I was playing with the xmit.co services and was inspired by the things they did. When I started thinking about it, I saw similar indie projects recently and decided to write about them.

Stucco Software

Via the perusing of #IndieWeb I discovered the Octothorpes project. I've added it to my site, and when searching for a tag, I also post a link to their discovery page for that tag.

The project is run by Stucco Software, a small two-person shop who just deliver cool tools and services.

They're working on a new project called Pocket Change, and they're writing devlogs about it. I read their latest post, which they call the Change Log series, and it's quite inspiring and might explain why I liked their Octothorpes project so much. There's this feeling of small, human-ness, and autonomy.

The idea is that the data lives with you, the user, and the application is only just a tool. It has the same vibe as file over app, a good blog post and philosophy by Steph Ango, maker of Obsidian.

Hundred Rabbits

I've been following @Neauoire on the Fediverse for a while and was always intrigued by the eccentric code and examples he shared. To me, it looks like Brainfuck, the programming language, but this is of course not the case. They're part of the 100r (Hundred Rabbits) collective, which is on the intersection of art and code. They offer a lot of cool little apps.

Conjured Ink

Another great collective is the folks at Conjured Ink, who are trying to make %things% that allows creatives to sell their art. Democratising art sales, saving people from closed platforms and marketplaces, and adding human values to the process.

xmit.dev

When I was browsing someone's blogroll (reminder for myself; make one too!) I stumbled upon @pc (Pierre Carrier) and his site/company xmit.dev. He offers a lot of small services and they feel very hacky (like Hackers or The Matrix, not in badly written); storing 64kb of data with a public key at 0pw.me, or its counterpart 1pw.me where you do the same thing but with a password.

There's also some other fun stuff like found.as which is sort of an URL shortener, but it can also store something like HTML or Markdown, up to 1MB.

All of this is hosted on xmit.co which is the backbone for all of these services, it's a free hosting provider. You can sign up and use it yourself, it's a very striking UI, very minimalistic and functional. It's a far cry from the big corporate user experience, but that's what makes it so charming.

He wrote a very nice post about shipping small things.

Inspiration for another day

I'm just really falling in love with all these small indie projects, and it's very inspiring. I've had things on my mind already..

In one of my previous posts, about being jaded about capitalism, it might seem like I'm against making money, but that's not really the case. I've been thinking a lot about "using my free time wisely" and not make games but use my programming skills to bring some kind of SaaS to life.

But maybe I should just ship a small human thing. ✨