesus/air is my AwesomeWM based Interface to my PostmarketOS Kobo e-reader. Linux on your e-reader isn't a huge market share to begin with...

• callibella

  4 23 0.0 JavaScript

  Sync your personal calendar to your work calendar, privately 🐒

I have plenty of ultra niche projects and I never regretted working on any of them. On the contrary - i use them daily and it brings me much joy. Here are three:

https://github.com/bjesus/muxile lets me continue my tmux session on the phone, bridging the two over WebSockets. How many people use tmux extensively AND want to continue on the phone? Not much i guess...

https://github.com/bjesus/callibella is my way to sync my personal calendar to my work calendar without revealing my personal entries. It's very useful for me but less needed if your personal calendar is Google because i heard they have their own integration.

https://github.com/bjesus/air is my AwesomeWM based Interface to my PostmarketOS Kobo e-reader. Linux on your e-reader isn't a huge market share to begin with...

• air

  2 41 3.3 Lua

  Awesome Interface for e-Readers (by bjesus)

I have plenty of ultra niche projects and I never regretted working on any of them. On the contrary - i use them daily and it brings me much joy. Here are three:

https://github.com/bjesus/muxile lets me continue my tmux session on the phone, bridging the two over WebSockets. How many people use tmux extensively AND want to continue on the phone? Not much i guess...

https://github.com/bjesus/callibella is my way to sync my personal calendar to my work calendar without revealing my personal entries. It's very useful for me but less needed if your personal calendar is Google because i heard they have their own integration.

https://github.com/bjesus/air is my AwesomeWM based Interface to my PostmarketOS Kobo e-reader. Linux on your e-reader isn't a huge market share to begin with...

• mega_calendar

  1 68 6.5 JavaScript

  Plugin for redmine: Brings a better calendar and more opportunities to display issues and holidays

• timeline

  5 7 8.9 JavaScript

  Timeline generator. Turns your photos, calendars, GPS tracks and more into a nice timeline of your life.

My timeline thing. It gathers all my crap and puts in onto a timeline. It's a more fine-grained version of scrolling to a specific date on my photo stream.

https://github.com/nicbou/timeline

It serves no purpose, but somehow it attracted one contributor.

It's pointless on purpose. It's the thing I work on when I want to forget about work, and build purely for myself.

• pegao

  5 13 0.0 JavaScript

  Pegao is a community about lists of links on topics of interest.

I built Pegao[1] as an open source side project, which is a web aggregator or bookmark to group links into lists trying to solve my own problem: I had many tabs open on my phone. It didn't work, but I actually use it to remember some links or tools that I know I'll use for upcoming projects.

This is my profile https://pegao.co/@zakokor

[1]https://pegao.co/

• Smalltalk

  24 266 0.0 C++

  Parser, code model, interpreter and navigable browser for the original Xerox Smalltalk-80 v2 sources and virtual image file (by rochus-keller)

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/ Parser, code model, interpreter and navigable browser for the original Xerox Smalltalk-80 v2 sources and virtual image file

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Som/ Parser, code model, navigable browser and VM for the SOM Smalltalk dialect

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Simula A Simula 67 parser written in C++ and Qt

> do you regret those endeavours?

No, not in any way; the projects were very entertaining and gave me interesting insights.

• Som

  8 24 0.0 C++

  Parser, code model, navigable browser and VM for the SOM Smalltalk dialect (by rochus-keller)

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/ Parser, code model, interpreter and navigable browser for the original Xerox Smalltalk-80 v2 sources and virtual image file

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Som/ Parser, code model, navigable browser and VM for the SOM Smalltalk dialect

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Simula A Simula 67 parser written in C++ and Qt

> do you regret those endeavours?

No, not in any way; the projects were very entertaining and gave me interesting insights.

• Simula

  2 4 1.8 C++

  A Simula 67 parser written in C++ and Qt (by rochus-keller)

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/ Parser, code model, interpreter and navigable browser for the original Xerox Smalltalk-80 v2 sources and virtual image file

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Som/ Parser, code model, navigable browser and VM for the SOM Smalltalk dialect

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Simula A Simula 67 parser written in C++ and Qt

> do you regret those endeavours?

No, not in any way; the projects were very entertaining and gave me interesting insights.

• ArchiveBox

  248 19,861 9.8 Python

  🗃 Open source self-hosted web archiving. Takes URLs/browser history/bookmarks/Pocket/Pinboard/etc., saves HTML, JS, PDFs, media, and more...

  

• react-qml

  1 115 10.0 HTML

  Build native, high-performance, cross-platform applications through a React (and/or QML) syntax

Not exactly useless but I haven't updated it for a long time. The project is called react-qml[0]. Basically it allows you to develop Desktop application using modern JavaScript/TypeScript and/or Qt/QML.

This project helped one of my consulting client 5x their development velocity.

[0]: https://github.com/longseespace/react-qml

• rockstar

  10 4,134 -32.7 Python

  Makes you a Rockstar C++ Programmer in 2 minutes (by avinassh)

My project Rockstar: https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar

I have zero regrets, gave me lots of experience with open source and the community

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com featured

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

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