ROUNDTABLES ★ 59 upvotes 2017

Ask HN: What is your side project for 2017?

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled analysis of the business dynamics, operational challenges, and strategic takeaways:

An open Ask HN community consultation from 2017 where @forgottenacc57 convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.

Core Principles for Independent Builders:
1
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
2
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
3
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:

Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.

Community Discussions & Critical Reviews

High-signal perspectives, counter-arguments, and peer founder insights debated on Hacker News (113 total discussions):

SI @silvaben Peer Contributor

Write a book on Vue.js.

I have been working with Vue for the last 3 months and it has been a very pleasant and rewarding experience. While Vue's official guide is a wonderful resource, I feel that it doesn't delve into topics like Vuex, VueRouter, interacting with an existing API, integrating Vue into your existing project (Rails, Node.js etc) etc.

I have started writing a small book that starts off with a gentle introduction to Vue.js and then walks the readers through building a complete SPA (Single Page Application) similar to Reddit/Twitter.

This year, I want to spend the first couple of months finishing this book.

For those interested, I have created a small subscription form - http://eepurl.com/cvUk5D. You can add your email here to get notified when I launch this book and also get access to the early release.

SI @siscia Peer Contributor

rediSQL[1] which is a module that embed SQLite into Redis.

It is a fun way to go back to low level C code, I started to kinda miss it after years of high level languages...

Right now it only use redis as connectivity layer but I want to make it way more integrated into redis, I want to replicate keys on both redis and inside sqlite in order to have the best of both world (and make some interesting tradeoff between speed and memory), here[2] the proposal if you would like to contribute.

[1]: https://github.com/RedBeardLab/rediSQL

[2]: https://github.com/RedBeardLab/rediSQL/issues/12

LE @letientai299 Peer Contributor

"Auto Table of Content" userscript/addons[0].

I believe any article longer than 3 pages should have a table of contents. If readers feel bored, they can look into the TOC, jump to other section to find something fun. But most of they don't have one. So I make it my self. This's inspired by this Firefox addon[1] (no longer maintained).

[0]: https://github.com/letientai299/userscript-auto-toc

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/table-of-contents/

Edit: Add newline between links.

SF @SFJulie Peer Contributor

My life.

Making better bread, cider, and delete all my open source projects.

Creating the first post-luddites anti computer guerilla movement.

Oh, and since I am bored of all the terrorism laws that results in our countries converging to soviet unions mood, I will also make pirate parties spike water with recreational harmless drugs so people stop look like scared zombies and give them a smile back on their face.

Then in 2018 we make a fun revolution with no casualties, and we all live happily ever after.

I become a dictator edicts every one have the responsibility of leading their life make the country a democracy and retire after a day in Corsica because this place is amazing and life to short to take yourself seriously.

KR @krapp Peer Contributor

I probably shouldn't share these because they're nowhere near worth sharing yet but...whatever. I can come back in a year and see whether or not I actually finished this time.

- A HN-like forum written in Hack[0], mostly for self education and to teach myself how to work with Vagrant.

- Actually finish a game in the pseudoframework[1] I (mostly finished) in C++.

[0]https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/basedforum

[1]https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/sdl_framework

HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 59 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 113 comments
TOPICS & TECH STACK: