Neat Side Projects No. 6

Intro

This weeks edition is a bit shorter as I'm preparing to go to Europe in a few days. The upcoming trip will probably require some more flexibility on the publishing side of this weekly side-project list. I haven't planned everything through so I'm not sure how it will work out. Naturally, there are also other responsibilities along I need to keep up with.

• Devlibs is collecting art-work from developer laptops
• noCSdegree: Interviews with people, who got into IT without a computer science degree
• Stylish and informative status-pages with supstatus.com
• Jump into writing straight away with "New Tab Draft"
• Cube.JS is using a different approach to visualizing data
• "Desktop" is a desktop client for GitHub

To share any feedback please get in touch. Let's get started with some neat side-projects:

Devlibs is a project collecting art-work from dev-laptops

Many people working in IT decorate their laptops with stickers they get at meetups and conferences. These stickers range from funny works of art, icons, emojis to known project they either prefer to work with or are simply "sexy". Developers are known to decorate. Devlids is collecting these sticker-collections. You can browse through and see whos laptop is behind each of them. If you like to, you can also submit your laptop lid to the collection.

Interviews with people who got into IT without a computer science degree

Engineering jobs don't need a degree really. More than a degree, it needs commitment and love to what you are doing. That holds up for many jobs (but not all). As more and more companies realize this they drop their requirement to have an engineering or computer science degree for their jobs. This opens the doors for many self-taught developers like myself. Pete has started noCSdegree. It's a website featuring the stories of self-taught developers.

By the way, if you're interested in reading a bit more about my story of getting into coding you can check out my interview on coderstory.

Don't want to be unprepared in case your site goes down? Check supstatus.com!

Many things can take your website down, some are in your power to address while others aren't. In either case, if you are running a professional website you want to prepared. Why? Quite simply: When your site goes down your visitors and users will turn to Google and find websites where people talk about your website being offline, speculate reasons and more. You want to have an authority place to communicate what is going on. Naturally, you need to communicate and establish this authority place beforehand. supstatus status-pages gives you exactly this. You can set up your uptime tracking and post information about the current state if needed. All running as sub-domain under your project.

Start writing straight away with "New Tab Draft"

Sometimes I just want to write down some thoughts down quickly. It might be an outline for an article I want to write, an idea I want to outline briefly or just store something for a moment to not lose my clipboard. New Tab Draft allows you all of this in your new tab. All information is stored locally to protect your privacy. Unfortunately, there is no Firefox version as far as I know.

Visualizing data with a different approach

Usually, you would visualize data by writing some sort of data loader, process it if needed and hand it over to a JavaScript library. Cube JS is taking it a bit differently. It allows you to bring it all together by let the rendering library access the database directly and process the data into the needed format to get it ready for display. The source code is published under MIT license on GitHub. A handy tool to build an open statistics page for your indie side-project by the way. Once I get some time I'll try it out for the search data collected by startup name check.

Desktop client for GitHub

As the name suggests, Desktop is a desktop client for GitHub. It allows you to perform the most common tasks you would normally do on the GitHub website but using a desktop application. Without having tried it (as there isn't a version for Linux yet), I would hope this saves you time loading time. Currently, the software is available for Windows and Mac only. Hopefully, a Linux version will be released soon. It is, of course, open-source and the source code is available on GitHub.

Closing words

If you like this collection of side-projects you might also like the previous editions: Neat Side Projects No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4 and No. 5. More side-project related posts can be found under side-projects.

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The cover photo, again, was shot by Ashwin Vaswani. If you got an interesting set of neat photos and want to be featured (with backlink) let me know. Thank you!