Ask HN: How's your quarantine side project going?
( An update to this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170881 )
What have you been working on? How's it going?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2020 where @robmerki convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
My side project is usually making high end wordclocks[1]. But I’ve been using those wood working tools to make wooden stands to make sneeze shields out of plexiglass sheets[2].
This started by my neighbor (a dentist) asking if I could help him make some stands for his office. I’ve since sold over $1200 worth of the stands. I wouldn’t say this effort is sustainable in the long run, but it feels nice to be helping small business reopen.
I had plans to try and start some marketing efforts for my clocks but I haven’t had the time (no pun intended)
[1] www.finewordclocks.com
[2] etsy.me/2D7lrMW
For about 2.5 months I found myself unemployed during this mess so I picked up Starting Forth and taught myself how to program the Arduino Uno with FlashForth. My achievements are reading a thermometer and controlling a distance sensor. Forth was worth learning and I think it is the perfect platform for this type of work so long as you are willing to figure things out on your own because there isn't much google can do to help when you get stuck. I have a job again but I am looking forward to more embedded programming with Forth.
I have been slowly and steadily making progress for https://www.ncovindia.in/
Its an Covid Dashboard for India. Recently I added district wise 3-weeks trends for all districts in India. This feature was a result of personal necessity of checking daily cases in my district.
I plan on adding more features like 5-day moving averages and trends on testing stats.
Would be happy to hear some feedback from HN community.
I've been working on a single player word game for web and mobile. :)
https://seanwilson.itch.io/wordoid
Top score I know of is around 2,000 points if anyone wants to try and beat that!
I'm also working on an ebook version of my web best practices guide:
http://www.checkbot.io/guide/
I am writing a file sharing and text messaging application that works with full file system explorer GUI in the browser. HTTP has proven insufficient to work within the applications security model so now I will need to investigate using WebRTC.
But before that I will be figuring out how to interact with a Windows like GUI in the browser via remote control to different machines without dependencies for test automation.
I've been steadily writing my book about ADHD: https://adhdpro.xyz/
I posted on my blog a few times about my struggles with ADHD, and the response was enormous. I had over a dozen DMs on LinkedIn asking me for advice. It turns out very few people talk about building ADHD specific productivity strategies. The market gap was there so I started writing.
I wrote an average of 1,000 words every day in June. It's the first project I've ever created totally solo and I'm almost done.