Death of the sideproject?

Over the years I've built and maintained a bunch of tools, apps and libraries, with varying amounts of success. Recently though, with how easy AI has made coding and how widely it's been adopted, I've started asking myself what the point of most of them is anymore.

The point used to be that me with my coding skills could make small tools that improved people's lives, coders and non-coders alike. That's not really the case anymore, since anyone can prompt almost anything into existence (with varying amounts of success). The other problem is that side projects have never been my main focus, so I've never put in the effort needed to keep all of them up to par code-wise.

So what role do they actually fill? Let's go through them.

QTagger

QTagger started as a tool for my now wife to tag academic interviews, or basically to tag transcripts. There were some open source and paid alternatives out there, but none of them had the features she wanted, so I built one to her spec.

It was genuinely hard. You have to learn text manipulation inside the DOM, which is not very straightforward: highlighting parts of the text, wrapping it in spans and a bunch of other stuff. With my know-how back then I could finally pull it off, and there wasn't much competition because it was tricky to wrap your head around. Especially for a small side project that would never make any money, or even get much attention with all the other open source tools already out there.

The point was only to solve a problem in a very specific niche, and it got a couple of users. It was fun, but it never became more than a nifty little tool that some people found useful.

Now any academic researcher wanting a better transcript tool could just prompt one out of thin air, with exactly the features they want and no pressure for it to be economically viable or interesting enough to be its own open source project. Usage and search results have basically dropped to zero, so I'm letting the domain expire. I don't find any personal joy in maintaining something I could prompt into existence in an afternoon. I'm proud of building it back when it was difficult, but I guess I have to set my sights on something more in line with the times to feel that pride again.

Apps: Sets and Reps & Simp Tools

Sets and Reps was a super simple Apple Watch app, mostly a proof of concept to see if I could integrate some native watch code into React Native. Simp Tools was an app for digital love notes that had a viral spike a couple of years ago, but these days it's basically used by noone.

Both recently got notices about security vulnerabilities because of outdated Firebase SDKs. I don't have the mental energy to deal with that right now, so they're getting shut down. No one will be sad about it though. They're old, unmaintained, have basically zero users on the app stores, and have no economic potential. I don't feel fulfilled maintaining them. They just have to go.

Due2Cal

Due2Cal converts reminders from the Due app into Google Calendar events and keeps them in sync. I thought it was extremely handy, but apparently no one that uses Due has had this problem, so I've never had a single user except me. I'm taking it private and running it on my homelab instead. It was a small project even back then, and anyone could prompt something like it today.

What's left?

That leaves two projects that still hold some kind of potential.

LiveOL

LiveOL, the live orienteering results app, is my favorite. My pride and joy throughout the years. It has a very active user base with a couple thousand monthly active users, actual revenue from subscriptions, and I'm in fairly frequent contact with the people using it. It's still fun!

But not because of the tech. That has become pretty trivial now that I can prompt it. I recently added push notifications, which would have been a huge pain in the ass back in the day. That's why I put it off for like 10 years. This time I prompted it into existence over a weekend. It works really well, which is great for the users and, on some level, really frustrating for me as a programmer. Either way, I'm fine with it.

Digital Nyckelkvittens

My second project with some potential is Digital Nyckelkvittens, a digital key receipt service. I haven't made a single sale yet, but I keep getting inquiries about it all the time. I see real potential if I find the time and energy to tweak it to fit what the market actually needs.

The problem is I don't really have that energy or motivation right now, since I don't see a huge economic upside. Managing key receipts isn't exactly a passion of mine either way.

Final remarks

With that said, I am removing the "Projects" page from this site, and will probably remove any mention of projects from my LinkedIn just to clean things up. We are now in an age where just building something is not very valuable, and might even be frowned upon depending on the context. I guess we will see where the vibe-coding takes us! Now I have to get back to leveling in WoW Forever.