I have to confess something: I am somewhat of a pet project hoarder. Throughout my whole life, well before my formal education as a computer scientist, I have been creating new things on the computer, usually by remixing or duplicating already existing things. Depending on how far things got, I started telling my family and friends about it, hyping my own idea, before eventually getting bored of it and deleting it.
Looking through my pet projects is a bit like flipping through a photo album: In every image, you can see a noticeable growth and change in relation to the previous one. But mostly it’s fun looking at how I did things in the past.
So I have decided to pick a few of these side projects and compile them into something which I call a Pet Project Sematary - because very much like the animals in the book of the same name, my long-dead pet projects have the tendency to unexpectedly come back to life.
I have selected these projects based on how funny or interesting I find them. Please do not mistake this for a portfolio or something - this is what I do in the dark, when no one looks.
Interesting & Fun (Mostly Fun) Pet Projects
- What, me worry?, Computer generated image (BASIC listing, circa 1994)
- Köpkes Adventure I & II, Adventure Games (HTML, Java, RPGM2K, 1999)
- Europe Times, Newspaper from the future (School Project in HTML, 2000)
- #risa-bar & rpg-irc.net, Roleplay-centric community (phpBB, IRC, 2001)
- Bunter Haufen Goettingen, coordinating mailing list for a local movement (Mailman, HTML, 2004)
- rampenlicht.net, local community network (HTML, PHP, 2005)
- Various Home Pages, static content pages (HTML, Java, PHP, Flash, JavaScript, all over the ’00s)
- Local Images, beautiful images from around you (Objective-C, 2012)
- thingsmap, get real time updates from around you (Website & iOS App, 2013)
- 90srewind, 90s podcast (Podcast, 2014)
- Marauder / 2nd Left, Location Based Social Service (Objective-C, 2014)
- hungry, find a place to eat near you (Swift, 2015)
- eatsmart.cc, open your own small restaurant, or visit one (HTML, 2015)
- hilfszwerg, find or offer help for small tasks around you (Facebook Chat Bot, 2016)
- spielerunde.org, community for offline gamers (HTML, JavaScript, Parse, 2017)
- paperboy, get quickly up to date with relevant news (Facebook Bot, Firestore, 2018)
- hecto, a command line text editor (Rust, 2019)
- zeitungsbote.cc, news-based social network (React, PWA, Firestore, 2020)
The entries in this list are updated occasionally.
Image Credit: Paramount Pictures, from “Pet Sematary”, 2019