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What side projects are you currently working on and how can others be of help? (Feb 4)

Ben Halpern on February 04, 2017

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Joel

👋 Hi everyone! I'm working on the easiest, most flexible, file upload SaaS product you've ever seen - shubox.io. Ok that may be a little hyperbole but, as a web developer who's handled his fair share of files and images needing uploading and processing, shubox is the thing I've always wanted. So I built it myself.

It'll take files and images uploaded through your web browser and stick them into your S3 bucket of choice. If you want images to be processed and transformed (resized, gifs having frames extracted, exif data stripped, mobile phone photo orientation correction), it'll do that for you too.

Seriously, I love it. I love working on it. If you've had to upload photos or files and wish there was an easier, more straightforward way to do it - this is for you. If you want to see some demos, I made a bunch of them on CodePen here: codepen.io/shubox/

If anyone wants more info, or wants to try it - hit me up on twitter at @shuboxio. At this point I'd just LOVE some good constructive feedback. Thanks so much!

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Joshua Carmody

I'm working on an Android app for learning Japanese kanji (the writing system), and perhaps Japanese vocabulary as well.

It's already available in Google Play at play.google.com/store/apps/details... with basic functionality. It's currently intended only as a companion app for people studying with a specific book. But over time I'd like to evolve it into a more general-purpose app that can be used with any method, and also include vocabulary flash cards and quizzes as well. Other features I'd like to add include handwriting recognition, a "nag me to study" notification option, animations of kanji being drawn, and a bunch of other stuff.

If anyone knows a free or relatively cheap-to-license 教科書体 (textbook-style) Japanese font, that'd be immensely helpful.

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Daniel Strunk

Adobe and Google partnered to release an open source font for Japanese, Chinese and Korean in 2014… maybe it will be of use to you! You can either use Typekit for the fonts, or download the fonts directly from GitHub:

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Joshua Carmody

Thanks! I'm aware of Noto and am currently using it, but unfortunately it's not "textbook style". It's too squared-off and stylized to use as a model for teaching handwriting.

I'm looking for something more like this: wazu.jp/gallery/views/View_epkyouk...

I'd use the font I linked, except that the license only allows it to be used with Epson printers, and I doubt Epson is interested in making an exception for a free app that can't offer them any significant money.

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Sir Scott

Hey Joshua! I use daily KanjiSenpai and it's proposing alternative font and two of them may correspond to you criteria:

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Gary Sieling

I'm building a search engine for lectures (findlectures.com). One thing I'm looking for is conferences / speakers people have found really instructive.

I'm also especially looking for talks on how people approach graphic design projects, to help me map out a project to improve the user experience.

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Joshua Carmody

Some of my favorite dev-related talks can be found on YouTube here: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDC62D1...

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Gary Sieling

Awesome, thanks, I'll add these!

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Bryan Baldwin

I'm thinking of developing my own cross-platform build system to replace GNU Autotools, CMake, and the like.

GNU Autotools lack sufficient cross-platform support.
All of the tools generate unnecessarily complex scripts and makefiles.
Most of the tools require some intrusion into the source code, like added header files, in order to work.
CMake has to be installed to run the build. Anything that makes the user install anything above and beyond their platform's toolchain just to compile code has completely lost the plot of why there are tools in the first place.

And that eliminates just about everything that's out there.

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Aidan Woods

I'm working on a PHP class to help configure security headers like CSP, it'll also (configurably) automatically inject flags into cookies with certain substrings in their name (like auth, sess) to try and better protect session data (upcoming version will enable use of SameSite – an attribute that isn't supported in PHPs setcookie yet). There's a bunch of other stuff too, just to highlight the most useful features IMO.

There's already some great work been done (by others) to help make this much easier to integrate into frameworks (where use of PHPs global methods directly isn't really possible).

If anyone is familiar with headers and cookies in a particular framework they use, then they could be of help by creating an adapter for it on the 2.0 dev branch here: github.com/aidantwoods/SecureHeade...

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Supe

I've been sporadically working on an ffmpeg frontend (carlosfdez.github.io/videocrop/) designed to preview and crop a video without transcoding. I often record gaming footage and I may sometimes make a short video out of one, but I often go over the footage I have long before I begin editing. Reducing what I have to work with at editing time an itch I've been wanting to scratch.

However, this is my first ever real attempt at a C++ project from scratch, so I have quite a bit to learn, especially when it comes to handling dependencies, cross platform, and building releases (I don't know how to test if the release even works on another machine, works on my machine indeed). I also need a proper name for it...

If anyone knows any good resources or info please let me know.

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Gregoor

I started working on a crowdsourced-reasoning web-app, for now called Arguably (arguably.herokuapp.com / github.com/gregoor/arguably). I feel like there are already a gazillion apps to share opinions, but barely anything for exchanging arguments (without narratives, analogies & opinions mixed in).

While I would appreciate technical help, I'd love to just get a sanity check, or maybe even some interest in using it (when it's done).

A very similar project is Arguman (en.arguman.org/) which is the closest thing I found to what I imagine (which is also why I used there data for my early alpha. I think it does a good job of showing the general idea, but has numerous flaws.

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Lukas von Mateffy

I'm currently working on an open-source home automation project. It's called Halbert (combination of "HAL[-9000]" and a typical butler's name "Albert".
It's usable in a lot of different ways.
You can use the built-in voice control (hotword detection => SpeechToTex => Language Intent Parser) to use it e.g. "turn off the lights in the living room".
You can also use the web interface, which is designed to work really well on tablets and phones for easy usage.
The system is written in a modular way, so it's easily configurable and extendable.

I'd love to have some help on the built-in components like Weather Components or Special Control Units.

github.com/Capevace/halbert

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tbodt

I'm making a headless browser in Python. The browser itself is closed-source, but I've extracted some components into open-source libraries. If they're something you'd like to use, feel free to use them. If you have problems with them, it would be awesome if you could send an issue or pull request my way.

github.com/tbodt/v8py — Minimalist, yet full featured Python bindings for V8. Mostly lacking documentation, but the API isn't very complicated and I'd be glad to answer any questions.

github.com/tbodt/greenstack — A fork of Greenlet that gives each greenlet its own stack, instead of doing this disgusting thing where the stack contains bits of different greenlet stacks and other bits of stacks are scattered around memory. This is necessary if you want to combine V8Py and gevent, since V8's garbage collector keeps pointers to objects on the stack and greenlet kinda screws up the stack. Plus switching is a bit faster.

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Sumit Kumar

Currently working on a Raspberry Pi robot and a central brain (Skynet?) that controls it & infinitely more robots. At the end I want to test different algorithms on swarm control as if the robots are autonomous vehicles.

(Basically a small scale thing of what we do at car2go in a couple years).

As soon as I'm far enough that others could join I'll have everything on Github. Until now, I'll post and ask stuff about Linux, Raspbian, Robotics, Socket.io and and and on Twitter.

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Ian Spence

I'm working on an open-source iOS App that allows you to easily inspect the certificate chain of any website.

It was released last summer, and is already fairly popular (especially in Russia). I would love it if you were able to take a look at the app, and suggest any features that you'd find useful. If you're comfortable working with Objective-C and OpenSSL, feel free to contribute to the project on Github!

App Website: certificate-inspector.com/

Github: github.com/certificate-helper/cert...

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Atakan

I'm building a dictionary website (tukodic.com) that will help to Turkish and Korean people.

I'm using Node.Js, MongoDB and Redis in Tukodic's backend. This stack will provide an API for mobile and web app. And looks like I will use React & Redux in front-end stack for SPA.

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effing fight

effingfight.com/

Mission: Every month we donate to a different organization in jeopardy under a Trump administration. Organizations include Planned Parenthood, ACLU, Natural Resources Defense Council and many more.

How you can help? Promote and share! Right now, we have about a hundred people signed up, donating a total of ~$1500 every month but we could use more people joining the good fight.

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Co-op Source

I'm working on a platform for bootstrapping/building "remote first" software cooperatives that follow the seven cooperative principles. Members can propose ideas/projects and when enough interest is expressed the project is started and supported by other members. Involves a lot of moving parts such as membership management, proposal management, voting/governance, legal documents, crowdfunding, software licensing, project management, sales & marketing, design, etc. Anyone interested should feel free to contact me.

A second, more experimental, side project is a VR app (AR eventually) to allow members to collaborate on a design together. Ideally the design could be transformed into running code in realtime. While the primary goal is to enable member collaboration we are also interested in finding out if using VR has any particular advantages over using 2D monitors, e.g. estabilsh trust, 360 degrees of design space, utilize more of the visual cortex vs typing text, etc.

See: coopsource.org
email: alan a-t ^^^^ this domain

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cmp

Working on a two new products for myself.

First I'm rewriting an app to manage splitting fairly and getting paid back for receipts (usually restaurants). I call it "Split It." It's currently in a state of being a complete hack, but it works and I get my coworkers to pay me back for lunch. I get the points on my Amex for free.

Second, I'm creating an app that merges the task list and calendar and helps you understand how much time you have per day to do things then decide which of the many things you can do that you will do.

i.e. I have two meetings at 11am and 4pm. I know I have lunch around 1. So about an hour at 12 and 2 hours at 2. Lets do some minor stuff at 1, (specific) serious work before 11, something in the 2 hours, and maybe nothing after 4pm meeting in case something comes up.

Goal is to be able to track all your todo items without constantly requiring you to check the list. It builds a habit of picking certain tasks to do and deciding when to do them today. It also tries to prevent you from scheduling too much in a single day by making it obvious to you that between meetings/events going on and the tasks you've scheduled that a lot is going on. From there you can see if what you're doing is what you should be doing giving the time you have...

That one you can sign up to see more soon at realday.io

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Cédric JUNG

I usually make software with Node.js.

I'm going to improve my self-hosted website where I can put my lessons: github.com/cedced19/learn-memory
You can have it too and there is a mobile application to learn your lessons. You can contribute by translating it or updating the WYSIWYG.

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Tomáš Ehrlich

I'm working on I18n component for React along with babel-plugin which takes children of this component and transform them into ICU formatted message. It allows using variables, inline components, plurals, gender/polite forms without knowledge how the ICU format works. It's basically React binding for ICU message format.

Right now I'm looking for review, comments and feedback. I'm using this lib already and it's much easier that react-intl, but I'm curious how others feel about it.

Repository: github.com/lingui/js-lingui

Blog post: medium.com/lingui-engineering-blog...

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Kaleb Haslam 🌐

I'm quite new to the programming world, so I don't exactly have the skills and experience yet to build anything actually useful, but one thing Ive been working on here and there is a text based RPG game* github.com/hhaslam11/text-fighter
I'm also trying to learn web development, but kind of getting overwhelmed by all the different languages (deeper than html/css) and not really sure where to start, so it's kinda off to a slow start.

At this point, I think feedback is the most valuable thing to me :)

*not much for entertainment quality, but it taught me a lot while making it so I continue developing it :)

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mdickin

I've developed a scripting language called Pumlhorse. I originally started it wanting a quick way to write automated Web API tests without a clumsy UI (looking at you, Soap UI). I also wanted:

  • A unified platform for integration tests, load tests, even UI tests
  • A simple, highly-readable syntax so that non-devs could understand and write tests
  • A flexible framework to allow all sorts of add-on modules.

I ended up building it on top of Node.js with a YAML script format. After working on it for over a year, I see that it could be used for a lot of other things: workflows, API frameworks, etc.

Anyway, the thing I need most is for people to actually use it and give feedback. I use it personally at work, but part of me feels it's not polished enough yet to pitch to others to start using. It's also lacking in documentation, but it feels kinda hollow to write documentation that no one will see (which is 90% of documentation, am I right?)

I also think the YAML format would lend itself well to a sort of WYSIWYG editor.

Once people were using it, I would love to see new modules get added or see different uses for it that I had never thought of.

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Chris Villarreal

I worked on whowerelosing.com one night last weekend after the whole ordeal that happened with President Trump's Executive Order. I've had friends reach out with suggestions and improvements to the site but it would be a help to get actual users to input their info and stories to the site to help others understand who was affected by the signed order.

Suggestions are also helpful. I can also make the repo public if others would like to contribute to the code base (build using React and Firebase).

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Markus Harrer

I'm working on reengineering patterns. There is a free, genius book out there (scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/) that I'm currently migrating to GitHub/AsciiDoc so that everybody can contribute: oorp.github.io . I would like to discuss the existing patterns and create new ones together with others: github.com/oorp/oorp/issues/6

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Mark Steadman

I have a podcast hosting service I'm setting up (at podiant.co/) and, with so many things, am always on the lookout for people to help spread the word. The hosting is free with technical support being offered at different price levels.

If you know of anyone looking to start a podcast, or who would be interested in porting their feed over, please point them in my direction! You can find the service at @podianthq on Twitter. It's in public beta right now, and so far the feedback's been really great, but obviously I'll need some fee-payers to make it sustainable! 🙂

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Robert te Kaat

I'm working on a lightweight eventing library that only needs a database (MsSql or MySql). It will also handle ordered delivery based on a functional key, which solves the hardest challenge with event based / asynchronous messaging solutions. You can find it here: github.com/kwaazaar/Resonance

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Dominik G

I'm working on a Node.js Web Mail Client.

The basic reason I do this is to learn node and build frontends in several frameworks to learn more about them. I'm currently thinking about starting a blog about it to show examples for different frameworks in comparison aside from the default "TODO" app.

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Pramjeet Ahlawat

I am working on a chrome extension for tabs management, called peek-a-tab. A properly working but limited on features version is already available in the chrome store at chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/....

I know there are already a lot of tabs managers out there in chrome store but all of them just opens a list of your tabs, you click on a item and the tabs opens up. But what I wanted was to look what's happening in a tab quickly and close it if it's not required anymore.

Few things I tried to do with the extension are:

  1. Lightweight as much as possible because a system is already on load when a lot of tabs are opened.
  2. To shift to another tab as fast as possible, search the URL and title of the tab.
  3. Multiple window support. The extension shows a list of all tabs from all the windows.
  4. Quickly get a peek on what's happening in a tab.
  5. Closing a tab from the list itself.
  6. By combining 4 and 5, it's very easy to get rid of all the unnecessary tabs quickly.
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Padraig O'Brien

I'm am creating a web app that will allow you to source a mortgage anywhere in the EU, would like to talk to some one in a German bank who is responsible for issuing/managing mortgages

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Dr. Donut ☕️

I open-source my ideas here. I'm open to collaboration, or simply advising others on any of these. Feel free to tweet at me @bebischof

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Richard Kichenama

Obsessed with hexagons, I have a project to create a battle game in css3, html5, and vanilla js for 1 to 6 players. I could use some design, visual and game, help.

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CodetteClub

Hi! We have an open source project going on... you can read about it here: medium.com/codetteclub/first-portf...

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Ben Halpern

Ah cool, this looks great. Good luck!

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Miguel Piedrafita • Edited

Rigth now, I am learning Laravel, and I'm working in a project called OrgManager, a Github Organizations Invite Generator.

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Liam Barry

I am porting Lua to IBM i and also working on a DB2 module for it to access the system database.

It's lots of fun and I am learning at the same time.

github.com/WorksOfBarry/luaILE