Ask HN: Side Project Ideas?
I'm looking for something to build in my spare time. Preferably a website or webapp.
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2019 where @tkifnn convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
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.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 23 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 16 comments
One simple way could be to pick up project based in a technology stack you know. I will follow up with an example, see this book [1], about good python projects.
What you can do is, read the description of each project and do it yourself. Don't look at the solution in the book, then when you are done, compare. If some project excites you further, you can probably extend it so if the book offers a CLI solution, may be write a GUI for it and so on.
The trick with side projects is to build momentum and I hope this technique could be helpful. Have fun doing your side project.
[1] https://nostarch.com/impracticalpythonprojects ↗
I had the same "problem" and created a static site generator [0] in both Python and Perl (as a learning exercise in the former case). I blog daily using this program [1].
[0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog ↗
[1] https://plurrrr.com/ ↗
FWIW; I am looking for beta testers ;-)
A comparison site for hospital prices.
These have to legally be made available by each hospital for all services they provide (since January 1, 2019).
At the moment they're hard to find, often buried on the hospital's website and not easy comparable to other hospitals in the area.
A kayak-like site for health procedures would be very useful.
An app where employees can vote the options for menu in office Kitchen/Pantry. May be employees can vote weekly/monthly once.
How about a website or webapp? should only take spare time. If i were to do something, that qualifies