Having fun with side projects again
I fell in love with programming back in the late 90s when I found out about Geocities. Geocities was a hosting service that was allowing you to make websites without much coding. Kinda like a proto-Squarespace. I decided to build a website that hosted virus removal tools. Back then the different antivirus companies provided individual removal tools for individual viruses. The internet was a small place and viruses had distinct names. There were few by comparison with the attack vectors we have today.
The website I built led me to learning about HTML and CSS and then somehow about operating systems like Linux. I ended up getting interested to computer science, studying it for 6 years and making a career out of it. All because of a side project. During my career I was always working on a side project, but there was a problem. On the back of my head I was always thinking of monetisation. How can I make this thing I was building profitable? I never cared for becoming rich out of it, just to make some profit. It took me many years to realise that this was the thief of joy. I wasn't creating something for me to have fun or solve a problem, I was creating something hoping the internet will find it useful. This was misguided.
With the advent of LLMs and Agents, creating and delivering side projects has become so easy. During the last year alone I've put online a web app that aims to give you an answer to the question "Should I rent my flat out or should I sell it?" and another app that aims to answer the question "What is the best movie of each year since the year I was born". On the back of that I got interested in self hosting those apps. I found out about Hetzner, a European hosting service, Dokku, a self hosted Heroku "clone", Umami, a Google Analytics self hosted alternative, and so many other tools that enable me to have fun again!!
A lot of the times I start with a wild idea. I will go on Claude or Codex or an OpenRouter LLM and start fleshing the idea out. My rental app took a week of back and forth with Claude, with real scenarios and numbers. The original deliverable was an excel doc. Once I played around with it I realised that it's valuable and I could make it generic. The ask to Claude was simple. "Make me a Python script that I can reuse". The script ended up to a full app, the app ended up in Github, Github actions were hooked with my Dokku instance to auto deploy and before you know it I had it out there on the web.
I did hook up Umami for some analytics but I will admit here that I'm not sweating this. I don't care how many people use it but I find it intriguing that during the past 7 days 8 people visited the website and used the tool. Somehow in this wilderness that it's the web today 8 people (or bots) ended up there. Fun!
The second project about the movies is the one that gave me the most joy yet. This idea started back in 2020 during the pandemic. Back then I found out myself with a lot of time and I wanted to watch a movie. Often I end up scrolling through Netflix getting paralysed by the plethora of options I have. I ended up spending 30 minutes scrolling and realising I don't like anything. To solve that I thought I'd watch the best movie for each year since the year i was born. That was opening the Pandora's box. What is the best movie?
My original idea was to make a web crawler in Python and get data from IMDB, Wikipedia and some other website and fetch the IMDB scores, Oscar wins and box office earnings, put them in a formula and make a final score. My score. Sort the movies for each year by the highest score and watch this. The website was terribly flimsy. If you've written a crawler you'd know that they are very easy to break as soon as someone changes a CSS variable. I put the site down at some point during 2021 and decided to rewrite it. Life happened, weekends became busier and I found myself forgetting about this until recently.
The last month or so though I decided to finish it! I gave it to Claude and through some back and forth the website is now live. I can iterate over it from my phone. I ask Claude to iterate over an idea and produce me a design, I change things I don't like, Claude opens a PR, I review it from my Github phone app and merge it and it automatically goes live on my Dokku server. So far I have managed to take my original idea and expand it. The data pipeline is robust and runs automatically every week. I can get ideas from friends or people from the web and iterate over them. I am having a blast! I can release a new feature from the train while commuting home.
Little things that I loved doing are the little award pills on each movie poster, looking through the pages to find the Palme d'Or win for the year, the little "weights" button that changes the weights of each data point and how that changes the movie ranking and the "stream" information. More than anything though I like how I feel I have found a groove with my tools and I can have fun with side projects. I don't care for monetisation, I care about the joy they bring me. So much so that I even blogged about it!
This blog was written by a human, me! By hand! All 1039 words, no 1040, no 1042, wait...
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