Personal Projects

I have a few projects that I maintain in my spare time. Personal projects are a great place to learn new things and give back to the web community.

konsens.it

free online group decision tool

I’ve launched konsens together with Martha in 2022. It’s a free online tool that makes group decisions easier. Since we want to make this service accessible to as many people as possible, one doesn’t need to create an account to start a new decision process and all data related to a decision is automatically deleted after 42 days.

Martha designed the user interface and I wrote the complete backend and frontend code. I also make sure to keep the service running and up-to-date. The frontend code is written in Elm, which keeps breaking changes and updates in the frontend to a minimum while guaranteeing a high reliability and low error rate.

Indexmiete

indexmiete.max.hn

German inflation and rent tracking tool

In Germany landlords can tie rent prices to inflation, which is called “Indexmiete”. If inflation rises more than 3% and the last rent increase was more than 12 months ago, landlords can increase the rent by the amount of inflation. During the corona crisis with very high inflation rates, this meant tenants had to suddenly pay 15% and more for their rent.

It’s also not that easy to figure out when the 3% increase happened or when it could happen in the future. That’s why I’ve build the indexmiete website, where visitors can choose the month of their last rent increase to easily see by which percentage prices have increased since then. It also provides a warning in case the last increase was more than 12 months ago and the increase is higher than 3%. The inflation data is fetched from the German Federal Statistical Office on a daily basis, which is the same data used by landlords to check if they can increase their rents.

Jung & Naiv Suche

This project is currently in a broken state. I will fix it and generally improve it’s usability, once I have a bit time to work on it.

jungundnaiv.max.hn

search for all interviews from Jung & Naiv

Jung & Naiv is potentially the biggest German political interview format on Youtube. It’s been around for a long time, which means it’s also a great archive of what politicians said years ago. But if you are looking for a specific thing a politician said in an interview, one would have to rewatch the multiple hour long interviews or manually search through every transcription.

My search website makes searching through all Jung & Naiv videos effortless. I downloaded the automatically generated subtitles from Youtube for all interviews (over 500 videos), had flexsearch create an index for all subtitles and timestamps and then built a user interface to search through the 500 MB search index and return a link to the time stamp in each video, where the search term was mentioned.

In the first version the index was created in the browser whenever the site was opened. In the current version the index is generated before and uploaded to backblaze storage. Visitors then download the index on loads, that it can be again searched directly in the browser. Since flexsearch now also allows storing the search index in a database, I plan to keep the search index on the server, only send a request for the search results from the frontend and then return the fully rendered HTML. I’m looking forward to this work. I’m currenly waiting for datastar to have a stable 1.0 release to begin working on it.