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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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What side projects are you currently working on and how can others be of help? (Feb 15)

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vikkio88 profile image
Vincenzo

I am working on a podcastmanager platform, all by myself backend in php e frontend in vuejs2, but no one seems to care (probably because I am terrible at marketing myself)

github.com/vikkio88/ascoota-web
github.com/vikkio88/ascoota-api

and the PoC: ascoota.surge.sh

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focuswish profile image
FocusWish

Marketing is really the hard part. I feel like coding has almost become a commodity - but marketing requires some sort of secret sauce and there's no exact template you can duplicate for success.

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vikkio88 profile image
Vincenzo

to be honest with you I don't really mind, I am really enjoying to do that as one of my side project, and gave me a change to test on the field my new instruments that I coded, and new frameworks that I have been studying, like vuejs2.

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eoinmurphy profile image
Eoin Murphy

Looks awesome so far! I personally use PocketCasts, so it'll be hard to get me away from that. But, keep going with it anyway.

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vikkio88 profile image
Vincenzo

oh thanks, I am not really a designer so I am basically working copying stuff around :D
I will take a look at that

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effingfight profile image
effing fight

We built 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.

It's mostly done but could use a bit of love on social media, Facebook, etc to spread the word.

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spiced_wafer profile image
chris ryan

I'm working on a web app, when-to-reddit.herokuapp.com/
It helps redditors figure out the best time to post to a subreddit.
I'm thinking of expanding it to automatically post on a user's behalf.

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eoinmurphy profile image
Eoin Murphy

Interesting project. Where are you pulling the data from?

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focuswish profile image
FocusWish

Definitely add that auto post feature!

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orbmancer profile image
Damien Bry

I started mentorleo.co a few weeks ago. I teach a friend (Léo) to be a web developer, and now we are starting a community with a few other Léos.

It could be awesome to have other developers (not only web) joining the community to give introduction courses to the Léos !

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philnash profile image
Phil Nash

I'm mainly working on my own website, but I'm adding interesting features using latest browser stuff. I just added the experimental Web Share API to blog posts. I need to improve my service worker too.

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jchiatt profile image
J.C. Hiatt

I'm currently working on building a food API for my city that will allow all the local restaurants here to put their menus online instantly (for free) and also provide nutrition information to apps like MyFitnessPal.

I'm building the API 3 times: in WP-API, Rails, and Node. I'm then going to build a frontend with React, and then probably a content management tool with Angular. And then finally, a mobile app with React Native.

This is all for the sake of learning this year. That's why there are so many different technologies.

I will gladly take any advice!

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kwaazaar profile image
Robert te Kaat

Working on an open source lightweight eventing library using a MsSQL or MySQL database for storage. Reasons for using this library, instead of existing tools like RabbitMQ, Kafka, etc can be costs, simplicity (you only need a database) and support for so-called ordered delivery (per functional key) that relieves event consumers from handling ordering related issues themselves. You can find it here.
I'm also working on a rest-api that runs cross-platform and accompanying docker images.

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aeiche profile image
Aaron Eiche

I'm always continuing my ongoing efforts to improve my Gift-Registry Web App, DoWant! (github.com/aaroneiche/do-want) It suffers from young-developer syndrome which makes it a little difficult to work through the various problems. I'm currently working on transitioning all the AJAX calls to proper REST endpoints.

I could always use more help with this. Unfortunately, I rarely have anyone jump on board (Probably because the code is a bit of a mess)
So I either could use help getting it off the ground, or I could use some help replacing it with a better system (probably written in Node)

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mikesimons profile image
Mike Simons

I have a few things on the go but there are a couple that could do with a wider audience for testing.

The first one is erbmash; a standalone binary that takes an erb template and optionally a json / yaml file and parses / renders it. The primary motivation was for initializing container configuration but recently I found it helpful in reducing the boilerplate in creating an HTML slide deck with shower.js.

It could really do with some wider testing and feedback so if you like the sound of it, please have a look.

github.com/mikesimons/erbmash

The second one is a tool for folks stuck behind corporate proxies. They get in the way no end and are particularly problematic for laptops that get taken home / off site. Especially if you run VMs or docker on it (or even docker in VMs!). When you provision a VM inside the corporate network you need to set the proxies. Then, when you take the machine home the VM no longer has connectivity because it's trying to use the proxy.

Similarly, when you set HTTP(S)_PROXY env vars, cli tools always blindly use these. Rarely are the network rules so simple that ALL connections should go through the proxy so requests to some local machines fail.

I wrote a tool called pacyak that proxies proxies. I run it locally on my laptop and set all of my proxy settings to 127.0.0.1:8080. For VMs I use vagrant-proxyconf with VAGRANT_HTTP(S)_PROXY set to 10.0.2.2:8080. This allows VMs and docker to work inside or outside the corporate network without having to change their proxy settings.

When pacyak detects you're on the corporate network, it will use the PAC file provided by your company (most have one) to decide which proxy to use or not. This resolves the issue with CLI tools inappropriately using the proxy.

Again, it could really do with some wider testing and feedback so if this is a problem you have, please give it a shot and let me know how it works (or doesn't) for you.

github.com/mikesimons/pacyak

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jnfsmile profile image
Naftali Friedman

A website for a small business (done free for family). Can use help with graphical design and tips for working with Angular 2

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20zinnm profile image
Meyer Zinn

TIP #1: Use Vue.js

In all seriousness, generally you can use Bootstrap or similar to make a fairly good website quickly. I threw together climatemirror.org in a few hours.

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effingfight profile image
effing fight

intercoolerjs.org/ is marvelous for getting results quick, you should check it out!

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focuswish profile image
FocusWish

What's your rational for preferring Vue over React?

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20zinnm profile image
Meyer Zinn

Ease of use, time to pick up, docs, "hype" vs functionality, extensibility, which one of them had IDE support (Vue because it's not a new language), which one of them seemed the most sane. Those are what come to me off the top of my head, Vue is also faster (if it matters in a web app...) and can really be used as just a component if needed (without a need to learn a new language and use every precompiler under the sun).

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20zinnm profile image
Meyer Zinn

I will note it doesn't have the same tooling, but since it's plain JavaScript so it's not a huge problem.