A significant portion of the material was done in the early years, when I worked like mad. Now I'm running the business at a more comfortable pace, though ramping things up to work on a new product for the site.
Any plans to monetize?
Recently: Erin and Thomas are still busy putting the finishing touches on their half of Starfighter, and I'm basically just on client communications duty, so I gave myself a two-day engineering project as time off for good behavior.
Certain events which happen when players play Starfighter games are significant. We want to congratulate players when they happen, ideally in as close to real-time as possible. Also, since "strike when the iron is hot", if that player happens to be a job seeker that would be a really good time to do an introductory phone call if they're willing to do one.
We have heuristics which identify these important events and pipe them into Slack. The plan was originally "If we see one of the notifications, send them a person-to-person email."
But if you're playing Starfighter in your browser, you aren't in your email client, so you might not see the email until e.g. the next day. What we really want is like Facebook messenger, except inside our own application, hooked up to Slack, with the ability to be selective about who it is open to.
Enter Apollo, messenger of the gods:
Front-end: React and SockJS Back-end: SockJS-go, some Go glue code, and NSQ Back-end for Slack: three very trivial endpoints in our main Ruby on Rails application Interface on Slack: two slash commands and one asynchronous incoming webhook
How it looks in practice:
In-app message window: https://www.evernote.com/l/Aaf2wn2dyxhPDoHAzSYymDcNIasqcmj91...
Slack: https://www.evernote.com/l/Aadc-vDMIpxNc7z6XZ1_xH1jMSNOVJ-58...
Not bad for two days of work. (Starfighter will likely OSS the only hard part of this, which is the NSQ-to-websocket piece.)
I guess unless these are made clear, potential community builders might have lot of doubts on Hellobox as a platform.
Good work though, the stuff seems pretty neat.
https://github.com/jxm262/xchange.js
I built another project to analyze prices across the exchanges using the xchange.js library. Surprisingly both have 13 stars on github :) I'm planning to add _alot_ more functionality over the next month or so to both projects.
I'm proud of it because its a general purpose library (http longpolling) versus random prototypes that I normally make. Also it has a lot of unit tests, code comments, and a decent README. I can appreciate the amount of work it takes to create a polished library for others to use after making one myself.
For a client I've built and maintain part of the backends of the largest speed camera app and data provider in Europe.
I could keep making these, but it's do or die with side projects. You either commit to them with a full heart, or they begin to bit rot.
Currently I just maintain the projects and promote them the only way I know how (Hackernews and Twitter). There are other outlets for promoting your projects, but they tend to be very niched and specific.
You can see the Twitter accounts here:
I was quite happy to learn recently that it's pretty popular with my wife's team at Amazon. She had a pleasant surprise when she installed it on her machine and noticed my name in the About dialog :)
It's due for an update though...
It's barely made any money (40€ in a year or so), but the great feedback makes it all good.
