Often I wonder if a project is too small to publish. This tool will only be useful for me, I think. But if you open source the project, others might find it useful, and they might request features or fix bugs to make it better for everyone.

Even if no one uses it but yourself, a published project accessible at a public domain is way easier to use than having to spin up a local dev server. This also minimizes dependency rot, e.g. getting errors or depracation warnings when running an old project with a new version of Node.

A few of my projects are like that:

• SuperCalc - A multi-line/expression calculator built on Math.js inspired by Numi.

• OntologySearch - A web search tool for ontologies.

• table-annotate - A tool to annotate tabular datasets with links to wikidata entities.

(though to be honest I haven’t used the bottom two recently as I’ve done less semantic web stuff).

This week, I published two more small projects:

• Font Playground - A tool to help you pick fonts by comparing them with visually similar sizes.

• DataBox - A data toolbox to run DuckDB queries in your browser. (Useful for testing queries on remote Parquet files or huggingface datasets, or running geospatial queries)

Note these are all static single-page-apps that don’t need a backend server, so you can host them for free, forever, on Netlify or Cloudflare Pages.

But you can even extend this to most traditional backends that request data from APIs or even some databases (like SQLite), by deploying them to a serverless platform like Workers. Only compute intensive tasks like heavy analytical queries or ML jobs can’t be deployed in this way.