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Ask HN: What is your job role and what are the side projects you are working on?
The question in itself is self-explanatory. Please mention your normal day job role (backend developer, full stack engineer etc) and what are the side projects you are doing currently.
This question is about having insight about what people are doing.
- ItsChucky 11y agoI work for a small map tech company and my job role is basically a graduate C# developer, with some configuration duties also to cater our product to different customers. I didn't know C#, only Java, before starting the job so it's been nice to learn about concepts like WPF and Linq this past year. I do some freelance work for a small business owner in which I code small Java apps that hook to the eBay and Amazon APIs, for the benefit of his business. It makes me a little money but I've recently asked for a pay rise. Other than that, I want to make my own mobile apps using tools like Xamarin but I haven't really built up the confidence in myself to create any of my ideas. They mostly seem like things that have been done before or where I don't see that they might get as much use as the idea does in my head. On top of that, I enjoy my free time. I find it very hard to come home and have the energy to code after my 9 to 5 where I've been doing the same thing, staring at a screen, 7 and a half hours. Instead, I try to exercise a fair bit and build hobbies outside of programming. I'm a bit of an everythingist, admittedly, though it's not a quality I think leads to becoming a master in programming. Has anyone else faced similar problems to me? What is your answer to your own question, OP?
- werber 11y agoI have the same thing with coming home from work and just being done with screens. What's worked for me is coding for 1-3 hours before work, and treating one weekend day as a normal workday but for myself.
- ItsChucky 11y agoI've sort of tried the second one and usually do get a bit done at weekends. I like the first one though, I'll try that too. It's all a question of whether I can get up that early!
- werber 11y agoMy job title is just Developer, but I work primarily in a front end capacity and currently I'm working on a passion project, a cross platform mobile app that I'm transitioning from Ionic to native, a Swift project that's a pretty simple voice note recorder that starts recording when you open the app, and a teaching/building project with a friends art collective, slowly building it while teaching them how to code each part.
- Airspectral 11y agoI'm a Mechanical Design Engineer in normal day job and I conceive spectrometers for LULI laboratory. The side projects I'm currently doing is my Startup Air Spectral (http://www.airspectral.com http://www.airspectral.com), where I'm developping a miniature hyperspectrale camera. I'm doing currently another project where I'm not the leader. It consist on builting a new motor concept based on the cogeneration principle. In parallele of my Mechanical education, I learnt programming and lead with my friend during a moment the project lylconcepts (http://lylconcepts.com/ http://lylconcepts.com/)
- garysieling 11y agoSoftware developer; Working on a tool to do faceted search across google docs / dropbox / onedrive
- kethinov 11y agoJob role: I'm the manager and lead dev of a team working on a number of military software projects for the US Air Force. Side projects: I've been tinkering with new approaches for doing MVC and templating in JS. See my projects on GitHub: https://github.com/kethinov https://github.com/kethinov
- Esox 11y agoWeb Developer; building (or trying to) a roguelike in my spare time.
- rfc 11y agoI'm a product manager. Side project is building a genome data ingestion pipeline with my dad. We're both really passionate about giving people a faster and cheaper solution to processing genome data. Current project is to allow researchers to send fully sequenced genomes to our server, align the sequenced genome to a referenced genome, then store the data in a performant way that can be queried against. Right now, its either too technical for the researchers or too expensive. I have dreams of making it something big but time is a limited resource as well as finding people who A) know how to build massive data platforms at scale and B) know enough about genomics to build the platform. We're coming along well so far. The alignment of sequenced genomes to referenced genomes if done (although not scale ready yet). Currently working on/learning the data storage side and what to do there. Shameless plug: if anyones interested in our project, we could use some help.
- aryamaan 11y agoSounds interesting.
- rfc 11y agoThanks. We're pretty excited about it. There's lots of big challenges to solve, especially on the data from. Full 30x coverage of a human genome is (uncompressed) around 180gb. So the core problem we're trying to solve right now is: 1) Compressing the files locally and sending via FTP to server 2) Aligning 180gb files against the reference genome (180gb also) in less than 5 minutes 3) Storing that data in a performant way so that you can do comparative genomics (compare multiple genomes against each other) 4) Do the above with 100's-1,000's of genomes a day. It's pretty rewarding. Apart from the cool data side, it's feels good to know that building something like this could really help accelerate critical research in finding diseases.
- adenadel 11y agoIs anyone using your pipeline? There are lots of fully developed commercial pipelines for human WGS (Illumina BaseSpace, DNAnexus, Seven Bridges, etc.) Depending on the hardware you have available bowtie2 might not be the best aligner. What are you using for variant calling? If you're using the GATK Haplotype caller you're going to have issues with commercial licensing.
- Delmania 11y agoSoftware developer, focusing on web service and application development. Side projects, a few gigs on Upwork.
- oldfatslow 11y agoI don't have a title, we are a pretty small company. I manage the systems, networks and our virtual environment. On the side I enjoy projects that don't include a keyboard or mouse like fixing old mopeds and dirtbikes. I'm currently restoring a 1996 Tomos Sprint moped I had when I was a kid.
- sjs382 11y agoIn my day job, I'm a full-stack developer at an ad agency. Side Projects: Early next week, I'm going to be releasing an Android word game. Revenue-producing side-projects: https://SendToMyCloud.com https://SendToMyCloud.com & https://PrivateForms.com https://PrivateForms.com Other side projects: http://artpacks.org http://artpacks.org, http://aboutbrowser.com http://aboutbrowser.com & http://norefer.link http://norefer.link
- dhca78 11y agoYour revenue-producing side-projects are strangely inspiring. If you don't mind me asking, how do you market them?
- sjs382 11y agoMostly, I don't. In the beginning (for each) I found a few people asking on forums for software that solves the exact problem that these products solved, and then posted the software as a solution. Since the first few weeks, I haven't done any marketing at all—everything comes in via search, or referral traffic.
- dhca78 11y agoThat's cool! Thank you for sharing.
- itl12 11y agoWhat stack do you use for your projects?
- sjs382 11y agoIt varies a bit from project to project, but I usually start with a custom PHP MVC framework: GluePHP for routing, Savant3 for templates, and PHP-ActiveRecord as an ORM. I'm definitely someone who prefers to work with small, understandable modules with very limited scopes/responsibilities. I've recently considered polishing up the most-used bits and packaging it as a proper framework, but I probably need a kick in the ass (or even just a hint of interest) to do so. :) Artpacks.org strays from the framework a bit by using Backbone.js for the front-end. So does the game that I'm working on.
- anonx 11y agoFull stack Software-Engineer. Side project is a Toolkit for high productivity web-development in Go language built around the concept of code generation [1]. I'm using it for another side project (online start-up incubator platform). [1]: https://github.com/colegion/goal https://github.com/colegion/goal
- pdpi 11y agoNominally software engineer, doing Devops but moving to a backend position. My main side project right now is building a software synthesiser in Rust
- joellovera 11y agoJavascript Developer Side projects: http://magicplaylist.co/ http://magicplaylist.co/ https://github.com/loverajoel/spotify-sdk https://github.com/loverajoel/spotify-sdk
- thecolorblue 11y agoJavascript developer, mostly doing front end work and some node server side and for build scripts. Side projects (I've been trying to cut these down) are: 1) helping my brother with marketing a food catering business, 2) developing my product management skills 3) building a local food e-commerce site. Before you say it, yes, I have a problem focusing.
- christopheraue 11y agoSelf-employed Magento Developer Side Project: Tool to save window positions and opened files to restore them anytime later: http://getcapp.com/ http://getcapp.com/
- 0x54MUR41 11y agoCurrently, I am a computer science student. I have two side projects that now currently on development stage: - MIM, Mobile inventory manager I build it using Ionic Framework: https://github.com/meisyal/MIM https://github.com/meisyal/MIM - AMI Converter, A desktop-based multimedia converter that supports image, audio, and video conversion: https://github.com/meisyal/ami-converter https://github.com/meisyal/ami-converter
- kingcorleone 11y agoSoftware developer for Canadian government; Currently trying to finish reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace
- lsiunsuex 11y agoday job - full stack developer for a local company that develops worksheets for k-8 teachers side job - full stack developer for a website that provides continued education for dental students and dentists I'll generally take the random freelance job that comes around, both remote or local - building a Wordpress website for a local plumbing company this week. If those 3 aren't consuming all of my time, I've been planning an idea for a programmers network, but i haven't had much free time lately :(
- at-fates-hands 11y agoMy day job: front-end developer, which means different things to different people. Mainly do JS work right now with Angular JS on a large enterprise transactional application. My side project: Working to create an agency that helps a specific niche business. We already have close to a dozen clients on a monthly subscription that are generating a good chunk of revenue. A few more clients and I can forgo my current contracting gigs and do it full time.
- karaokeyoga 11y agoday job: front-end and full-stack developer for various clients side projects: http://lcd.al/ http://lcd.al/, http://realkana.com/ http://realkana.com/, and iOS game development
- japhyr 11y agoI teach high school math and science. I've been writing in the mornings and late at night, and I just finished an intro Python book: http://nostarchpress.com/pythoncrashcourse http://nostarchpress.com/pythoncrashcourse It will be out next month, and I'm very happy to focus on supporting the book now that the writing is finished. I love writing at the introductory level, where the focus is half on technical issues and half on helping people learn to think as a developer. Writing a book has significantly increased the degree of professionalism I bring to my side projects. My school district just adopted a new learning management system, but there's no functionality included for generating report cards, so I'm working on a project that automates the process of generating report cards. The software is relatively easy and enjoyable to write, but the politics involved in making sure this work is implemented correctly into the overall district processes is challenging. Having worked through all the details involved in publishing a book helps me identify and work through the many non-technical issues involved in fully implementing a side project.
- drakonka 11y agoDay job: Build Engineer in games Side project: browser based snail simulation.
- ksmithbaylor 11y agoI'm a Software Engineer at my company. I used to work on a large Rails project, but now I am on a team where we are building out a smaller product with a React/Flux frontend. I work mainly on frontend stuff right now. I have a small side project for a family member. He's a commercial beekeeper and needed a way to track information about his hives, so I am making him a mobile app (built with Ionic) that lets him put QR codes on the hives and track everything he needs about them. My wife and I just had our first baby, and I'm starting Georgia Tech's OMSCS program in the Spring, so I don't have much spare time right now. But off and on I have been learning Clojure/ClojureScript, Haskell, and more about React and its ecosystem. I also am teaching an introductory JavaScript class for a local tech "bootcamp" company, and enjoying it a lot.
- iisbum 11y agoFull stack developer by day, Full stack hacker by night :) My most recent side projects are http://whenactive.com http://whenactive.com and http://creatorslog.com http://creatorslog.com
- jneumann004 11y agoRight now, I am primarily a front end web developer. I always have a lot of different projects running around in my head. I have two big ones right now. The first is a React Native app integrating with a Buddypress site. The second that I am working on is a plugin that integrates a popular API with Buddypress that I am going to post on CodeCanyon.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoI'm an OS/embedded programmer contracting to companies across the USA. Currently porting android to a panel controller for some industrial equipment (I honestly don't know what; it hardly matters). My side projects are gaming-related.
- aryamaan 11y agoYou develop games?
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoI proctor a game lab with young folks (Jr High to Collage and now a few grads) every Wednesday night. We've got 4 card/board games under our belts. The current on - "Hobo Hoedown" - is amazing, getting good focus group feedback and nearly ready to publish.
- Hockenbrizzle 11y agoGreat question. I'm excited to see the other responses. I'm a visiting scientist at a nuclear physics institute, but my degree was in mechanical engineering. Currently working on creating highly charged isotopes to be used for cancer research. Last year I built a single seat off-roading buggy with some friends, which was a really rewarding, and fun project. Current side project is learning to work with some RPI's to make a mesh network that I could use for my sound system. Also, since we can't be on computers all of the time, learning to play guitar and training for a triathlon.
- japhyr 11y agoDo you have a picture of the buggy you built? Spending a lot of time in front of a computer makes me want to build physical things. I have no experience welding, and I'm always impressed with what people can build out of metal.
- Hockenbrizzle 11y agoCertainly do! http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LTl1dfiFXXo/U4etdcKdRTI/AAAAAAAAAxM/jpn-MWrjiF4/s1600/IMG_0066.JPG http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LTl1dfiFXXo/U4etdcKdRTI/AAAAAAAAAx... http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--6qOASg5xts/U4exjAZ4TEI/AAAAAAAAAx0/XD3mu2-kXFs/s1600/IMG_20140518_203452436_HDR.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--6qOASg5xts/U4exjAZ4TEI/AAAAAAAAAx... http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4c8DArPQnO4/U4etHJaRrmI/AAAAAAAAAxE/uwnmzRsGfvw/s1600/IMG_0006.jpg http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4c8DArPQnO4/U4etHJaRrmI/AAAAAAAAAx... I did about half of the welding on the buggy and I actually learned how to weld while we were building it. YouTube videos were enormously helpful and welding is really fun. Technically this was for my university, but we raised funds for it without their help and built it not out of requirement, but out of interest.
- japhyr 11y agoThat looks fun, and it looks like a test of your confidence in your own skills!
- nodivbyzero 11y agoI'm Software Engineer at game company. I work on rendering stuff now. My current side project is events aggregator written in golang: http://www.wonderweek.ca http://www.wonderweek.ca
- codegeek 11y agojob: bootstrapped product business projects: Building a Single Page App. Backend API development in Laravel framework, Angular on the front end. Learning devops, deployments. Using Digitalocean API to auto create environments and setup new client accounts.
- rgoomar 11y agoI work as a software engineer Primary side project: http://meteorweekly.com http://meteorweekly.com
- louden 11y agoI am a data scientist. I am working on two side projects. The first project is a cloud based power/sample size calculator as a competitor to PASS. The second project is a statistical distribution visualization website with API to generate random values.
- rafaqueque 11y agoBackend engineer at Sherpany (https://sherpany.com https://sherpany.com) and my side project is called numbers.today (https://numbers.today https://numbers.today), a quantified-self platform.
- mamcx 11y agoWorking solo for http://elmalabarista.com http://elmalabarista.com (iOS, Web apps: obj-c, python, html+js+css, .net, sql backends (severals) all at the same time!) and providing consulting, for 9 years now! My side project is build a kind of alternative to MS Acces + Excel + Terminal, or a resurrection of a data centric development environment like Visual FoxPro was. Yep, this sound brutally complex. That is way I'm doing this slowly, and think very hard in what to do, how and why. Building a relational language first (ie: Exploring how better could be instead of stick to just use python or F#... also fun). Most likely this will end as a custom DSL + also use python/f# just because reinvent everything is impossible with just me a few resources ;)
- tmaly 11y agoI build software for legal and compliance in the financial industry. On the side I am working on a mobile food site that takes a different approach on finding food to try at restaurants near by.
- kgen 11y agoSoftware engineer, and my side projects involve helping people learn things interactively: RegexOne: http://regexone.com http://regexone.com SQLBolt: http://sqlbolt.com http://sqlbolt.com
- dhca78 11y agoWow that's cool! I hope you keep up the good work. SQL and Regex are great topics too for these types of websites.
- soared 11y agoIntern! I split my time between school (business) and work (digital marketing agency). My side project is a Windows 10 Smart Mirror. Its got voice commands, drag and drop UI, lots of cool stuff. Its open source too! http://innate.cc http://innate.cc Its very interesting reading these responses..
- atmosx 11y agoMy day-job role is pharmacist. Although 'Pharmacy Manager' is a more accurate[1] description of what I do. I also work as remote sys-admin for a couple of US-based startups. Add to that I'm studying for my final MDPharm exam(!). My side-projects are argosnap[2] and on a RoR application which came out of the need for an application to manage/keep track of customers credit and I'm planning to make a SaaS out of it. [1] I micro and macro-manage our family pharmacy. I also work on the bench. I have 5+ years of managerial experience in the secondary sector (~ 150 ppl business) and I assure you that the amount of managerial work required by a medium-sized pharmacy in Greece is astonishing. [2] http://www.convalesco.org/argosnap/ http://www.convalesco.org/argosnap/ - a tarsnap notification utility.
- haidrali 11y agoMy Job is "Full Stack Web Developer" at Void Labs and In my side project I am currently doing PollPK.com, A website which let user publish polls and other user can vote on those polls ( just like Reddit user can post links and other can comment ) Here is my early beta http://beta.pollpk.com/ http://beta.pollpk.com/ example polls would be like anything e.g. Who is the top football in the world ( Ronaldo, Messi etc ) Who is the current best actor ( Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio etc )
- chrisrickard 11y agoI am Director at Melbourne Software consultancy inoutput. My side project is a cross platform code generation tool, think Yeoman mixed with a pretty UML editor mixed with an AppStore... well, oneday!
- orless 11y agoOn may day job, I'm a senior software architect for the Deutsche Bahn (German Railways). On my free time, I work on a number of open-source projects (see https://github.com/highsource https://github.com/highsource). For instance: * https://github.com/highsource/maven-jaxb2-plugin https://github.com/highsource/maven-jaxb2-plugin - probably the most advanced Maven plugin for JAXB * https://github.com/highsource/jsonix https://github.com/highsource/jsonix - Powerful XML<->JS mapping library in pure JS * https://github.com/highsource/jsonix-schema-compiler https://github.com/highsource/jsonix-schema-compiler - XML Schema->Jsonix mappings compiler, also XML Schema->JSON Schema converter * https://github.com/highsource/jaxb2-basics https://github.com/highsource/jaxb2-basics - a set of plugin for JAXB (like equals/hashCode/toString generation and more) * https://github.com/highsource/ogc-schemas https://github.com/highsource/ogc-schemas - compiled GIS XML Schemas And a few more.
- sheraz 11y agoCTO by day (apps and search) http://helloaviva.com http://helloaviva.com - By night I work on a niche app for city-parents to find changing tables, nursing rooms, and play areas http://www.3cosystem.com http://www.3cosystem.com - where I map out all the tech and startup events for 60+ cities world-wide
- sideproject 11y agoI'm a software engineer at a health-focused startup by the day. I run two sites http://hellobox.co http://hellobox.co - tool to create and run your own communities (e.g. like HN) http://sideprojectors.com http://sideprojectors.com - market place to sell & buy side projects
- Veratyr 11y agoI'm a software engineer working on internal business tools. My current side project is evaluating academically published demosaic algorithms for camera sensors by implementing them with Halide (halide-lang.org) and running them against my personal photos. I'm mainly aiming to learn about how camera sensors actually work and what the image processing pipeline looks like between a bunch of RGGB pixels and a JPEG. I'm hoping to build my own pipeline but I may also contribute my implementations to RawTherapee, if the papers' authors permit. Learning Halide is also fun. It's amazing how fast a computer runs when you use optimised code.
- rubicon33 11y ago-- Day Job-- Senior Software Engineer (currently iOS). -- Side Project -- I'm building a web betting platform, for E-Sports! My goal is to provide THE BEST option, available internationally, for betting on E-Sport games. It's a really exciting project that I've been working on for 2 years. I'm using AngularJS, and WebSockets to create a 'real-time' user experience on the client side. -- Shameless Plug -- If you're interested in Co-Founding, I'm interested in talking to you.
- xyn_ 11y agoI'm a full stack engineer and would love to hear some more details. Shoot me a message, my email is in my bio.
- rohitksh 11y agoMy day job is of a full stack developer Side Projects: jquery-fade-slider - http://jqueryfadeslider.com http://jqueryfadeslider.com A jQuery plugin to add fade effect to your slider items Google Drive Browser - http://rohit-sharma.in/Google-Drive-Browser http://rohit-sharma.in/Google-Drive-Browser A mini-app which lets you get the list of files from your drive which are modified most recently Places App - http://places.rohit-sharma.in http://places.rohit-sharma.in A foursquare like application isbndbjs - http://rohit-sharma.in/isbndbjs http://rohit-sharma.in/isbndbjs An SDK for retrieving data from ISBNDB http-requestor - http://rohit-sharma.in/http-requestor http://rohit-sharma.in/http-requestor A Wrapper around Net/HTTP which allows you to perform HTTP Requests rails-gsa - http://rohit-sharma.in/rails-gsa http://rohit-sharma.in/rails-gsa Integrate GSA(Google Search Appliance) with your rails application
- nicbou 11y agoCurrent job: front end developer for a well-known mapping product (no, not that one), although my contract ends in a month. Side projects: http://markdownnotes.com http://markdownnotes.com, and many, many others. I also write picture-rich articles about history: http://en.nicolasbouliane.com/blog/the-berlin-airlift http://en.nicolasbouliane.com/blog/the-berlin-airlift
- krn320 11y agoI’m a game programmer working on mobile games for iOS and Android, using mostly Unity game engine. As a side project I’m also making a game (how surprising!), but I can’t share any details in case someone steals the idea and makes even better game out of it ;)
- adam-_- 11y agoMy day job is a backend developer for a job startup. For the past few years I've been on and off working on a side project to create meetup for cyclists: http://cowbellhq.com http://cowbellhq.com. A few years is too long but I find it very hard to focus dedicated time to the project outside of work, friends and hobbies.
- smartera 11y agoMarket research / analytics director by day. Building a niche end-to-end encrypted storage/communication web app by night.
- heynickc 11y agoDay job: Software Engineer (.NET) for a manufacturing company working on custom line of business apps. Side Projects: A blog where I tackle topics that junior/mid-level software engineers might like to learn more about.
- Killswitch 11y agoDay Job: Kind of hard to describe, my title says VP of Engineering, but I work for a screen printing and embroidering shop, but I don't work on anything in the company, I was hired as the first and only employee to build a SaaS to help printing shops manage their business, and we'll be dogfooding of course. Side projects: I have a few, mainly I am building a Heroku competitor using Docker.
- wanghq 11y agoCheck http://convox.com http://convox.com if you haven't. Discussion from HN: http://www.hackertoolbox.com/tools/395 http://www.hackertoolbox.com/tools/395
- Killswitch 11y agoNice link, but I'm doing stuff a little different and attempting to tackle a different problem along with it.
- bakztfuture 11y ago-- Day Job-- I'm a student at the University of Guelph ... Not quite a day job but definitely keeps me busy! -- Side Project -- Helping to organize business information around startups at http://www.StartupTimelines.org/ http://www.StartupTimelines.org/ -- Shameless Plug -- If you're interested in contributing/helping out gimme a shout Bakz at bakzdesign.com
- eecks 11y agoI'm a software engineer using java, xml, plsql, oracle db, javascript, html/css. I am about to start a side project in java and have one just started in python with flask. I want to start using reactjs too.
- someotheridiot 11y agoI'm a dba but do a lot of automation and build self service websites for internal use. My side project is http://rebrickable.com http://rebrickable.com which will calculate what LEGO sets and custom fan creations you can build by reusing your existing collection of sets and loose parts.
- crisopolis 11y agoI'm a Business Analyst and I manage a horrid Talent Management system made by Taleo :-/ Side Project: - Pinellas911.co - Civilian 911 CAD - Talent Performance System - Coding the backend (big dreams?) ---https://medium.com/@chriscombs/beginning-of-a-side-project-part-1-4b993a8daa9c https://medium.com/@chriscombs/beginning-of-a-side-project-p...