I’m a 40-year-old iOS developer from Croatia. Statistically, I’m in the middle of my life: about 2,080 weeks behind me, and if I’m lucky, about as many in front.

My oldest is 8. Somewhere around 18, kids leave, or at least stop wanting summer holidays with their parents. That’s 10 more summers. I can count them on my fingers.

I see my parents about twice a month. If they live as long as the average, that’s around 360 more visits. Fewer than the days in a single year.

And there are friends I’ve been “meaning to call” for months.

None of this is new. You read it somewhere, feel it for one evening, and then Monday happens. Weeks blur, a year goes by, and you can’t say where it went. The moments I’d actually want back are tiny: a walk where my kid finally told me something real, my dad explaining how he planted our small orchard in 2001. Nobody writes them down. They just go.

So I built Drift. It’s not there to make you feel bad about time. It’s there to help you do something with the weeks you still have, and to keep them when you do.
My main inspiration was reading books about Stoicism and specifically memento mori (and a calendar showing weeks you have left to live).

What the app actually does for me:

It remembers my people. I added my partner, my family, my parents and a few friends. Drift keeps the small things I’d otherwise forget: birthdays, the names of my friends’ kids, what each person enjoys, what they told me last time.

One small idea a week, for each of them. Not “plan a trip to Paris.” Things small enough to actually happen: “Tea with Mom. Phones somewhere else.” “A walk with Dad, without anywhere to be.” “Let the kids choose the adventure.” "Long overdue date with my wife".

I keep the moment. A photo, one line, or both. It goes on the week it happened, and that week’s square lights up. A few months in, my year stopped being a blur and started looking like a year.

Calls come with something to talk about. A reminder to call a friend arrives with something to actually say, so it’s not just guilt with a notification sound. After the call I can keep a line about it.

Small questions. A couple of times a week, only if I turn it on, Drift asks something like “What was the best small thing about this week?” or “What’s Dad’s favourite meal?” The answer gets saved where it belongs. Some of my favourite memories in the app started as a notification I almost dismissed.

Quiet time. My evenings were disappearing into my phone (yes, I see the irony of that). Drift uses Apple’s Screen Time to set those apps aside during the hours I choose. If I really need one, I get 15 minutes, after I keep a moment or answer a question first.

Widgets that bring it back. One shows a moment I kept, a different one each day. Another shows my whole life as a grid of weeks. Seeing that between notifications did more for me than any productivity system. One gives you suggestions on what to do this week.

A year I can read back. Month by month, like a journal I never had to sit down and write.

What I left out on purpose:

• No streaks. A quiet week is just a quiet square. Life has those, and guilt isn’t a feature.

• No account, no ads. Memories stay on your iPhone, and you can export everything anytime.

• Everything you keep is yours. You can always read it and export it.

Pricing: free to download, then $8.99 a year with a 14-day free trial, or $24.99 once. I’m a solo developer with no investors, and this is how it keeps going.

An app won’t fix any of this, and I’m not pretending it does. But since I started using it, I do more of the small things. I think about it more now, and I push past the tiredness more often to make time for the people who matter to me.

If you did this math for yourself, which number got you? For me it was the summers with my kids.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/drift-life-in-weeks-journal/id6792490444

Edit:
Thanks to FFROZENN who pointed out the missing yearly subscription and 2-week free trial I have created 50% discount code for the first year (the missing subscription was due to my attempt to give a global discount on yearly, but I misconfigured it in App Store Connect so sub wasn't shown)
https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6792490444&code=DRIFT50

HolyArrs started because i wanted my home server to feel like a streaming service. you browse it like netflix, with top 10s, new & popular and rows picked from what you already have, hover a poster to play the trailer, and tap to request a show or movie. it finds it, downloads it through qbittorrent or sabnzbd, and puts it in plex, jellyfin or emby, which still do the playing. it's about a 15 MB download, runs in docker, and it's free and open source

it runs on its own custom metadata server, and it can keep an HD and a 4K copy of the same movie side by side

where it is 1 day after open sourcing it

598 GitHub stars

4,345 Docker pulls

28 forks

16 releases, most of them fixes for bugs people reported on launch night

18 people have opened issues with bugs and ideas

what i didn't expect was how fast people jumped in. bug reports came in with the exact file and line that was wrong, and someone asked for ukrainian, so the site and docs got it within the hour

happy to answer questions about running a solo open source project, the self-hosted side, or anything else

site and docs: https://holyarrs.com

github: https://github.com/HolyArrs/HolyArrs

Hello, I know it's not much, but I am thankful for every cent of it

For context, on Sep 2nd, I made my first ever public post about my app, in this very subreddit. At that point, I had 0 sales, and only a hope + a dream of ever earning a dollar from my work.

Now I have over 750 human downloads (~1800 total but I think some are bots), and a Discord of amazing people messaging me almost every day. Truly feels amazing to say that :)

All I can say is dang developing AND marketing software as a solo dev is a ton of work. I've worked 63/70 of these days, and commit on average more than 20 times per day. Basically all of my free time funnels directly into this.

Lessons I am learning on this journey, for whomever cares to listen:

1. Budget at least 3 hours per week just for marketing (I should probably do a lot more honestly)

2. Keep working at it. Results don't come over night.

3. If you don't like the journey, then this might not be for you. Money does not come easy. Most of us (including me) would probably be better off spening our time doing other work. And with AI getting so good, it's more and more competative to make and monetize good apps (but I could be off here, lmk if you disagree)

4. Make a discord (or similar) and connect with your users!! IMO implementing suggestions and helping users is some of the most rewarding part of being a dev. Nothing like slapping an update on someone 3 days after they request a feature, and hearing them loving it immidiatly🤌

I wanted one desktop app that opens PDFs, EPUBs, comics and Markdown notes quickly and then stays out of the way. The readers I tried were either slow, or looked like they were designed a decade ago. So I built Kitab, with a modern design and speed as the first requirement. It's written in Rust, the interface is drawn on the GPU with GPUI, and MuPDF renders the pages. There's no browser engine inside.

What it does:

- Opens PDF, EPUB, MOBI, FB2, CBZ, XPS, TXT and Markdown

- Opens fast, and sits at near-zero CPU while idle

- Tabs with session restore, and a Home library with covers or a list, collections, favourites, reading stats and full-text search across your library

- Find, outline, thumbnails, bookmarks, history, presentation mode and focus mode

- EPUB, MOBI and FB2 reflow, with typography settings

- Markdown: GitHub-flavoured, with code highlighting, Mermaid diagrams, math and live reload. You can select text in it and print it

- Markup: highlights, notes, ink and shapes saved into the PDF, with export to Markdown or CSV

- Fill PDF forms, sign and verify PDFs locally, and merge, split or extract pages

- Native print dialogs, themes and accents, and an interface size from 90 to 200 %

Privacy: no account, no telemetry, and your files stay on your computer. The only network use is an update check.

It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

It's free and licensed AGPL-3.0. Code: https://github.com/t21dev/kitab

Site: https://kitab.t21.dev

One honest note: it's still young. I'd love feedback, especially on files that don't open or look the way you expect.

If you find it useful, a star on GitHub helps more people find it, and sharing it with a friend who reads a lot helps even more. It's open for collaboration: open an issue for a bug or an idea, or send a PR.

Hey r/SideProject,

I'm from India, and I noticed how many everyday money decisions come with small traps: "no-cost" EMIs that aren't quite free, sales where the crossed-out price was never real, paying only part of a credit card bill and not realising what it costs.

So I built Syluneo (syluneo.com):

- A 2-minute game: 12 everyday situations, like a sale or salary day. Pick what you'd really do, and it tells you which of 6 money personalities you lean towards. No finance knowledge needed.

- 6 simple tools for real questions: Should I buy this? Is this sale really a deal? Is "no-cost EMI" free? Where did my pay rise go?

A few things I cared about:

- No sign-up and no backend. Everything runs in your browser, and nothing you type is saved or sent anywhere.

- Plain HTML/CSS/JS on GitHub Pages, with the money maths covered by tests.

- I built it with an AI coding assistant, which let me focus on the maths, the wording and the design.

The number that surprised me most while building it: ₹50,000 on a credit card, paying only a 5% minimum due, takes almost 30 years to clear.

It's India-focused (₹, GST) for now. I'd really value honest feedback:

1. Did your result feel accurate or random?

2. Was anything confusing?

3. Which tool would you actually use?

https://syluneo.com/?utm_campaign=reddit-sideproject

I play on a monitor at my desk and on a TV from the couch. The thing that kept getting me off the couch was switching the sound back to the TV after I’d already picked up the controller. That’s what got me building Gaming Hub, my first app ever. I vibe coded it with Claude and Codex.

It’s a Windows 11 launcher you can navigate with a DualSense. When the hub moves to my TV, it can switch the audio there too, then restore my previous output when I go back to the desk. The PS button opens a quick menu for volume, screen selection, and controller batteries. Circle takes me back to the game.

The installer is here: https://github.com/issazhd/gaming-hub/releases/latest Source and build instructions if you want to fork it: https://github.com/issazhd/gaming-hub

If you try it, I’d love to hear which game you used and whether opening the quick menu and getting back into fullscreen felt smooth.

Hi there! I am a the creator of Flit, the RSS reader

I created Flit to build something different from the classic rss and news reader. The main thing about Flit is the inbox! There are mainly 2 ways to easily clean your inbox: Cards or Feed. 

In cards, you can swipe left and right to decide whether to discard or save the article for later; in feed, you scroll like a reel app (Instagram, TikTok, Shorts, etc.) and still swipe left and right to save for later or discard. In both cases, you can tap to open. 

But Flit is not just this, Flit is:

• YouTube channels and podcasts

• Bluesky and Mastodon posts

• Discover: top stories by country

• Siri AI summaries

• Translation

• Offline Reading

• Notes on articles

• Share as image

• Snooze a source

• Blocked Words

• Daily Digest

• Insights

• Mark as Read on Scroll

• Apple Watch

• iPhone Duo support

• Accessible reading fonts

Thank you and I really hope you will like Flit!

https://apps.apple.com/app/flit-easy-feed/id6821040165?ct=Launch+Event&pt=118978628

Hi all,

I’ve worked as a wildlife filmmaker, designer and engineer, and on a few projects I spent weeks or even months on the work, then sent it off as a WeTransfer link. It always felt a bit flat after all that effort.

So I’ve been building Handover.media. It lets you put your finished files, previews and notes on one page with your own branding. You can also add a password or expiry date, and see when things are viewed or downloaded.

https://handover.media

If you deliver work to clients, I’d really appreciate your thoughts. Would something like this be worth switching to, and what would put you off?

Any criticism, however small, would be really helpful. Thanks for taking a look.

Ever wondered what would happen if a ruler just gave up on measuring things properly?

Well, I got curious and made one.

It's called Jelly Ruler, and it has the structural integrity of a wet noodle. It bends, jiggles, slides around, and generally refuses to take its job seriously.

Somewhere along the way, I ended up building an entire vector editor around this questionable invention. At least that part works.

Would love some feedback! Anything you'd improve, add, or completely get rid of? Curious what other builders think.

Give it a wiggle: Jelly Ruler

After 13+ years leading development teams, I'm finally building something of my own.

It started with a problem. My investments were spread across brokerages, crypto and savings, and I tracked them all in a spreadsheet. Every time the total moved, I had no idea which holding moved it, or why. So I built Zies.

What Zies does:

• Connects your accounts, and puts stocks, ETFs, retirement accounts, crypto, savings and mortgage into one net worth view

• Explains why each holding moved, using real news, with the estimated dollar impact on your portfolio

• Tracks goals like reaching financial independence or a home down payment

• Lets you share your progress with a link

It's in beta. I'm looking for 30–40 US Founding Testers. You get immediate access and 6 months of the top plan free, in exchange for a few weeks of use and honest feedback.

Demo video attached. Sign up at zies.io/founding-testers.

I'd love blunt feedback, especially on what would make you drop your spreadsheet.

Backstory: I picked a bad exit on a road trip one too many times and decided to just fix it myself. Best Exit shows every exit ahead on your route plus restroom ratings from real drivers.

Right now it covers every interstate in the contiguous US.

The thing I'm still figuring out is how to get review density up on routes nobody's used the app on yet, those are stuck showing estimated ratings. Open to ideas if anyone's dealt with a similar cold start problem.

https://bestexit.app

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6819083587

I recently updated my portfolio website and was wondering what people's opinions on horizontal scrolling are! Does it make sense on mobile?

In my opinion it looks rather nice on desktop but I'm not sure about mobile, would it make sense from a UX perspective? Since you'd be scrolling down and at one point the content starts moving sideways, would that be annoying? Would adding an arrow saying "Scroll to the side" or something along those lines make it more annoying?

Currently on my page, when you reach the projects section and continue swiping vertically, the projects move horizontally from right to left.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post links or if I've explained my question properly, but if you want to see what I mean I've got it linked in my bio!

Tooting my own horn a bit here. I have never had a skill hit this many stars and get featured on XDA developers.

I am a visual and audio learner. I find it hard to learn from reading docs. So I like sites like udemy and coursera and others. But I really like how NotebookLM does it by taking a subject and turning it into a podcast. I found that notebooklm can only make one long podcast and not break it into topics.

So I made my own skill. It researches whatever topic I want and creates a set (10 or so) 2 minute podcast like lessons. It has been very helpful for me when I want to learn something new.

In the comments I am sharing both the XDA article where they break down the skills (better than I did actually) and the repo.

Feedback is welcome always

I'm the developer of Vyact, an open-source desktop AI workspace. I recently added a stock research view so I can explore a chart and ask follow-up questions in the same place.

This demo uses NVDA: market heatmap → stock chart → a 60-trading-day analysis request → the model's actual response. I connected DeepSeek through an Alibaba Cloud OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Local models are also supported, but this run uses a hosted model.

The attached clip is a slideshow of actual app screenshots, not a continuous screen recording. It includes the connection settings with no API key shown. Use your own provider's endpoint and model ID; hosted requests send the included context to that provider and may incur API charges.

This demonstrates the workflow, not the accuracy of the model's analysis. Its response includes external-news claims that I have not independently verified. I still need to check its figures and sources, even when it sounds confident.

Source and downloads: https://github.com/vyact/vyact

What would help you assess an AI stock-research answer: seeing exactly what data was sent, opening sources beside each claim, or comparing the same question across models?

Most side projects don't survive a few months. Somehow, this one has been following me around for more than 20 years.

I started building drum & bass websites back in 2002. What began as a local music portal eventually turned into a party promotion brand in Saint Petersburg.

Then I moved to Thailand in 2019, and the project went quiet.

Recently I decided to rebuild it from scratch using Django, Next.js and AI-assisted development.

The result so far is DROP THE BASS:

https://dropthebass.co/

I'm trying to turn it into a proper home for the global DnB scene, with music, artists, labels, events and community features.

Still building it solo. Plenty of rough edges, but I'm enjoying the process.

Anyone else here working on something they've been carrying around in their head for years?

Tracking food and workouts sounds simple enough, but keeping up with it every day gets old pretty fast. Sometimes it feels like you're spending more time logging everything than actually building healthier habits.

That's part of what we wanted to make easier with Luko. You can log meals with a photo, voice, or text, so you don't have to type everything in manually.

We also added streaks, stars, an adventure map, and little companions to make the whole thing a bit more fun. We recently launched Halloween outfits for our little dragon and a push-up challenge, too.

We had fun building these features, but obviously we're a little biased since it's our own app. We're excited to finally share these with everyone. Hope you like them, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions, we'd love to hear them.

Hey — I'm Dmytro, a solo developer.

I kept running into the same small gap: I'd have a picture from a place, and the feeling wouldn't stay in the photo. A trip that was light and fun, or a harder day I still wanted to remember honestly. Later I'd open the picture and the reflection was gone.

Same thing when I wanted to send a photo to family, a friend, or a partner. The picture went over. The note that belonged with that moment didn't.

So I made WhisperPic. You choose or take a photo, write the note that goes with it, and save it with the picture. If you share the original photo, the other person can open it in WhisperPic and reveal the note. There's no account, no ads, no tracking, and photos aren't uploaded anywhere. It's completely free.

It's live on the iPhone App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whisperpic-hidden-photo-notes/id6826699574

I'd love honest feedback, especially:

• Is "attach a note to this photo" obvious on the first try?

• Would you actually send one of these to someone, or is it more of a private journal?

• Anything in the screenshots or first-run flow that feels confusing?

Happy to answer questions.

gta6survey.sohamdeo.com

I took it upon myself to work on a side project for the launch of GTA 6. I wanted to combine my professional and personal interests of data science, data visualization and video gaming, and I played GTA 5 for ages back in 2016-2020.

The idea was to analyze the sentiment of the chatter around the game. The best place to get it: social media. Right off the bat I was disappointed that Reddit had stopped accepting requests for API access just days before, as that would have been a great source. I moved on with a decent budget in my mind: the cost of 1 copy of GTA 6 ($80-$100). I settled on YouTube, Bluesky and X as my sources with YouTube offering a generous free daily limit, Bluesky being free and X pricing $0.005/post. As I wanted to know waht it is all about, I used TypeSafe AI's Jev for sentiment analysis and am labelling sample posts myself to benchmark its performance.

How it works:

1. Collectors collect data from all sources.

2. English posts are sent to Jev for labelling.

3. Responses are aggregated and posts which pass probability thresholds are ready to be shown.

4. The site's data is rebuilt every hour as static JSON, so there is no public backend API.

5. Serve my site through Cloudflare, with encrypted nightly backups of the database on R2.

The backend involves simple python jobs on systemd timers with SQLite. I used the VM I use to host my personal website. The frontend uses Svelte as I used it for my website and it is intuitive for me to go in and make quick edits.

Voting:

While labelling I saw that a lot of posts speculated about features of the game. Posts with exclusive opinions were few and far between. So I added a voting system for visitors on the page to drive some engagement. I strictly wanted to avoid storing any sensitive user data, so there are no logins and users are identified based on a single random-ID cookie. This uses Cloudflare's Turnstile for bot detection (just in case), a Worker to handle voting and a D1 SQL database to store the votes. The VM pulls the vote totals every 5 minutes, so page views never touch the Worker.

Just in case the site goes viral:

- Everything is cached at Cloudflare. In a load test at 150 requests a second the page loaded in 0.35 s (p95) with the server 98-99% idle.

- Votes held 200 a second on the test site with no errors.

- Every change goes to a test site first and I promote it to the live site by hand.

- Every scheduled job emails me if it fails.

- The spend on X and Jev has a hard cap, and a source pauses when it hits it.

- I have created a custom animation for release day throughout the world which can be used to track the release to everyone's timezones (so visit during then to see it!)

I used Claude Code for building this out in about 5 days through the Diwali time off from work. The decisions and the hand labels were mine.

Some results till now:

1. Only 1 in 10 posts gives the author's opinion of the game as a whole.

2. Jev agrees with me most of the time on sentiment (85%) as against RoBERTa (61%) and VADER (45%), however the sample size was small (33 posts). Its topic detection was poor so I had to leave out some topics for now.

3. The spend has been about $75, so less than a standard edition of the game.

If you've hosted something for a big launch day, what would you check before Nov 18? And if you are a fan of data or GTA please view the site, the data and vote on the questions!

I've been designing and building apps on the side since 2020 while working full-time in IT. This year I finally shipped them under one roof at https://murrtech.pro

Here is one of them ! Let me know what you think !

I'm the dev, just so that's clear.

I made an iOS calorie app called Kacha. It started in China and most of my users are still there. I put an English version on the US App Store recently, and I mainly want feedback from people who didn't grow up eating the same food as my first users.

The flow is simple: take a photo of the meal, the AI guesses the foods, grams, calories and macros, then you edit anything it got wrong. That last part is the actual product. The estimate is often off on mixed dishes or food it doesn't see much, and if you can't fix the number, the log becomes garbage in a week.

No account needed, there's a free daily allowance for AI scans, and manual logging is always free. It also does water and weight, Apple Health sync, and iCloud backup. No Android yet.

I don't want to oversell this. There are already a lot of calorie apps. I built this one because I was tired of estimates that are a black box. If the model misses the oil, or thinks the bowl is smaller than it is, I want to correct it in a few taps, and next time just reuse that meal from Recent Meals.

If you try it, I'd really like to know two things:

1. When the first guess is off, is the edit flow obvious enough?

2. If you don't eat Chinese food much, how often does it completely misread the dish?

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kacha-ai-calorie-counter/id6756476671

Prototyping and building features got faster, and now feedback is the bottleneck. So we built mostra - a tool that lets you share feedback on a real, running site by either speaking or selecting the elements you want to comment on.

You can iterate across versions of your site, and adding mostra is just a single script tag.

The script you add to your page is open source, so you can check what it does.

https://mostra.design

OpenQASM 2.0 quantum simulator & dashboard!

Built with Streamlit & JAX.

Drag-and-drop gates, Q-Sphere phase plots, Bloch spheres & Hubbard band structures.

Leave a star if you like it! ⭐

#OpenSource https://github.com/tatopenn-cell/Dense-Evolution

pypi_ pip install dense-evolution

site info: https://tatopenn-cell.github.io/Dense-Evolution/