I made a bunch of side projects over the last 9 months, and even accrued 500+ accounts and some donations!

I just stumbled upon this subreddit and have a bunch of fun projects I'd like to present, any thoughts/feedback/criticism, etc. all welcome.

So, first things first, a little about me, I work full time in an unrelated job, but have picked up full stack and mobile programming. I have two roommates who help a bit in their own way, one is a server expert and happened to have a server in our apartment basement, and the other is my brother and he picked up some frontend programming. We're all avid cyclists and decided to start building about 9 months ago.

Our first idea was https://sherpa-map.com a SPA website allowing users to create cycling routes, send them to their Garmin devices, download them as GPX files, etc. This site uses the open-source software Graphhopper on the backend which I've augmented to send back surface type information.

This site has a loooonnnggg list of features, from the simple, like a live weather radar, to the extreme like this functionality:

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AI surface classification

This video demonstrates the ability to classify road surface types in real time using high-resolution satellite imagery of road portions with unknown surface types!

I trained a Pytorch resnet 50 model with tuned hyperparameters and 10 epochs on 200,000 satellite images of roads with known surface types! (We host a OSM Postgres server with coordinates of roads and their associated surface types, I made a script to pull images of said roads for training).

I built the model into a secondary backend written in flask and piped the images being used back through live web sockets to my node.js backend to the person who is logged in!

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Okay, on to the next side project, a cycling physics simulator! https://sherpa-map.com/cycling-route-calculator.html

Cycling Physics Simulation

This site lets users enter information about their bike setup, upload or use a preset route, and enter in their physical information to see how different changes in their setup might affect how fast they will be throughout a course! It can also pull complex weather information throughout the course and give a full suite of nutrition details!

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Okay, Next project! The Activity Racer!

https://sherpa-map.com/activity-racer.html

Activity Racer

This site lets users upload their own or competitors' GPX activity files and line them up against each other at any point in an event, to see who was faster where! It's great if you've done the same even year after year with differing setups, allowing you to get insights as to which might have done better at what point.

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Okay, final project, this one's pretty half-baked as I'm still in the process of implementing so many other things, a podcast creation app! (I was bored and just started working on this a week or so ago, for no good reason). Currently, this one lives on https://sherpa-map.com/podcast.html

This podcasting web app creates a peer to peer to peer... mesh network using webRTC so, small groups can communicate with the highest level of fidelity both in audio and video! Simply enter a room name and have other users enter the room name as well and they're connected! I've already used tensorflow.js AI to allow a blur background option, similar to MS Teams, whereby bodypix classifier AI picks out the person and I use a blur on a JS canvas behind them.

I also went a little bit off the deep end and managed to implement the RNNoise background noise suppressor on the frontend, it's written in C, but I was able to use Windows Subsystem for Linux + emscrption to compile it in just the right way, with exposed malloc and free and a JS wrapper to use on the frontend in WASM.

I actually use WASM (typically Rust) in many fun ways throughout all of these projects.

I'm also in the middle of recreating the first site in React-Native + Maplibre for IOS and Android as individual APPs.

In addition, I'm also working on the integration of my main site into a different project for a different group.

So, I have a fun collection of side projects with slightly different GUIs, across different platforms with no coherent landing page as of yet but I've been having a blaaaast putting them together. As a final note, I even have a bit of an easter egg in the automated email system I use for account verifications and password resets do_not_reply@sherpa-map.com I hooked it up to ChatGPT API and told it it is a disgruntled worker whose sole task in life is to watch a do_not_reply email box and respond sarcastic/snarky to anyone who dares send a message to it, if AI comes for humanity, I bet I'll be on a list for this one lol.