We're partnering with one shelter in Edinburgh (Scotland) to start, and built the website and a pair of apps to showcase animal listings. We've had a few success stories of people finding pets already, which is really motivating!
If you know of a shelter in the UK who might want their listings on there (ideally they'll have a means of exporting them and we'll build an importer), let them know to get in touch with us :)
For interest, we also just submitted our annual report to our regulator, if you'd like to read about the first year of our parent charity https://www.kale.charity/reports
I wrote a SRFI (scheme request for implementation) for transducers, which are efficient composable algorithmic transformations. They allow you to eagerly transform collections, say like using map and filter, but without building intermediate collections. The SRFI document is here: https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-171/srfi-171.html
Then I rewrote a large chunk of racket's for loops for guile: https://hg.sr.ht/~bjoli/guile-for-loops
They are zero cost (apart from negligible macro expansion) and provide a homogenous way to iterate through various collections. I am now in the process of implementing foldr for it, which will allow for a general way of writing lazy iterations.
I've spent most of the year working on colourisation and recovery techniques. Colourisation is probably 70% of the way, but restoration is as hard as ever.
The project isn't meant to be a unicorn. The tech stack is boring, and probably wouldn't scale.
There's about 50 people on board, and about two or three videos streamed a day - so it isn't remotely "successful" yet, but I set a four year timeline for it.
I don't have any specific stats to offer - because I don't collect it. I collect as little data as I can get away with. Both for personal belief, and economic reasons.
Hard to get massive fines for the inevitable breach when there's no PII to steal.
But, you don't have to put your CC in. Not until you've established a relationship.
I am always looking to improve the look, however.
Lessons learned:
* If you'd like to start making money on the Internets, don't start with a SaaS
* Making your first $currency will give you a (much needed) morale boost
* If you're just starting out and you're in for the long-term, optimize for learning and building relationships
* Worthwile Things take time
* You probably won't get it right from the first time (whatever it is). It is far more important to keep iterating rather than getting the right answers from the very beginning.
* Most minor decisions won't matter in a few months', let alone in a few years' time. Don't overthink it. Make a fast decision and if necessary, re-evaluate it down the road
* Don't rush to automate tasks
* Build it, and they will do absolutely nothing
* Businesses live and die by their distribution channels
* Running a lean operation (i.e. low-cost) is a competitive advantage
* Having an audience is an unfair advantage
* Writing is a gift that keeps giving. Write more!
* The true validation is people paying you money
After many months (or years?) of procrastinating, I finally published my personal website (https://jmstfv.com). I have been meaning to do this for a long time but kept putting it off for various (artificial) reasons. So, I hand wrote the HTML, copy pasted the CSS from my other projects, and called it a day.
Lesson learned: start with the least painful solution.
EDIT: added couple more "lessons learned"
Main UI: http://lipcolourmatch.com/
Map of colourfamilies: http://lipcolourmatch.com/colourfamilies
Gallery interface: http://lipcolourmatch.com/browse-all
Main lesson:
* Making money with affiliate models in this space can be hard if you don't already have a big existing audience (ie. from a Youtube channel) - wrote a bit about it here
https://blog.race-conditions.net/posts/experimenting-with-th...
Elm Resources (https://wolfadex.github.io/elm-resources) - opinionated list of tutorials and tools for Elm
elm-license-finder (https://github.com/wolfadex/elm-license-finder) - tool for listing elm dependencies
elm-text-adventure (https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/wolfadex/elm-text-adve...) - package for building text adventures in Elm
Grove (https://github.com/wolfadex/grove) - WIP GUI tool for management of Elm projects
Slime Buddy (https://slime-buddy.netlify.com) - A little slime pal that you can take care of (re-wrote it from JS to Elm)
And I have 2 other projects that aren't quite ready to show. Maybe I'll have something for 1 of them before the 1st?
It shows which players gigged together, and colours the players based on the country they live in. It's a wiki, so anyone can add themselves or other players, as well as add a link to a YouTube video to promote their music.
A bunch of people (Gypsy jazz a pretty small world!) added themselves (there are over 200 players on it now) then it died down.
I also wrote a blog post about the design process: https://www.jeremiecoullon.com/2019/11/27/djangoverse/
It was fun and meant I got to learn a bit of React and D3 !
Gitfuck (https://www.instagram.com/gitfuck/) - automated Instagram account featuring commit messages of frustrated developers on GitHub
Windows 95 Accessories (https://unexpectedcomputers.com/) - Windows 95 swag and jewelry
My Handmade Story (https://myhandmadestory.com/) - Success stories from makers who make and sell handmade products
- A SaaS for productized services (https://www.manyrequests.com)
- I wrote a book (in 24 hours) on productized services: (http://www.productizebook.co)
- I also grew a FB group (Productized Startups) to 1950+ members on the topic of productized services.
My goal for 2020 for my SaaS is to hit 150 customers or $10k/month in monthly recurring revenue.
To achieve that goal I plan to:
- Improve the UI of the SaaS in Q1 and Q2
- Release one piece of content per day
- Grow my community of productized startups founders to 4k members
How I did it: - Started a small Facebook group, added friends - Started connecting on FB with productized service entrepreneurs, added them to the group - Mentioned the group in various places (Twitter/Indie Hackers/...)
Does that count?
Verbly (https://verbly.3digit.dev/) -- Simple app for practicing Italian verb conjugations in various ways
Sw/Sh Pokedex (https://dex.3digit.dev/) -- Easy little app for type matchup information and party-planning for the new Pokemon Sword/Shield
This tool was built as part of a larger suite of tools that highlight and resolve the cost performance gaps businesses face when entering the Chinese market.
1. Something that takes a line-chart and turns into a word narrative of what the graph is describing. https://towardsdatascience.com/financial-storytelling-using-...
2. Sentiment-tagging (positive/negative) for financial news. Personally, I don't believe there's a lot of alpha to extract from this, because news usually lags market information. But A LOT of people believe differently, and this article shot up on relevant Google searches, way ahead of academic papers or other sources of authority. https://towardsdatascience.com/a-new-way-to-sentiment-tag-fi...
https://storry.io/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/storry/id1485126254?ls=1
Gonna have to try to convince some friends to hop on it.
I take photos and record videos on my phone. All my friends and family too. I used to share them on different media sharing platforms. Used to have a meaningful discussion/conversation on the shared content with the people I know.
Things changed and got worse. I hated infinite scrolling and public feed which I still do. I never really liked the idea of "liking/hearting" - rarely "liked" stuff. Also, these days it's all about influencers and things get lost in the feed.
Keeping all this in mind, inspired by good aspects of the existing platforms and really based on what I needed, I decided to build Storry.
If you ever want to talk about bundling other service offerings into the company formation offering let me know. We had our fair share of learnings there :)
I made some enhancements in 2019 to my Hacker News reader (https://webbindustries.com/hackernews), but who hasn't made one of those.
There are a lot of things to improve, but it's a start...
I also made a little game using TypeScript: https://xojoc.pw/games2d/4snakes/
Talkative (meettalkative.com) - The easier way to interview your users
Referlist (referlist.co) - Increase sign-ups via Robinhood-style referrals
I didn't get rich by writing this book, but it's very useful for networking in blockchain community. It's like an expensive name card. It also boasts my reputation.
I developed a blockchain framework called Mamba: https://mamba.black
For those who are familiar with blockchain programming, Mamba is like Truffle but instead of based on Solidity+JavaScript, it is based on Vyper+Python.
For those who are unfamiliar, Mamba is like Ruby on Rails but it's for writing decentralized / programmable money applications.
My plan for 2020 is to write more tutorial articles in Mamba website and develop more features in Mamba framework.
For business: I am helping a company build their programming bootcamp (not related with blockchain).
Initial thoughts:
Would love to see a 'display title of folder' upon hovering on a thumbnail in compact view. I like compact view more than normal, but without displaying filenames I can't see what things are.
Would like a way to change the font display/size/formatting of the filename display somehow, but at least changing the preview sizes increases the font size of it (it was too small a font size by default for my monitor setup). Although now I'm getting bigger thumbnails by increasing preview size even if I only want the font size increased, but better than nothing.
Tabbed hubs with a top bar instead of using recent history on left?
I like how there's such a good variety of search tools.
Love the auto tagger. Would be cool to fiddle with how it works/sensitivity settings in terms of the threshhold for word frequency/whatever else is triggering tagging conditions. This could be incredibly useful for ppl with large libraries.
Since I have so many videos in one hub I'll probably end up wanting additional sorting/categorizing options. Thinking I'm going to have to do that with file system folder reorganization and then potentially doing 'show folders' enabled within Video Hub currently eh? (Or separate hubs for each category I suppose, maybe I'll end up doing that if this symlink stuff is too unwieldy).
On a related note, it would be cool to add in more autocategorization functionality like the autotagger, and bundle in sort of 'library organizer' functionality. A lot of people have tons and tons of videos that are really difficult to sort/categorize by hand. There's probably some sort of library management software out there but I haven't looked into it. If you know about the software Calibre it has all these ebook databases it crosschecks your files with and then auto-tags/auto-genres/ISBN classifies everything. Not sure if something like that exists for video files, but there's probably ways of detecting genre/patterns in the metadata and filename themselves I'd think.
Potentially but also maybe not, a minor bug/unintended functionality is clicking on a video to 'show similar videos to' plays the video in my default player. But maybe there's a toggle for single click > double click video playing that I'd ideally set it to double click because I don't always want to play a video if I just want to see what's related to it. Can't check the options panel right now cause I'm at video 9000 in the loading bar of the 27k total ;p. Another solution for this instead of single/double click would be if one can just click the text filename it'll show similar videos to without playing the video whereas clicking the thumbnail just once triggers the play video. Also that 'similar videos to' has really interesting potential, can see that also being very useful depending on what triggers a similar condition for large libraries as well.
Anyways, great software! Will recommend to others. Pleased to find it because it really does come in handy. Switching over from default Windows File Explorer to One Commander was also another great thing I did in the past few weeks that's going to improve my workflow like Video Hub will -- anybody who's on Windows should really checked out One Commander, I prefer it now to even directory opus.
I didn't implement a font-size feature because I thought the 'zoom' would be good enough -- it resizes the entire UI, but that's a benefit for some people (my parents for example, or me -- with a 55" 4K monitor I use as my desktop - but I sit far away).
I _just_ implemented a threshold feature (will be released in 2.1.0 -- probably in January). You can see the PR: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/pull/322 -- I hope that's what you had in mind.
Another feature I plan to implement is fuzzy search (just have to pick one of 3 libraries to use: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/issues/311 )
Double-click toggle is something others requested -- I'll see if it's easy-enough to implement. Perhaps single click would then just show similar as you suggest, while double-click would open.
Just FYI -- all the generated screenshots & thumbnails are based off the filesize, so when you decide to create a new hub that has a lot of the same videos (perhaps when you're creating smaller hubs from individual folders from the symlink one), you could just copy/paste the screenshots and the screen generation process would go by quicker (the app will just check that the screenshot exists and move on). After that, when you click the "Any changes" resscan option - it will delete any screenshots for videos not in the hub.
In a similar vein I found myself doing a lot of work that I think should be unnecessary just because I wanted to buy some fonts and not depend on yet another subscription service so decided to build https://woff.cc/ aka "Web of Fonts". It's currently in the planning stage but when launched, it will allow you to upload your licensed or (SIL) free fronts (including all Google fonts already built in), optimize them (subsets, css embedding, etc.) and either host it there for free or download and host it yourself.
Part of my marketing effort is improving visibility on Etsy and so I’ve started selling much less expensive items on Etsy too[1]. They are not so much for the revenue as for the traffic, ratings, and learning how to best use Etsy. These secondary products are all based on things I’ve designed and made for/with my young kids.
Two observations:
- I’ve really enjoyed the path of developing better processes of how to fabricate things
- I’ve really enjoyed getting my kids involved with making. It’s fun to observe them thinking about how to make stuff and working with them to figure things out (they are 3 and 6).
Being a Disney fan, I needed to browse Disney plus movies with IMDB rating. Also, my friends wanted to view Disney plus catalog without registering. This site serves both of these purpose.
I couldn't find a service that could tell me if the latest deploy of my web app would make it slower, so I decided to build it.
website: getpixelpal.com
To be honest, though, I've fallen out of love with it and I'm considering shutting it down or making a pivot to something else.
react-frappe-charts - lightweight (~17KB) React charting library with TypeScript definitions and Storybook playground - https://github.com/sheshbabu/react-frappe-charts
airhealth - mobile webapp to check air quality - https://airhealth.now.sh / https://github.com/sheshbabu/airhealth
Your site looks nice. What did you use to build it?
I am now working on Devolio (https://www.devol.io), a welcoming community for developers to share and discuss. I am really excited about letting users custom-design their profile and integrating with Github. I wrote about what I learned this year and how I got into programming at http://uzpg.me/2019/12/28/projects-and-learning-in-2019.html
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ascrewaske...
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pindigo-social-pinball-scores/...
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pindigo
The idea came from being in the trades in my previous career. Companies in the trades spend a ton of money on advertising but fail to capitalize on a lot of their incoming leads. We use humans to answer incoming text, fb messenger, and webchat questions for people like electricians, hvac techs, plumbers, etc.
Long term idea is that as we get more data on how these conversations typically occur, we can build some ML systems to lower the cost of answering the questions.
It's still MVP stage right now. Got a few customers and planning on ramping up marketing in January.
It was a fun and frustrating learning experience. First meh prototype with a Raspberry Pi Zero: https://victorbitca.github.io/posts/2019/04/creating-an-op-z...
Second prototype based on the Teensy board: https://victorbitca.github.io/posts/2019/06/a-proper-op-z-pl...
YouTube: https://youtu.be/MvYTbIU1d-c
Store page: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/mod...
Lots of people have. There's now some consequences for customer-unfriendly data sharing policies, too: someone will notice and you'll get negative press. It was recently in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/smarter-living/privacy-on...
Question: traction numbers? If this is "how many people are using my side project", I'm fairly sure the answer is "nobody" - which has the bonus that I don't need to worry about supporting backwards compatibility.
I've been using it for a while now, and just needs final touches before I'll release it https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia
It was a fun project that took a year to write. The programming bit went into developing a page for pre-orders and fulfillment using stripe and other tools. But suffice it to say, I liked writing a lot more.
The landing page: https://thecrux.rockentry.com/
Can you link to any resources you used in learning to build them?
Probably don't have many sales outside that scene to be honest, so I'm hoping with time that will change.
EDIT: Built almost entirely in Vue.js :)
I built: - Software at https://mattebot.co - Revamped https://marcell.me (native iOS, macOS development) - https://focuswindow.app (improves productivity by allowing you to focus on the task at hand).
Repo: https://github.com/kfarr/magic-matta/
Write-up: https://medium.com/@kfarr/creating-magic-matta-for-the-2019-...
Project managers import a project schedule from Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project via Excel. Each contractor gets a personalized link where they can submit daily updates on the status of their tasks. All changes are tracked for auditing purposes.
It's a work in progress, comments and suggestions are welcome!
It's an interactive database of the top 100 Shopify stores, with 19+ e-commerce data points available for each one.
I'm really happy that the average time spent on the website is over 4 minutes and 30 seconds - I never expected people to be this interested, so now I'm thinking of ways to expand this idea.
I also launched the web version of https://movewellapp.com
Planning on a new site launch of https://impossiblehq.com on Jan 1
SuperAnimo (https://www.superanimo.com) - free cartoon video maker I've been working on for years, recently made the publishing more user-friendly
Neither project has any traction or sales.
www.itswinwinboardgames.com
It takes your wishlist from BGG and analyses the geek market looking for the best prices for each board game in it.
I built it mainly with Python+Flask+Bulma, an all new tech stack for me, and I use it almost daily, because who doesn't like to find some bargains.
All in all, 95% of the advice floating around about how to start something is on point and I encourage everyone to launch THAT idea in 2020.
My plan in 2020 is to focus much more on the marketing side of things
I can really recommend a project like this as the opportunities for learning are vast!
We're also working on a more robust system to filter content that some users might not want to see, although anything extreme should be removed either way.
https://graphql-test-suite.herokuapp.com/help a GUI for testing graphql apis
Kind of a project-feature / workspace-switcher for macOS. Facilitates human context switching by allowing you to save and load all open applications and their state (open windows, tabs, etc.)
Not entirely finished - open beta pretty soon.
It earns me daily coffee money haha
[0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/commits?author=kenneth...
Right now there's only one template available, but I plan on adding custom templating mid-January.
(It's fully functional btw, so don't hesitate and sign up!)
IPFS (https://ipfs.io) is a P2P internet protocol that's made to enable a decentralized internet...I believe its goal is to supplant (or at least supplement) HTTP(S). As I said, my knowledge of IPFS is still pretty basic, but I find it fascinating and I thought it might be relevant for this application.
A dedicated peer to peer system focused on privacy has no server and no third party. Instead the model is client-client without third party routing. Privacy is then achieved because connections are direct, in an application layer sense, between nodes and each node is a client running the same application in the same way. This is always confidential and never anonymous. This is achieved because there is no application layer addressing used at all, not even DNS.
Think about it more in terms of a shared disk drive on a private network mapped to a local file system address instead of a web location.
P2P things just interests me.
I would love to get some feedback.
Some notes:
* Currently it uses IP addresses for connection, which is less than ideal.
* Currently every device is treated as a separate user.
Road map:
* I am working on a web service that will issue named accounts and digital certificates. The named accounts will identify their current IPv6 address to the account service so users need only to connect to an account which can be any IPv6 address for portability.
* Once accounts are a thing I will need to change several things on the client application. My goal in this step is to separate users from devices so that a single user can connect and manage multiple devices. That extra layer of abstraction will allow options for management, security, and convenience that are not currently available.
* I also want to enable end to end encryption for all users/devices. That is just a simple matter of public key exchange built into the already designed invitation model.
* Then I want to create a text client that supports markdown.
Its a simple hack, and a niche use case. But I enjoyed building it.
(Ongoing)
https://joybuddies.com (warning: comic sans)
https://opensimworld.com (older, but redesigned this year)
A visual statecharts editor, aiming to help with state management for frontend apps.
I also build a way to archive anything you browse online so you can read it again offline as if you were still online. > 500 stars on GitHub. https://github.com/dosyago/22120
