r/WeirdSideProjects

got tired of my micro-managing department lead hovering near my cubicle for 10 minutes every afternoon making passive-aggressive small talk about sprint velocity.

i threw together an ESP32 micro-controller, an ultrasonic distance sensor, and a tiny Twilio SMS script. taped the sensor under my desk partition facing the aisle. when it detects a stationary body standing within 4 feet of my desk for longer than 20 seconds, it sends an automated webhook to my phone that triggers a hyper-realistic ringing incoming call screen. i pick up, say "sorry man I have to take this emergency client call", and he walks away every single time.

I was getting so sick of third-party recruiters hitting my LinkedIn inbox with "urgent 6-month contract" roles that pay terrible rates.
I hooked up a python script using a LinkedIn API wrapper. If an inbound message contains keywords like "urgent," "contract," or "rockstar," it automatically triggers a reply.
The first reply is standard: "Thanks for reaching out. My current base is $350k, can your client beat that?" If they actually reply to that, the script escalates. "Actually my landlord just raised rent, I need $600k and a company jet ski." If they reply AGAIN, it just starts sending them Wikipedia links to random medieval battles.
It’s completely useless spaghetti code, but checking my inbox is actually entertaining now.

I am terrible at keeping in touch with family. I fed a language model a bunch of specific childhood memories and inside jokes about my mom. hooked it up to twilio. every tuesday at noon it texts her something nice and completely unique. she called me crying last week thanking me for being so thoughtful. I feel incredibly guilty but the code works flawlessly.

I have a bad habit of sending typos or saying the wrong thing in the main engineering channel and panicking. I bought a cheap usb foot pedal on amazon and mapped it to a custom macro. if I stomp on it, the script instantly hits the up arrow, backspace, and enter keys to delete the last sent message. saved me from complaining about my hangover to the director of marketing yesterday.

some enterprise WFH tracking tools monitor typing cadence variance to detect whether an employee is actively drafting documents or copy-pasting text from ChatGPT.

wrote a lightweight Chrome extension that intercepts DOM keydown events when typing inside Google Docs or Jira. it introduces subtle, randomized 15-millisecond human micro-delays between keystrokes and occasionally injects a backspace-correction sequence every 40 words. makes AI-generated code or text paste logs look 100% like a tired human developer manually typing at 55 WPM.