Ui Alternatives

ui reviews and mentions

• Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
  13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Nov 2022

  My most ambitious web project was https://noiseblend.com which is a web app for discovering music on Spotify.

  It’s a next.js + React slow and memory hungry mess [1] which could have been static HTML with some JS for the dynamic bits.

  Experience taught me to keep it simple nowadays, but I had to go through the Noiseblend mistakes first.

  The stack is Python with Sanic for the backend, Postgres for db and Redis for cache.

  That’s what remained after removing all the unnecessary services I implemented because I thought they were paramount: high availability, data locality, time series databases, performance monitoring, alerts etc. Forget about those until you start making money on the product.

  The biggest disadvantage a web service has over a desktop app is that you have to keep it up. No matter what, you have a server to manage and make sure it keeps responding. That worry doesn’t exist on offline desktop apps.

  The other is finding the market for it. Noiseblend didn’t have a market, and it being dependent on Spotify didn’t allow me to ask for money unless I did something more. That’s another problem, avoid creating functionality that depends heavily on big companies.

  I thought about “pivoting” and turning it into a playlist building tool for DJs. I added filtering songs by key and mode (e.g. A minor) and asked a few people if they would use such a thing. Turns out that they use a semi-offline desktop app [2] that already does that and is much faster and powerful.

  Oh well, at least now I have a way to find songs to improvise on with my Kaval and guitar.

  From my observations, people are reluctant on paying for websites. I guess they don’t feel as “owned” as a desktop app.

  [1] https://github.com/Noiseblend/ui/blob/master/pages/artists.c...

  [2] https://mixedinkey.com/camelot-wheel/