I've build remote-controlled, riding flamethrower based on deodorant and ESP8266 (Arduino):

I made a web app that utilizes the GeoLocation API, that is used by search and rescue services in a couple of countries, to located missing and/or injured people “in the wild”. Over a few years, hundreds of people has been found due to this tool, some of them would probably not have survived without it! Made the first prototype myself, then two other devs joined in.

Open source and SaaS is offered free of charge to the rescue services. :)

when ur friend says: im "programmer/hacker" hahahah

Coolest thing i've built solo? I think it's my 3D snake multiplayer game.

It all started with a simple 2D snake game to teach programming basics at community college. Then i added a multiplayer mode based on a simple UDP implementation. Then i wondered how it would look ike in 3D and i had the idea to figure out how to implement a 3D engine by myself and i dove into the maths and wrote a simple 3D engine based on a windows forms picture box.
I showed the game to my colleagues and the loved it and we played it a lot.
So i added special mode boosters, and sound and map events and obervermode and observer polls.... you know it.

Here's a little collage of the journey...

I think in my case its a monitoring system I'm still writing which does already work (just far from done).

I got this as a crazy idea while thinking that it would be impossible to make and then thought fuck it and I wrote it.

Written in php, and as long as you can write a module for it, you can pretty much make it monitor anything you'd like.

I'm using it to monitor a few websites and servers I run :)

My own text mmorpg and it's selfmade Chat system! <3

Yeah it's barebones and has some flaws, but its the first project I set an worked through with a very pleasing result ^^

It's a CLI-Style interface with a command and chat mode, multiple rooms, user descriptions etc.

Some day I want to improve it even further, bring much more functionality in the mix, but first I would have to reinforce the base/core of the program ^^

I'm building a device that will readout books to blind people

Coolest thing I’ve built solo?

Damn, there’s been a lot of things over the years, but I guess the most used one I’ve made would be my voice activated tv remote - yes it’s real.

So in essence it’s a google home... yea I know spyware and all, but look it was free so I’m going to make use of it... err where was I, oh yea.

An IFTTT account which taps into the google assistant API and creates a webhook, although the authentication side of things is 0 to none, so had to put a api-key into the requests to at least have some layer of auth.

This webhook then hits a raspberry pi containing a PHP API to accept and authenticate the request in, digest this into KEY commands for the TV, and drops this into a Python script to connect to the TV over a web socket connection ( I found python more stable for this ) and sends the pre made key requests, it can even do multiple keys at a time... that was a pain.

So after all that, the end game becomes about a second from saying “hey google, change the tv channel to xxx”

This sick and twisted contraption is finished and the tv is my little bitch.

This has been built out to handle channels by name, number, volume up/down, sources switching to hdmi, tv, vga and a bunch of other things.

The things we do when we can’t find a tv remote for days....

Next up, getting it to launch Netflix app and going to a specified show / episode.. but may be to adventurous.

Personally the coolest was the program I built for my fathers use on his job.

It was my first to be used commercially in the real.

That was a very big thing, I was 17 at the time an used turbo pascal 5.5 and he used it to compute how well all machinery was doing, they rented out diggers and other construction equipment to construction sites and manually compute this with a calculator took up to three days. (This was 1987 so there was not very many ready made programs for business, you often had to build your own)

With this program he had it done in around 30 minutes.

The next best was recently when I got my raft distributed consensus cluster server working. Its a little bit like zookeeper.
Building that purely from the research paper was rewarding but a bit of a challenge.

Is this something cool?
I wanted a portable battery but I had no money (student life in Mexico), but I had a couple of damaged tablet batteries and a damaged router case.
A year ago I did not use it, but now it is useful when I occasionally go out to capture some Pokémon.
The downside is that it only has one USB port to discharge and micro-B to charge. And of course I do not go out with the antennas, I take them off, I just put them on for the demonstration, haha.

Two years ago, I developed an security app for Android as a school project. I didn't like teamwork at school (you know, you do all the work and everyone else is getting the same grade you receive, specially if you are the nerd of the class), actually I hated it, so I made it alone.

Its name was "Alex" and was a simple "panic button". You can configure two emergency emails and phone numbers (contacts only, not police) and, if you're in danger, you just have to press the button and the app is gonna send two messages/emails to your contacts: the first one, to tell where are you (GPS, only the name of the place) and that you're in problems. The second one with an audio/photo file of the situation.

Sounds like a great app, and I tested it few times. The reason I didn't continue with this is that I got my first job and I had not time, and that, tree or four months later, the government (of the city) launched a similar app. Less sophisticated, but I think it's still useful: "No estoy sola"(I'm not alone). I haven't tested it cause I don't trust on the authorities, I'd preffer to send my location to a friend through messenger app instead.

I don't know if I should re-work this app (I didn't released it, I just have the beta) or work on something else. I'm afraid that, if I release it, someone could die or get kidnapped because of a bug or something going wrong with the app :c What do you think?

My own system software for my own store using cool stack

1) Built an entire SoC around a MIPS CPU. Fixed bugs in the CPU. Created hardware, busses, firmware, wrote Linux drivers, ported Linux.

2) Still working on a C++ abstraction framework for heterogenous computations for 4 years. About to solve / create a prototype for GPGPU and maybe even HDL code generation. Utilizes dynamic dispatch for scalar, SSE, AVX and other targets. I started this only because I did not like the performance of procedural noise algorithms utilized in a game prototype I started in 2015.

3) Created a game in 5 months to drag myself out of depression. Feeling success while your job sucks is soooo goooodd...

I've created a small smart home web app 2 or 3 years ago.
Features:
- Change DECT heating controller settings
- Philips Hue control
- Wunderlist integration
- Send a cooking recipe to the web app (from a large recipe site, with a greasymonkey script)

I've mounted an old Android tablet to a kitchen cupboard where the web app runs in kiosk mode in fullscreen (you can swipe between the different panels).

The web app is build with .NET Core Web-API, Vue.js and MariaDB. Everything runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Last year I've discovered openHAB with HABPanel...

A functional system bar for my window manager in Go. It's so light on system resources that htop can barely report its system usage. Also, I haven't changed anything in the code in a year and it still works perfectly.

Online tag, it was a small game topdown only using programmed graphics (simple circles squares and lines). One could hide underneath trees, and there were powerups, toggleable walls.

Was quite popular for a year or two. Would love to make a remake of it.

My project...

coolest thing I ever built?
My career..
except it's not cool, and not sure if it's a career at all.. not so good on a thing, just some knowledge here and there..

now I am sad about my life

You all like WoW? I developed a MUD (Multi User Dungeon, the first real mmorpg's) server from scratch using telnet and nodejs.
You can create accounts and characters with different classes/races and dive into a world full of quests, monsters and lots of loot :)

I put six round LCDs inside a 13x18 IKEA frame and turned it into a six pack for my home made flight simulator instead of buying the Saitek/Logitech one which would cost at least six times.

I am still working on it and it is far from being done, but a compiler.

Alarm clock Pi that reads news headlines and weather cast to me in the morning.

Not impressive but it’s the project I enjoyed most..

BANano, a free library that transpiles B4X (a crossplatform development tool) source code to JavaScript.

It allows users who are not fluent in JavaScript to make PWA's and dynamic Websites using a VB-like language and the Abstract Designer native to the B4X tool.

100 weeks is a long time, and I'm not even sure I'm gonna survive! But my roughly estimate is by:
- wk125; I've managed to live on my savings; Because I'll (try to) finish any project and just focus on my thesis.
- wk150; I've defended my thesis. Now I apply for PhD and get rejected.
- wk175; Begging for my last job to get hired again.
- wk200; Thanking myself for not buying bitcoins back then.

Probably I'll also manage to learn Go somewhere there.

To understand recursion, just click these links:

3d printer
I only assembled it from prusa parts but still it was lots of fun, learned a lot about how 3d printers work.

Then it was printing trex using 3d printer and it was funny to because it took me about a month to do so just because of amount of parts and the problem with parts that were broken and needed to be fixed.

From software projects, once I build a browser plugin in 2-3 hours cause I was pissed off with those shitty popups all around. I published it on browser store, made code opensource and forgot about it.

Recently I got some survey from a german university about it and I was like wtf ?
I looked at a statistics and my plugin had about 500 daily users and I was amused because the ui is shitty as fuck and the ux is even more shitty.

I plan to update this plugin but since I am focused on a bigger personal project for almost half a year now I have no time to do it.

10 years ago: a big red button that would play a random episode of a random TV show on our student home TV.

Allstar by Smash Mouth using console.beep and thread sleep in c#

Me: I need a new website. Let's make it with NodeJS / AdonisJS so I get a grip on that tech.

Also me: mmh, how about I use it as an API so that I can plug some other things in it?

Also me: successfully develop a headless CMS based on an API, with AdonisJS. Not perfect, but runs like a charm.

I made an infinite canvas whiteboard app specifically designed for quick notes with pen input but now I want to scale it to something bigger: a tool to allow children with DSA to take notes and study better using images, videos, gifs and sound directly into the canvas, right next to their notes.

Coolest thing I have built solo is me. I tried my best to be a better me everyday. I trained hard to be in a position today. I won't be here atleast in next 5 years

A localized sense of cold productive isolation. No, you can't see it.

I read that like 'Coolest being you've been solo'

Well... My first ever game for Android - AlcoLudo 2 <3

Coolest but probably most unnecessary feature in the dev world: A whitespace (programming language) to Java bytecode transpiler. Well I kinda started, but never finished actually due to lack of motivation to really finish it. At least the Parser and Interpreter were fully functional.

I made a launcher for dungeons & dragons online.

to do that i had to re the login,server list and server queue to get it to launch

Then i added a gui using pyqt5

Built a Speedreading Homebrew for PlayStation Portable back in the days... People in the metro were even asking me about it and wanted to get the 'app'.

Laid the foundation and got a patent application for a custom Enterprise PHP framework that interacts with all of the big chat AI api's and can communicate with the outside world as IVR, SMS, Webchat, etc. Had corporate guidance but a lot of leeway and was the sole developer for a full year of the project. I've since left the company and they expanded the team and are soon to go to production with it.

A long time ago I got an idea for an Internet concierge shopping service that would pair you up with a human to help you comparison shop anything. Obviously this was before AI or the kind of tech we’re used to now. The idea was that the help of a real live person to help you track down deals was better than some of the emerging product recommendation engines I was researching. I figured I’d at least make a short term business out of it until tech caught up. So I built the site, DB, and business logic and recruited my bargain-hunting wife to help people find good buys. It worked ok, but wasn’t easy to monetize because people wanted her help for free rather than pay any kind of fee. Their perception was they weren’t saving a substantial amount if they had to pay someone to help them. Of course, our pitch was that by paying someone to help them, they might avoid paying more by trying it on their own.

It was an interesting experiment anyways.

So many actually... most of them are opensource

The coolest thing i wrote solo is a web app that parse my whatsapp text export files and show messages in bblocks with space between blocks proprotional to the delay between messages. I did this after a breakeup with my ex and i wanted to read all message history.
And yes, i had some stats features also.