Ask HN: What's your successful or moderately successful side project?
Ideally “success” defined as extra income, but I’d also love to hear about projects that you have that are successful in other ways
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I've developed a mobile-friendly version of a classic French academic dictionary, addressing the major usability issues of the original http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm ↗ and the company's subsequent, yet only slightly improved, version https://cnrtl.fr/definition/laid ↗ .
My version has been thriving for several years, reaching an impressive SEO peak of 30k visits per month. This is a significant achievement considering the hundreds of hours invested in web scraping and data processing, while the website itself only took around 20 hours to build. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to maintain it recently due to time constraints, causing a gradual decline in traffic. Nevertheless, the site remains free for everyone to use.
For those interested in the tech stack, it's a combination of React, Racket, and Rust.
Check it out at: https://www.le-tresor-de-la-langue.fr ↗
I welcome any feedback and suggestions!
I built a web app for a bike valet service at a local hospital. Hundreds of people use it each day to make their bike commute to work easier!
The app lets them scan in/scan out with their employee badge and assigns them a parking space and sends an email to them. Then they can just leave and the valet attendant puts their bike in the right spot.
As they're leaving work they can tap a link in the email that texts the valet attendant that they're on their way so their bike can be pulled to the front and ready for them.
I originally got paid for it but now do maintenance/small updates for free or trade to have them do maintenance work on my bicycle.
Not super successful yet but I've been working on https://nativi.sh ↗ on nights/weekends. It's a tool to help make your writing more fluent when you're working in a non-native language.
We have a fair amount of users who've worked it into their daily professional and personal writing, which I'm pretty stoked about. I've pretty much only worked on B2B stuff professionally so it's fun making something that an individual gets utility/happiness out of.
If you feel like a blog post: https://maxrozen.com/lessons-from-my-third-year-running-a-saas ↗
In short, started the 200th uptime monitor while working full time, added a bunch of features, did some marketing, added status pages and cron monitoring, and eventually, consistent effort paid off.
I might even let it employ me one day, but I enjoy my full time job at the moment.
My online writing and projects mostly serve as introduction funnels to cool people, which later leads to consulting gigs, job offers, etc.
For that purpose I'm really fond of my little tutorial at https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf ↗. It got really big here on HN about a year ago and kind of sold me on the idea that, hey, I'm actually not bad at this writing thing when I want to be.