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Neat Indie Projects No. 3

Neat Indie Projects No. 3

Peter Thaleikis

Peter Thaleikis

Engineer. Maker. Open Source Fan. Backpacker

by Peter Thaleikis

Intro

Here is no. 3! If you haven't read about the previous projects you might find the first list of side projects and the second list of side projects of interest.

If you got any feedback for the list or want to leave the makers behind the project a comment reply to this tweet, please. Here we go with some neat side projects and their makers:

“Ecosia“ — the search-engine that plants trees 🌳️

Even you might have heard about Ecosia before I still would like to introduce the search-engine that plants trees as climate change is without a doubt very important. Quite similar to Google, Ecosia provides a search-engine with advertising on the top of their search results. The advertising money earned from the search results doesn't flow to investors though. It flows into selected projects to plant trees and reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If you can do one little thing to make a positive impact on the environment, switch to Ecosia 🌳️

Green, Eco-friendly, Search Engine

“proGramCLI“ — a self-hosted, CLI-based Instagram clone 🤳️

proGramCLI is a self-hosted, CLI-based Instagram clone by Sarthak Sharma. Privacy is important and especially when it comes to your close friends and family. A self-hosted version gives you more control over who sees your photos and videos. If you don't want Zuck and friends see everything you share and type this is your way forward. It's naturally open source: sarthology/proGramCLI.

Instagram, Privacy, electron, node

“curlx“ — if cURL and Postman had a baby 👶

As a developer, I'm often checking if APIs work as expected and serve my purpose. Even there are graphical programs such as Postman, I somehow end up at the command-line often. curl is my tool of choice then. With curlx, Shivkanth Bagavathy has built a tool for those who like to explore APIs on their command-line. You can see headers as well as formatted responses directly on your bash. It also comes with a list of previous requests (history) and the option to manage your requests in collections. As to expect, it's open sourced on GitHub.

Open source, Command-line, bash

“Wavenet for Chrome“ — syndicate any marked text into sound

Wavenet for Chrome is a browser extension to syndicate any marked text into acoustic output. Michael Poirier-Ginter has built a tool which could help people with strong reading deficits as well as visually impaired people. The extension is open source, you find the source code on GitHub.

While the extension is free, Google Cloud comes with a small charge. As with most cloud providers, there is a free tier for new customers. Check the Google cloud offerings for details.

Open source, Browser Extension, Chrome extension

“lazydocker“ — the lazier way to manage everything Docker

If you ever used docker you have had your time with the numerous commands and options. Finding out what the current state of your containers is can be annoying as well as challenging when you are new to docker. With lazydocker by Jesse Duffield this gets easier. It shows you containers, images, volumes, etc. on one screen. By selection with the mouse, you can find out more about the state and resources used. "The lazier way to manage everything docker" says Jesse. He has also published a short video showing the features and functionality.

container, serverless, Docker, open source

“Kimai“ — self-hosted, open source invoice management web-app

Freelancers and entrepreneurs this might be of interest for you. Kimai is a web-application to track working-hours, manage clients and projects, and generate invoices. These are only some of the various features it comes with. On the website you can find a complete list of features in version 2. You can find information on how to self-host the application using Docker, 1-click installers and even FTP in the documentation. If you are looking for an alternative to Xero or InvoiceNinja this looks like a good option. The software by Kevin Papst is open source on GitHub and he supports the development with donations.

PHP, open source, self-hosted, invoicing system

Final thoughts 🙏️

As mentioned above, if you haven't seen the previous lists I would recommend having a look. There are some interesting projects included in the first list of side projects and the second list of side projects.

Any tweet or mention helps to spread the word. It would be awesome if you could share this article on Twitter or Facebook 🙏️

Other mentions

The mighty tree on the cover photo was taken by Niko in Nicaragua.

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