Bucking a long running trend of starting but never completing side-projects, I’ve kind-of “completed” LessNoise!

LessNoise shows you unfollow recommendations for your Twitter feed.

I’ve followed way too many people over the years, and my feed feels super noisy (particularly in the chronological view which I prefer).

Here’s the idea (described on the homepage):

👉 Check it out at lessnoise.net

You can also discuss it and give it an upvote on PH:

How it works

The main motivation for building it was getting (back) into a bit of web development. I hadn’t really done anything like this since ~7-8 years ago at University, and wanted to see where the frameworks, IDEs, tools and services are at now for a project like this.

This project definitely confirmed that I’m a bad and impatient developer… it definitely felt good to get to something mostly working.

The server is written in Node.js using the Express framework, and hosted on Heroku. The bit that took me the longest by far is understanding the Express “control flow” and how to pass states across requests. I made a mistake of diving into the Oauth code without really understanding this stuff and ended up debugging for ages.

You can see more about what I used here, and the whole source is available here (PRs, bug reports very welcome.)