r/sideprojects

I am seriously considering switching from IT to carpentry

I've been in IT for about 5-6 years now, have undergrad in CompSci and masters in Quant. I have couple of side projects and a pretty stable job in a Sillicon Valley company. Looking at how world is moving, how tech is evolving and how AI is advancing, I am considering switching to some physical work, like carpentry.

Has anyone of you done sth like this - started a physical job as a side project/side hustle that actually then evolved into more profitable thing?

reddit.com

u/Common_Shake_6999 — 3 days ago

▲ 14 r/sideprojects+1 crossposts

Send a Damn Letter. I built a service where I handwrite and mail letters for people. No AI. I love writing and it's a fun hobby for me. Mailing people letters is better for the world.

I had a dumb business idea so I'm going for it. I feel like love letters, family holiday letters and honestly just writing letters to each other is dying out. I write, so I'm pretty passionate about keeping mail alive haha. I think that more people need to receive and send letters, period. I think there are so many people who grew up on text messages and facetime that they've literally MAYBE never even received a letter. Which makes me sad. I think the world would be a better place if more of us mailed letters to our friends. So I figured I'd attempt to save it, sorta. www.SendADamnLetter.com

The idea is you type the exact message and I physically write it by hand, put it in an envelope, stamp it, and mail it or I help you figure out what to say first or go with the flow. I write screenplays and journal daily so my handwriting is pretty awesome.

Just me sitting in my office writing per usual. I love getting letters in the mail and sending them to friends and family. I feel like it's dying out and I don't want to let that happen. There's no way I'm the only one that thinks about this? Lol

Either way, I'll never let writing letters fade away.

If you feel giving any feedback or talking about it. I have the link but unsure if we're allowed to do that here.

Roast the idea and website if you want. I genuinely want to know whether this is stupid enough to work. Would love your feedback especially because analog hits close to home for me.

reddit.com

u/Whateverworksout — 3 days ago

▲ 2 r/sideprojects+1 crossposts

Looking to build an App/Website where data is pulled daily and accounts can be established. What's the best website to build this?

I have a FAANG background in OPs but no coding. I am looking to build and deploy a app/website that will pull data daily making it a one stop place for my users (not trying to go to in depth)

I've looked at base44 but are there other and better options I should be looking into?

Thank you in advance

reddit.com

u/Ok_Attention9023 — 3 days ago

▲ 2 r/sideprojects+3 crossposts

Can anyone try this website out for 5 minutes?

Looking for honest feedback: what's good, what sucks, and what should I add? As a student myself I built a free speech coach for students that gives feedback on speeches and presentations and also has a bunch of other confidence/debate/public speaking features

Thanks Heaps!

https://speechmate.lovable.app

u/Chris199991 — 4 days ago

▲ 3 r/sideprojects+2 crossposts

I built a local-first Kanban board where AI agents do the work and you stay in control with less cognitive load.

I am building a Task Tracker because I wanted a task manager that gets simpler as AI gets more capable, not more complex.

Most task apps are either cloud-hosted and heavy, or plain text and bare. None were built for agents and my personal progress. So I built one that is.

What makes it different:

- Local-first : One SQLite file. No account. No cloud. No telemetry. Point it at Ollama or any local LLM engine and nothing leaves your machine.

- Native MCP support (18 tools) : Claude, Cursor, Windsurf can plan work, create tasks, log progress, and complete work directly on your board.

- Installable PWA: with reminders that work even when the app is closed.

- Approval-based Chat AI : Ask the assistant to move overdue tasks, create subtasks, or reprioritize. It proposes changes on an approval card. Untick what you don't want. Apply. Everything is checked against board rules and applied all-or-nothing. AI can't delete anything.

- Voice : Talk to the assistant and hear it answer. Hands-free.

- Timeline (Gantt) : Drag bars to reschedule, drag deadlines into start dates. Across individual projects or all of them at once.

- Low cognitive load by design.

GitHub: https://github.com/Parv17k/tasktracker

Built it because I wanted a task manager that gets simpler as AI gets more capable, not more complex.

Would love feedback and stars, especially from people working with agentic AI tools.

u/parvkhatri — 6 days ago

▲ 6 r/sideprojects+1 crossposts

One new subscriber yesterday

One new subscriber yesterday. For an indie dev, that's a big day.
YourMeal: Food tracking, no sign-up needed. Link in the replies.
What was your first "someone actually paid for this" moment?

u/Adventurous-Gift3370 — 6 days ago

▲ 2 r/sideprojects+1 crossposts

SceneMill - Video editor

I’ve been building my own video editor - SceneMill

I wanted to share something I’ve been working on for quite a while: SceneMill, a free, non-destructive desktop video editor built from scratch with C++20, Qt 6 and FFmpeg.

The goal was never to make another web-based editor or a wrapper around an existing editing application. I wanted to build an actual desktop video editor and see how far I could take it.

It currently runs fully offline, requires no account, and has no telemetry.

What actually works right now

The core workflow is already fully functional:

Import → Media Library → Timeline → Edit → Preview → Save → Reopen → Export

And the project has grown quite a bit beyond basic cutting.

Some of the things currently implemented:

Multi-track video, audio and subtitle timeline
Non-destructive editing with undo/redo
Split, trim, ripple delete, snapping, markers and In/Out ranges
Background proxy generation for heavy footage
GPU-accelerated preview with CPU fallback
Color correction, curves, color wheels and 3D LUTs
Effect stacks with keyframeable parameters
Transitions
Text and animated titles
Manual subtitles + SRT/WebVTT
Masks and motion tracking
Screen recording directly into the project
Voice-over recording with multiple takes
Audio EQ, compressor, limiter, noise gate, etc.
H.264 / H.265 / VP9 export
Up to 4K and 120 FPS export
Export queue
Autosave + crash recovery
Portable "Collect Project" workflow
Plugin system through a versioned C ABI
Optional local editing assistant for silence/scene detection

One thing I particularly care about is that the preview and export use the same rendering/effect pipeline, so what you see while editing is intended to match what gets rendered.

There are also automated tests covering a lot of the actual application workflow, including tests that interact with the real main window.

Why C++?

Honestly, part of the reason was simply:

I wanted to see if I could actually build one.

A video editor touches a ridiculous number of areas at once: media decoding, rendering, timeline state, audio, UI, caching, project persistence, export, GPU acceleration, threading, plugins...

It's been a pretty interesting rabbit hole. 😅

Current state

SceneMill has completed the core editor phase and the creative-tools phase, with most of the workflow phase implemented.

It's definitely not finished and there are still things I want to improve, but it's now at the point where I can actually use it as a real editor rather than just a prototype.

I'm currently working toward making the whole experience feel much more polished and cohesive.

I'd genuinely like to hear what other people who build software this way think.

u/Ill-Astronomer7156 — 6 days ago

▲ 3 r/sideprojects+1 crossposts

Do you actually check a reel before you share it? I (mostly) don’t, and I’m trying to change that

I fact-check primary research data for a living and forward reels with zero checking :(

A few days ago I sent someone a reel about Lindt getting sued and only wondered afterward if it was real. Checking would have meant leaving the app and searching, so I didn’t bother.

The fix I’m playing with is a simple button in your share menu. You share the reel to it and it tells you if it’s true. It doesn’t exist yet. I put up a page to see whether anyone would use it: https://pb-bookmeup.github.io/Verdict/?src=reddit

What would get you to check before you hit send?

reddit.com

u/Book_Me_Up — 6 days ago

▲ 68 r/sideprojects+1 crossposts

I made an Android app that makes your phone fart at random times

I made a small Android app called FartsApp that plays random fart sounds in the background.

The idea is basically unpredictability and anticipation — you choose the maximum number of farts per hour, press Start, and then you never know exactly when your phone is going to do it.

It:

works while the phone is locked
doesn’t interrupt active audio like YouTube, music, games, or calls
waits and plays later if the phone is busy
avoids repeating sounds until the available list has played through
works offline

The free version includes 5 sounds. There’s also a one-time Premium unlock for 100+ sounds and higher fart-per-hour settings.

Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fartsapp.app

It started as a stupid idea, but I ended up spending way more time on the background behavior and timing than I expected 😄

I’d be interested to hear if anything feels confusing or behaves strangely on different Android phones.

u/FartsApp — 10 days ago

▲ 2 r/sideprojects+1 crossposts

I built cookieless analytics that an AI agent can read — feedback on the trade-off?

I build measuremy.site. The problem I am exploring: small-site owners often want to know which source or campaign led to a signup, but do not need a complex analytics setup. They may also want Claude or Codex to inspect that data and suggest a next marketing experiment.

The project uses a lightweight, cookieless tracking script for pageviews, referrers, UTM tags, and events. An MCP connection lets an agent read site-scoped traffic, funnels, and campaign results. A person should still verify the numbers and approve any decision; an agent recommendation is a hypothesis, not proof.

The trade-off is deliberate. GA4 has much deeper reporting, audiences, and Google Ads integration, which this does not. I wrote out the comparison here: https://measuremy.site/compare/google-analytics

I would value blunt feedback: for a small site, would you keep GA4 and connect an agent through its APIs, or use a simpler cookieless tool? What one question should the agent answer reliably before this is useful?

u/No_Product_5759 — 7 days ago

▲ 5 r/sideprojects+2 crossposts

I MADE A WEBSITE ON MYSELF

For years I have been misrepresented. Teachers call me "a student." My family calls me "Matei, take out the trash." Historians have been suspiciously quiet.

I have fixed this. He bought my name as a domain and built a monument: mateidomenti.com

It covers my arrival, my conquests, my empire, and testimonials from Zeus. All claims have been independently verified (by me).

The one thing on there I actually built is Billotter, a free invoice generator that runs entirely in your browser, no signup. The rest is also true. Probably.

Feedback is welcome. Criticism will be forwarded to my legal team.

u/Substantial_Half6671 — 10 days ago

▲ 5 r/sideprojects+2 crossposts

Abstractle: describe today's word without describing it: metaphor beats definition

Wordle meets creative writing, kind of. Describe a target word without describing it literally - metaphors and illustration over objective description. You're scored on 2 metrics: Accurate (did it come through?) and Poetic (did you evoke it instead of defining it?). Free, no sign-up. Curious what people write.

abstractle.com

u/Friendly_Imps — 10 days ago

▲ 2 r/sideprojects+2 crossposts

I made an app you can use to find your perfect spawn seed or explore all 14 trillion chunks of your world for unique features. It's free, open source and runs locally - no internet required.

https://preview.redd.it/zbcxo3fyuhth1.png?width=1767&format=png&auto=webp&s=c7c20597c79d991471a3d5a1c859a88a48a108b0

I haven't tested it with other versions other than the one I have (26.4 snapshot 2), I am sure people are going to have problems with it, especially with older ones, they seem to be very different.

Seed in the example is a spawn in a pale garden: -6294100580933879548

Link to download: Seed Scout · defamation.dev

reddit.com

u/Moist-Length1766 — 10 days ago

▲ 3 r/sideprojects

I built a "countdown to retirement" app because I wanted to see how long I had until retirement

A while back I worked out the date I plan to retire, and was looking for an app that I could use as a widget. I searched quite a few apps but could not find something that would show how long I had left on a widget on my home screen, so I built an app around it.

It's called Retirement Counter. You set your retirement date and it runs a live countdown (years / months / weeks / days, ticking away), and from there a few things grew out of "I actually want to look at this every day"

It's free, and there are no ads, no account required, and no third-party tracking — everything runs on-device. There is a one-time Pro unlock which adds extra functionality, but it's not required.

So if something's missing or you think there is something that should be added, please let me know. I would really appreciate any genuine feedback.

You can try it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mikesdavis.retirement_app

u/No_Suggestion4496 — 10 days ago

▲ 2 r/sideprojects+1 crossposts

How are you measuring whether your AI agents are actually worth what they cost?

I'm looking at teams that run several agents in production (support triage, lead research, internal ops, that kind of thing). Seeing the model bill is easy. What seems hard to see:

- which agent is driving which part of the bill

- how many runs actually succeeded vs. needed a human to fix them

- how much human review time each agent eats

- and so what one *successful* result really costs, per agent

From what I've seen so far it's usually a spreadsheet stitched together from provider dashboards and logs, and when finance asks "is this worth it?" the honest answer is "probably, for some of them."

For people running 5+ agents:

Do you track cost per successful outcome at all? How?
Have you ever downgraded a model or killed an agent because of numbers like this?
Who asks for this at your company: engineering, finance, or nobody yet?

Disclosure: I'm exploring building a tool for this, so I'm mostly trying to learn whether it's a real problem or just mine. I'll share a summary of what people say in a follow-up post.

agentledger-j9tdnyphz-aarez-manzars-projects.vercel.app

u/BiteRevolutionary634 — 10 days ago

▲ 3 r/sideprojects

Faded. a social app where photos gradually decay with time or views, until they eventually disappear forever. Feedback welcome!

Like instagram, but all photos have a shelf life: they can be up for year, an hour or ten minutes, or up until they're viewed 100 times, 1000 times or a million times. The longer they're up, the more they fade - user chosen filters are applied gradually over the lifetime of the photo (be it measured in clicks or time), gradually obscuring it. If you want to see it, you have to catch it early.

This is a fun side project of mine, An experiment in digital persistence and scarcity. And, yes its vibe coded, built on replit.

Currently just a responsive web page (desktop, and works great on iOS devices, which I have). Native apps for android and iOS to follow.

joinfaded.com

u/Objective_Farm_1886 — 10 days ago

▲ 6 r/sideprojects+6 crossposts

I rebuilt PicPop’s photo-cleanup flow for v1.0.5

I shared an early version here a couple of days ago. Since then, PicPop 1.0.5 is live with screenshot, blurry-photo and large-video cleanup alongside similar-shot review. I wanted the demo to show the part I care about most: swipe to queue, review your picks, then confirm. Nothing is deleted before confirmation, and scanning stays on the iPhone.

I’m the developer. PicPop is free to download; full access is through paid PicPop Club ($4.99/month, $24.99/year with a 3-day trial, or $59.99 lifetime in the US).

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/picpop-photo-video-cleaner/id6808016560

Demo music: “Happy Beats & Business Moves Vol. 11” by Sascha Ende, CC BY 4.0.

If your camera roll is a mess, what piles up fastest for you: screenshots, similar shots, blurry photos, or big videos?

u/Relative_Button2864 — 11 days ago

▲ 1 r/sideprojects

Building an app where you check into a bar and can see the other people there. Looking for holes in it.

The idea: you check into a specific place, you see avatars of other people who are also checked in right now, you can signal to someone, and if they signal back you can message. Check-in expires when you leave. completely anonymous

I already know the hardest part is density. If you open it and the room is empty, the product doesn't exist. Every app in this category that died, Highlight, Sonar, Tinder Social, died there rather than on the idea.

What I'd like input on:

What would stop you personally from checking in, assuming the place was busy?
If you're a woman, does the anonymity actually make this feel safer, or does the whole concept read as a bad idea regardless of the design?
What's the smallest amount of information about a stranger you'd need before you'd signal to them?
What am I not seeing?

Happy to share more detail with anyone curious, and if anyone wants to try it early, say so.

reddit.com

u/Expert_Midnight19 — 10 days ago

▲ 3 r/sideprojects+1 crossposts

First app almost shipped, any tips before I open up the beta?

Hi all! First time building my own thing, pretty new at all of this.

I tried a bunch of budgeting apps over the years and every one felt like a part-time job to set up and maintain. My wife wouldn't stick with any of them either, so we always ended up back to the excel spreadsheet, which took me time every month to do expenses for our household. So I started building something simpler for us, and it kind of snowballed into a real app.
Right now we're in beta with a handful of friends, and soon I want to open it up to more testers. Honestly it's scary and exciting at the same time. I've been heads down on code for months and now real people are poking at it and finding things I never thought of lol.
For those of you who've shipped before:
How did you find beta testers outside your friend circle?
Anything you wish you'd done before going live on the App Store?
How did you decide when it was "good enough" to ship?
Any advice is welcome, even the brutal kind. Thanks 🙏

reddit.com

u/Severe_Lion_5545 — 10 days ago

▲ 5 r/sideprojects

crypto dev, paranoid about my keys leaking, so I built a dependency scanner

I'm a crypto dev and I'm genuinely paranoid about my keys leaking. Not in the "use a hardware wallet" way, in the "some npm package I installed at 2am has a postinstall script that reads my .env" way.

Which is a real thing now. The TanStack packages did exactly that, grabbed SSH keys and cloud creds and CI tokens. If you're a crypto dev, that's your deployer key and your RPC keys and whatever else is in that file.

So I built a scanner. You POST a lockfile to /api/paid-scan, it downloads every package and hashes every file, an AI reads the ones it hasn't seen before looking for exfiltration, obfuscation, postinstall stuff. Files anyone already scanned are free, so it gets cheaper the more people use it.

Check it out on https://security.togoder.click

u/PussyTermin4tor1337 — 11 days ago