I created OSINTBuddy (https://github.com/osintbuddy/osintbuddy), this project allowed me to break into the software industry despite being a highschool dropout and it's managed to gain a tiny bit of popularity in some niche OSINT communities, this still surprises me haha.

I've been in the process of rewriting/refactoring the codebase these past few months to use Rust instead of Python and Vite instead of create-react-app. OSINTBuddy is a web based version of something like Maltego (https://maltego.com/). I started the project years ago and its currently my main side project although I have a few other ideas I plan to start building starting next year.

Wow, that’s honestly impressive — especially hearing that you made it into the software industry without finishing school. That takes guts and talent.

And OSINTBuddy looks seriously cool — I imagine building something like a web-based Maltego must’ve been a huge technical challenge.

If you don’t mind me asking — how’s it going now? Are you working full-time as a developer? I’d love to hear more about your journey. Respect!

It's going good! I'm currently taking some time off work due to medical issues I ran into which is kinda nice since I get to dedicate more time to OSINTBuddy. Overall my journey has had plenty of ups and downs. In short I'll be forever grateful to the software industry for being mostly meritocratic, I'm not sure where my life would be if all companies required degrees.

30 years of coding, and the project I have the best memories of wasn't even a big deal from a technical perspective. Today, it would be generated by AI and forgotten. But in 2002, ordering pizza online was a new thing. Being able to click the ingredients you wanted, having the pizza on-screen change its appearance to show those ingredients, even splitting the pizza in half to show different toppings on each half? And works on all browsers? in 2002? That was new.

It was still just a 1-2 hour project as I recall, part of a larger project when we were re-doing the Dominos web site. And one of the other guys in the office helped me on it, so it was not even a solo effort.

But what made it cool was for a decade or so, I was able to tell people that if they had ever ordered pizza online, odds are they have seen and used my work.

That’s such a great story — and honestly, what you described was way ahead of its time. It’s wild to think how something that took a few hours back then could influence how we interact with services for years. And being able to say “people probably used my work” is a huge badge of honor. Respect!

I have two!

One is a webapp I wrote almost 20 years ago for my dad and it's still being used today. It runs on IIS and built with asp classic and vanilla html/css/js (no frameworks back then). They use it to track orders and invoices to suppliers/vendors and ensure what they receive is what they ordered.

The other, an electron-type app that saves people hundreds of hours per month by letting them bypass some bad UIs and interact with external services directly. It's been running for 6 years, only had to make very few updates, and it's the one thing I don't need monitoring for - not only it's been quite stable, I get called immediately if it breaks (eg when external services change their endpoints).

Wow, that’s amazing! There’s something really beautiful about software that quietly runs for years — especially when it helps your family or saves real people time.

Your first project really touched me. A 20-year-old app still in use today? That’s not just code, that’s legacy. And the second one sounds like exactly the kind of practical tool that developers dream of building — something that just works and stays out of the way.

Thanks for sharing this, it’s inspiring!

In 2023, we have seen a lot of AI directories popping up and lot of founders (including me) manually submitting their products on these platforms to gain traffic and foundational backlinks.

So we have launched Boringlaunch, a submission service that helps grow your online presence by submitting your product to 100+ platforms. It's perfect for new products that need more visibility and backlinks to improve their SEO and search rankings.

Our customers love it because it saves them from doing boring tasks and they can focus on real marketing.

Here is the website link: https://www.boringlaunch.com/

Nice work! I totally get the pain of manually submitting products to tons of directories — especially with so many new ones popping up. Automating that sounds super helpful, especially for solo devs or indie hackers trying to gain visibility.

Did you build Boringlaunch entirely solo, or with a team? Curious how you keep up with the ever-changing list of platforms.

thanks man, we didn't automated it yet, currently we are doing manually to maintain the quality of work. We are team of 2 people, me and my friend.

We keep updating our database every month where we add new/trending platforms in our internal list. We have analysed more than 800 platforms in the period of last 2 years.

Love this question. My proudest project is a small but surprisingly useful CLI tool that automatically finds and closes stale Jira tickets for my team. Nothing flashy, but it’s saved us hours of manual tracking and actually got picked up by a couple of other teams.

That’s awesome — I love practical tools that quietly save time. Your CLI idea is the kind of thing that sounds small but delivers real value. I can imagine how helpful that is in a messy Jira board. If it’s open source, I’d love to see it!