Ask HN: Quixotic Side Projects
What are some of your more futile side projects that looking back on, you are wondering "what was I thinking".
ONE of mine in the early 2000s was a signed Java applet that could launch other applets in a shared VM. Applets were added by having the user drag an HTML page into it and it would parse the HTML and find the <APPLET> tag. This was back in the day when I had a desktop that had 256MB RAM and Java VMs would be 30-50MB while running.
My current quixotic side project is a form-driven document templating system, something in between Mustache and HotDocs. RTF token-replacement works fairly robustly; working on finding field tokens in existing documents now. Future will be expanding support to DOCX and a nice GUI for template library management and form questionnaires (currently uses a CLI).
I don't know of a home/office alternative to HotDocs, so I decided to make one. It'll never have the enterprise features those things have, probably never be fully scriptable, but maybe small shops want to automate some of their paperwork too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Close to all of my side projects, save for my home automation server.
(No particular order)
* Lighting control using UART over CANBus transceivers, with a collision detection and retry mechanism so any node can send whenever.
* A custom 915MHz network protocol with Golay code to increase range without needing real LoRa
* A system for automatically deploying Squirrel programs onto ESP32s(Based on another custom protocol of course)
* "Hey, I know, let's build stuff that takes power on XT60 cables and make up a bunch of cables and splitters and battery packs!"(Perhaps the dumbest of them all)
* "I think I'll write my own backup solution"
* A custom notetaking solution with a P2P distributed database embedded in it, you just copy the sync code between devices and they stay in sync
* A protocol for making local services securely accessible remotely, similar to Nabu Casa(It was the base layer of the notetaking sync)
* Another attempt at a P2P database, which was like secure scuttlebutt except it had mutability and true without-a-trace deletion. I think I called it a "Doubly ordered pseudochain" or something.
* Many, many, custom hardware projects. I currently have zero in use aside from a few adapters made from modules.
* A random number generator for tue very smallest 8 bit chips, made by pure trial and error. Of all the stuff I've done, for some reason this one actually seems to be used in a few places in super niche applications.
* A low code game text adventure IDE with a terrible custom language.
* A mad libs style text generator. Nothing wrong with that, except the first version used a custom json parser in C and ran on PICs. Way saner than most of the rest.
I'm pretty sure my current project is my worst. I've been making a web forum platform from scratch, and I've paid for a bunch of 3rd party integrations (like cloudflare, mailgun, etc.), and have bought a dozen or so domain names. It's futile because forums are incredibly out of vogue right now. But it's a fun diversion.
Hmmm, doesn't sound futile to me. The world can handle another forum implementation... maybe add some threading? (mix of discourse with zulip!). Perhaps mix in some automatic text summarization? [1] :-).
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33900964
It depends on what you mean by forum. Yeah, a lot of subject-based forums are being "redditified", and other switched to the real-time Slack/Discord model.
Also, I see a lot of community-based products, where forums are just a component (example : outverse [0] ).
But I don't think simple forums platforms are (or never will be) out of vogue. There may even a be lack of diversity right now.
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PS Actually. I always wanted a forum with a UI like Hacker News or Radiohead Message board [1]. I like that bare and outlined design. Does a similar OSS forum exist?
[0] https://www.outverse.com/
[1] http://msgboard.radiohead.com/
Check out Lemmy. The creator recently released a PhpBB styled version rewritten in Rust, but he has another version too
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
Mirrors/demos in the readme
I miss forums
All side projects feel like tilting against windmills, until they don't.
My current is turning an old python script to a server side app. It went in the opposite direction. It started out simple and productive, but then turned into a quagmire.