Side Project Graveyard
Almost everyone has had a side project they've worked on and eventually left behind. Software Engineers are no exception. I am certainly not an exception either.
Throughout the years I've been coding, I've almost always had a side project that I've hacked on to pass the time. Whether for learning new tech, pursuing a crazy business idea, or satiating a creative spur, I've almost always had a side project to keep my IDE warm.
Tonight – after being disappointed that no one was online in League – I opened up my CLI wistfully, not certain what I should work on. Should it be one of the 3 ideas I've been bouncing around in my head? Should it be the 2 half-baked projects I've been nursing?
Navigating to my ~/code directory, I habitually typed ls and then hit enter. Then it hit me. ~/code was basically my side project graveyard.
UGH.
Actually... Seeing all of those in one place is kinda cool. Slightly nostalgic. Slightly sad. I wonder if other people would want to see this.
Wait a minute... I might not be the only one! What if... what if I made a side project where people can share their dead side projects! Let me check to see if a domain is open!
Sweet, we're good to go. Let me bounce this idea off of a few people first, ideally those who have had side projects, and especially ones that have died.
Then, I'd need to cobble together my personal boilerplate, decide if it should be anonymous or if I need accounts, and then...
UGH.
This is going to turn into another dead side project, isn't it? Fuck.
You know what would be cheeky? If I wrote a blog post detailing all of my thought process, and how it would have ended up as a dead side project within itself. Meta innit?
Well, damnit. I wanted to share these side projects via a cool site I made, but I guess a blog post will do as well.
So without further ado, here is a somewhat comprehensive list of my dead side projects.
Legend
💡 = mostly just an idea
💻 = mostly just code
🚢 = actually shipped something
Side Projects
(oldest to newest)
- 💡 CSGO pro match analysis - to be used for informed skin betting, of course
- 🚢 Climb.gg - programmatically analyzing pro League of Legends matches (not mine, but I worked on it)
- 💻 EsportsEDU - non-profit to engage K-12 students through competitive video games and educational content
- 💻 RA tool - I made a little tool to help me be an RA in the dorms
- 🚢 meme.dating - tinder, but match based on meme preference
- 💻 Requaint - personal CRM
- 🚢 noni.menu - AR food menu app
- 🚢 qwerty.gg / buildspace.io - teaching kids to code through video game examples
- 🚢 Kanga - not really a side project, but I could never forget you ❤️
- 💡 ShakerKit - bar-in-a-box kit to build out your home bar. equipment, ingredients, liquor
- 🚢 CafeList - yelp / nomadlist, but for cafes. Gotta get the right vibe, yo
- 🚢 ezclap.gg - http://niceme.me but for EZClap
- 💡 producthunt.gg - product hunt, but specifically for gaming products
- 💻 i'd pay for that - a marketplace for ideas, vote saying you'd pay for something, and then the maker that makes the idea can buy a list of first paying users
- 🚢 domainh.ax - site that looks up available domains
- 🚢 hydrohomie.xyz - service that texts you reminding you to drink water
- 💡 code snippet sharing service - be able to share code snippets with peers super easily
- 💡 emojidomains - idk something to do with emoji domains
- 💻 domain trading cards - see your domains in a page as trading cards
- 🚢 zentab - a beautifully animated new tab
- 🚢 resumdx.com - keep your resume as a markdown file and generate a nice PDF for it every time without needing to do super weird Microsoft Word formatting
- 🚢 lofi.vote - lofi music with presidential result twitter embedded
- 🚢 meld - reddit/hackernews/designernews but merged into 1
- 💡 keeb.page - place to share what keyboard parts you own / marketplace to buy/sell
- 💻 use old macbook and puppteer and cron jobs to scrape random websites - idk I feel like I should collect my own datasets or something
So yeah. Most of em are dead, but I learned a lot along the way.
✌️ peace
