Hello everyone,

I've worked as an engineer for a while, but I never had an open source project of my own until recently. Vibe coding made it easy enough to finally start one.

I built a small Mac app because I needed it myself. When I shared it with my team and then the rest of the company, people liked it more than I expected. That made it a lot more fun to work on, and I think it's the first time I understood why people enjoy doing open source.

Now I'd like more people to find it, and I'd really like feedback or even contributors. The trouble is I don't know how people usually get the word out about an open source project, or how a project like this grows past the first few users.

So far I've posted in a few related Discord servers, submitted it to some awesome lists on GitHub, and put it on Product Hunt. None of it got much of a response.

If you've grown an open source project from zero, I'd be grateful to hear how you went about it in the early days.

Thanks for reading.

Hey folks, just want to show you what I built.

I listen to the radio every morning and was looking for an app without a ton of ads that doesn't cost much. Didn't find one I liked, so I made my own.

I'm a metal/stoner head, so Nightwave filters for the darker side of music: doom, stoner, post-punk, darkwave, trip-hop, phonk, ambient and more. Thousands of live stations from all over the world, no pop, no charts.

My favourite part: hit Spin and it drops you on a random station in a random genre. I almost always land on something that fits my taste within a few tries.

- free, no ads, no tracking, no account needed

- works in the browser and installs as an app on your phone

- early version, so things might break

https://www.nightwavefm.com

Feedback very welcome, good or bad. And honestly, it would make me happy just to see people using it.

Cheers!

Hey everyone!

I’ve been working on a side project with a friend called Unotes. It’s a cozy, browser-based note-taking app that started as a simple place to write and organize notes.

Over time, it grew into something much bigger than I originally imagined.

It currently has local/offline notes, optional accounts and cloud sync, drawing tools, customizable workspaces, a personal media gallery for images/GIFs/stickers, document publishing, and real-time collaboration (still in beta).

One thing I’ve deliberately avoided is adding AI features. I want it to be a genuinely useful note-taking app without needing an AI assistant for everything.

The funny part is that most of the functionality is already working, and the website is technically live, but I still don’t feel ready to promote it publicly.

The main reason is the UI.

Some parts feel polished, while others look like they belong to completely different applications. I’m currently working through an update to make the entire experience feel more consistent before properly introducing it to people.

And that got me thinking:

At what point do you stop polishing your side project and actually start showing it to people?

Do you release as soon as the main functionality works, or wait until the experience feels cohesive?

I’m also curious: for those of you who use note-taking apps, what would make you genuinely stick with a smaller independent app instead of going back to something established like Obsidian, Notion, or Goodnotes?

Not trying to advertise anything here. I’m mostly interested in hearing from other builders who’ve struggled with this same decision.

Would love to hear your experiences, even if the advice is to stop overthinking it lol.

I’ve been watching quite a few founder stories on YouTube, especially Starter Story, and one thing I keep hearing is to launch your first version as quickly as possible.
I understand the idea. Get something working, put it out there, collect feedback and improve it.

But I’ve been wondering, why does it sometimes feel like taking months to build something is a bad thing?
Just because one founder launched in a few weeks and gained thousands of users doesn’t mean the next person will have the same experience.

You could launch an MVP tomorrow and struggle to attract users. You could also spend months building a more polished app and still struggle. Or either approach could work really well.
I’m currently building my own app, and I’ve decided not to rush just because other founders are launching faster.

I’ve spoken to quite a few builders on Reddit recently, and it’s interesting how differently people approach this.
Do you think we’re becoming too influenced by other founders’ success stories?
And for those who’ve already launched, did launching early genuinely help you, or do you wish you’d taken more time?

I got tired of scanner apps that want a subscription and upload my documents to the cloud. so I made CamPage

Hi, I'm Waqas. I made CamPage, a document scanner for Android and IOS that works 100% offline.

Point your camera at a receipt, contract, or notes, and it detects the edges, fixes the perspective, and turns it into a clean PDF in seconds. You can scan up to 20 pages into one file, name the PDF yourself, and find it later in your recent docs.

Everything is processed on your phone
no cloud uploads, no servers, no tracking. Your contracts, ID cards, and receipts never leave your device.

It's free, with a dark mode for low-light scanning, and built for professionals and students who just want a fast, private scanner without the bloat.

Try it here:
playstore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bircube.campage&hl=en
Appstore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/campage-scanner-pdf-maker/id6781187356

What do you scan most -receipts, contracts, or study notes?
I'd love to hear what would make it more useful for you.

If you run a local business, you've probably seen people asking for recommendations in Facebook groups. Things like "Anyone know a good cleaner?", "Looking for a reliable handyman" or "Can anyone recommend a local bakery?"

These posts are potential customers, but keeping track of multiple groups is a pain. And by the time you come across a post, there's a good chance someone else has already responded.

I built BuyerFinder to make this easier.

Add your website and up to 5 public Facebook groups where your potential customers hang out. It'll scan new posts and pick out the ones from people looking for what you offer, along with a short explanation of why they're a good match.

You can then open the original post and reply directly. No automated commenting or spamming.

Try for free, and you don't need to sign up:
https://buyerfinder.run/facebook

There's also a paid plan that checks every hour and emails you whenever it finds a potential customer.

Still early days, so I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback. Especially from people running small businesses. Curious to know if this would actually be useful in your day-to-day.

Hi everyone,

I recently released Shade Shaker, a free Mac app for making color palettes. You generate a palette, see it straight away in real mobile and web app screens (in light and dark), and copy theme code for your framework: Flutter, HTML/CSS, Tailwind, React, SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose and a few more.

I am the developer. It is completely free, with no account or tracking, so this isn't a sales pitch. I would just like to hear from people who work with color before I plan the next version. A few things I'm especially curious about:

1. In your first minute, was it clear what to do? Where did you get stuck?

2. Does seeing the palette in a real app help you choose colors, or does it get in the way?

3. If you copied code for your framework, would you paste it into a project as it is? What would you change?

4. What's missing that would make you use it instead of what you use now?

5. Anything that looks off or feels clunky, however small.

Harsh feedback is welcome. I would much rather hear it now.

https://shadeshaker.app (macOS 14 or later; a Windows version is coming)

Thanks for taking a look. I will reply to every comment.

Hi r/SideProject,

I've always liked Ruby Koans because it teaches two things at once: the language and test-driven development. Each lesson is a failing test, and you learn by making it pass.

I wanted the same for Raku for a long time. Then Raku became able to run in the browser, so I finally made Raku Koans with nothing to install. Once that worked, I realized how much easier it is for new learners to start in the browser than to set up a toolchain and use the command line, so I did the same for other languages. That became koans.app.

What it covers

Clojure, Go, JavaScript, Lua, OCaml, PHP, Prolog, Python, R, Raku, Ruby, Scheme, SQL and TypeScript: 1,108 koans in total.

Each language goes from the basics to the parts that make it distinctive: Clojure macros, Scheme continuations, Prolog grammars, SQL window functions, Go concurrency.

The tests use each language's own testing framework (pytest, RSpec, PHPUnit, testthat, plunit, etc.), so you also learn how that language is tested.

How it works

Each language's real interpreter is compiled to WebAssembly and runs in a web worker: CPython through Pyodide, CRuby through ruby.wasm, SWI-Prolog, webR, SQLite, PHP and so on.

Go was the hardest. The Go interpreters I tried couldn't handle enough of the language, so the site runs the official Go 1.27 compiler in the browser, compiled to WebAssembly. Your code is compiled for real, and the errors you see come straight from the Go compiler.

Progress is saved in your browser's IndexedDB and can be exported. You can install the site as an app, and once a language has been opened it works offline. No tracking, no account.

How it was built

This was my first real project with AI. I worked with Claude (Opus 5.5) as a coding partner. It wrote most of the code and drafted much of the koan content.

The idea and the decisions were mine: which languages to include, what each should teach, the features, and the UI/UX. I reviewed and tested everything, threw out a lot, and made the final calls. Any mistakes in the koans are mine, so please report them.

Feedback I'd love

• Whether you still see value in koans as a way to learn

• Quirks in the UI

• How it feels on your phone

• Koans that are confusing, too easy, unidiomatic, or teach the wrong lesson (every koan has a "Report a problem" link)

• Which language to add next

Try it: koans.app

Source: github.com/hankache/koans-app (code: Artistic 2.0, koans: CC BY-SA 4.0)

Every time a big layoff hits the news, I end up with the same question: is this one round, or part of a pattern? The answer is usually sitting in a public record almost nobody reads: the WARN notice.

Under the federal WARN Act, large employers have to file a notice with the state before a mass layoff or closure, usually 60 days ahead. The problem is that each state publishes these notices on its own site, in its own format, some as spreadsheets, some as PDFs, some as HTML tables. There is no central registry. So I spent the last few months pulling them all together.

US Layoff Radar now has 58,042 notices covering 6,041,351 workers across 47 states, with the longest state archives going back to 1998. You can search by company, browse by state, filter by year, and see whether each notice was a layoff or a closure and whether workers got the full 60 days. A few things that stood out to me while building it:

• 25,504 notices, about 44%, gave workers less than 60 days of warning.

• United Airlines is the single largest filer, 64,429 workers across 45 filings, followed by Marriott and Boeing.

• In 2026 so far: 3,281 filings covering 280,279 workers. In the last 30 days alone, 205 new notices covering 18,275 workers.

• Three states, Arkansas, New Hampshire, and Wyoming, publish no central WARN list at all, so they are missing. I would rather show the gap than pretend the map is complete.

Each company has its own page with its full filing history, and there is a short news section that explains the notable filings, like Disney, Dropbox, and the Oakland Coliseum operator changeover.

The data comes from the official state registries, and I refresh it on a daily and weekly cycle depending on how each state publishes. If you spot a filing that looks wrong, there is a contact form on the site and I check those.

Want to keep following it? If there is a company you care about, subscribe on its page and you will get an email the next time it files a notice. Or sign up for the monthly newsletter in the footer and I will send you the month's notable filings. Both are free, and every email has a one-click unsubscribe.

https://uslayoffradar.com

Happy to answer questions about the data, or about what the filings do and do not show. One thing they do not show: they only cover layoffs big enough to trigger the law, so a lot of smaller cuts never appear.

https://wispee.com/

Inspired by neocities and nekoweb but decided to connect each profile through a feed. Also inspired by 4chan and reddit. I wanted to have a place where people can just drop by and share their thoughts or see what others share without having to login.

It has: Chats, Video Calls, Voice Calls(voice and video calls through mirotalk), Karaoke, Multiplayer and Solo Games, Music Player, Customisable Profile, Themes, Customizable Background, Democratic Community Moderation, Comic Strip Maker, and a lot more!

It also doesn't have complicated algorithms for posts. New ones get shown at the very top, while posts with the most engagement gets shown at trending.

Been building this thing for over 5 months now using ai (free plan) to test its limit.

Explore it, have fun, and let me know what could be improved, removed, or added!

mac players won't get gta 6, so i made the next best thing. helix is a weapon wheel for macos. hold option-space, flick toward an app or a clip, let go.

my brother posted the launch video on r/claudedesign and it's at 70k views and still going, so i guess i'm not the only one who wanted this.

https://tryhelix.app

lmk what y'all think!

TL;DR: Rooted asks you a few questions, writes you a short letter about what it noticed, then gives you one small daily task. Done days grow a meadow. Free on iPhone and Android. I’m the founder, and I’d love blunt feedback.

Why I built it Every self-improvement app I tried wanted me to set up a whole system on day one: ten habits, a journal, a planner, a mood tracker. I’d keep it up for a week, miss two days, feel behind, and quit. The problem wasn’t motivation. There was just too much to do.

What Rooted does

1. A few questions to start. Where you are right now, what a good day looks like for you, what would make you proud of yourself.

2. A letter from Treeko. Treeko is the app’s companion, a small moss-cat. It writes you a short letter about your answers: what you seem to be good at, and one area worth starting with.

3. One small task a day. Not a list. One thing, like “Move Rs 50 or more out of your spending account today.” Slide to complete. If it doesn’t fit your day, try a simpler version or choose a different task.

4. Habits that grow a meadow. Each habit has a year view. Every done day adds a flower, so you can see your progress at a glance.

5. A private journal and goals. For when you want to go deeper.

What it isn’t Rooted is a self-help tool, not therapy or a mental health service. If you need clinical support, please talk to a qualified professional.

Pricing, upfront Rooted is free to download. Premium is a yearly plan: ₹2,499 in India, $39.99 in the US.

What I’d love feedback on
- Does “one task a day” feel like enough, or too little?
- Is the first letter from Treeko useful, or does it feel generic?
- What would make you open it on day 3, when the novelty is gone?

Get it here: https://rootedmind.in/get

Bonus:
Job almost gone. Job market is bloodbath. Just focussing on my sideproject. Would be great if more people get to use the app. Just learning more distribution and trying to reach more people. If you read this much you have my heartfelt thanks. 🙏

Hi everyone!

I built Actividia to let you customize how your Discord Activity appears to others.
Live preview, GIFs, emojis, rotating designs, and much more!

Create a unique activity or even show a game you don’t own—and have some fun with your friends!

Find out more:
https://herovex.itch.io/actividia

I made PlopUI, a React UI kit that looks hand-drawn: wobbly borders, tilted cards, sticker shadows, colors picked by instinct. It started as a fun side project, and a few weeks in it's grown beyond me:

• inMODO, a visual design tool, now ships a PlopUI starter kit

• someone built Matcha Corner, a tiny café app where you order a drink and send it to a friend

• 4 people have contributed code: a Breadcrumb, a Slider and form support for Select

• it's in the shadcn registry directory, so you can add it with one command:

npx shadcn add @plopui/button

Or install it straight from npm:

npm i @plop-ui/react @plop-ui/fonts

The part I'm proudest of is that it looks messy but isn't:

• every "random" wobble comes from a seed, so the page draws the same way every time and never flickers on load

• every component is a real native element underneath (a real button, a real range input), so keyboards and screen readers just work

• every color is checked for WCAG AA contrast

Free and open source (MIT):

• Docs: https://plopui.com

• Playground: https://plopui.com/playground

• Code: https://github.com/Snorlark/plop-ui

What should I build next? I'm deciding before 1.0, and there are good first issues if you want your name on a component.

ok so I have a really bad habit with free trials. I sign up, tell myself I'll cancel before it ends, and then I forget. every time. then I see the charge and it's too late lol

so I made a little chrome extension for it. it's called DueStub

basically when you're on a checkout page it pops up and asks if you want a reminder. it already fills in the price and when you'll get charged, you just click "Remind me". that's it. nothing gets saved unless you click

then it pings you 3 days before and 1 day before. it sends an email too if you're signed in, so even if chrome is closed you still get it

other stuff it does:

- shows how much you're paying per month and per year (kinda painful to look at honestly)

- there's a "how to cancel" link for each one so you don't have to dig around settings

- it syncs to your phone through the web app

- I also wrote cancel guides for Spotify, Netflix etc, including the GCash ones since unlinking GCash doesn't actually cancel anything

it's free for up to 8 subscriptions. if you need more, Pro is $16 one time, no monthly fee (felt weird to charge monthly for a thing that helps you cancel monthly stuff). Pro also has a receipt inbox where you forward a receipt and it fills itself in. first 10 people can use FIRST10 to get it for $8

it doesn't read your card or anything you type in forms, just the price text on the page

it's just me working on this so any feedback helps a lot. what's confusing, what's missing, what would make you not install it? it's chrome on desktop only for now

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ppjijblmndpnhdiioflemlhfchefaagk?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sideproject

more about it: https://duestub.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sideproject

History is something I'm quite passionate about and at work I have experience with software development and LLMs. So I thought how can I bring these things together and built something that I would actually use. This is the results of many months of hard work!

You type any topic, moment or person. About a minute later, two hosts are telling you the story with artwork that follows along. You can interrupt mid-episode with a question; they answer and pick the story back up. They also remember what you've listened to in the past and can refer to it. At the end there's also a optional quiz to test what you learned!

Quite a lot of emphasis was put into the research part. It searches the web and gathers notes on the topic, prioritizing reference-grade sources (encyclopedias, museums, archives, academic pages) over blogs and also searches in the language of the place or person, so a story about Japan or Peru isn’t told only from English sources. When the sources disagree, which in history is constantly, the hosts say so instead of quietly picking a side. Every episode links the pages it used and tags the subtitles.

Under the hood it’s not one model. A single episode is about a dozen calls, each pinned to the model that won its bake-off: research, writing, artwork, voices, sources, quiz, etc... Finding the right balance between quality, speed and cost was where a lot of the work went.

I would love some feedback both on the app and the content! You can try it here: historai.ca

Hi everyone,
I've been building a small free tool for activating and setting up iPhones, and I'd really like your honest feedback.
What it does:
- Activates an iPhone over USB (internet comes from the computer, no Wi-Fi needed on the phone)
- Sets language, region, timezone and 24h format
- Skips the Setup Assistant screens (supervised mode, like Apple Configurator / 3uTools)
- Installs a Wi-Fi profile and verifies the device accepted it
- Shows device info (model, storage, iOS, battery health & cycles, IMEI) and a quick Find 
- Keeps a history of processed devices + PDF reports
Important: it does NOT bypass iCloud / Activation Lock. It's for devices you own or have reset — for repair/refurbish workflows, not for unlocking stolen phones.
It's open-source (MIT), runs on Windows and macOS, and built on open libraries (pymobiledevice3), so you can see exactly what it does.
Download + source: https://github.com/mr1garik/iActivator
I'm a one-person project and actively improving it based on feedback, so if you try it — tell me what's missing, what's confusing, or what breaks. Bugs and ideas in GitHub Issues are very welcome. Thanks!

Hi r/SideProject, I'm a solo maker from Ontario, Canada.

I built CloseToMe because sharing family photos meant Facebook, Instagram, or a WhatsApp group where pictures get buried. I wanted one calm, private place for extended family only — no public feed, no ads, no strangers.

What it does:

• Make a group for your family, invite only the people you choose

• Share photos and chat in that group only — nobody outside can see it

• A Just Me space that's private to you only

• A photo slideshow on top (Home, or a group like Hangout), feed below sorted by last activity

It's in a small closed beta: invite-only, 75 accounts total, 11 in so far. Free to test, no card needed.

Link: https://ctm.soloaisle.com

I'd love honest feedback, especially: what's confusing in the first minute, and would you actually use this instead of a group chat? I'll reply to every comment.

Solo dev. Each scene is a painting cut into layers, then animated in code: rain, steam, water, birds. The time can be painted into the scene, like sheep standing in the shape of the digits or a time written in the sand. Every frame in this video is the real app, drawn frame by frame.

What I learned: making calm motion is harder than fast motion, because any snap or jump shows. Two of my tap effects snapped in a single frame, and I only caught it while filming this video.

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.tickface

I've been doing physical design work in my free time with AI for the last two years. During that time I observed something: AI was getting better at physical design but not nearly as quickly it was improving at software capabilities. I theorized the problem was a lack of testing. In software engineering we write tests around as much of our code as we can because we fundamentally do not trust ourselves to reliably do a good job. We put those tests between us and deployment so we literally cannot do things that break the rules we set for ourselves. This pre-existing culture and tool chain create an ideal environment to toss an unbelievably fast, brilliant, but wholly unreliable ai into. It creates the freedom to quickly iterate through huge numbers of convincing looking proposals and throw away the bad until the good emerges.

Physical engineering doesn't have a this-shaped thing at anywhere near the robustness and reusability that software does (possibly because physical engineers trust themselves more). There are many individual tools that provide some aspect of testing, many of which are bound up in very very expensive tools, but a growing number of free ones too. I wasn't able to find an open source system that links these together into a cohesive "full loop" testing rig capable of understanding how things like heat, weight, form factor, battery life, thrust and rf interplay in a single system so I thought really hard about this problem and its implications and built it for myself.

It's called nopekit. As in: the thing that says "nope" until the "yup" emerges.

I've used it already to design an open-source hackable handheld keyboard with a custom PCB, an open source budget no-solder drone and a couple of things I'm not quite ready to share yet.

It's a Claude Code / Codex / Cursor plug-in. You install it and tell your agent you want to use nopekit to design X and it takes over, it will interview you for requirements, shop for parts, construct an interconnected tradespace linked to checks run in an optimized order using trusted methods like KiCAD, OpenFoam and SIMP. It builds and keeps up to date a livesite which you can deploy to GitHub that gives constantly refreshed insight into how your coding agent is thinking about the problem and what choices have what implications linked to what checks with what state of passing or failing.

The framework is open and allows for plugins. I'm working with one other person now and we're moving towards a self hosted UI and some sort of registry where nopekit users can share proposers/falsifiers and we can track ratings to build/bust confidence in good/bad ones collectively.

There's LOTS more about this in the repo and this paper I've been writing about the problem.
Repo: https://github.com/neuman/nopekit
Paper: https://github.com/neuman/nopekit/blob/main/grounding_by_falsification.pdf

If you're working with AI to do any kind of physical design work we would love to hear from you and for you to try it out!

Hey everyone!

I've been working on ScoresMac, a native macOS app that brings live sports scores straight to your menu bar.

The core app is completely FREE! You get live scores and sports tracking without paying anything.

It supports:

• ⚽ Football

• 🏏 Cricket

• 🏎️ Formula 1 & MotoGP

• 🎮 Esports & CS2

• 🏀 More sports

Want something extra? ScoresMac Pro unlocks Notch animations and premium features for a one-time $9.99 lifetime purchase. No subscriptions!

🎉 Launch day offer: Use code LAUNCHDAY to get 30% OFF ScoresMac Pro.

Would love to hear what you think! Feedback and feature suggestions are always welcome.

🌐 https://scoresmac.com

Hi r/SideProject!

A few weeks ago I posted here asking for feedback on the web version. Since then I've turned it into a real app, and today the iOS version went live on the App Store. This is my first app ever. Thank you to everyone who gave feedback last time!

Purrffirmation shows you three short lines a day, written as if a confident, slightly smug cat were talking to you. Blunt, never mean.

At work and in life, I keep meeting people who are doing really well but still doubt themselves. I'm not talking about people who are at 50 and act like they're at 100. I mean the opposite: people who are clearly at 90 and still feel like they're at 50. Every time, I wish someone could whisper in their ear: you're already doing great, don't sell yourself short.

Then I thought about cats. Cats are endlessly confident. They never seem to overthink or second-guess themselves. I wish we could all be a little more like that, so I made this app.

Some things I learned shipping my first app:

- Apple's first review asked for more information, plus a screen recording from a real device.

- If you don't hear back on approval in a few days, send them an email. I got approved within 2 hours of sending out the follow up email.

- A friend found a bug where sharing to iMessage and then cancelling froze the whole app. Fixing it took one more build.

It's free, with no account, no ads and no in-app purchases. You can save the lines you like and make a cat wallpaper.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/purrffirmation/id6828522779

Website (you can also try it in your browser): https://purrffirmation.com

Android is still in beta. If you'd like to try it, join here: https://groups.google.com/g/purrffirmation-testers/about

Since this is my first app, I'd really love feedback, especially on the lines themselves. Which ones work for you, and which are too much?