ROUNDTABLES 22 upvotes 2021

Ask HN: What's Your Side Project?

22 pts
Hacker News Signal
2021 · Shared by @princevegeta89
Ask HN: What's Your Side Project? by @princevegeta89

The Founder's Submission

Direct narrative and submission text authored by @princevegeta89 on Hacker News:

Hi all

I've built a complete restaurant ordering software which I was able to successfully deploy and get some friends who run restaurants on it. Been eyeing technologies like Nim and Flutter for quite some time now. Thinking of mobile games as well and the list goes on lol. What is everyone working on!

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled reflections, business mechanics, and tactical takeaways:

An open Ask HN community consultation from 2021 where @princevegeta89 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

Key perspectives, counter-arguments, and peer founder insights debated on Hacker News (28 total discussions):

TH @the_only_law Peer Contributor
MA @matjazdrolc Peer Contributor

Hey,

I've been working on body weight logger. I find MyFitnessPal and other popular apps too bloated.

Instead I built a progressive web app. It stores data in LocalStorage. You can install it to your home screen and it works offline.

It's been a nice exercise in working with Material UI, Redux and react-router.

I plan to add Dropbox/Google Drive integration later. Open to other's ideas and contributions.

https://github.com/drola/weight-logger-pwa ↗ https://weight-logger.catdad.net/ ↗

CO @cookiengineer Peer Contributor

https://tholian.network ↗

A peer-to-peer network of Web Browsers that try to identify deception online, track deceivers and their publishing channels and lets users know about malicious or deceptive content.

Tries to work with swarm intelligence as much as possible, and the peer to peer cache also contains a history of urls and their content. Currently implementing the distributed AI stack with compositional game theory mechanics.

KN @knoebber Peer Contributor

It seems like Covid left a lot of restaurants scrambling for contactless ordering solutions. They can be nice, but I find it annoying when I have to use my phone to look at a menu or to make an order. How does your system work?

My side project is https://dotfilehub.com ↗

It’s a bare bones version control system for single files + a web interface.

HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE 22 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 28 comments
TOPICS & TECH STACK:
More Retrospectives by @princevegeta89