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

Ben Halpern on February 14, 2017

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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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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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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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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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Eoin Murphy

Interesting project. Where are you pulling the data from?

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FocusWish

Definitely add that auto post feature!

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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effing fight

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

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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.

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Jean Gruneberg

So for my sins I am responsible for the lab environments at a Casino operator - numbers fluctuate but anything up to 14 labs, 700 virtual servers, 75 workstations and 40 slot machines - and all the infrastructure running Windows. Unfortunately our software vendor has no real clue wrt CI etc, all fixes are individual .dll's / config edits / SQL updates etc. So 6 months ago, myself, a server group guy and 2 dba's have taken it upon ourselves to automate ourselves out of the mess. Most of the heavy lifting being done in PowerShell running against vSphere / commvault. Using GIT to maintain dev / release and prod stable branches. Have managed to get from 70 days to build a new lab to 15 ;-)

Thankfully we have shown the value to management and they have made this process official now, I have been moved to the automation group and the plan for the next 6 months is to integrate all the pieces into Jenkins for CI into the labs.

Anyone working on automation Windows server builds from VMware templates, would love to compare notes!

J

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FocusWish

Currently working on:

1) JavascriptSnake.com - a simple snake game built with React Js. I'm a beginner at React so would love some feedback!

2) Wanderlust - this is still in the prototype stage. It's a tool to discover cheap flights. What differentiates this from other services like Google Flights, Kayak, etc, is that this is specifically made for people who don't have a destination in mind and want to go somewhere spontaneously. Therefore I try to include as much data as possible about the cities. This was originally using NomadList's API but they shut that down :( Feedback appreciated!

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Gerard Ribugent Navarro

I'm working ricube.net, a personal search page which indexes only the url's you're interested in, based on your twitter or facebook activity. Also i've developed browser extensions(firefox&chrome) and a telegram bot for manual additions.

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Geoff Davis

It's pretty basic, but I'm writing a simple React-based widget to easily allow people to search for and contact their Congressional representatives.

Check out the repo: GitHub link

Preview my current progress here: geoffdavis.info/react-find-rep

API may be fidgety for now, but planning on open-sourcing and packaging it up so it can be embedded easily.

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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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tbodt

I'm writing a set of python bindings to html5ever: github.com/tbodt/htmlpyever. If you need blazing fast, totally html5-compliant parsing in Python, check it out. It's currently in an unfinished state, but it'll be done at some point.

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Meyer Zinn

I'm currently working on the Climate Mirror project, which can use volunteers to help archive federal climate data. climatemirror.org

I'm also very interested in IPFS (ipfs.io) and its applications.

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Jamie Perkins

I'm working on a social podcast player - tung.fm. Looking for a co-founder, particularly someone who is an Android dev!

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Gary Sieling

I'm working on findlectures.com. Currently working on improving the sections with technical talks (both more, and better content).