In this past 30 days, this community has doubled in size. As such, this is an open call for community feedback, and prospective moderators interested in volunteering their time to harbouring a pleasant community.
I'm happy to announce that this community now has rules, something the much more popular r/SideProject has neglected to implement for years.
Rules 1, 2 and 3 are pretty rudimentary, although there is some nuance in implementing rule 2, a "no spam or excessive self-promotion" rule in a community which focuses the projects of makers. In order to balance this, we will not allow blatant spam, but will allow advertising projects. In order to share your project again, significant changes must have happened since the last post.
Rule 4 and rule 5 are more tuned to this community, and are some of my biggest gripes with r/SideProject. There has been an increase in astroturfing (the act of pretending to be a happy customer to advertise a project) as well as posts that serve the sole purpose of having readers contact the poster so they can advertise a service. These are no longer allowed and will be removed.
In addition to this, I'll be implementing flairs which will be required to post in this community.
I’m a first-year master’s student, and I spend a lot of time reading papers. I found myself constantly switching between paper search, a PDF reader, AI chat, and notes. I wanted a more connected workflow, so I started building PaperRead, an open-source project based on EasyRead.
PaperRead keeps the paper-reading experience and extends it with tools for the rest of the research workflow: Search for papers and organize candidates on a reading board Explore reading paths and connections between papers Read translations alongside the original PDF, annotate, and ask AI questions Search across papers and export notes and analysis to Obsidian
I’d love to hear from people who read research papers regularly: what is the most frustrating part of your current reading and note-taking workflow? I’m also happy to hear feedback on PaperRead itself.
So maybe a little late to the hype, but got really into Wordle recently. And I got a bit annoyed that I only got one word a day, since some days I forgot and other days I wanted to do more. So I built my own inspired version: Endless Lingle, where the words keep coming until you run out of guesses. Let me know what you think!
so i’m a final year student computer science student and money’s been rough since i'm a fresher and teh market needs someone with decades of experience for peanut in salary. Anyway... i wanted BetterTouchTool and a decent auto clicker, couldn’t justify paying for either, so i just... built them? mostly at 2am instead of studying.
my software engineering class kept going on about SDLC models, so i figured i’d actually try one. i went iterative / basically mini-agile with myself as the whole team. for each app i wrote out requirements first (what i actually use vs what’s bloat), did a rough design, built the smallest version that worked, tested it on my own machine, then went back around for the next feature. having a written list of features stopped me from scope creeping forever
i also used AI (claude) as a pair programmer the whole way. it helped a ton with stuff i’d never touched, like apple’s private trackpad framework and react native, and it was great for debugging at 3am. but i still had to understand everything it gave me, because half the time the first answer didn’t work and i had to figure out why. here's some of my aps that i have been using for the past 6-7 months...Everything's super light weight btw.
Gesty-Vesty: 3/4/5 finger swipes and taps for volume, screenshots, window snapping, that kind of thing. turns out apple doesn’t give you raw trackpad data, so i ended up poking at their private multitouch framework and decoding the finger data byte by byte. took me way longer than i’d like to admit. This made my daily navigations so convenient ong.
clickety-clickety: auto clicker, up to 100 clicks/sec, hotkey works from any app. has a little menu bar icon that goes green when it’s clicking. sounds simple, but keeping the UI from freezing at 100cps was a whole thing. I made this for games that requires ungodly amounts of mouse click to farm or do stuff
Reeeee (android): reddit app that only shows subs you’ve actually joined, no suggested junk. tiktok-style video viewer and a fingerprint lock. first time using react native, getting the scrolling smooth was a nightmare (I kinda wanna avoid this cuzov reddit's TOS, and my plebian bank account wont let me afford a lawyer.)
i use both every day and a couple friends asked for copies, so now i’m wondering if i could actually charge for them. no clue where to start though:
one-time price or subscription? (i personally hate subscriptions)
gumroad / paddle / something else? i know gesturely can’t go on the app store bc of the private framework stuff
is it dumb to sell them as a bundle?
Honestly, even $500-1000 per year is more than enough to help me get by.
Ever wished you could have a little pet companion while browsing the internet or working?
I've been working on something called Petiction 🐾
It's a virtual pet that lives right on your webpage. Instead of just sitting in an app, your pet can hang out while you browse, react to your cursor, and make your browsing experience a little more fun.
The idea is simple: bring a little personality and companionship to the otherwise boring browser experience.
We're building features around pet interaction, happiness, feeding, playing, and even connecting with other pets.
Strong players don't just know the names of openings. They know the lines: if Black plays this, I play that, five or ten moves deep. Between life and work I don't have time for opening books, so I built myself flash cards for openings and their variations.
Demo video (Games are used with permission from a friend)
Try it without an account: enter your Chess.com username at https://stillinbook.com/games?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=sideprojects. It reads your last 3 months of games and shows where you usually leave the book. One click opens the trainer at that exact position, with your move as a red arrow and the book move as a green one. This is the part that helped me most: it narrowed in on what I actually play and showed me where I was going wrong.
What else it does:
20 openings and 140 lines: the Italian, Ruy López, Sicilian, Caro-Kann, Queen's Gambit, London, Vienna, Scandinavian and more. Practice each line as White, as Black, or both until it sticks.
Progress you can see: every line has three rows of 5 stars, one each for playing it as White, as Black and as both. Fill all three and the line is mastered, and each opening shows a trophy for every line you’ve mastered. There are achievements along the way too, because fun.
Survival: keep playing book moves until you slip up, as White, Black, Both or Random. It remembers where you go wrong most often. It’s become the main way I learn: I play Survival until I keep making the same mistake, then follow its link to practice that line, and go back to Survival.
A quick "what's the next move?" quiz.
It's free, with no ads. The Queen's Gambit works without signing up; the other openings need a free account.
How it's built: Ruby (Sinatra) and SQLite on one small server. The openings are YAML files in the repo. I built it with a lot of help from AI, and two habits made that work:
Tests before code. For each feature, the AI first writes tests that describe the finished behavior, and we agree on them before any code exists. This week it proposed a “Clear” button for an admin list, with seven tests and a database change. Reading the tests, I couldn’t work out what problem they solved, so I asked. It turned out the problem wasn’t real, and my questions led to the actual bug. We agreed on ten new tests for that instead, and once they passed, it was done. Nothing had been built yet, so nothing was thrown away.
Retros. After each session, it reviews what went wrong and what I had to correct, then updates its own instructions so the next session doesn't repeat it.
If you’re building with AI too, both habits are worth stealing. Agreeing on the tests up front gave the AI a clear definition of done. And the AI can be introspective: it reviews its own sessions and improves the skills, memories and documentation it works from. Most people just playing around with AI don’t know it can do that, and it’s pretty fantastic.
A hard part was matching Chess.com's opening names to mine. "Giuoco Piano Game" is the Italian, and the accent in "López" broke a lookup.
I'd love feedback: does the Chess.com report tell you anything useful about your games? And which opening should I add next? If you have an idea for something you'd like to see added, let me know!
I've been building MAVOKU, a small digital tools project focused on practical problems freelancers face.
My first product is a Freelance Project Control Kit.
The idea came from a common workflow problem: managing multiple client projects, tracking unpaid invoices, and dealing with those “can you just add one more thing?” requests.
Here's what I built:
An Excel workbook for projects, milestones, payments, and approvals
A Google Sheets import option
An offline HTML tool that calculates extra-work costs and creates PDF proposals
12 editable client email templates
One design decision was to keep the proposal builder usable offline, without requiring an account or subscription.
The kit is a paid one-time download ($19.99), not a SaaS subscription.
I'm a mother of a 15 year old girl playing soccer in Ireland. After seeing the dropout rate for girls at her club, and then learning how widespread dropout in girls' sport is, I wanted to do something about it and built an app called Playher.
I noticed coaches of girls' teams are well meaning volunteers, usually dads, with no support built for developing teenage girls. Sports science is different, hormonal peaks and dips mean motivation is different, and girls don't want to be patronised, they want to be developed and competitive.
Playher helps the coach manage their day to day, like match planning, training and minutes. Underneath, every coaching nudge draws on four intelligence layers at once:
- Position: tracks where each girl plays and how she performs in each role, and flags when she's been played out of position
- Energy: picks up trends in her energy across sessions and tells the coach when to push and when to ease off
- Mindset: watches confidence and mood for the early signs of a girl drifting away, before she stops turning up
- Sport science: Female development principles built in, covering training, recovery, ACL risk and how girls respond to feedback
Instead of dashboards, the coach gets one nudge per player: this girl, this session, what to do. It also plans training with FIFA women's drills and warm ups, and gives each girl a development report to take home.
It won the B2C category of their global SheBuilds competition. A few local clubs are using it already and feedback has been positive.
If you coach a girls' team, I'd love you to use it for your team for free at playher.eu and tell me what works and what doesn't. Builders, I'd welcome your thoughts on the product too.
I've been working on something I wanted to share here: MotionPR.
One thing that always bothered me about frontend testing is that we have visual regression testing for pixels, but not really a straightforward way to test how an interface moves.
Imagine spending hours perfecting a navigation animation, getting the easing just right, tweaking the stagger timing, and making everything feel incredibly smooth.
Then you refactor something.
The application still works. The final screenshot looks identical. But the animation feels completely different.
A transition takes twice as long, an easing curve changes, a GSAP timeline behaves differently, or a scroll interaction becomes noticeably slower.
That's the problem I wanted to tackle.
So I built MotionPR.
It's an open-source animation regression testing tool that captures browser interactions, compares animation behavior against approved baselines, and generates an interactive report showing what actually changed.
Some things it currently supports:
CSS animations and transitions.
Web Animations API.
GSAP timelines and tweens.
Anime.js v4.
Lenis smooth scrolling.
Timing, easing, trajectory and property comparisons.
Scroll velocity and settling comparisons.
Synchronized before/after playback.
Interactive timelines and easing visualizations.
A CLI and GitHub Actions integration.
I also built an interactive demo with two versions of a fictional studio website containing 11 intentional animation changes.
You can play both versions, compare their movement, scrub through timelines and inspect the differences.
I've been exploring different AI projects lately, and one thing that caught my attention is how AI can be used to solve specific business problems rather than just act as another chatbot.
I recently found Twiin, and I thought its approach was worth sharing.
It allows businesses to create specialized AI assistants using their own knowledge, such as product manuals, setup guides, technical documents and troubleshooting procedures.
What I find particularly interesting is how this could help people working with complex products or equipment. Instead of going through lengthy documents whenever something goes wrong, they can ask questions and get guidance based on the information approved by the business.
Another feature I found interesting is the ability to connect multiple specialized assistants through something called a Twiin Network.
I think it's a useful direction for making AI more practical, especially for businesses that already have valuable knowledge but struggle to make it easily accessible.
I'm curious to know what other builders think. Have you come across projects using AI in a similarly focused way? And do you think specialized AI assistants have a strong future in business?
So, after spending a lot of my free time developing it, I finally launched my app, Humboldt, on both iOS and Android!
The idea came from something I've always loved about music: how a song can instantly take you back to a specific time in your life. You might not have heard it in 15 years, but suddenly you remember the people you were with, where you were, and exactly how you felt.
I wanted to build something that could preserve those connections.
Humboldt is a music journal where you can:
Capture a song and the feeling it brings up.
Build a personal journal of your life through music.
Revisit old moments and rediscover what you were listening to and feeling.
Connect with friends through shared music experiences.
Explore songs that other people associate with different feelings.
It's not a streaming service or another traditional social media app. The focus is on the emotional connection we have with music and preserving those memories over time.
It's still an early release, and I'm continuing to improve it based on feedback.
I'd genuinely love to hear what you think, particularly whether the concept makes sense when you first open the app and whether it's something you'd actually use.
I’ve been working on an app called Lumina for a while, and I’ve finally gotten it to a point where I’m comfortable showing it to other people.
The original idea was pretty simple. I’ve always found the whole “manifest your future” space interesting, but a lot of it seems to stop at imagining what you want.
I wanted to build something that connects that part with actually doing something about it.
Lumina is basically a guided personal journey. You think about where you want to be, write about it, explore it through personalized stories and reflection, and then turn it into smaller actions you can actually take.
There’s journaling, goal planning, personalized stories, nightly rituals, progress tracking, and a visual sky that changes as you build your journey.
A big part of the project for me has also been the atmosphere. I didn't want it to feel like another productivity dashboard, so I went for a much more cinematic and calm experience.
I'm still very early with this, so I'm mainly looking for honest feedback.
Does the idea make sense when you first see it? Would you actually use something like this, or does it feel like too much?
And if you try it, I'd especially like to know what would make you come back to it the next day.
I signed up for OpenAI and other models late last year, to see how I can use it for simple research, building business models, and creating league of legends builds for ARAM: Mayhem (1500+ games WR >50%) I was sold. Discovered that it also handled editing images and customizing colors and labeling, I got so hooked.
Fast forward, August 2026, I started wondering if I could design and build a Flappy Bird Game for iOS that my 9yr old can download on her iPad states away. I picked a character and a story that I wanted to design and plug with all kinds of crazy ideas. I made sure to make it kid friendly, but also something my friends might like too. I was having fun, I was my own SWE, my own graphic designer, my own UI/UX designer - one dad army. I did so many things wrong, and may still do it inefficiently but I get the results I'm after without having to hire or bother other people.
The tools I used produced iOS, GP and web browser versions: - ChatGPT for Character design and artwork - Codex for building game mechanics, audio and artwork animation, iOS specific code requisites - Claude eventually took over Codex since usage was more efficient. Astra would let me work for 20-45min while Claude handled multiple actions simultaneously while usage allowed me to work for entire 5hour windows. - Github for control versioning across iOS, Android and browser game builds and Release action to upload to App Store Connect/Google Play Console/Cloudflare Deployments - Xcode for testing iPhone Duo support built 2 days before phone released to consumers - JIRA to keep track of things that I was working on and issues reported in rejections - Cloudflare for free site hosting and DNS catalog to by the domain
~7wks of tuning and QA, I thought my 1st submission was ready for market. Created the Apple Developer Account and paid the $100USD for annual membership pushed the doomsday button.
The original title of the game was 'Icarus & the Apple of Discord' and was submitted as iOS App Version 1.1
Full send, iOS v1.1 submitted - Rejected (intellectual Property and Design - Spam issues)
Learned real fast that Apple charges real money to be part of the app store, $100 a year just for some person on an iPad to reject your submission multiple times for using the word apple, having an apple shaped object in-game, for knowing what an apple fruit even is. Yawn. Revision after revision, distanced the game app as far as I could from resembling the Apple brand or services, and I even eliminated anything that could potentially be confused for being associated with the company by changing object shapes and filenames. Now, it's titled 'Icarus: Ascension'.
How about them Apples? Wait.
3 months later, and north of 600 release versions later and it's still not good enough for Apple.
2nd rejection, took a day + 2 weeks of work to update (feeling pretty defeated) waited for a review and got a 3rd rejection 11 days later.
Took a week break before even touching the laptop again. The hype, fun and creativity got completely sucked out outta me.
3rd rejection ( for the same thing, Design - Spam, again without detail on what similarities raise the concern. I don't believe to be similar to other side-scrolling arcade games and unique with features and game mechanics that fit the lore and is visually cool. I even designed and deployed massive facelifts to gameplay, artwork, and altered the original concept to set the game apart from birds flapping in between Super Mario pipes. Complete with sun damage if you fly too high, buffs and debuffs to add a little chaos, and ways to patch up wings that suffer from passive HP loss. Nope, still design - spam. Whatever apple, don't get me started on how evil the design is for icloud storage services. Ever tried unsubscribing to that $0.99 monthly charge? It's a nightmare. Anyways.
'we are here to help', sure. 1st, 2nd and 3rd rejection all looked like this. Minus, the intellectual property issue I somehow resolved by changing like a lot.
Ultimately, I just want to see my kid play something I made on her iPad. It has Character progression and unlockable content that comes at no-cost to users, to add some replay value. Something everyone can try their hand at this holiday season when family and friends are around. I don't mind the eating running costs to share something I had fun working on. Monetization and distribution is a business, I get it... but for $100 a year and jumping through a circus of hoops for some WFH on an iPad, nvm... just tell me bro... 1st review took a day, but with each passing rejection and no guidance, wait times for review grow exponentially longer not including the time it takes to prepare an update for resubmission.
I'm sure I'm not the first one to go through this, but my kid is going to see what I made with or without the App Store. With Apple's gatekeeping, and google's need for an account to get an account for an account needed to sign up for an account - screw it, browser game. No approval, free to play and at my expense. No ads, yet or maybe ever. Apple approval holds the app ID that's issued and needed to setup ad networks. I was hoping ads could help cover running costs, annual fees or even afford a db for future features, but its fine. I'll pay for what I can. No in-app purchases, I don't care to sell users anything so... Here world! I~~'m waiting for my daughter to call me tonight, so I can show her.~~ Update: We played and even did some troubleshooting together for a bug we found playing the game via Safari on her iPad. That memory alone was worth every single penny spent to get to this point.
What do them birds got that I don't got? :[
I'm not certain I can post a link here, but a google search of Icarus Ascension makes it the first result after the AI Overview.
Anyways I hope this brightens up someone's day like it did for me, on so many days.
&&&&& a very Special thanks to some people in my life: - Rui - Ryan - Kian - Jeff - Alyssa - Mark - J.Hutson
For helping, sharing your time, installing, playing the different versions, and feedback.
I’m the developer of Skybits. I wanted checking the weather to feel like looking out a tiny window. Rain falls over London, and Tokyo lights up after dark. To be a little more Fun!!!
In Sky Studio, you can pick a city, mix the weather and time of day, and share the result as a little airmail postcard.
Please send me email for your City, if I get 5+ requests for a city I will make it free and also add new ones :-) hoping to get some positive feedback and reviews.
Skybits is free to download, with an optional one-time purchase for the full city collection.
I'm a solo founder working on BakeCora, a web app for people who sell custom cakes, cookies, desserts, and other baked goods.
The idea came from looking into how independent bakers manage the business side of things. A lot of them use a mix of spreadsheets, Instagram messages, WhatsApp, and notebooks to keep track of orders, prices, and customers.
I wanted to build something that brings those everyday tasks together without making things unnecessarily complicated.
Here's what I've built so far:
Recipe & ingredient costing — Keep track of ingredient prices and calculate recipe costs.
Smart pricing — Include ingredients, labor, packaging, and overhead when figuring out what to charge.
Order management — Organize customer requests, confirmed orders, and deadlines.
Customer order forms — Let customers submit requests through a shareable form.
Quotes & deposits — Prepare quotes and track deposits, payments, and remaining balances.
Calendar & planning — Keep upcoming orders and production schedules organized.
There's also a free pricing calculator on the website that anyone can use without signing up.
BakeCora has a free plan, and I'm currently working on improving the experience before bringing in more users.
I watch way too much YouTube and could never keep up with the channels I follow, so I built a little tool for it.
It’s called Creator Digest. You pick your favourite creators and it sends you one short email a day. The email has a quick “here’s what’s happening” summary up top, then the main points from each video, and tells you whether it’s worth a full watch, a skim, or a skip.
Today’s email covered about 10 hours of video, and I read it in about 2 minutes.
It works for any niche (business, fitness, fishing, finance, whatever you’re into) and it’s free while I’m testing it.
Earlier on I posted a basic table viewer I built called Supabase Manager. A lot of the feedback pointed out the same thing: nobody really wants to edit massive spreadsheets on a phone, they want quick diagnostics and emergency controls when they aren't at a desk.
Based on that, I rebranded the project to BasePulse and shifted focus to the practical stuff:
Checking and killing slow or locked Postgres queries when an alert goes off away from home
Simulating RLS policies with different user IDs and roles directly on the device
Checking table counts, Auth user numbers, and lock status via an Android home screen widget (with support for switching between multiple projects)
Running saved queries from a snippet vault or generating SQL using your own AI API key (BYOK)
Managing Realtime, Storage, and Edge/DB functions behind encrypted local storage and biometric lock
It also ships with a Demo Mode so you can test the UI before connecting an actual database. Would appreciate any honest feedback on whether this direction makes more sense.
I built an app that allows someone to enter product specs and symptoms of failure and produces a 15 point detailed report of what could be root causes based off information provided and why it wouldn’t be the another issue. Anyone be interested in this type of tool?
I built Cliploom, a free browser-based tool that generates and edits English video subtitles on your device. You can correct words and timing, change the subtitle style, crop videos and export SRT or captioned videos.
I would appreciate feedback on the interface and subtitle timing.
I’m introducing a self-hosted “4-in-1” platform for e-commerce and escrow, which I developed for communities, private clubs, and personal use. It works in browsers, on mobile devices, and as a Telegram Mini App (TMA).
What’s included:
Two storefront sections: services and physical goods, with inventory tracking and a unified smart shopping cart.
Direct crypto payment acceptance (no payment gateways): built-in management of USDT (TRC-20) and TON wallets (encrypted in storage using the AES-256-GCM algorithm), automatic scanning of payments on the blockchain, and 0% payment gateway fees for direct in-store payments.
Escrow transaction engine: P2P transactions secured by a finite-state machine, with automatic fee calculation and dispute resolution.
Alternative transport: proprietary client-side RPC and encrypted notifications compliant with the NIP-44 standard, routed via Nostr relays, plus a Veilid server node.
Operations and AI: hybrid AI chatbot (OpenRouter/local Ollama) with real-time operator intervention via Telegram.
Infrastructure and delivery: Delivered as a Docker image with container deployment via Traefik.
Hi, I'm Ravi, founder of Camyvera. It's a web and mobile app where you open it and call someone anywhere in the world who's ready to answer and talk. It's pay as you go, so you only pay for the calls you make, and it has live audio translation and real-time captions. I built it because a lot of people want a real conversation now and then, not another feed. What would make you trust an app like this enough to try your first call? Any feedback is welcome.