I have been working on a side project for going on 12 years now. In that time a bunch of competitors popped up. I gave up on the idea several times. All the competitors shut down their public APIs though, which is why I started up on it again about 5 years ago. I've got it in a place I really like. I use it daily.
The biggest blocker for me right now to making it open is wanting improved security. I ideally want all the data encrypted in a way I can't read it. I haven't worked out the scheme.
I've got it in a sort of private beta, but I can't get anyone to use it other than me. And you know what, I think I'm at peace with that.
The project has been if nothing else a place for me to test ideas and try techniques. Beyond that, it's the tool I wanted.
The Digital Ocean droplet I run it on costs me all of $5 a month, the domain $15 a year. I could be doing worse.
I've got a side project I've been working on for over 12 years, on and off. About a year in, a very popular competitor popped up, and it was roughly as good as what I was working on so I gave up - for a year or two.
Then they closed their API and had some PR drama so I started up again. Rewrote the whole thing. I've got it about 90% of the way there, and I was getting ready to open it up for a public beta and suddenly GDPR happened.
I don't even want names if I can avoid it, but the core data of the product could be construed to be PII, which means I want to get some sort of encryption on it before I open it… And I just haven't come up with a way to do that that doesn't involve rewriting the whole thing.
So right now, I've got a project I spent 12 years on that only I am using - and using heavily - and love. I generally put a couple hours a week into it.
If anything it's been a fun testbed for keeping my frontend skills up to snuff, especially as I've moved from full-stack to backend in my professional career over the last 5 years.
My open data side project (which incidentally had interest from Apple and Google at the time) had a need for a couple of web server certificates for the API and website, so as yet another side project I built a little certificate management tool and forgot about it for a year.
After a year I then went back and realized it was getting 1,000 downloads a week, I did it a bit more work on it and stuck a price tag on it, it's since been my full time job for several years.
End of last year I had some time and started building a side project I've been thinking about for quite some time. I bought the domain and promised to myself that this time it will be different, this time I will publish.
Months go by, with lots of refactoring, "core" features and no progress at all. Some weeks were most productive than others though and just last month there was something usable.
So instead of doing what I always did, building more stuff, I setup a server, nginx, certbot, and released the damn thing. By released I mean it was available on a URL, but nobody knew about it. And that was calming, because it was out there and that was the goal.
That helped me mentally to just share it with other people and see what happens. And I did, and it wasn't bad, and it was fine.
I still don't have much time to spend on it, but I know it's outhere with people using it, and I can always work on it.
Almost a year ago, I posted my open source side project (an AWS security scanner): CloudSploit[1]. Since then, I have kept the open source version, but built an entire web service around it with paid plans. It's gotten a good amount of traction and I've enjoyed adding new features, as well as the process of learning to start a new business (it's all new for me).
I built a few in the past, typically with a friend or two, but they were dying together with the initial hype/interest.
So, lately I tried to focus on bigger challenges and set up companies to handle the os project. My passion is security which I think should be more open. Cryptography is pretty much open nowadays (meaning everything we use crypto-related is likely open), but many other areas in security are not, e.g. authentication.
I had so many side projects I made a side project to centralize accounts and payments. It’s now called Chief Tools (https://chief.app) and contains a certificate monitoring tool (https://cert.chief.app), a zero-downtime deployment tool for PHP (https://deploy.chief.app), a DigitalOcean billing monitor (https://bill.do; which I acquired) and a URL shortener (https://tny.app).
All of these have no marketing and terrible landing pages since they are mostly built for me (although I like to think they are pretty ploished) but hit $500+ a few weeks ago. It took 5-10 years but interesting to see either way (payments were only available about a year ago though, before it was all free).
The funny thing (to me) is that the URL shortener is doing the big bucks since apparently there is still a place for new ones in the market which I did not expect, I mostly built it to be able to easily redirect a hostname.
By far most of my side projects died before seeing the light of day. Either because I lost interest or I found another project that did what I aimed to do better than I imagined.
Only a couple went live but didn't get traction:
- A site for ip geolocation lookup
- A curated index of conference talks and meetups
Last year I decided that I'd do much more market research before writing any code, and that I'd see it through all the way. So I'm working on https://www.nslookup.io for about half a year now, which isn't profitable yet (€50 monthly cost). I'm still confident I can get it profitable. There's enough search traffic, other tools have horrible UX, and I've committed to spending time on it at least weekly next year.
Basically it started as a personal need/itch to scratch. Also, I'm old enough to remember when my data were my data, applications were my applications and no other entities were interested in what I do/write/see. ;) The NSA things helped my decision to do this, but I was thinking about the program from before.
I decided to open source the code after a review on the App Store (probably the US one) that basically said: "Who are you and why should I trust you". This comment hit a button inside me (and was fundamentally true).
Finally got my side project (a SSL add-on for Heroku) launched: https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl - It had been kicking around as half finished for almost 6 months.
"Worth It" is a tough one as it's still mostly losing money even though people constantly complain about how expensive it is.
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.
My last project which is still online is from 2014 - Hashcash.io - But nothing really changed since then. It was pretty cool experiment and I use it myself on many content websites I have, as well as many people use it to protect their wordpress (mostly) blogs. It is running on auto-pilot, just does its job :)
Nice project. I can relate in that I have my own personal hobby project that I have been working on for years and I would like to get many more users trying it out.
Mine is a new kind of data management system that can manage unstructured, structured, and semi-structured data. Think of it as a file system, database, and NoSql system all rolled into one. It is currently in open beta at https://didgets.com/
You say you have 'finished it'. Software is never finished, but if you have checked off all the feature items from your design, then close enough for now. With my project, the TODO list is still extremely long. It can do many things already, but I seem to put two more items on the list every time I cross one off.
It seems that every solo, multi-year project goes through the phases you describe (burn out, depression, questioning your sanity, etc.) and mine is no exception. It still feels very self-fulfilling every time I get a major piece working or I blow away the alternative in a speed test.
I'm a compulsive project hoarder and they all build on top of each other.
My first project was an open source full stack real-time framework I built about 10 years ago. I worked on it for about a year but it didn't get any traction so I pulled out some of the core logic and turned it into a stand-alone real-time remote event library; then within a few years, it got some traction. Then as WebSockets was becoming mainstream, I migrated my framework from HTTP long-polling to WebSockets but realized that it didn't add much value anymore, so I added pub/sub and RPC functionality to it (I also built some additional components so that it would run as a self-sharding cluster on Kubernetes).
Then I was working in the blockchain space and so I decided to build a lightweight quantum-resistant blockchain using my pub/sub library for peer-to-peer messaging... Then after I finished the blockchain, I decided that it would be fun to build a decentralized exchange on top of it and so I did. It's been running for a few years without issues though it's low volume but the community around it is dedicated.
Now I'm looking for new things which I could build on top of the blockchain and DEX. I'm thinking to use it as a payment system which accepts multiple cryptocurrencies interchangeably. I have a few ideas but I'm more focused on earning money nowadays so I'm hesitant to start anything new. Lol. After all that work, I only earn about $1000 per month in passive income. I'm a brute-force entrepreneur.
It's pretty easy to maintain all this. Like the author says; tests help, but even more important is to keep the number of third-party dependencies to a minimum and to avoid using overly niche programming features or features which are unlikely to be forward-compatible.
This is my personal experiment to see if I can build and market a full-fledged SaaS tool. It has also been a nice way to pick up a new programming language (Elixir).
I have a lot of unfinished projects. I start working on a new idea, build out some functionality and then the interest fizzles outs and the project is left unfinished.
This time, I decided to take a different approach - I decided to keep publishing the app incrementally. I started off with just a landing page first, last week I added the demo survey. There are a LOT of things left to be done before I can roll out public access to this project, but getting a few beta users has been a nice inspiration to keep me going.
I’ve been working on the same project for over 15 years. It’s been written in C, C++, Python, Ruby, Java and Scala. It had an XWindows front end, Swing front end and now a simple web front end (but there is talk of moving to Vue or React.) It ran on the local machine, then shared web hosting, and now AWS. It’s used flat files, SQL and Mongo for storage.
Currently it’s in the shop because I decided to rip everything into microservices and deploy it using Kubernetes.
Along the way I learned 2 things. First, I like solving the same problem over and over again with different technology. You learn both the new technology and uncover aspects of your problem you hadn’t seen before. Second, it’s important to release. I’ve got a website with 75% of the links broken, and the only visitors are me and the googlebot, but it’s released. There’s an artifact I can show my wife or my brother without firing up an IDE. It makes a big difference with respect to a sense of accomplishment (despite the broken links.)
I created a side project this summer based on an open source tool which I use in my day job. My idea was to offer this open source tool as a service.
So I set aside a week to travel down the East Coast. Every day I went to offices and MeetUps and demo'ed the original open source project and my service built on it. Each day was 15 hours, door to door. One time I had to patch a shoe with duct tape.
A week after my return, I'll admit that the service is a failure. The idea is a good one, and everyone wanted to try it, but no one committed themselves to using it, much less paying for it. The trip was still a success! When you show people crazy projects, they show you theirs. The projects I heard about, I had no idea that they existed. Networking was good. Being new places was good.
I solved a problem that I had at work. I needed a tool to make interacting with HTTP APIs easier, and didn't like any of the existing ones, so I created Insomnia [https://insomnia.rest/].
It took a weekend to build a proof of concept, then I released it to the public. As I improved it, the user base grew slowly. Then, a year later, I was able to quit my job to pursue it full-time. If you're curious, I have an Interview [https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/insomnia] on Indie Hackers with more detail.
I run my side project https://namesmith.io for about 5 years now. It is a domain name generator which can also check the domain availability. It is covering the server cost plus a bit extra. About $200 per month.
I didn't work on it for about 3 years but I recently decided to give it some love. I still think it has potential.
The biggest blocker for me right now to making it open is wanting improved security. I ideally want all the data encrypted in a way I can't read it. I haven't worked out the scheme.
I've got it in a sort of private beta, but I can't get anyone to use it other than me. And you know what, I think I'm at peace with that.
The project has been if nothing else a place for me to test ideas and try techniques. Beyond that, it's the tool I wanted.
The Digital Ocean droplet I run it on costs me all of $5 a month, the domain $15 a year. I could be doing worse.
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