What is your favorite project that you have ever done?

#programming #discuss #opensource #productivity

Top comments (13)

Nicholas Warwick • Apr 21 '23

Wait - do you guys actually finish your projects?

cubiclesocial • Apr 22 '23 • Edited

Jacob Carter: This prototype should have been done weeks ago.
Major Samantha Carter: It's done. It's just not... finished.
Jacob Carter: Interesting distinction.

Source: imdb.com/title/tt0709068/character...

Ben Halpern • Apr 21 '23

Lol definitely not

Srikar • Apr 21 '23

Well… it’s kinda hard to explain 😝

Ben Halpern • Apr 21 '23

this

Accreditly • Apr 25 '23 • Edited

A strange one, because the project itself was pretty mundane. Many, many years ago, when Facebook was in its infancy, it released what it called its Canvas platform. The first version of Canvas was pretty simple, it was a way of hosting your own 'app' on Facebook, which was essentially an iframe to your app. Facebook passed a few query strings to your iframe that allowed you to auth the user. Pretty basic.

In the first version Facebook allowed you customise your profile a little bit by adding 'apps' to your profile page. When they released this feature I managed to get access to the developer platform and built an app that allowed you to select your favourite sports team, and my app simply displayed that team's logo on your profile.

The app probably took me an afternoon to build - probably a maximum of 5 hours - and most of that was spent wrangling with Facebook's new APIs which weren't heavily documented at the time. It worked, I added it to my profile, and kind of forgot about it.

Fast forward a week and I thought I'd check on it...

Monthly Active Users: 50,000+.

I couldn't believe it. Over 50,000 people had installed my app, that I spent a few hours building. Those 50,000 users are users who installed the app and configured it. I don't get any stats on how many people had viewed the 'Tab' on users profiles unfortunately (Facebook cached your output and stripped any JavaScript - probably to stop everyone's profile from looking like MySpace monstrosities!).

I decided to pop Google AdSense on the Canvas screen (where someone selects their team when setting it up) and see what happened. Don't judge me, I was a poor student at the time.

Over the coming weeks my app spread like wildfire. At peak it had 1 million active monthly users. At this point I got contacted by an account manager at Facebook. They audited my app to try and help me increase my ad revenue and make the app a little easier to use. There wasn't much to it, but I implemented their changes and my ad revenue increased quite a bit. I got a little addicted to looking at the stats at this point, it was the first thing I did in the morning and last thing I did at night; checking my user count and associated AdSense revenue. Revenue wasn't huge here, but for a first year student who had an income of £0 normally it was pretty amazing, and earning me substantially more than my student loan.

All of this was hosted on a single dedicated server that I had for all of my personal projects. It held up pretty well. The app didn't really do much, but I did encounter some table locking issues from time to time, normally when a big game was about to be televised and I'd get 50% of my monthly traffic in the space of an hour.

I diversified the app quite a lot to other sports and then to other clubs and organisations like universities.

Fast forward a couple of months and I get a notification from Facebook saying that my app will soon be disabled, along with hundreds (thousands?) of others as they were removing Tabs from the Facebook platform all together.

I knew it was a short lived project. I didn't expect anything from it, it was just a way of playing with Facebook's new API, so I wasn't overly upset.

I have since had some other success with Facebook apps over the years, although it's turned into a pretty closed platform now, which I think is for the best for the platform itself.

Hopefully someone enjoys my little tale!

Aditya Mathur • Apr 26 '23 • Edited

Over the past year, I have been working on a picture less dating app. When I started the development process, I was unfamiliar with the react native expo workflow, so it was a great achievement when I finally published the app on the Play Store. Since then, I have been receiving feedback from users about the idea and the app itself, which has convinced me to continue marketing the app and adding new features. I am very proud of this project and consider it my favorite one to work on.

I would appreciate some feedback from users about the app, which is currently only available on the Play Store in India and is called "Meld."

Mardeg • Apr 23 '23

As always it's the last one you just did. For me it was loading spinners that don't actually spin even though they appear to be (the dots only move in straight lines): emojicons.glitch.me/spinner.html