Missed in HKG
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A while ago I started working on a new side project called "Missed in HKG" with the main purpose to polish up my rusty JavaScript skills.
Here goes the back story: Many years ago I used to live in San Francisco and by that time, was a frequent reader of the two city magazines, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and SF Weekly. I can’t remember which one or if both, but there was a popular section called “Missed Connections”, which always was a fun read.
Earlier this year I came across an article on Medium called “Missed Connections - Why I read the classifieds (and why you should too).”. I read it and it reminded me very much about my time in the US and how I frequently scanned these classifieds in various coffeeshops.
It also reminded me that I was looking for a good idea to build a side project around, a project with a purpose and an oversee able scope so it wouldn’t be too much work, because these things might never get finished in the end. It required to have all the functionality that I was interested in trying out and was basic enough to not eat up too much time. Building a ‘missed connections’ site seemed like the perfect scope and a fun idea.
I started to look for what else was out there and besides probably the most well known missed connections on Craigslist I didn’t find much else and have to say, not one of the sites I found seemed any good. Design-wise it almost felt like a little time travel back to the early 2000’s and back then and for obvious reasons none of them would display nicely on mobile. To me displaying ‘ok’ and thus being usable on a mobile phone is the minimum requirement for such an app. To fill that gap and to provide a prettier, better and faster mobile alternative was kind of a no-brainer and my new side project was born.
I talked to a friend of mine about what I wanted to do and he agreed it was a fun little project to work on and offered his help to build a proper backend and API for it. This was a huge improvement to the whole project and we started working on it.
To make a long story short, the site was built and has been finished for some time now, only getting some minor tweaks and improvements here and there.
So far we never officially announced it, since there was always something more important to do. To not carry one more to-do over into 2015, consider this the launch announcement for “Missed in HKG”, our own version of Missed Connections for Hong Kong.
Give it a go at missedin-hkg.com and spread the word ;)