Two Side Projects in One Week
Hey, I’m Hassan – Senior DevRel at Vercel. I write about my side projects and share things I learn along the way in web development and AI. Going to keep this one short and sweet, and talk about how I completed two side projects in one week a few months ago. Hope you enjoy!
After a relatively quiet August, I had one of my most productive weeks ever in September. I spent ~10 hours coding on Saturday and another 10 on Sunday, only taking breaks to eat with my family, hit the gym, and watch some Big Bang Theory episodes. I also spent a few hours coding each day after work during the week. As a result, I managed to ship two side projects.
I usually work in sprints – I’ll spend all my free time one week coding, then spend relatively little time coding the next week. I recently found out that it’s what Naval refers to as “working like a lion, not like a cow”. What I will say, is it was both rewarding and exhausting. Let’s get to the projects.
Project 1: DevTool Angels
The first one was a list of active investors in developer tool startups. It was a table built with Next.js and Tailwind that was linked to a Postgres database. I had also built a similar table for work so I was able to reuse a lot of the code and I seeded the database with a list of devtool angels from swyx.
After launching on Twitter, I got close to 30 DMs from angel investors and VCs who wanted to be added. I had some great conversations and got some excellent feedback for future features. My favorite suggestion was adding angel investor profiles so folks can have a dedicated URL that shows their investments, bio, and average check size.
Project 2: Tailwind Color Picker
My second project, which did much better than expected, was a Tailwind color picker chrome extension. Here’s how it works:
1. Takes a screenshot of the site using Chrome’s captureVisibleTab API.
2. Analyzes the image data to pick out the hex color code.
3. Passes the hex color code through an algorithm to match it to the closest tailwind color, which it copies to your clipboard and returns.
This project only took me about 3-4 hours as I copied most of the code from a few different repos I found that I linked in the README.
Open Source
I’d be lying if I said this week wasn’t exhausting. But it was also incredibly rewarding, both in terms of the amount I learned and the excitement from people saying nice things about the projects. And it doesn’t hurt that I broke 40k followers on Twitter because of it!
Both of the projects are open source, here’s devtool angels and the tailwind color picker if you want to take a look at the code.
AI Projects
I’ve been getting more into AI the past couple weeks. Two days ago, I shipped an AI side project that hit 20,000 users in 2 days.
I’m going to be writing a new post about this project this week! Subscribe if you want to be notified when it comes out.
For those of you that made it to the end, thanks so much for reading! If you have any questions, feedback, or just want to say hi, respond to this email or comment below and I will reply.
Those projects were amazing! 😊
Well done!