标签：#sideprojects

Have you ever been in a computer lab, classroom, or office where you needed to quickly send a file between your phone and laptop? I run into this problem all the time. Sometimes there's no USB cable, no pendrive, Bluetooth is painfully slow, or uploading to cloud storage just to download the file on another device feels unnecessary. So I decided to build SilentShare . What is SilentShare? SilentShare is a browser-based peer-to-peer file sharing application that lets you instantly share: 📁 Files (up to 50 MB) 💻 Code snippets 📝 Text 🖼️ Images No installation. No account. No server storing your files. Your data goes directly from one device to another using WebRTC . Whether you're sending files from your phone to your laptop, between classmates, or across the internet, SilentShare keeps the process simple. Why I Built It I wanted something that: Opens instantly in any browser Doesn't require creating an account Doesn't upload files to someone else's server Works on desktop and mobile Feels lightweight and fast Instead of relying on cloud storage, I wanted the browser itself to become the transfer tool. Features ✨ Peer-to-peer file transfer using WebRTC 📂 File sharing up to 50 MB (including ZIP files) 🔒 Optional end-to-end encrypted rooms using AES-GCM 📷 QR code invitations with built-in camera scanner 📊 Live progress, transfer speed, ETA, pause & resume 🖼️ Preview support for: Images Audio Video PDFs 💻 Share code snippets with syntax highlighting 👥 Multi-user rooms (around 5 participants) 🌙 Dark & Light mode 📱 Installable as a Progressive Web App (PWA) How It Works Create a room Receive a random room code Share the code, QR code, or invite link Other devices join Start sharing instantly The files are transferred directly between devices instead of passing through a storage server. Privacy One of the goals of SilentShare was privacy. No user accounts No cloud storage No permanent database Nothing stored after the browser tab closes If you set a room password, all transf

Try the demo: K-Saju Crew For fun only. K-Saju is an entertainment project. The K-Pop roles below are a playful interpretation of saju-inspired signals, not personality assessment or advice. A two-person compatibility page can stay stateless with almost no effort. Put both birth dates in a URL, render the result on the server, and the link is the record. No account, no database, no cleanup job. That was already a product rule in K-Saju. We do not retain personal inputs. A result is reproducible from its GET parameters. Then we built /crew : “What if your friend group debuted as a K-Pop group?” A creator makes a link, sends it to a group chat, and each friend enters their own birth date. At three to seven members, the app assigns distinct positions, shows pairwise chemistry, and creates a shareable poster. The fun part is the casting. The engineering problem is that the social flow needs a temporary shared state. A link cannot accumulate submissions by itself. This post is about the decisions behind that feature: where we allowed state, how we made the result durable without retaining a lobby forever, and how we kept the casting explainable instead of treating it as a black-box score. The conflict: a self-service group flow needs somewhere to collect data There were two clean but incomplete options. The first was to keep everything stateless. The creator would enter all members' dates at once, then receive a result URL. It matched our existing architecture, but it defeated the point of sharing a link. The person who starts the group often does not know everyone else's date, and asking them to collect it in a chat creates friction before the feature has started. The second was a conventional persistent group object. It would make joining easy, but it would turn a deliberately stateless service into one that keeps user-provided dates indefinitely unless we built retention and deletion policies around it. We chose a hybrid instead: The lobby is temporary state. It store

For the past few weeks, I have been building Soterios , an open-source, local-first security and system maintenance suite for Windows. The idea started simple: most security tools either lock features behind paywalls or collect unnecessary data. I wanted something different, so I built a privacy-first application with: No telemetry No analytics No network activity unless you explicitly enable it Current Features Malware scanning with ClamAV, quarantine, and reporting Windows security audits Firewall management and network monitoring Credential safety tools with local password checks and breach lookups Process inspection and system maintenance utilities Built With Soterios is built with Electron and Node.js using a modular architecture designed to make future expansion straightforward. Why I'm Sharing It I'd rather build in the open than in isolation. Feedback, ideas, bug reports, and contributions are always welcome. GitHub Repository https://github.com/chrisriv10/Soterios

Hey DEV community, I recently launched bgchanger.video , an AI video background changer for removing or replacing video backgrounds directly in the browser. The idea is simple: many creators, indie hackers, marketers, and product teams need cleaner videos, but traditional editing tools can feel too heavy for quick background cleanup. With bgchanger.video, you can: Upload a video Remove the original background Export with a transparent background Replace the background with a solid color Download the result in formats like MP4, WebM, MOV, MKV, or GIF Keep the original audio when needed I built it for quick workflows like: Product demo videos Social media clips Creator videos Ad creatives Cleaner profile or presentation videos Background cleanup before further editing The current version focuses on making the workflow straightforward: upload, configure, generate, download. I am still improving the product and would love feedback from other builders: Is the workflow clear enough? What export options would you expect? Would you prefer templates, custom background uploads, or batch processing? What would make this useful in your own video workflow? You can try it here: https://bgchanger.video Thanks for checking it out. Feedback is very welcome.

How I moved from a traditional web application mindset to exploring local-first architecture I wanted to build a simple software tool for my personal use. Nothing complicated. Something in the category of tools people build for themselves: A personal expense tracker A budgeting application A private knowledge management tool A personal organization system The important characteristic was this: The data belonged to one person. It was not a social application. It was not a collaboration platform. It did not need users interacting with each other. There was no requirement for: Public profiles Sharing updates Real-time collaboration Social features It was simply a tool that helped one person manage their own information. When I started thinking about building it, my first instinct was the most natural one for me. I am a web application developer. My comfort zone is building web applications. So my first thought was: "Why not build a Ruby on Rails application?" Something like: User | Web Application | Ruby on Rails API | PostgreSQL Database This is an architecture I have worked with many times. The workflow is familiar: Create models Build controllers Add authentication Store data in a database Deploy the application Access it from anywhere This is a proven architecture. For many products, this is exactly the right approach. But while thinking about this project, I asked myself a different question: Am I choosing this architecture because the problem requires it, or because it is the architecture I already know? That question changed the direction completely. Understanding The Actual Problem Before choosing technology, I wanted to understand the nature of the problem. What kind of application was I actually building? There is a big difference between building: A social network A marketplace A collaboration platform A communication application versus building: A personal tool A private utility A single-user productivity application In the first category, the server is the

I built JSON Utility Kit as a small browser-based toolkit for everyday JSON tasks. The CSV to JSON converter recently got an update for nested JSON structures. For example, headers like user.name, user.email, order.id can be converted into nested objects instead of flat keys. What it supports: CSV to JSON conversion Nested object output from dot notation headers Browser-side processing No signup JSON formatting and validation tools nearby Tool: https://jsonutilitykit.com/tools/csv-to-json/ GitHub: https://github.com/kejie1/json_utility_kit

We are two friends building Pageonaut , a collection of 126 free browser tools (converters, calculators, PDF and image utilities, dev helpers). Early on we committed to one constraint: everything runs client-side . No file uploads, no accounts, no server-side processing. That one decision shaped the whole architecture, and it broke things in ways I did not expect. Here are the lessons, including the one where our server filled up with 419 GB of cache and took the site down twice. Why client-side only Every time I needed a quick converter, the top search results wanted me to upload my file to their server, create an account, or pay to remove a watermark. For work that a browser can trivially do locally. So the rule became: drop a file into one of our converters and it never leaves your device. You can watch the network tab while using it. This is great for privacy and trust, and it has a nice side effect: our server does almost nothing per user, so hosting stays cheap even if a tool gets popular. The cost: some tools are genuinely harder to build. PDF manipulation in the browser (we use client-side libraries instead of a server queue), image processing on the main thread without freezing the UI, and no "just call an API" escape hatch. When a tool truly needs the network (say, fetching a URL you give it), the page says so explicitly. Lesson 1: Unbounded URL params + ISR = a full disk This is the expensive one. We built shareable challenge pages: beat my score, try this color, that kind of thing. The URLs look like /tools/<slug>/challenge/<value> , where <value> is user-generated. With Next.js ISR, every unique URL that renders gets persisted to the filesystem cache. You can see where this is going. The value space is infinite. Bots found the pattern and started enumerating it. .next/server/app grew to 419 GB . The disk filled up, the site went down, and because we did not understand the root cause immediately, it happened a second time a few days later. The fix was tw

I’m building Euro Toolhub , a German-first index of European software, SaaS, cloud and AI alternatives. The idea is simple: many companies, agencies, developers and privacy-conscious users want alternatives to common tools when they care about things like data residency, open source, self-hosting, European jurisdiction or reducing dependency on non-European providers. But most existing lists stop at listing tools. I want Euro Toolhub to go one step further. Each provider profile can include: country and jurisdiction category alternative-to mappings open source status self-hosting availability EU data residency DPA availability certifications where known target audience strengths and limitations a transparent sovereignty score embeddable badges for providers The project starts in German because the first target market is DACH, but the structure is prepared for more languages later. The long-term vision is to build a practical decision platform for digital sovereignty: not just “which European alternatives exist?”, but “which one fits my actual use case?” Current categories include web analytics, cloud and hosting, newsletter tools, CRM, email, password managers, AI APIs, project management, video conferencing and e-signatures. I’m looking for feedback from developers, SaaS founders, privacy people and self-hosting communities: Which European tools should be added? Which categories matter most? What would make a sovereignty score trustworthy? Should the provider dataset be opened through GitHub for corrections and submissions? Project: https://www.euro-toolhub.eu/de Provider submission: https://www.euro-toolhub.eu/de/anbieter-eintragen ``

Hey developers, I've been thinking about a problem and wanted to get some feedback from the community. We have search engines like Google, Bing, and others that help us find websites through keywords. We also have directories and archives, but I haven't found a place that attempts to catalog every active website on the internet in a structured and discoverable way. So my first question is: Does a platform already exist where I can browse or search through a massive database of active websites, regardless of whether they're popular or not? The Idea Imagine a project called "Library of Websites." Instead of ranking sites primarily through SEO and search algorithms, the goal would be to build a continuously growing database of active websites across the internet. Website owners could install a small script or verification snippet on their sites, similar to how Google Search Console verification works. Once verified, the website would automatically become part of the Library of Websites database. The platform could then: Categorize websites by industry, niche, and technology. Track whether sites are still active. Allow users to browse websites like books in a library. Discover small, independent websites that search engines rarely surface. Create a searchable index of the web that focuses on discovery rather than ranking. Over time, this could become a living map of the internet, helping people explore websites they would never normally find. Does something like this already exist? What are the biggest technical challenges in building such a database? Would website owners actually be willing to install a verification script? Is there a better approach than relying on voluntary website registration? What would you personally want from a "Library of Websites" platform? I'd love to hear your thoughts, criticism, and suggestions. Thanks!

The Problem That Wouldn't Leave Me Alone Pakistan has 220 million people. A functioning legal system. Hundreds of Acts, ordinances, and constitutional provisions that technically protect every citizen. Almost nobody can use them. The median lawyer's consultation fee in Karachi is more than what many families earn in a week. Legal aid is understaffed and geographically concentrated in major cities. And the laws themselves? Written in English — a language most of the population reads functionally at best, and doesn't speak at home at all. So when a landlord illegally locks someone out. When a factory worker gets fired without severance. When a woman wants to know her inheritance rights. When a tenant needs to understand what "Section 16 of the Rent Restriction Ordinance" actually means for their specific situation — they either find a lawyer they can't afford, ask someone who doesn't really know, or quietly give up. This isn't a knowledge problem. It's an access problem. I'm a CS student at Sukkur IBA University in interior Sindh — not Karachi, not Islamabad. The kind of city where you feel the gap between what the law says and what people actually know it says every single day. That gap is where HAQ started. HAQ is an Arabic and Urdu word. It means right — as in, what is rightfully yours. The name felt important. The Core Idea: Ask the Law, Get the Law There's a specific failure mode with AI and legal questions that drove every design decision I made, and it's worth naming clearly. Standard LLMs — any of them — will answer legal questions confidently. They'll cite "Section 144" or "the Transfer of Property Act" with total authority. They are often wrong. Sometimes subtly: the section exists but doesn't say what the model claims. Sometimes obviously: the Act doesn't apply in that province. Always uncitable: the user has no way to verify without finding the source themselves. For an accessibility tool, a confidently wrong answer isn't neutral. It's actively dangerous.

If you've ever received a .pages or .numbers file on a Windows PC, you know the pain — you can't open it. No preview, no converter built in, and Apple's iCloud web tools are slow and clunky. So I built iworkviewer.com — a free, browser-based iWork file viewer and converter. No signup, no upload to any server. Everything happens in your browser. What it does Open .pages files → view them instantly, export to PDF or .docx Open .numbers files → view spreadsheets, export to .xlsx or PDF Open .keynote files → view presentations, export to PDF or .pptx Batch convert multiple iWork files at once The tech Built with Next.js, Cloudflare Pages, and pure client-side JavaScript. All file processing happens in the browser — your files never leave your computer. Zero server costs, zero privacy concerns. Why I built it I kept seeing Reddit threads and Quora questions: "How do I open a Pages file on Windows?" The answers were always the same — use iCloud.com (slow), download some sketchy converter (risky), or ask the sender to export as PDF first (annoying). I figured: if the browser can read a file, it can convert it. And it turns out, it can. Try it 👉 iworkviewer.com Open a .pages, .numbers, or .keynote file right in your browser. Free, forever, no account needed.

3 platforms, one queue, zero editorial control. That was the state of my content automation before I sat down to spec the dashboard. LinkedIn, X, and Threads each had their own generator, their own state files, their own publishing loop. Drafts got generated, passed a quality gate, and fired into the void. If the draft was mediocre or the timing was wrong, I found out after the fact. The problem is not the automation. Automation is why I can run three platform engines without spending two hours a day managing content. The problem is that zero editorial visibility means you cannot catch the bad ones before they post. What I wanted: see every draft before it goes out. Edit inline if needed. Post immediately or schedule for the next slot. Compose something manually when I have a specific take to push. Keep the comment automation untouched because that runs high frequency, low stakes, and babysitting individual replies defeats the point. The spec came out to three core flows. Review queue. Every pregenerated draft surfaces here with full context: platform, topic, generation timestamp, quality score. One click to edit inline, one to approve for the next slot, one to post immediately. The goal is a 30 second review per draft, not a full editing session. Manual compose. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to say. A text area, platform selector, and post button. No generation, no queue, just publish. This is the escape hatch for when something is happening in real time and the pregenerated queue is irrelevant. Schedule view. A simple calendar showing what is queued for which slot across all three platforms. The generator already handles slot logic and quiet hours. The dashboard just needs to surface the state so I can see gaps and move things around without touching JSON files directly. What I deliberately left out: comment automation. That pipeline runs separately, fires frequently, and does not benefit from human review on every reply. Adding it to the dashboard would cr

I got laid off in March 2026. The day HR handed me the 30-day notice, I had a small panic attack, then opened my laptop and started building things. Here's the deal: I had 30 days before severance ran out, and I wanted to see how much I could ship with AI tools before the money (and motivation) ran dry. I gave myself a single rule — every project gets a 7-day deadline, otherwise I kill it. I built 6 things. One has real users. One broke in production. Two I never opened again. This is what happened, in the order I built them. 1. AI Buddy (Chrome sidebar) — shipped, 15 users A Chrome extension that puts an AI assistant in a sidebar. Select text on any page, hit a keyboard shortcut, it goes to the AI, reply shows up without you leaving the page. Works with GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek. No login, no credit card. Time: 11 days (April 1–11). Status: Live on Chrome Web Store. 15 real users as of June 28, 2026. Rating 4.2. What I used AI for: 90% of the code (500 lines of JavaScript, written in Cursor). The README, the Chrome Web Store description, the marketing tweets — all AI-drafted, then I rewrote the parts that sounded like AI. What went wrong: The first version had a Stripe integration. AI wrote 90% of the webhook signature verification. I had to rewrite it from scratch. Also the model-picker UI went through 5 revisions because AI kept proposing what looked right but didn't work. → Chrome Web Store 2. Weekly report generator — personal use only Every Friday at 4pm, a script grabs my git commits, Slack messages, and Linear ticket changes, throws them at GPT-4, and asks for a "manager-readable" weekly report. I review, tweak, send. Time: 2 days. ~200 lines of Python. Status: Running for 11 weeks. Has 1 user. Me. Cost is $0.12/week. What I used AI for: The prompt. It's surprisingly tricky to get GPT-4 to write a weekly report that doesn't sound like a robot. The single most useful line: "if you don't have data, write 'no progress this week' — don't make things up." T

I started a gaming guide blog six weeks ago. Twenty-one articles later, it's getting traffic from Google, I have four affiliate programs set up, and I have never written a single line of code. This is not a "how to make money blogging" post. This is a practical breakdown of the tools, the workflow, and the mistakes I made so you can skip them. The blog is yxgonglue.com. It covers PC and console game guides — GTA VI pre-order comparisons, VPN setups for gaming, cloud gaming platform rankings, extraction shooter loot guides. Niche stuff. The kind of content people search for when they have a specific problem. Here is the stack that runs it. THE STACK WordPress + Kadence Theme Hosted on a standard shared hosting plan. Kadence is a free WordPress theme that loads fast and does not fight you. No page builder. No Elementor. Just the block editor and Kadence blocks for tables and formatting. The biggest lesson here: your theme does not matter as much as your content structure. Pick something lightweight. Stop theme-shopping. Start writing. Yoast SEO The free version. It gives you a red/yellow/green score for each post based on keyphrase density, subheading distribution, link count, and meta length. Is it perfect? No. Is it a useful checklist for someone who does not do SEO for a living? Absolutely. One thing Yoast taught me the hard way: Custom HTML blocks are invisible to the plugin. If you paste your article into a Custom HTML block, Yoast reads zero words, zero links, zero headings. Everything turns red. Use the regular editor. If you need a table, use a table block. Keep it simple. Google Search Console This is where you see what people actually searched before they clicked your article. The gap between what you think people search for and what they actually search for is enormous. Search Console closes that gap. Submit every new post URL manually. It takes ten seconds. Do not wait for Google to discover your site on its own. THE CONTENT WORKFLOW One Article Per Day Tw

Every developer hates writing READMEs. It's boring, repetitive, and always gets skipped. So I built ReadmeAI — describe your project, AI writes the README instantly. What it does Fill in project name, description, tech stack, features AI generates a complete professional README.md Switch between Raw and Preview tabs to see rendered markdown One click copy Tech Stack Next.js + Tailwind CSS Groq API (openai/gpt-oss-120b) Deployed on Vercel Why I built it (Write 2-3 sentences personally — mention the challenge, that you're a student builder, makes it relatable) Live link https://readmeai-three.vercel.app/ Built this in a day as part of my 30-day AI tools challenge. Would love feedback from the dev community!

TL;DR — A prototype that works for you but breaks for everyone else usually isn't bad luck. It's four repeatable culprits: you designed for one assembly, your fasteners drift, the enclosure ignores real loads, and you never wrote down why it works. Fix those, and "works on my bench" becomes "works, period." You built the thing, and it works. In your hands, on your bench, every single time. Then a friend tries it, or it sits in the garage a week, or the temperature drops one night, and it just stops. Frustrating doesn't really cover it. Here's the reassuring part: that gap between "works for me" and "works for anyone" is almost always the same small handful of culprits. You're not missing some secret skill. Once you've met them a few times, you start designing around them without even thinking about it. 1. You built it for one. Now build it for two. That first one fit because you were there — nudging, sanding, coaxing it together. The trouble is, all of that lived in your hands, not in the model. So the second copy fights you. If you can't make a second one without the fiddling, it isn't done yet. Bake the clearance into the CAD, then print one you promise not to touch up. That's the real test. 2. Your fasteners are quietly betraying you. Press-fits creep. Hot glue lets go. Jumper wires back out. Double-sided tape taps out the first warm afternoon. I know the boring fixes aren't the fun part — a screw boss, a captive nut, a bit of strain relief, a connector that actually clicks home. But boring is exactly what's still holding a year from now. 3. The enclosure is a load, not a lid. It's easy to treat the box as an afterthought. But heat, dust, and vibration are real forces working on your build. A board that runs cool in the open can slowly cook once it's sealed up. A connector that's happy on the bench can buzz itself loose in a drawer that gets opened every day. Give the heat somewhere to go, mount the board instead of letting it dangle from its wires, and clamp dow

Over the past few months, I've been building a gaming website focused on Elden Ring guides, calculators, and tools. While the project started as a simple hobby, it quickly became an interesting experiment in SEO, content strategy, and web development. Here are some lessons I learned along the way. Building the Site Was Easier Than Getting Traffic Launching a website with Next.js was straightforward. Getting visitors was much harder. Many developers underestimate how competitive search traffic can be, especially in gaming niches where large sites already dominate search results. Publishing a website is only the first step. Why I Chose Next.js The project uses: Next.js TypeScript React Tailwind CSS The biggest advantage was SEO. Server-side rendering and static generation helped ensure that search engines could easily crawl and index pages. Performance was also excellent compared to many traditional CMS solutions. Tools Attract Different Users Than Articles One interesting discovery was that calculators and interactive tools behave differently from standard content pages. For example: Guides answer questions. Tools solve problems. A player may read a guide once, but they might return to a calculator dozens of times while planning different character builds. This makes tools valuable long-term traffic assets. Internal Linking Matters More Than Expected When new content was published, internal links helped search engines discover and understand related pages. For example: Build guides linked to calculators. Calculator pages linked to stat guides. Stat guides linked to weapon builds. This created a stronger topical structure around the Elden Ring ecosystem. Search Traffic Takes Time One of the biggest lessons was patience. Many pages received: Zero impressions Zero clicks No rankings for days or even weeks. Then suddenly search impressions started increasing as Google tested pages across different queries. Traffic growth was rarely linear. Content Clusters Work Well Inst