Ask HN: What is your side project?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2017 where @max0563 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 36 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 42 comments
One project is Padmapper for affordable housing since the affordable housing sites built by government contractors are not great.
https://github.com/codeforsanjose/findahome ↗
Another project is the programmatic serving of California drought data via a JSON api.
https://github.com/codeforsanjose/calidrought ↗
I also am thinking of a tiny little golang website that helps people organize board game parties - basically a wrapper around meetup.com.
As far as non-tech projects, I want to make a bar cart I own prettier by lining the inside of its top tray with an LED strip.
https://cineargus.com/ ↗
Follow directors, script writers and DOPs on movies and get alerted when new movies they work on come out.
I wrote it mainly for myself. When I sit down to watch a movie I decide on what I want to watch based more and more on who made it rather than what it's about. E.g. Taylor Sheridan wrote "Sicario". Based on how much I enjoyed that movie, I knew I would likely want to watch "Hell or High Water".
Still a bit incomplete, I haven't written the "how it works" section yet. But you can search for movies and find people that worked on them, follow them and get alerts.
My last side project was this free Tumblr Theme called Dark Side inspired by the Star Wars franchise. Got about 750 active installs in the first month, pretty happy about it: https://www.tumblr.com/theme/40329 ↗
I also released on GitHub in case people want to fork and customise it: https://github.com/edmundojr/tumblr-darkside ↗
Currently improving my postcard sending service - https://postbirdy.com ↗ . Which is not really something special, just a fairly basic, yet functional service with my attempt to try making it quite fast and not hated by google PageSpeed Insights.
Also working on a simple service of screenshotting a website from multiple browsers (well, technically just emulating size and user agent with possibly PhantomJS). Not yet live, maybe in a week or two. Taking my time!
Currently most active is Lifoo (https://github.com/codr4life/lifoo ↗), a Lisp/Forth-inspired language that's embedded in, and compiles to Common Lisp. Good luck trying to generate funny money from of that idea :) Still, I wouldn't change the experience for anything; it might be imperfect, but this one is mine; no more squeezing ideas into what someone else once thought was possible.