Do you have a side project? Talk about it!

Many professional developers have also side projects!

Some have a commercial SaaS software, others an open source npm module ... others a blog!

There are also multiple reasons to have a side project: to update your resume, to make an extra income, to sharpen your coding skills or get new skills, etc.

So...

Do you have a side project?

Talk about it! Tell us where we can find it, what makes it special, what technologies did you use, etc.

If you don't have one yet... would you like to build one?

Comments

[Heiker]

I do have one. It's called tinytina, I like to describe it as the mix of postman and curl that nobody asked for. It reads a json file that contains information about an API (url, post params, headers, etc...) and does one of these things

• Executes the http call. This includes a limited "interactive" mode where you can modify the data before sending it.
• Shows the data as a curl or httpie command
• Transforms the json schema into a markdown document.

It was made using some good old fashion javascript and a handful of libraries.

---

I have also started to put my content in a blog. For the moment it lives here: vonheikemen.github.io. And the source code can be found here.

It was made using Zola, a static site generator. What makes it special (for me) is this.

• Awesome syntax highlight
• Multi-language support. The theme that I chose didn't have it but I change it
• Basic tag system. Again had to hack it, but it's there.
• Built-in dev-server with livereload.
• Single binary. This means no messy installation steps.

[Duc Nguyen]

I like the name tinytina! It's very cute. But have you ever heard of newman? Our team are using it to run Postman tests automatically.

[Heiker]

Yes, I did knew about newman. But it really didn't solve the problem that I was having. As far as I know newman works with entire collections or folders, but not individual requests. And it doesn't let you modify the data before sending it.

Before tinytina what I did was write a bash script with a group of curl commands. That works fine, bash gives you variables and the ability to make the http requests but its syntax is very awkward. That's the problem that it solves, it allows me to replace those scripts with a json file while I still maintain the ability to share my "http calls" as curl commands. The Postman GUI also solved my problem but I always thought that my needs were way to basic for such a heavy app.

[Razvan Ilin]

Employed as a Software Engineer, but as you mentioned, we also like our side-projects. 😀

I'm working on a platform that connects directly to data sources and then allows you to create charts to visualize your data. The data sources that are supported at the moment are JSON APIs, MongoDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
It's actually an open-source project so everybody can contribute and self-host it for free, but it also works as a SaaS platform if people don't want to bother setting it up themselves.

I'm quite passionate about data and coming up with ways to visualize it, hence the drive to work on a project. The platform uses NodeJS with ExpressJS in the backend. For managing the data, I'm using the Sequelize ORM with MySQL, but planning on supporting PostgreSQL at some point soon as well. On the front-end side, I'm using React with Redux as the state manager. The project was started before the introduction of React hooks, so it's not yet migrated to that (and I'm not sure that will happen since it will take too much time to do it).

The main website here
The GitHub repo

[Pierre Bouillon]

I'm still a student and I work as an apprentice software engineer. However, I'm trying to keep it up with my sides project since I started programming, even tho the first ones were pretty simple and just aimed to teach me new things.

Lately I build a very small toolbox for MQTT in C# to discover how NuGet works It's pretty fun but I'm planning to perfect it a little. It's simple but useful and had been so for some of my coworkers.

Here is the NuGet page and the GitHub repository

Lately I've been too busy with school projects and lessons, but I'm still planning to improve it 😄

[Srebalaji Thirumalai]

I just hacked a weekend project. srebalaji.github.io/timezone-track/

Timezone Track helps people to track different timezones in one simple page.

[rafapastor]

simple but useful, congratulations

[Nicolas Carlier]

Working on side projects is definitely one of my hobbies.
I'm a big consumer of news of many kinds. This is why I've developed my own "technology watch" tools. I am developing readflow.app that is a news reader with some cool features. Automatic classification of articles into categories thanks to a simple rule engine. Offline support, PWA, etc. And to feed this tool I have also developed a modular RSS aggregator: Feedpushr.

Finally, because I like to mix my hobby and my work, I have also developed "Devops" tools such as Webhookd, an HTTP server that exposes shell scripts as remote functions. And APImon, a simple API monitoring tool.

Anyway, I like to develop side projects ;-)

[Panos Dalitsouris]

I also have two. One is called unigym. What is does is a set of tools aiming to help personal trainers and gym owners manage their business.

What you can do

• Manage memberships
• Create events and invite members
• Build and assign workout programs to gym members
• There is a private profile page for each member with access to their workout and meal plans as well as their subscriptions.
• and so much more to come...

It's still in active development it will be launched in August 2020.

The app is built using Laravel, MySQL, Vue.js and RabbitMQ

---

Other then that I also maintain a ruby gem active_policy that is meant to be a way to authorize a request before hitting the controller in your rails projects.

[sensen]

I have one that I'm focusing on for over a year already! It's called Typing Hero, a text expander app for Android platform.

Text expander allows you to set a keyword for word or phrase that you type frequently. For example, you can type "ty" and have it transformed into "Thank you!". You get the idea!

The basic feature is available for free for everyone without any limitation. Subscriptions allows user to enjoy additional feature focusing on convenience and further efficiency.

The app is written in Kotlin, using RxJava, Room, and some services from Firebase.

You can find out more on typinghero.app.

You can get it on play.google.com/store/apps/details....

[Hugo Gresse]

I've 3 😅

• ⭐️ OpenFeedback.io which is a feedback saas for event/meetup/conferences.

  • anonymous constructive vote
  • big admin with user management, can load speakers/talks with an external API, etc
  • using Firebase Functions, Firestore, Mailgun, React/Redux/Formik, OpsGenie
  • repo: github.com/HugoGresse/open-feedback

• Ical2Api which add an API on top of ical feeds. It's missing a lot of UI but it's working and have proper slack support for hours reminders and weekly reminder with upcoming event this week. We use it in Montpellier, France for local meetups on meetup.com.

• FillMySlides which use a Google Slides as a template for generating thumbnails/images.

  • You post your google slides url,
  • give a json with the data
  • and a zip will downloaded at the end.

About me: android engineer, I guess web engineer now too :D, I've left an advertising company to focus on my side project while searching for a ethical job.

[Brad]

I've been working on the same project for almost 2 years. It's gone thru around 4 iterations. Feature wise its more or less a semi-complex CRUD app, but each iteration was done with a different focus on different aspects. Sometimes I'd be focusing on e2e, CI/CD, testing, or trying out different libs and frameworks.

At this point I'm just trying to finish it to completion haha.

I mainly did my side project as a place to test out new ideas and technologies. Some were worth the effort, some weren't. But that's all part of learning :D

[Davide 'CoderDave' Benvegnù]

I have actually a few side projects...

The one that is taking me the most time now is my YouTube Channel CoderDave, where I talk about DevOps, Azure and Microsoft in general

About coding projects, instead, first and most "famous" one is AzureWebAppSSLManager which allows you to get free SSL certificates and install (and renew) them into your Azure App Service and Azure Functions.

Another one is BugGuardian, a library, written in C# and targeting the .Net Standard 1.1, that allows to easily create a Bug or a Task work item on your Azure DevOps account or on your on-premises Azure DevOps Server or Team Foundation Server 2015+ when your application throws an Unhandled Exception. I also have extensions for Asp.net MVC, WebForms, and Asp.net Core