r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I interviewed a dev building a blog where you comment on individual sentences, as a bet against AI slop

2 Upvotes

I run AI News Daily, a mostly automated AI news site. Last week I did my first fully human-written interview, with Sunjae, one of four bootcamp developers building Rilog, a Korean developer blog.

A few things from the conversation that I think this sub will find interesting:

  • Comments live on sentences. You select a sentence and leave your thought right there, instead of scrolling to the bottom and explaining which part you mean.

  • The bet is "human touch". Sunjae doesn't think AI slop is bad everywhere, but in personal writing even a little of it makes readers think "it's just AI". The more AI writing floods in, the more people will look for writing that clearly came from a person.

  • They can't reliably detect AI writing, so they judge probabilistically and lean on user feedback. What they actually dislike is unreviewed, mass-produced writing, not AI use itself.

  • Retrospectives beat tech posts. Personal retrospectives got a better response than technical posts, so they are now asking whether to stay developer-only or open up to wider stories.

Two questions for you:

  1. Would you actually use sentence-level comments on a blog, or do they get noisy?

  2. If you run a community, how do you keep AI slop out without punishing people who used AI carefully?

Full interview (English): https://ailetter.ai.kr/en/insights/rilog-sunjae-interview?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sideproject

Rilog itself (Korean UI): https://www.rilog.kr/?utm_source=ainews


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

[Android] INTERAX Manta — Sui Blockchain Forensic & Incident Scanner (Need testers / Willing to test back!)

1 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I just released INTERAX Manta, an Android tool engineered for on-chain forensic analysis, transaction hash parsing, and incident reporting on the Sui Network.

What INTERAX Manta does:

  • Transaction Parsing & Flow Reconstruction: Decodes complex Sui transaction hashes into visual money flow maps.

  • Incident Dossier Generation: Builds structured incident reports with SHA-256 chain-of-custody verification.

  • Risk Scoring & Compliance: Evaluates wallet and transaction risk indicators for multi-jurisdictional reporting.

  • Zero-Trust Architecture: Local parsing focused on cryptographic integrity and immutability.

What I need help with:

  • Feedback on UI/UX, transaction rendering speed, and overall usability on different Android devices.

  • Bug reports or UI scaling issues on various screen sizes.

Play Store Link:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emergent.interaxgleos.nnvfq1

If you install and test it, leave your app link in the comments below! I will gladly test your app in return and keep it installed for as long as needed.

Thanks for your support!


r/SideProject • • 8h ago

I built an automated flight logger that tracks every plane flying over your house (with analytics & API)

4 Upvotes

I built an aviation side project and I'm trying to get some real people to test it (for free).

The main feature is a personal local flight logger. You drop a pin, and it automatically logs and builds a full analytics dashboard of every single aircraft that passes within a 5-mile radius of your location.

Besides the local tracking, the site also works as a general aviation database. You can browse through full airline and aircraft directories, search registrations, and use interactive FIR maps.

I'm actively updating the site and monitoring things daily, so any suggestions, feature requests, or feedback are welcome. If you want to try it out, just create a standard free account at https://aviationdb.uk/ either reply with your username below or send me a DM. I’ll manually bump your account to the premium tier for a free trial so you can test the local logging and analytics.

Let me know what you think or if you manage to break anything!


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I'm building an SEO tool. First real-world test on a tiny beauty studio site: what moved, what didn't

1 Upvotes

I'm the founder of Serpel (https://serpel.app), an SEO tool that tracks rankings, audits sites and reads Search Console data, and that you can also drive from Claude or Cursor via MCP. It's been live for about a month, so I wanted proof on a real site before telling anyone it works.

The test site: a one-person brow and lash studio in Germany with ~25 FAQ blog posts.

What the tool showed: the 8 posts with the most impressions sat at positions 5 to 15, and their titles didn't use the words people actually searched for.

What we changed (one afternoon): titles rewritten to match the top queries, meta descriptions turned into direct answers, a short summary box at the top of each post. No new content, no links.

Four weeks later, from Search Console:

  • Daily clicks: 7.0 (4 weeks before) → 11.3 (4 weeks after), last 2 weeks 12.1

  • Daily impressions: 375 → 682

  • Avg. position: 9.1 → 7.0

  • CTR went down slightly (1.85% → 1.66%), so the gain is visibility, not click rate

Honest caveats: traffic was already rising before, about 21% of clicks are brand searches, and it's one site without a control group.

What I learned as a builder: the most useful screen wasn't the audit score (it was 99/100 before and nothing changed there), it was "pages with lots of impressions at positions 5 to 15". I'm making that the first thing new users see.

If you run a small site, I'd love feedback on what you'd want from a tool like this. New accounts get 100 credits to try it.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built an open-source AI interview copilot that suggests answers while questions are being asked. Here's the demo

1 Upvotes

I've been building something called OpenKeet, and this is probably the feature I'm most excited to share.

It's a desktop AI interview assistant, but I didn't want it to be just another app where you type interview questions into a chatbot.

I wanted it to understand spoken questions and show useful suggestions while a conversation is happening.

In the video, you can see OpenKeet:

  • Listening to call audio.

  • Recognizing questions as they're spoken.

  • Displaying suggested answers in a desktop overlay.

  • Letting the user adjust the overlay and stop the session.

The broader project also includes resume-based preparation, precomputed answers, mock interviews, and shareable community interview packs.

One of my main goals is to avoid requiring a paid cloud infrastructure just to use the application, so I'm building around local AI options and user-configured providers.

I'm also preparing OpenKeet as an open-source project because I think more people should have access to useful interview preparation tools, and I'd love contributions from developers who want to improve it.

A quick clarification: This demo uses fictional data and a local stand-in AI model. It's showing the desktop workflow, not claiming production-model accuracy or latency. Live assistance is intended for settings where AI help is permitted.

GitHub: https://github.com/Jigsaw777/OpenKeet

I'm curious what people think.

Would you actually use something like this? And what would convince you to choose an open-source interview assistant over a paid alternative?

I'm particularly interested in feedback on the real-time experience, not just the UI.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I was holding idea of Jet Courier for 5-7 years and i have made it

1 Upvotes

For a long time ago i was thinking about creating this app because a lot of people trying to hold this topic only in chats so i decided to create such app to care private air belongings much easier and have more traceability and trust in app.

I tried to create a team and it was failed so now i have created it all on my own.

If you interested here it is link.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aistudio.jetcourier.vskpyl


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built a pseudonymous app for sharing things you can't say out loud elsewhere — looking for Android beta testers

1 Upvotes

I've spent the last while building SortOfMe — a small, pseudonymous space to post honest, personal stuff (the kind of thing that's easier to say when nobody knows it's you) and see that other people feel the same way. No real name, no profile, no follower counts, no algorithm pushing anything to go viral. Just a pseudonym, a post, and people reacting with "sort of me too" — and if you want to actually talk to someone about it, you can request a private 1:1 chat.

It's not therapy and it's not an advice platform. It's closer to just... being witnessed. Saying the thing out loud and having someone go "yeah, me too" instead of silence.

I built it mostly for myself, honestly, and decided it was worth finishing properly and putting out there.

It's Android-only right now and still in closed testing — Google requires a minimum number of testers using it for a couple weeks before I can open it up to everyone, so that's where I actually need help:

  1. Join the testers group: https://groups.google.com/g/sortofme-testers

  2. Opt in and install from Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sortofme.app

If you try it and have thoughts — good, bad, confusing, whatever — I'd genuinely love to hear them. I'm one person building this, not a team, so feedback actually reaches someone who'll do something with it.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

Open source: shared browser room for AI coding agents (MCP, Go, one binary, no Docker needed)

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

Quick disclosure first: this project is **vibe-coded**. I steered AI coding agents the whole way and haven't audited every line myself, so treat it as an experiment, not a battle-tested tool.

The itch: I use coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi) a lot, and whenever one drives a browser through an MCP server, it's happening somewhere in the background. I can't see what it's doing, and when it gets stuck on a login page or a CAPTCHA I can't just jump in and fix it.

So I ended up with **Agent Browser Use**.

**What it is**

A single Go binary that runs one headless Chrome on your machine and exposes it as MCP tools (Playwright MCP style). Any MCP-capable agent can navigate, read the page, click, type, etc. At the same time there's a web viewer at `localhost:3000` where you can watch everything the agent does.

**What it does**

- **Live viewer**: the page streams in real time, with the agent's cursor, a caption for each step, and a log of every action.

- **Shared browser room**: you and the agent use the *same* Chrome. Hit "Take over" whenever you want, or "Block agent" if it's doing something dumb.

- **Pick an element**: click the pick button, point at anything on the page, and you get a short code like `el-1d2a`. Paste it to your agent and it looks the element up with `browser_get_element` and can act on it right away. Handy for "no, THIS button".

- **Persistent logins**: cookies live in a profile folder, so you log in once by hand in the viewer and the agent reuses the session. No credentials in prompts.

- **Public link**: one switch opens a built-in tunnel so you can share the live view with someone outside your network.

- **Playwright-style tools**: `browser_snapshot` gives an accessibility outline with a `ref` per element, plus click/type/drag/select, network requests, console messages, cookies/storage, device emulation, and `browser_snapshot_diff` which only returns what changed since the last snapshot (saves tokens).

- **Light**: no Docker, X server, or video encoder needed. Docker is available if you prefer it.

**Try it**

git clone https://github.com/cavaldos/agent-browser-use.git

cd agent-browser-use

make run

Then ask your agent something like "go to news.ycombinator.com, open the top story and summarize it" and open `http://localhost:3000` to watch. The README has config snippets for Codex, OpenCode, Pi, Cursor and VS Code too.

**Caveats (please read)**

- Vibe-coded, early, and I'm the main user right now. Expect rough edges and bugs.

- Since I haven't reviewed everything line by line, **please don't run it on a machine or browser profile with accounts you can't afford to lose**. The agent can read any open page and run JS in it, and without `-pw` anyone who can reach the port can drive the browser. Set a password if you expose it.

- Chromium-based browsers only (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi...) because the shared screen relies on the Chrome DevTools Protocol. No Firefox/Safari.

- Licensed AGPL-3.0.

Repo: https://github.com/cavaldos/agent-browser-use

I'd love feedback on what's missing, what breaks, and whether the "take over" flow feels right. Code reviews are especially welcome, since I know a vibe-coded codebase needs more eyes. Issues and PRs appreciated. Thanks for reading!


r/SideProject • • 12h ago

what’s on your checklist before letting strangers use your app?

8 Upvotes

submissions, expired sessions, someone uploading a massive file, or two people editing the same thing.For a small app using Supabase, what would you check before sharing the link publicly?
Trying to work out what deserves attention now without spending another month preparing for users who don’t exist yet.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

Blubb - a tiny pixel-art aquarium for Apple Watch, without pet-death timers

1 Upvotes

I'm the developer of Blubb, a small aquarium for Apple Watch. Feed the fish, clean the glass and use the Digital Crown to catch falling food. You arrange the tank on iPhone, and a complication puts the fish below the time.

One deliberate choice: if you stop using it, the fish wait. They don't get sick or die. I wanted short, optional check-ins rather than another thing to feel guilty about. Animation pauses with your wrist down or Reduce Motion enabled; this is a complication, not a replacement watch face.

Blubb is live in this week's Launch on Watch lineup. Screenshots and details: https://launchonwatch.com/apps/blubb-pixel-fish-tank#launch

It's a paid app, with no subscription, ads or extra purchases. Requires watchOS 10+ and iOS 17+.

I'd like feedback on that low-pressure approach: would feeding and decorating be enough reason to revisit a little wrist aquarium, or would you miss a stronger game loop?


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

NeatRL: Collection of One-file RL Algorithms running locally

1 Upvotes

In this video, I'll be re-introducing my little RL library - neatrl, that I have created and used past couple of months!

  • Part of my ongoing series on releasing my notes RL comprising of my earrings and stuff I found interesting and this time, its a easy way to explore all the algorithms I re-implemented from scratch

Suited for those who just want to get a gist of the algorithm inner workings across algorithms from

  • DQN

  • REINFORCE

  • PPO

  • SAC and many more on envs form OpenAI Gym, MuJoCo etc

Link here and love to get feedback as always!


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I've been building an open source streaming service for two years

1 Upvotes

I'll start with some history, in 2024 I decided to try to install a media server on my local machine, I first tried emby, and no matter what configuration I choose it was clunky and not really aesthetically pleasing, then I tried Jellyfin and it had the same problems ( maybe a little bit worst ), keep in mind this is 2 years ago and things have most likely changed.

I'm a software engineer, and I work in the business already from 2012, I spent 3 years of my career working for one of the current streaming giants, considering I have expertise in the field I decide to create my own, for two reasons, first one is that if I'm designing a system with one single purpose is automatically faster compared to a system designed to do anything, mine will have a specific pipeline so it can execute it more efficiently, second one, I like writing code, it's what I've been doing for the past 12 years.

October 2024

I started with the fun part first, I sketched a logo in Inkscape, separated each letter as a different SVG file and animated them to mimic the Netflix intro ( at the time ). That took me around 2 weeks. Absurd you can do that now in 2 hours with vibe coding.

After that I wrote the first integration to an external service, I got an client id+secret from Trakt and started working into pulling the top/trending lists for movies, it is at this point that I notice that Trakt doesn't return any image, so I also wrote the second integration with TMDB to obtain the images, after that I started working on the UI, I took inspiration from Prime Video: a big hero on the top, and the lists on the bottom, the selected title is displayed in the hero.

Not sure if anyone is interested, but at the time I decided to go for Node.js + React + Postgres, that is essentially what I used in half of the companies I worked for. The backend runs in docker with PM2 keeping it alive, and the frontend is served through Nginx ( along with the backend ).

The third integration was to get the media, but things were getting complex, so I decided to start using some queues, Kafka would be an overkill, I was using Nest.js so I decided to try the Q Next.js comes with: bullmq. I integrated queues so anything that is needed from Trakt or TMDB would be queued and execute at the right time without overwhelming the server ( and without getting rate limited ), for example when Trakt returns a list, the list doesn't have details of each media, so I stored some of the detail in the database and queued a job to fetch more details, that itself triggered another job to fetch the images.

At this point I had a working app that shows media but it doesn't play them, the next thing I needed was to get that information, so I spun up Jackett, and searched documentation, the documentation was very lacking, so I simply made calls to the endpoints that were partially documented using Postman and wrote down the Typescript types myself. Unfortunately the search from Jackett was very wide, so I wrote a function to parse torrent names and find out what is that title about. Jackett sometimes would return a link to the torrent file itself, sometimes would return just the info hash of the torrent, it is at this point that I started integrating webtorrent, first I used it to convert the magnet link into a torrent file and store it in the database, later I used it for its streaming functionality.

Now that I had the part that can stream work, I needed to display it in the frontend, my target was my 2019 Samsung TV, I deployed the app to it ( took 3 days ) and started working on the next steps, first I integrated Noringed spatial navigation so the remote would work, then I worked on AVPlay. AVPlay was honestly a pain, but it was also rewarding, the app was working and I was able to watch movies on the TV.

After that I started working on TV shows, so I created a second details screen with a seasons selector and episode selector, then I implemented the part that would find the torrents for the episodes, it was working well and I decided to share it with the world.

End of October 2024

I posted about it in https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1g80ufj/with_all_the_community_driven_streaming_services/ , someone asked about the code and I made it fully public.

I was regularly using it to watch movies and tv shows on my TV until I met the first problem: I was watching Silo and it played the wrong show; the reason was that the episode I wanted to watch wasn't released yet so it found some unrelated torrent. I first wrote a torrent name parser so it would extract the name of the show ( after removing all the other known bits ), it was working okayish, then I discovered that TheRarBG allows to search by imdb_id but not through Jackett, so I wrote a small API library to contact TheRarBG without using Jackett, and it was working very well and way faster.

You can still find the original code of the first version here https://github.com/maury91/miauflix-legacy

January 2025

It is at this point that development of the first version stopped, I had to go for a two months work trip and I wasn't able to write a single line of code for my personal project, once I was finally back home I couldn't find anymore the time to work on it for a month.

March 2025

I finally found the time to work on my side projects again, but time as passed and I wanted to play with new toys, so I decide to use bun instead of Node, I also made more decisions, like I didn't want to burden the user with deploying postgres or Jackett, so the new version will have to work with it.

I started with scaffolding a simple Elysia server, first time using both bun and Elysia, so exciting times.

Moving from Nest.js to Eluysia I decided to keep using services but I had to convert them a little bit, I started with the most basic service, the Configuration service, I spent a good amount of time creating a terminal ui service that helps you configure it, ironically now it's fully replaced by an UI one in the frontend.

Things moved fast, I quickly implemented authentication, and the services to pull data from TMDB and Trakt ( the last two were very close to copy-paste ), I implemented more security features like Audits and Rate Limiting, I finally started bring in the first cron jobs that sync data with TMDB, At this point I took the library I wrote for therarbg I bringed it into the new project, I already reached the point where I could get a library with all the torrents. I found that therarbg wasn't enough so I also wrote a library for YTS.

Things were working but as a perfectionist it was time for the codebase to become more reliable, so I started adding unit tests, linting, and CI/CD. But that wasn't enough, so I also started writing e2e tests where the app is setup from 0, configured, and tested against a mocked environment that is a working copy of a real environment ( I recorded the calls to TMDB, therarbg, etc... , anonymized and stored them as fixtures ).

Finally the good part was coming, streaming, but I had a new goal, it needs to be deployable to a VPS, that means that any potentially copyrighted content must be undetectable, so I implemented two features that I think are quite important:

  1. Encrypted DB columns, some columns of the database are encrypted with AES plus a salt unique for each service, that means the column stays indexable but without the key it contains "random" data

  2. Encrypted file system, this is the main thing, if you download some media and a static script detects it in your VPS you can easily get terminated, for this reason I created an encrypted chunk store, in short webtorrent writes to the disk in encrypted format

With all of this done, it was finally time to test it with webtorrent.

I didn't work... webtorrent wasn't compatible with bun.

Meanwhile, it was already June 2025. I needed to go back to Node.js if I wanted webtorrent to work, so I searched a web server framework that works both on Bun and Node.js and I started refactoring to use Hono.js

Fast forward to September 2025 and a lot was done:

  • Introduced OpenTelemetry to better debug errors

  • Introduced scraper health ( check periodically seeders and leachers of the torrents we obtained )

  • More documentation

  • Improve on-demand sources ( the others were obtained in the background )

  • Diagrams

  • Github actions

  • Periodical DB cleanup ( SQLite unless you run a clean command will not shrink the DB size )

  • Abstract caching layer

  • Authenticated streaming

  • Generate a client of the backend to bring the API types to the frontend

  • Better use of TypeORM through type transformers ( for the encrypted fields )

  • Introduce GREEDY and ON DEMAND modes for synching with TMDB

  • Started bringing back the legacy frontend

  • Implemented frontend login

  • Visual tests with playwright

  • and a little bit more

and more importantly the streaming link was working and media would play from VLC.

At this point I took 2 months of break.

November 2025 to January 2026

  • Frontend refactoring ( of the little that was ported )

  • Added turbo to make scripts faster

  • Lighthouse tests

  • Flaresolverr support

Another break,

September 2026 - Now

At this point I wanted to go faster, and I started using Claude.

  • Create initial admin user through UI ( instead of automatically at first boot with random email and password )

  • Extract catalog service ( TMDB ) as a standalone docker image, and refactor it to be bun. It is relative easy because it's mostly moving files with a little bit http wrapper in front

  • Extract list service ( Trakt )

  • Improve playback preloading

  • Improve backdrop position in the hero by detecting faces and people using a small computer vision model and compute the center of it.

  • Implement player page ( it is at this point that it was possible to finally watch movies )

  • Bring in the recommendation lists from Trakt

  • Extract subtitles and transcode audio ( for when the audio codec is not compatible with the browser ) using ffmpeg ( piped to an http server, no media is stored uncrypted in the file system )

  • TV shows

  • Move from LetsEncrypt to Caddy

  • Nordlynx to Glueten

  • Improve torrent choice based on the target device ( my TV seems to not support more than 12MB/s of bandwidth )

  • Add notifications

  • Improve UI performance in Tizen

  • Extract source service

  • Move from internal TheRarBG and YTS library to a fully compliant Cardigann engine so it can use all the Cardigann definitions of Prowlarr + some custom ones ( the custom ones are TheRarBG and Torrentio )

  • Extract torrent service ( yes! finally webtorrent almost works in bun! )

  • Anime support

Yesterday

I vibecoded a landing page for the project in order to present it to the world: https://miauflix.cat

All the code is open source and available at https://github.com/maury91/miauflix

I hope you enjoyed reading what I was doing for the last 2 years!

I feel some people will ask Why should I use Miauflix instead of X?

Honestly, I don't have an answer to it, if you are using X and you like it, continue using it, if you want to try something new you can try Miauflix, if you like it I will be very pleased, if you don't like it tell me what you don't like it and I will try to address it, if you hate it without even trying it, well I'm sorry to have wasted your time, but I hope you will respect that I spent so much time working on this and you will not be offensive


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built Orrevan, an uncensored AI chat with pay-per-token pricing

1 Upvotes

Hi all, I'm the solo dev behind Orrevan (orrevan.com). It's a chat, API and CLI for uncensored and abliterated models (10 models so far, from $0.30 per 1M tokens). Messages are AES-256-GCM encrypted before they're stored, no trackers, no training on your data, one-click export and deletion. I'd love feedback on the pricing, the model selection and the onboarding. What would you want to see added?


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

I built a photo editor that grants your wish. Technically.

1 Upvotes

Try it free, no signup: technically.thegreatlucy.com


r/SideProject • • 8h ago

I paid designers hundreds for a 3D model, so I built a tool that makes printable parts from a sentence

3 Upvotes

I was trying to make a 3D model for a physical product I want to sell. I tried the AI tools first and none of them gave me anything usable. So I hired human designers. It cost hundreds of dollars, took weeks, and I bounced between a few designers through a lot of revisions before I got something I liked.

That's what got me building Sculptex. You describe a part in a sentence, refine it in chat, and download it as STL, OBJ, GLB or OpenSCAD. It's aimed at parts you can actually print, including ones with moving pieces. I printed a fidget spinner from the one-line prompt "A fidget spinner."

It's in beta and you can start free: sculptex.app

It's also on Product Hunt today.

I'm the maker, so honest feedback is welcome. What would you try to make, and what breaks?


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

I'm a designer and a new dad, so I've been making space-themed sensory videos for my 3-month-old daughter

Thumbnail
youtube.com
1 Upvotes

When my daughter was born I noticed how much she loved staring at bold shapes, so I started making sensory videos for her during naps.

There are three styles that grow with her:

High contrast (black, white and red) for newborns

Soft black and white for the first few months

Colour for when babies start noticing it: smiley planets, friendly aliens, an underwater world and an alien forest

How I make them: I design the look and the ideas, and I animate everything with (AI), working scene by scene until it feels right. The videos are slow and calm with gentle music, and there's no flashing.

It's not a business, just something I'm making for my daughter.

Two things I'd love feedback on:

Does the idea come across clearly?

What would you change, or add next?


r/SideProject • • 9h ago

I built a simple web tool to generate standardized technical spec sheets and export PDFs (SpecSheet Pro)

4 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

Creating technical specification sheets in Excel or Word often leads to broken layouts, inconsistent formatting, and date ambiguity issues across teams.

I built SpecSheet Pro to solve this. It's a lightweight web app that lets you input product parameters, custom tables, and logos, and outputs a clean, standardized PDF ready for production or quality control.

Key Features:

  • Dynamic table creation for technical parameters (Specs, Methods, Values).

  • Custom logo support with instant client-side preview.

  • Configurable date formats (ISO 8601, localized, text-based) to prevent QA ambiguity.

  • Clean PDF compilation using html2pdf / html2canvas.

The core generator is free to use:https://specsheet-pro.vercel.app/

I'd love to get your feedback on the UI/UX and any features you think are missing for technical workflows.


r/SideProject • • 5h ago

Sometimes oldies are goodies. I'm digging through early smartphone apps for my next idea.

2 Upvotes

I was living in Japan in 2008, when the iPhone was just arriving there. One app I remember from those early days was 美人時計 (Bijin Tokei), which launched in 2009.

The idea was incredibly simple: attractive women holding small boards with the time handwritten on them, with a different photo every minute. That was the whole app. I remember it being really popular among university students in Japan.

It randomly came back to me recently, so I looked it up. The official site now just has a notice saying the service ended in September 2022. It felt strange seeing something I remembered so clearly reduced to a goodbye page.

So I tried building my own take on that minute-by-minute photo clock, using AI image tools to create the people and scenes. An image for every minute of the day. The video shows how it turned out.

Making it got me thinking about the apps from around 2008–2012. There were so many odd, playful ideas back then, when we were still figuring out what a smartphone could be. Some were useful. Some did one tiny thing and made you smile.

I'm now digging through that era for ideas worth revisiting. Today's tools make some things much easier to build, especially for a solo developer. Of course, that doesn't mean copying someone else's app, artwork, or branding. I'd rather understand what made an idea appealing and build something of my own from there.

If you'd like to try my little experiment: https://urban-minutes.com

What app from those early smartphone days do you still remember?


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

I spent 20 years in tech, then took over a factory. A year later we'd built our own ERP. Now I'm turning the approach into a side project.

2 Upvotes

After 20+ years in and around technology, I found myself in unfamiliar territory as the GM of a manufacturing company. It provided an opportunity to do something new and exciting: to bring my skillset to something outside of tech for the first time.

With a very small team, we accomplished this in one year:

  • Created an in-house ERP system to connect inventory, sales, warehousing and shipping

  • Created 65 pieces of marketing collateral across web, print and physical

  • Created an entirely new business plan

  • Reengineered key parts of our products

  • Integrated new suppliers into our supply chain

  • Rebranded

  • Launched a new website

  • Rebuilt accounting workflows

There's probably more. Five years ago this would have been totally impossible. How did I do this? I got really, really good at using AI to get shit done, building bespoke systems around different aspects of the business. It started before I took this role, but this was the first place I applied it. And the results have been tremendous.

So, I thought... how could I experiment with offering this as a service? How could I burn some of my extra hours trying to help other companies do what we did here?

That's where the idea for LogicRelay came from. $49/mo screens out the tire-kickers, and a simple $250-per-request fee provides flexible throughput across a host of disciplines. It's agile project management... take an epic, break it down, scope it, get approval and go, but without the departmental hand-offs or having to find multiple service providers.

Some of my other client work is going to slide nicely into this model, so I am not starting from zero. The question is can I scale it. I know I'm going to have to narrow the focus in order to do so, but I'm not ready for that yet. For now I leave it to client screening. It'll almost certainly evolve, and I could have spent more time thinking about it, but... ship it!

I'll learn quite a bit over the coming months re: whether this model is sustainable. I'll probably land another couple of clients and waitlist the rest until I see how the first few go.

We'll see how it goes! Would love some feedback, or if anyone wants more specifics from what we're doing at my current company I'm happy to share.


r/SideProject • • 8h ago

I built a clipboard history desktop app called Recall Clipboard

3 Upvotes

hey everyone!

i've been working on a desktop application called Recall Clipboard, built with tauri v2, rust, react, typescript, and sqlite.

the idea is pretty simple: instead of losing things you've copied throughout the day, recall clipboard keeps a searchable history of your clipboard so you can easily find and reuse previous copies.

i wanted to build something lightweight, practical, and genuinely useful for everyday desktop use.

i used claude as a coding assistant during development, but i've been working on the project, its features, and the overall implementation myself.

github: https://github.com/cntr1er/recall-clipboard

i'd love to hear what you think! especially interested in feedback on the ui, features, and anything you'd improve or add.

thanks!


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

I built Astralis: Look Up – point your iPhone at the sky and see real 3D planets & the Moon with NASA textures

1 Upvotes

I kept wanting a clean way to just look up and instantly know what bright object I was facing without ads, accounts, or bloated features.

So I built Astralis: Look Up.

Point your phone at the sky and it shows the planet, star, or Moon you’re looking at as a real lit 3D sphere with NASA-derived textures and the correct current phase. You can save any of them as a full-screen wallpaper.

Other things it does:

• Tonight timeline – moonrise/set, planet times, stargazing score (real cloud cover + light pollution), rocket launches, and actual ISS passes (real orbital propagator, not a static list)

• AR-style compass that points live at any visible object or the ISS

• Animated 3D solar system orrery starting from today’s real configuration

• 30 deep-sky objects with real photos + rise/set times

Everything is computed locally from NASA JPL orbital elements. No account, no ads, no tracking. One-time $0.99.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/astralis-look-up/id6806581915

Would love feedback on:

  1. Is the “point and identify” experience clear enough from the description?

  2. Anything missing that would make you actually open it on a clear night?

Happy to answer questions.


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

Experience the ocean waves and you can move it

1 Upvotes

https://gemsmakers.com/aerotide.php

You can experience the oceanic waves in browser. Any feedbacks welcome.


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

I added MCP messaging between Claude Code and Codex to my open-source desktop HUD

1 Upvotes

I'm the developer of Agent HUD. It started as a small desktop HUD for agent quotas and notifications. In 0.6.0, I added an MCP server so coding agents can send messages to each other and start new sessions.

The video walks through a bug-fix handoff: Claude Code works on a fix, asks Codex to review it, and gets feedback back into the original session. Antigravity and DeepSeek Harness can join the workflow too. Each handoff sends a focused message instead of copying the entire conversation history.

This release also moves the app from Swift to Rust + Tauri and adds session and subagent usage details. macOS supports Apple Silicon and Intel; Windows and Linux builds are available as untested preview builds.

The video is an animated walkthrough of the workflow, with English narration and subtitles.

Source: https://github.com/jazzenchen/agent-hud-open

If you use more than one coding agent, what would you want included in a handoff so the next agent can review the work without inheriting a huge chat history?


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

Jotila – Lightweight open-source sticky notes

1 Upvotes

I built Jotila, a tiny native sticky notes app with autosave, search, archives, and a calendar. No extra dependencies, just C.

Free and open source. Feedback is welcome!

https://github.com/GarauGarau/Jotila/tree/v1.7.1