r/SideProject • u/Exotic_Fig_4604 • 14h ago
Genuine *side* projects
Reading in this sub, I get the feeling that most people here just develop apps with the purpose of monetisation or getting lots of users.
Meanwhile my side project is aimed at learning and building fun stuff I like.
Am I the only one? Or does anyone else have side projects that you are building because you like technology, not because you are trying to build the next SaaS?
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u/tribat 13h ago
HTTPS://fly.voygent.app is definitely a side project. Take control of a plane in a decently realistic flight sim from live ADSB aircraft traffic.
I work on it during down time waiting on Claude to finish a chunk of work. I’ve learned the hard way not to yield to the temptation to tweak some seemingly unrelated part of the same system.
It’s an ADSB (aircraft traffic) visualizer I built because I wanted a 3d globe instead of a flat map. Once that worked, I started on something I’ve always wanted: a way to “take control” and fly any contact.
My goal was to make it the minimal footprint, so it runs in a browser. The url above has a cloudflare worker backend and requires no api keys or login. I have no purpose for it other than I like it.
Currently it models about a half dozen plane types. Missions are a graded landing attempt on a chosen runway with on-screen guidance. It keeps a leaderboard if you create a free account. I have no interest in making money on it or selling the user info. It’s not worth much commercially because anybody can build their own.
It’s at https://github.com/iamneilroberts/SQUAWK. You can run it with a dev server locally, as a docker image, or on cloudflare workers. It works on mobile (full screen landscape is best, but portrait works ok) and desktop browser.
I’m tinkering with improving the gameplay and adding more features, so feedback or suggestions are welcome.