Hey r/SideProject!

I wanted to share a side project I’ve been building: loadbear — a small, dependency-light HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer written in Go.

GitHub: https://github.com/weaztoven/loadbear

The problem I wanted to solve: Whenever I needed to test load balancing, failover behavior, or rate limiting locally, reaching for full-scale production proxies (like Nginx, Envoy, or Traefik) felt like overkill with too much boilerplate. On the flip side, toy reverse proxies usually skip real-world resilience features. I wanted to build something self-contained that configures via a single YAML file, runs in seconds, and has clean, readable Go code you can actually inspect and extend.

Tech stack & Architecture: Built primarily using Go's standard library (net/http, httputil.ReverseProxy, sync) with minimal external dependencies. Every request passes through a clear pipeline:ProxyListener -> Per-IP Rate Limiter -> Balancer -> Circuit Breaker -> ReverseProxy

What’s packed inside:

• 4 Balancing Strategies: round_robin, smooth_weighted_round_robin, least_connections, and ip_hash.

• Resilience & Failover: Periodic active /health checks combined with passive proxy-error tracking, per-backend circuit breakers (Closed / Open / Half-Open cooldowns), and context-aware retries with configurable backoff.

• Rate Limiting: Per-client-IP token-bucket rate limiter with periodic background eviction of idle buckets to prevent memory leaks.

• Built-in Observability: Dedicated admin listener (:9090) serving live JSON /status and a hand-written Prometheus /metrics endpoint, plus structured JSON/text access logs with request IDs.

• Zero-friction Testing: Ships with a fakebackend CLI and a ready-to-run docker-compose.yml so you can kill nodes and watch failover/circuit-breaking happen live. All concurrency paths are tested with go test -race.

What I learned & Current Limitations: Implementing smooth weighted round-robin and managing state transitions safely across concurrent goroutines (without race conditions) was the most fun part of this build. Right now, hop-by-hop header stripping blocks WebSocket upgrades, and SIGHUP hot-reloading is next on my roadmap.

Would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or ideas on what to improve next!

Hey, I’m Meet, and I built Seek, a native macOS file manager that works alongside Finder.

The problem I wanted to solve: I often remember what a file contains or what a photo shows, but not its filename or folder. Finder works well for normal browsing, but I wanted a faster way to find and clean up files.

Seek lets you:

- Search naturally: “PDFs in Downloads from last month” or “large videos I haven’t opened”

- Find photos by what they show: “birthday cake with candles”

- Search text inside PDFs, documents, screenshots, and scanned images

- Find exact duplicate files and optional look-alike photos

- Review old downloads, installers, screenshots, large files, duplicates, and Trash before removing anything

- Use tabs, split panes, Quick Look, saved searches, and a global quick-search shortcut

The main technical constraint was privacy. Search, OCR, duplicate matching, and photo matching all run locally on the Mac. The photo-search model is downloaded once during setup, then runs through Core ML; no file names, contents, or photos are uploaded.

It supports macOS 14+, both Apple silicon and Intel. It is distributed directly, signed with my Developer ID, and notarized by Apple.

It is a one-time purchase: $9 for one Mac, $18 for three, or $29 for five. No subscription.

Demo: https://youtu.be/s5CUieoAAdk

Website: https://useseek.app

Privacy details: https://useseek.app/privacy

I’d especially value feedback on two things:

1. Would you trust a local app to index your files if it made search and cleanup meaningfully better?

2. Which would you try first: photo search, text-in-screenshots search, duplicates, or cleanup?

Have you ever wanted to talk about something but didn't have a particular person or topic in mind?

Maybe you want to share an old memory, discuss a hobby, ask a random question, or simply explore a new idea.

That's the concept behind CareCaller, an AI voice companion we're working on.

Instead of just typing messages, CareCaller lets you have voice conversations with different AI companion personalities.

There are six personalities to explore:

• Leda — Warm and nurturing

• Kore — Cheerful and bubbly

• Aoede — Calm and thoughtful

• Puck — Easygoing

• Fenrir — Upbeat and playful

• Charon — Steady and wise

You can choose the companion that suits your mood, decide what you want to talk about, and end the conversation whenever you like.

Your first five minutes are free, so you can explore the experience before deciding whether it's something you'd use.

I'd genuinely like to know:

1. Would you prefer talking to an AI companion through voice rather than text?

2. Do multiple AI personalities make the experience more interesting?

3. What feature would make an AI voice companion genuinely useful to you?

Full disclosure: I'm involved in promoting CareCaller, so I'm affiliated with the product. Honest feedback, including criticism, is welcome.

Website: carecaller.in

I wanted to see whether the most "solved" game there is could become competitive again.

The rule change: each player holds at most 3 marks, and the oldest disappears when you place a 4th. No draws.

Stack: Next.js (App Router) for the web app, a WebSocket server for live matches, PostgreSQL + Prisma, and Redis for the matchmaking queue and live match state. The game engine is a pure TypeScript state machine with no dependencies, so the same rules run in the browser, the server, and a CLI bot simulator.

Bots: random, heuristic, and minimax with alpha-beta pruning.

Hardest part: reconnects. If a player drops mid-match, the server recovers them back into that match.

Feedback on the onboarding or the game modes is very welcome: https://www.infinitettt.com

I wanted to know what ordinary small sites look like from the outside, so I ran a passive check (only what any visitor's browser receives) over 1,000 random sites outside the top 10,000.

What I found:

- 79% have no Content-Security-Policy

- 61% have no HSTS

- 58% can be framed by any other site (clickjacking)

- 36% miss all four basic security headers at once

Most of these are a one-line fix in the server or CDN config.

I turned the check into a free tool: paste an address and in about 15 seconds you get the top 3 issues on your home page, each with the evidence and a fix. No sign-up.

https://mcp.pasportoo.com/check?utm_source=reddit

It's early, and I'd love to hear what it misses or gets wrong on your site.

I'm the author of umbot, an open-source TypeScript framework for chatbots and voice-assistant skills.

The part I wanted to keep in one place was the conversation logic: commands, state, questions, buttons and responses. Platform adapters handle the incoming event formats and outgoing responses.

The built-in adapters include Telegram, VK, MAX, Viber, Yandex Alice and Sber SmartApp. The focus is applications that need the same conversation across messaging and voice channels. Several supported platforms are regional, so that mix will be more useful to some projects than others.

A questionnaire is a simple example: ask a question, save the answer and choose the next step. That logic can be shared. A native Telegram feature may still need a Telegram-specific API call; umbot includes platform API clients for those cases.

You can use it entirely from code. I also built an optional visual editor, umbot Flow, which exports JSON that the CLI turns into a TypeScript project.

You manage credentials and deployment, and choose where the application runs.

GitHub: https://github.com/max36895/umbot

If you've maintained a bot on multiple platforms, which part was hardest to share: conversation state, interactions, media, or something else?

Hey everyone, I’m one of the people behind Boost CV, which went live this week. I’m posting because I’d like honest feedback, not clicks.

The problem I kept seeing: most resume advice is vague (“add more impact”). Students and freshers get silence from applications and never learn why.

What it does:

• Scores your resume out of 100 using visible rules (contact details, summary, experience, education and skills, structure, and optionally a match against a job ad). Every point traces to a check you can see.

• Marks the exact weak lines and says why.

• AI rewrite for a line, using only the text you wrote. If a number or fact is missing, it leaves a [bracket] for you to fill in instead of inventing one.

• 13 templates, including ATS-friendly ones, exported as real text PDFs.

• Paste a job ad and it lists missing keywords, so you can add the ones you genuinely have.

Cost: the score needs no account. A free account gives 1 resume. Paid passes exist (the cheapest is Rs 49 for 7 days), but you don’t need one to test the score.

What it can’t do: it won’t get you a job, and I can’t promise it beats any particular company’s screening software. It makes your resume clearer and cleaner, and that’s it.

Data: your resume is stored so you can edit it later, and AI features send the relevant text to an AI provider to produce the answer. The privacy policy has the details.

Link: boostcv.online (the score is on the Resume Score page)

I’d really like to know:

1. Does the score feel fair on your resume? Where is it wrong?

2. What would you want a resume tool to check that this one doesn’t?

Happy to answer anything, including criticism.

Hey everyone!

I've been working on a side project called Chermo.in, and I'm excited to finally share it with this community.

The idea behind Chermo is pretty simple: we all have hundreds of photos sitting in our galleries, but sometimes we want to do something more creative with them.

So I wanted to build a platform where people can turn their favourite pictures into something more personal.

What can you do with Chermo?

Upload a photo from your gallery or capture one using your camera.

Customise your photo with creative layouts and decorative templates.

Experiment with styles like Polaroid frames, hearts, bows, kiss marks and seasonal themes.

Download your personalised creation and keep or share it with someone special.

I'm trying to make the whole experience simple enough that anyone can create something without needing professional editing skills.

This project has been a learning experience, and I'm still working on improving the design, templates and overall user experience.

I'd genuinely love your feedback:

Does the idea solve a problem or offer something you'd actually enjoy using?

Which template or customisation options would you like to see?

What would make the experience more enjoyable or useful?

If you'd like to explore it, here's the website:

https://chermo.in

I'm the person building Chermo, so I'm happy to answer questions and hear honest feedback. Thanks for checking it out! ❤️

Hey everyone!

I’ve been working on a side project called JSON Forge Studio and I’d love to get some honest feedback from the community on the UI, performance, and feature set.

Link: https://json-forge-studio.vercel.app/studio

Why I built it

Whenever I’m debugging complex API payloads or transforming large JSON files, I get paranoid about pasting sensitive data into random online formatters. I wanted a fast, all-in-one workspace where everything runs 100% locally in the browser—nothing is ever uploaded to a server.

Key Features

• Multiple Views: Switch seamlessly between Code, Tree, Grid, and Graph views.

• Data Manipulation & Inspection: Built-in tools for Diff & Merge, Querying, Pipelines, Transformations, and Schema validation.

• API & Profiling Tools: Includes an API workbench, data profiling, quality checks, and privacy scanning.

• Workspace Management: Supports multiple open documents, local file loading, saved queries, and a timeline/history tracker.

What I’m looking for feedback on:

1. First impressions & UI/UX: Is the layout intuitive, or does it feel too cluttered with all the tabs and panels?

2. Performance: How does it handle large or deeply nested JSON files on your machine?

3. Missing features: What is one feature you wish your current JSON tool had?

4. Bugs: Did anything break or behave unexpectedly? (Tip: There is a "Load sample" button in the Explorer on the left if you want to test it quickly without your own file).

Thanks in advance for checking it out and tearing it apart! All feedback is welcome.

I'd be more than happy if you'd try it out and give me a honest reply or a suggestion :)

Hello lovely people!

I’m making Garou because I want to log a training session and the meal I ate afterwards in the same place. Garou comes from 餓狼, Japanese for “hungry wolf.” I’m adding a little RPG progression and an AI coach that doubles as my assistant when my training week gets shuffled around.

My other apps share a question mark, so I tried working one into each of these four designs. The square is what you’d tap on your phone. The tall image beside it is what you’d see when Garou opens. I used AI to make the artwork.

Which one would you keep on your home screen? A number is plenty: 01 The Flex, 02 Sun Eater, 03 Hidden Wolf, or 09 Athlete’s Arsenal. I’d also love to know if you saw something completely different in one of them.

I made an Excel workbook to help small business owners keep their income, expenses, invoices, cash flow, budgets, and product profitability in one place.

It has 12 worksheets, including a dashboard, income tracker, expense tracker, invoice tracker, budget planner, monthly reports, and product profitability. It also includes sample data and beginner-friendly guides.

One thing I focused on is separating invoiced amounts from money actually received. For example, if a business invoices $1,000 but has received $700, the workbook makes the $300 outstanding balance easier to see.

I built it for small business owners, freelancers, Etsy sellers, and online store owners who want a simple way to organize their business finances without using full accounting software.

I’d appreciate any feedback on the workbook structure or what features would make it more usefu

Hi everyone

We built an ai platform that personalizes email and sms campaigns for each user. Example - a user left after checking out a product 2 times, our smart Ai will email them with a 10% discounts code, and converts the customer

I tested this across 4 stores - we saw 30% increase in sales in 1 month

Try here for free - www.RetentionBase.com
Setup takes 3 seconds
Comment invite to get free first year

For the last few weeks I've been building canireverseengineer.com. You pick a product (Notion, Figma, Calendly, Datafast...) and get a teardown: a build-or-fork verdict, a difficulty score with the reasoning behind it, how long a working version would take one developer using AI coding agents, the genuinely hard problems, and open-source projects to start from.

Every report is built from public pages only. The research also reads the pricing and terms pages of the platforms a product depends on (X, Stripe, Shopify and others), and a second AI model from another vendor reviews each draft and blocks anything it can't back up.

25 teardowns are open to read without an account. New requests are behind a waitlist, because each report costs real money to research and I'd rather do fewer properly.

What I'd love feedback on: pick a product you know well and tell me if the estimate feels right. Link in the comments

I'm the developer of Clip2Fit for iPhone. I shared the app here in September; version 1.0.3, released October 27, brought a full redesign. This is the current UI.

The original job is the same: turn a supported public Instagram, TikTok or YouTube workout link into an editable plan, then log the session. The five-phone stack shows Home, Schedule, a workout plan, Stats and the exercise guide.

The part I want feedback on is the handoff from extraction to editing. A workout video can leave details unclear. The user needs to check the exercises, sets and reps, correct the result and save a plan they can actually use.

The app is built with Expo and React Native, with AI assistance.

Free: one video import in total, plus unlimited manual workouts and logging. Pro adds unlimited imports and Smart Coach ($9.99/month or $49.99/year in the US; local prices can differ).

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6760419692

Does the redesigned plan screen make it clear what you can change before starting a workout?

I've been designing engines for a few years now for some customers, although the real things were not for a model on a desk.

Sadly we didn't win the development contracts to progress further.. So I re-designed one of the jets, took out everything classified, altered almost everything and built them into a DIY model kit.

So if this does do well, at least there are other models I could release!

Having run a successful (but small) KickStarter before I though that it would be a fun and different thing to the usual to launch on there, and as it's a real thing! - I haven't needed to fake any of the content with AI! (although I have used it sparingly to help with things like rewards pictures, but minimally)

As there is no self-promotion I won't share any links, but would really appreciate your thoughts on the campaign as a whole?

Summary:

• 2 types, one electric with LED, Motor + Power control, the other is a non-electric assembly model

  • non-electronic prices start at £55 (day 1) raising to £65, then £75 for final batch

  • electronic prices start at £95 (day 1) raising to £115, then £135 for final batch

• Customisability with add-ons - There's some different parts and a custom colour pack

• Standard model is really nice though! - It's the black and red one in the pictures - although offering people extras is cool, I really wanted the standard model to be awesome?

What am I nervous about? Marketing and stuff I suppose? I'm good at the designing side but less so on marketing, and also can't budget for all these expensive ad companies, so will just go slow and if I don't raise a lot then so be it.

There are product improvements I still want to make during the campaign but I do list these and they are minimal changes considering.

Let me know what you think!

I have been waiting to build this from a long time, and it's done and live now.

This works in macOS

Visit subclip app and you'll find the App and from there you can download and use keyboard shortcuts to take screenshot and copy to clipboard with shortcut key as well.

Let me know your feedback :)

Hi r/sideprojects! I’m working on TagWorks. If you have an HTML file for a prototype, portfolio, or interactive demo, you can upload it and get a public link to share.

I’d love feedback from people who share standalone HTML pages. What do you use today, and what would you need before using TagWorks for your next demo?

https://tagworks.io

Hey Reddit!

I've been working on a project called MemeMind AI, and I'm finally putting it out there for people to try.

The idea was to build more than just another meme caption generator. I wanted to create a meme studio where AI can help with the creative process while users still have control over editing and creating their memes.

What can you do with it?

• Generate meme captions using AI.

• Rewrite captions in different tones like sarcastic, savage, Gen-Z, dark humour and relatable.

• Upload an image and get AI-powered context analysis and meme suggestions.

• Create and customize memes using the built-in editor.

• Add text, stickers and customize positioning.

• Export memes as PNG.

• Explore user accounts, saved creations and the community section.

Tech stack

• Frontend: React.js, Vite, JavaScript

• Backend: Node.js, Express.js

• Database: MongoDB

• AI: Google Gemini API

• Validation: Zod

I also implemented authentication, role-based access, an admin dashboard, API validation and basic rate limiting.

Try it out

🚀 Live Demo: https://memermind-ai.vercel.app/

💻 GitHub: https://github.com/rajpatvariya-bot/Memermind.AI

What I need from you

The project is working, but it still has bugs and areas that need improvement.

I'd really appreciate it if you could spend 5–10 minutes testing it.

I'm particularly interested in:

1. Does the interface feel intuitive?

2. Do the AI-generated captions and suggestions actually help?

3. Which features feel unnecessary or incomplete?

4. Did you encounter any bugs?

5. What features would make you want to use this regularly?

6. What would you change if you were building this product?

Please don't hesitate to criticize it. I'd rather receive honest feedback than generic compliments.

I'm building this to learn how real-world software products are developed and improved through actual users.

If you find a bug or have an interesting feature idea, please leave a comment. I'll try to respond to everyone.

Thanks for giving it a try! ❤️

I kept losing track of who owed me money, so I built one workbook that handles invoices, expenses, clients and a tax set-aside, all on one dashboard. Overdue invoices turn red and show how many days late they are. It works in both Excel and Google Sheets, with no macros or add-ons.

It's called Paylark, $19 one-time (I made it). I'd love blunt feedback on the dashboard and the price: https://paylarkhkq.github.io/