8 Super Power Side Projects
Developers are often perceived as having superpowers. And let’s be honest, they sort of do. Being able to code unlocks a whole world of opportunities to improve our workflows, our connection with each other, and our impact on the world.
Side projects are an awesome way to share those powers with others and support the causes we care about. Here are eight of my own side projects 🚀
#1 Story Prompts
Technologies: React Native, Expo, Animations
I have a friend who inspires me. He built a card game called Stories to encourage people to connect and understand each other better. I was so impressed with his passion and mission that I asked him if I could turn it into an app. He agreed and I got to work. I wanted the app UI to be playful and fun so I focused on making buttery smooth animations with a colorful design.
#2 Weekly
Technologies: React Native, Redux, Firebase
Most budgeting apps are too complicated and often don’t really help people stay on a budget. Weekly is designed to change that by focusing on a weekly safe-to-spend amount. Weekly integrates with Plaid to pull in bank transactions and has a refreshing and straight-forward UI. Check it out in the App Store.
#3 Spoken Stats
Technologies: React, Redux, Web Speech API
This web app allowed me to record volleyball stats by speaking commands into my headphones. My wife was a head volleyball coach at a high school and I started building this after spending hours watching game film to record the stats. With Spoken Stats I was able to record stats in real-time. When the game was over, I was done.
Turns out, recording voice commands in a stadium with cheering fans is not easy. I almost gave up on this project several times before I figured out a solution.
#4 Link
Technologies: Node.js, Socket.IO, AWS S3, Atom text editor
Link is an internal tool I built while working at a dev shop that didn’t use the standard git setup to share code. All of our code was stored in S3 buckets and pulled via FTP. I built Link to allow developers to login to a node service via an Atom extension and sync their file changes in real-time. This ensured all developers had the latest version of the code at all times.
Link also supported file versioning, viewing changes in versions, and restoring previous versions all with the Atom extension 😎
#5 Trade Automation
Technologies: Chrome Extension, React, plenty of vanilla JavaScript
A friend of mine called and asked if I could help automate his daily trading process. Basically, the task was to move information from one website to another in a series of stages with user validation at the end of each stage. This tool turned a mentally intensive 10-minute process into an automated 1-minute process.
#6 XR Nutrition
Technologies: React Native, Redux
You’re probably asking yourself what on earth you’re looking at. Those are blood cells with various conditions that could indicate nutritional deficiencies or other health issues. I built the XR Nutrition app over a weekend to help my wife and other consultants efficiently track their client's information. The app was well-loved and adopted by consultants for XR Nutrition.
#7 Pithy
Technologies: Electron, Firebase, React
Any idea what DRI means? Neither did I when I started working at WillowTree. Pithy is a nifty menubar app that lists all the acronyms used at WillowTree. I built Pithy during the weekly innovation hours given to all employees to think creatively about how to improve our work.
#8 Recipes App
Technologies: CanvasJS
You can’t be into side projects without building a recipe app at some point, am I right? If you’ve ever read recipes online they’re FILLED with personal stories and advertisements. This app was designed to simplify the process and clearly associate the ingredients with the steps where they’re used.
For some design flair, I used CanvasJS to extract the colors out of the featured image and used those colors in the elements on the page. See how the browns and grays match nicely with the image of the cookies 🍪 😏
Wrapping up
Thanks for checking out some of my favorite side projects! Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or look me up on GitHub.
