Ideas

These are various ideas for programming projects. Some are ambitious, some are easy. Some are well-outlined, and some are just random scrawlings.

Also note that I often come up with ideas that other people have thought out more thoroughly, but I'm not yet aware of them. If you find anything interesting or would like to provide some constructive criticism, please send an email (me@josias.dev).

Gemini-related

> But do you know what I really want? I want to go a round every 24 hours to collect new gemlog posts, convert them to epub and upload to my ebook reader in time for breakfast. I haven't quite figured that one out yet, though.

- bjorn

This is exactly what I've wanted as well, and I'm sure it can easily be done. Kelbot recently made something very similar, but not quite as well polished. Kelbot says they're not a programmer, so maybe I'll write a more flexible program based on their method, maybe even along with publishing weekly epubs straight on my capsule.

kelbot's script

Audio-focused social media

We have text-focused social media and image-focused social media, why not audio-focused social media? We would post voice messages to our friends so they can hear our voices as we explain what we are thinking, doing, and such. I started working on a project for this, but it didn't go far and I ended up losing the source code.

Update: this idea is far from new, and it seems that there are many projects working on variants of this idea. I'm satisfied, for now.

Repository Search Engine

I'd like a search engine that lets me find code repositories (and maybe related documentation). It would be entirely focused on this task, and likely make use of features specific to code repositories to improve results (branches, tags, etc). The index would contain repositories from anywhere and indiscriminately display them. GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, cgit, gitweb, and other forges would all be supported and treated equally. This idea came to mind after always typing "site:github.com <query>" whenever trying to search for repos online. I want to filter out the rest of the Web without focusing on GitHub or any other one code forge.

There are a few search engines that are similar to this idea. Most are simply code search engines (really cool, but not what I want here). I found one that fits exactly (called GitSearch), but with some caveats: it is supported by advertising, it's index is limited, and it conforms too much to the GitHub-style of stars, forks, etc. Git's strengths are not used, GitHub's are.

I've been tinkering with crawlers, but I understand that writing a search engine is a big task and should not be taken lightly. I may or may not take up this project.

Update: I was informed by petabyt of a project called searchcode, which does almost exactly this. Unfortunately, it's not entirely Free Software.