What side projects are you currently working on and how can others be of help? (Feb 4)

👋 Hi everyone! I'm working on the easiest, most flexible, file upload SaaS product you've ever seen - shubox.io. Ok that may be a little hyperbole but, as a web developer who's handled his fair share of files and images needing uploading and processing, shubox is the thing I've always wanted. So I built it myself.

It'll take files and images uploaded through your web browser and stick them into your S3 bucket of choice. If you want images to be processed and transformed (resized, gifs having frames extracted, exif data stripped, mobile phone photo orientation correction), it'll do that for you too.

Seriously, I love it. I love working on it. If you've had to upload photos or files and wish there was an easier, more straightforward way to do it - this is for you. If you want to see some demos, I made a bunch of them on CodePen here: codepen.io/shubox/

If anyone wants more info, or wants to try it - hit me up on twitter at @shuboxio. At this point I'd just LOVE some good constructive feedback. Thanks so much!

I'm working on an Android app for learning Japanese kanji (the writing system), and perhaps Japanese vocabulary as well.

It's already available in Google Play at play.google.com/store/apps/details... with basic functionality. It's currently intended only as a companion app for people studying with a specific book. But over time I'd like to evolve it into a more general-purpose app that can be used with any method, and also include vocabulary flash cards and quizzes as well. Other features I'd like to add include handwriting recognition, a "nag me to study" notification option, animations of kanji being drawn, and a bunch of other stuff.

If anyone knows a free or relatively cheap-to-license 教科書体 (textbook-style) Japanese font, that'd be immensely helpful.

I'm building a search engine for lectures (findlectures.com). One thing I'm looking for is conferences / speakers people have found really instructive.

I'm also especially looking for talks on how people approach graphic design projects, to help me map out a project to improve the user experience.

I'm thinking of developing my own cross-platform build system to replace GNU Autotools, CMake, and the like.

GNU Autotools lack sufficient cross-platform support.
All of the tools generate unnecessarily complex scripts and makefiles.
Most of the tools require some intrusion into the source code, like added header files, in order to work.
CMake has to be installed to run the build. Anything that makes the user install anything above and beyond their platform's toolchain just to compile code has completely lost the plot of why there are tools in the first place.

And that eliminates just about everything that's out there.

I'm working on a PHP class to help configure security headers like CSP, it'll also (configurably) automatically inject flags into cookies with certain substrings in their name (like auth, sess) to try and better protect session data (upcoming version will enable use of SameSite – an attribute that isn't supported in PHPs setcookie yet). There's a bunch of other stuff too, just to highlight the most useful features IMO.

There's already some great work been done (by others) to help make this much easier to integrate into frameworks (where use of PHPs global methods directly isn't really possible).

If anyone is familiar with headers and cookies in a particular framework they use, then they could be of help by creating an adapter for it on the 2.0 dev branch here: github.com/aidantwoods/SecureHeade...

I've been sporadically working on an ffmpeg frontend (carlosfdez.github.io/videocrop/) designed to preview and crop a video without transcoding. I often record gaming footage and I may sometimes make a short video out of one, but I often go over the footage I have long before I begin editing. Reducing what I have to work with at editing time an itch I've been wanting to scratch.

However, this is my first ever real attempt at a C++ project from scratch, so I have quite a bit to learn, especially when it comes to handling dependencies, cross platform, and building releases (I don't know how to test if the release even works on another machine, works on my machine indeed). I also need a proper name for it...

If anyone knows any good resources or info please let me know.

I started working on a crowdsourced-reasoning web-app, for now called Arguably (arguably.herokuapp.com / github.com/gregoor/arguably). I feel like there are already a gazillion apps to share opinions, but barely anything for exchanging arguments (without narratives, analogies & opinions mixed in).

While I would appreciate technical help, I'd love to just get a sanity check, or maybe even some interest in using it (when it's done).

A very similar project is Arguman (en.arguman.org/) which is the closest thing I found to what I imagine (which is also why I used there data for my early alpha. I think it does a good job of showing the general idea, but has numerous flaws.

I'm currently working on an open-source home automation project. It's called Halbert (combination of "HAL[-9000]" and a typical butler's name "Albert".
It's usable in a lot of different ways.
You can use the built-in voice control (hotword detection => SpeechToTex => Language Intent Parser) to use it e.g. "turn off the lights in the living room".
You can also use the web interface, which is designed to work really well on tablets and phones for easy usage.
The system is written in a modular way, so it's easily configurable and extendable.

I'd love to have some help on the built-in components like Weather Components or Special Control Units.

github.com/Capevace/halbert

I'm making a headless browser in Python. The browser itself is closed-source, but I've extracted some components into open-source libraries. If they're something you'd like to use, feel free to use them. If you have problems with them, it would be awesome if you could send an issue or pull request my way.

github.com/tbodt/v8py — Minimalist, yet full featured Python bindings for V8. Mostly lacking documentation, but the API isn't very complicated and I'd be glad to answer any questions.

github.com/tbodt/greenstack — A fork of Greenlet that gives each greenlet its own stack, instead of doing this disgusting thing where the stack contains bits of different greenlet stacks and other bits of stacks are scattered around memory. This is necessary if you want to combine V8Py and gevent, since V8's garbage collector keeps pointers to objects on the stack and greenlet kinda screws up the stack. Plus switching is a bit faster.

Currently working on a Raspberry Pi robot and a central brain (Skynet?) that controls it & infinitely more robots. At the end I want to test different algorithms on swarm control as if the robots are autonomous vehicles.

(Basically a small scale thing of what we do at car2go in a couple years).

As soon as I'm far enough that others could join I'll have everything on Github. Until now, I'll post and ask stuff about Linux, Raspbian, Robotics, Socket.io and and and on Twitter.

I'm working on an open-source iOS App that allows you to easily inspect the certificate chain of any website.

It was released last summer, and is already fairly popular (especially in Russia). I would love it if you were able to take a look at the app, and suggest any features that you'd find useful. If you're comfortable working with Objective-C and OpenSSL, feel free to contribute to the project on Github!

App Website: certificate-inspector.com/

Github: github.com/certificate-helper/cert...

I'm building a dictionary website (tukodic.com) that will help to Turkish and Korean people.

I'm using Node.Js, MongoDB and Redis in Tukodic's backend. This stack will provide an API for mobile and web app. And looks like I will use React & Redux in front-end stack for SPA.

effingfight.com/

Mission: Every month we donate to a different organization in jeopardy under a Trump administration. Organizations include Planned Parenthood, ACLU, Natural Resources Defense Council and many more.

How you can help? Promote and share! Right now, we have about a hundred people signed up, donating a total of ~$1500 every month but we could use more people joining the good fight.

I'm working on a platform for bootstrapping/building "remote first" software cooperatives that follow the seven cooperative principles. Members can propose ideas/projects and when enough interest is expressed the project is started and supported by other members. Involves a lot of moving parts such as membership management, proposal management, voting/governance, legal documents, crowdfunding, software licensing, project management, sales & marketing, design, etc. Anyone interested should feel free to contact me.

A second, more experimental, side project is a VR app (AR eventually) to allow members to collaborate on a design together. Ideally the design could be transformed into running code in realtime. While the primary goal is to enable member collaboration we are also interested in finding out if using VR has any particular advantages over using 2D monitors, e.g. estabilsh trust, 360 degrees of design space, utilize more of the visual cortex vs typing text, etc.

See: coopsource.org
email: alan a-t ^^^^ this domain

Working on a two new products for myself.

First I'm rewriting an app to manage splitting fairly and getting paid back for receipts (usually restaurants). I call it "Split It." It's currently in a state of being a complete hack, but it works and I get my coworkers to pay me back for lunch. I get the points on my Amex for free.

Second, I'm creating an app that merges the task list and calendar and helps you understand how much time you have per day to do things then decide which of the many things you can do that you will do.

i.e. I have two meetings at 11am and 4pm. I know I have lunch around 1. So about an hour at 12 and 2 hours at 2. Lets do some minor stuff at 1, (specific) serious work before 11, something in the 2 hours, and maybe nothing after 4pm meeting in case something comes up.

Goal is to be able to track all your todo items without constantly requiring you to check the list. It builds a habit of picking certain tasks to do and deciding when to do them today. It also tries to prevent you from scheduling too much in a single day by making it obvious to you that between meetings/events going on and the tasks you've scheduled that a lot is going on. From there you can see if what you're doing is what you should be doing giving the time you have...

That one you can sign up to see more soon at realday.io