Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

I just helped a startup exit successfully. I wore myself out doing so and it's not the first time I've felt worn out. I keep letting myself go too hard and forgetting I'm a human being first and foremost. I'm tired of feeling caught up in the cyclic bullshit and want to do better. I quit my job to focus on creating a personal, artistic expression, through software, in an attempt to help me grow myself. Hopefully it'll help others, too. My software is tentatively called Symbiant, but doesn't exist yet.

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I'm creating a web-first colony simulation game. I'm inspired by SimAnt, RimWorld, idleRPG, and Tamagotchi. My goal is to establish a strong, daily, mental health hygiene routine which promotes box breathing, gratitude journaling, and improved awareness of my health, fatigue, and motivation.

The game unfolds on an alien world covered in a thick sea of fog and asteroid impact craters. Huge fog waves roam the planet, splash against the crater walls, and continually intrude with frigid moisture. A damaged terraforming satellite orbits the planet and directs its limited energy towards one crater which keeps that crater habitable. There are three entities in the story: an AI powering the terraforming satellite, the consciousness of a biologist uploaded into the satellite's computer, and a fledgling ant colony within the barely habitable crater. The player fills the role of the protagonist, the biologist, and the hostile weather plays the role of the antagonist. The goal is to terraform the planet without throwing it out of balance.

The ant colony simulation runs on ~autopilot similar to idleRPG but with slowly unfolding visuals like 1x speed RimWorld. It's a real-time simulation which "runs" even when the tab is closed, but is only able to be controlled when the satellite orbits overhead and has line-of-sight with the crater. The queen hatches workers, workers expand the nest, navigate the fog, and search for food. The ants lay pheromone trails to food, but every night the fog rolls in and wipes clean the pheromones. Each day the ants begin searching for food once more. The colony grows optimally given available information, but is not omniscient or even opinionated. The colony will never push itself out of the local maximum of a single crater and struggles with attention due to the fog. Surprisingly, during initial nest expansion, the ants discover a rectifying crystal which allows them to sense electromagnetic waves emitted by the satellite. They develop a ritual around attempting to interpret these electrical impulses which provides a very rough form of of one-way communication from the satellite to the ants. The biologist leverages this communicational channel to assist the colony by providing high-level environmental awareness and opinionated responses.

Each day, the player is asked to show up and check-in at a consistent time. The player wants to be able to nurture their colony, but they need to unlock the ability to do so. They begin by engaging with a guided, box-breathing routine while "awakening" the consciousness of the biologist. It's effortful for the biologist to take autonomy from the terraforming AI in the same way waking up is effortful and so the player is guided through that process. Then, the player is greeted with a technophilic UI which provides in-depth stats and charts of their colony and the planet. Based on current and projected resources, the user makes a decision to encourage the colony to push harder or to ease up. This influences whether the colony will push out of a local maximum, but comes at the cost of damaging the health of the ants. The player needs to balance pushing the colony to expand into additional land with tapering their exertion to avoid long-term negative effects. Finally, the player is given an opportunity to self-reflect and journal on the goals and progress of the ants. Gratitude journaling provides a means of keeping attention on high-value food resources such that the ants don't lose track entirely due to the fog. Non-gratitude journaling (i.e. venting, daily reflections) provide a source of entropy for the weather system of the world.

Outside of check-in time, the player is only able to watch their high-level decisions slowly play out over the course of the day. The interface is calming and provides an opportunity for brief respite similar to taking a moment to observe an aquarium.

Overall, I am building software to help me be more consistent and diligent in my personal growth and mental health hygiene. Sometimes when I get depressed I stop caring for myself, but I'm always good about showing up for others. I want to leverage that to promote self-care. Conversely, when I'm firing on all-cylinders, I tend to think my motivation and determination are limitless. I take on significant personal growth goals only to eventually reach a mental breaking point because I never identify a good time to push less hard until forced. So, I would benefit from a visual indication of where I am at on a motivation/determination boom/bust cycle so that I don't find myself surprised by burnout.

I've never really responded well to software that implies I have problems which need fixing. Instead, I do much better when someone tells me a story, I contrast that story to my own, and I succeed in identifying personal growth areas through the reflection. Instead of creating "yet another mental health / journaling app" I am interested in telling a compelling, sci-fi story where the protagonist struggles to succeed in their goals due to a failure to acknowledge their humanity. I believe telling this story, while providing tools to participate and a pet to stay attached, is likely to instill long-term changes in those who engage.

There's a discord link in my bio if you want to hang out and watch my insanity play out in real time. :) No significant software written yet, but happy to have help once I'm capable of providing clearer instruction. Currently working through discussions of potential game mechanics and trying to define the scope of the mechanics.

DevEstimates

I made a tool to turn my spreadsheet for project estimation into a slightly better web app experience. The premise is that project estimates (how long will feature X take to ship) tend to be extremely inaccurate and moderately toxic BUT if you don't /try/ to make them accurate you can still get useful project data.

This is essentially the 2 outside estimates from the "3 point estimate" project management paradigm -- I ask everyone working on the project for two intentionally extreme estimates - a mythical ship date if everything went impossibly well (works on the first try, the designs don't change, nothing pulls you away, etc) and a date that is intentionally after the ship date if absolutely everything goes wrong. These are extreme enough it tends to take the stress out of picking a date, they can be given from the hip in 30 seconds, and they obviously can't be weaponized as 'actual estimates' so there isn't as much fear that some manager somewhere will try to hold anyone to them as a deadline.

There is no resulting "this will probably ship on date X/Y/Z" answer but it has been extremely helpful on my team so far since you can learn a lot from the relationships between the guesses - big gaps between team members means we're not on the same page, everyone jumping up means requirements just got changed or discovered, the guesses growing at the same rate week over week means we don't feel like we're making progress, etc.

It has been a surprisingly effective tool when using it this way but I'm the first to admit it isn't for everyone since it does NOT spit out a "when will this ship" date and it actually just tells the project leader where to go do more legwork (and I think it takes a rare, mindful person to like using a tool that tells them to go work more - doesn't feel like a pain killer OR a vitamin). As a secondary benefit it has also been helpful for folks (me included) to reflect on our estimation accuracy after the project ships.

I've made it in a "maybe this could make money one day if other people unexpectedly want this too" but I don't expect that and I honestly kind of love the project being just for my use case and not having customers - the writing is snarky (eg, "Estimating sucks but most businesses still demand estimates from their makers anyway..."), the ui is brutalist and minimal (no design framework other than the ironically named classless.css), and it is not very feature bloated yet. I have had fun throwing spaghetti code around and not worrying about breaking things for customers or impacting other team members.

At this point the project is (minimally) feature complete and I'm using it for my real life work - I'm in the last stage of deciding where it is going to live in production so hopefully it can 'go live' next week instead of living on my laptop. I'll make a proper HN post at that point so y'all can roast me into oblivion since I need to be taken down a peg every once in a while.

Urban DJ: https://urbanpoll.com/dj ↗ Wordle for music! A fun poll for music experts.

TL;DR - I'm bootstrapping a web-based music game that's a mix of Wordle and Dixit. It's an entertaining music competition where the community ranks 5 songs on daily bases.

Background - My partner used to manage a similar game at work as a team-bonding activity. They would set a music topic for the week, and then everyone would add some songs to a Spotify list. Then, once everyone had suggested a song, they would vote for the top 3 songs and compete amongst one another. It was a bit time-consuming to manage and count the votes, though. I thought - yeah, that's cool, and it could be applied to many types of companies. One day I should build something similar and start selling it to tech companies. A year later, more or less, I found the time to come up with an MVP and present it to some of my friends. Most people that like music love it and have been taking part for a few weeks or a month at least. After several iterations and feedback-based adjustments, I've now "upgraded" the project from MVP to "Beta" and would be happy to have more people onboard.

What I built - Urban DJ is the main stage where everyone can take part. You rate today's 5 songs (from 1-5) and then nominate one song on the next round's topic & suggest the topic after that. Your goal is to guess the community's vote. The more your vote matches the public, the more points you make. For example, if you position Song A as number 2, and 42% of the community has voted the same way - you earn - 42 points. It's an entertaining way to come up with "the best" songs on a given topic. I promise you that you will have fun if you love or know music. At the end of the day, as long as there are 5 persons playing the game - it is refreshed every day. The tech stack is Ruby on Rails + Turbo (hot-wired) & some Alpine JS.

What's next - Given that the game has reached a good level of stability, my next goal is to attract more people playing it. After that, I will focus on the business element - allowing people to set up private music stages to play with their group of friends, classmates, and colleagues. There could be a one-off fee or a monthly subscription for companies... I haven't decided yet.

My appeal - Please give it a go for a few days share your feedback on the process. I believe it should be able to be further simplified.

This should be a regular feature on HN, somewhat akin to "Who's hiring?" and "Who wants to be hired?". Maybe not on a monthly basis, but it would be cool to see periodically on some cadence.

There's a lot I could say on this topic, but TBH, I don't want to go into most of it in detail Right Now for various reasons. The main reason being simply that the side project stuff I might want to call attention to is largely not in the state where I'd want people looking at it right this minute. And the reasons for that, in turn, are manifold...

The good news is, progress is being made, and I should have some projects ready to put "out there" kinda soon'ish. Yay for being vague, I know. But I've learned to be leery of making hard promises on stuff like this. So much shit happens that you can't control. See above about "manifold reasons".

Anyway, we're not making any money yet... in fact, we've been losing money since day one, but thankfully the amount lost is relatively small since our expenses are small. Nothing that I can't just pay out of my $DAYJOB salary.

All of that notwithstanding, if you want a somewhat outdated view of what I've been working on for a while, see:

http://fogbeam.github.io/ ↗

https://www.fogbeam.com/ ↗

If things go well, this year will see lots of improvements to the underlying projects, videos, blog entries, and tutorials explaining how to use everything, and entirely new stuff not shown at the above links - as well as finally having everything available in SaaS form.

Sadly my backlog of "ideas to implement" remains far larger than my bandwidth for implementing stuff, so FSM only knows if/when some of the stuff I want to do will ever see the light of day.

NOTE: the "demo" links you may find if you click through the above links are offline at the moment. I'm in the middle of a big infrastructure migration / automation effort; moving a lot of stuff from Linode and "other" to OVH, consolidating DNS at Route 53, automating deployments with Ansible, etc. And one thing that hasn't been done yet is to bring up the new demo server(s).

Not currently public aside from maybe a thousand testflight users, but I built a stock and crypto portfolio tracker app focused on design. I'm a designer and developer and this was my first time diving into Swift/SwiftUI. Started as a covid project to learn SwiftUI and became a 3 year side project, complete with full node backend to do some auth, caching, cleaning up data and various things.

It's called Stocketa. Here's the site: https://stocketa.com/ ↗

and I opened up a few hundred Testflight spots if you want to play with it:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/3dZwTVhS ↗

Unfortunately despite the insane amount of time I've spend on it (many, many weeks with 20 hours on it) I've lost interest. It's just so hard to find quality stock/financial data that allows commercial use which I'd need to put this in the app store and charge for it. I pay a few hundred a month now for data that always has issues, APIs that don't work consistently, staff that's unresponsive/rude when I tell them their API doesn't work or is wrong. I've dealt with 3 stock data providers already and I still had to build a scraping engine to get certain bits of data. The real providers charge thousands per month for this data for good APIs, which I can't afford. All that and only for US data. International data was another headache I gave up on.

So yea, it's not a fun space to be in. If there was just a single API that was solid, worked and was not insanely expensive this would be a joy to work on. Polygon.io is the best API for this data but they don't understand indie developers and were telling me they had an amazing new plan for developers that was still close to $1k/mo.

Now I'm wondering if I should try to sell it to someone with more resources to build out.