I've had a few side projects that all served the purpose of letting me work on something interesting that I wished existed.
1. Making a SaaS out of open-source text search for searching source code because github text search was/is so bad. I went further with this any anything else, but even when I had payments and automatic processing of account activation and self-serve config, I didn't feel like putting any more effort into marketing/sales.
2. https://hackerer.news view (in Vue) for HN that doesn't mix new items with yesterday's popular items, and separates popular topics (e.g. twittter) from interesting niche ones.
3. Java library for bottom-up SQL query composition with type safety rather than left-to-right like Rails'.
4. And related to that a Collections like library that uniformly handles multi-, async-, error-, values. The pair of these was to make all queries handle the many case by default so there's never any N+1 inefficient queries written.
There was another few attempts at indexing old and new movies and shows to help discover things I'd like to watch. It used IMDB + OMDB data as well as other sources for newly available title listings. [Netflix used to work when they used star ratings and had a deeper catalog or recommending titles that weren't just popular even if I'd already watched them.] I was planning on connecting the listing to legal ways of watching them on various streaming sites as the fragmentation is the most frustrating thing. It was (at the time) not at all easy to find how to deep link to many of these and I stopped developing it.
1. Making a SaaS out of open-source text search for searching source code because github text search was/is so bad. I went further with this any anything else, but even when I had payments and automatic processing of account activation and self-serve config, I didn't feel like putting any more effort into marketing/sales.
2. https://hackerer.news view (in Vue) for HN that doesn't mix new items with yesterday's popular items, and separates popular topics (e.g. twittter) from interesting niche ones.
3. Java library for bottom-up SQL query composition with type safety rather than left-to-right like Rails'.
4. And related to that a Collections like library that uniformly handles multi-, async-, error-, values. The pair of these was to make all queries handle the many case by default so there's never any N+1 inefficient queries written.
There was another few attempts at indexing old and new movies and shows to help discover things I'd like to watch. It used IMDB + OMDB data as well as other sources for newly available title listings. [Netflix used to work when they used star ratings and had a deeper catalog or recommending titles that weren't just popular even if I'd already watched them.] I was planning on connecting the listing to legal ways of watching them on various streaming sites as the fragmentation is the most frustrating thing. It was (at the time) not at all easy to find how to deep link to many of these and I stopped developing it.