The punchline: I spent months building a pretty amazing site, to have him say that his audience was probably too old to understand how to use the site I built. So far, that technology has led to two granted patents and my startup![3]
The differentiator is that you choose a fixed duration, and if you stop typing within that duration, all your writing is erased. Such a constraint has been effective at getting me to pour out everything on my mind, without hesitation.
Built w React and open source @ https://github.com/krrishd/write
I only check my email 3x a day. But, I had such a hard time maintaining the will power to NOT check email, I had to build a tool to help. The service holds my email outside of my inbox and only delivers it at the three times a day I specify.
It has helped me focus on my real to do list, and not on email.
I am also working on an AI/ML bot that plays Out of the Park Baseball -- a baseball sim where you play as the team manager. The AI manages the roster and lineups and makes the big in game decisions. It does not handle pitches or batting (that is not part of the game).
Like I said, it started internal, but it was so apparent after a few days that it could be useful for other businesses that I separated it out with an API and stuck it at a different URL, in case it turned out (which it did) that I wanted to polish it into a product of its own.
- leave in 3 minutes for 32 minute wait connecting to bullet train
- leave in 3 minutes for 10 minute wait connecting to slow train
- leave in 33 minutes for 2 minute wait connecting to bullet train
- leave in 10 minutes for 3 minute wait connecting to slow train
Then I could see clearly my options in the way I preferred. I cared less about what time I would get home, and more about how much time I would spend waiting and sitting on a train, so this let me optimize for that.
The nice thing is that it lets you create offline web apps that you can actually print on paper (double sided) and cut.
It is a simple web app that basically wraps the flashcards latex package, while giving you a nearly-complete preview using mathjax.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/helvetica-neue-native-open/i...
I used to spend a bunch of time bouncing between HN and Reddit looking at headlines. So I built myself a tiny aggregator with React and socket.io that auto refreshes so I can glance at it throughout the day.
Turn on/off Dropcam inside home when security system is armed/disarmed.
Quick way to launch baby announcement website from within delivery room, depending on sex/name of my child, plus birth stats – my wife was thrilled ;)
My best "personal" product that I have also made available for others is http://footballpickempool.net. There are now great mobile apps for a pool like this, which are preferable for scoring and season-long rankings, but some still need paper. I was putting these together for our office each week, so I automated it.
Many webapps used internally for my job, so not personal, but a few that are hosted on their own domains and see public traffic.
We had a large number of cron jobs at my regular employer that ran across multiple servers and applications. Things started to get a bit unwieldy and insight into any issues was negligible, so I built a cron job monitoring tool for internal use. Eventually I figured that if we found it useful maybe others would too. So I looked around and realized there were a few others already in existence that seemed to be making money. Mine offered some features the others didn't so I figured I'd go for it. It's been a lot of fun.
Over 13,000 Chicago buildings with architecture style, architect (sometimes), year built, and other data points. Uses GeoDjango and browser location api to show stuff around you when you use on a phone or you computer. Also serves as a guide to learning about architecture styles and neighborhoods.
Kinda underwhelming, but I have simple tastes :D
Interesting timing for this question, as I just released it _today_[1].
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/momento-for-hacker...
I also enjoy writing the man pages, porting to very old compilers, creating packages, etc. It's a refreshing distraction from working with enterprise CMSes.
It's not a full time gig yet.
Also, 1 intention of this is to streamline my browser use. So that instead of just opening up a new tab and getting distracted with social media/article aggregators, I can organize my time online. I open a new tab to this website and see my todos, things Im interested in, projects Im working on, etc. And thus I have a starting point to go from.
Im also considering adding Kanban board type functionality to it so that I can prioritize my personal tasks/notes/todos and then move them to in progress and done. This needs a lot of screen real estate.
Then when a classification is incorrect, the user can drag the item to another location so that it is where it should be which will trigger a callback to re-train the classifier model so that it can continually improve.
As far as the classification itself goes, check out this recent HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14733562
Finally, Id love to hear about your iteration, what were you thinking? (feel free to pm me as well)
My idea is quite in a different direction. My best solution so far is http://multikanban.com . It really is just a personally customized kanban board. But it lets me navigate through multiple boards, each board is a project/goal/collection of tasks (maybe like your 'categories'?). Inside each board I store several things, notes, bookmarks, etc. And due to it being a kanban it helps me in the progress of getting it done too. Getting it done might mean several things, for example I have a Kanban board for books I want to read, so getting something done there means I just read a book. It serves both the purpose to see what I want to do, and what I've done, ad it helps me prioritise it too. However, it has lots of limitations.
Even though I'm quite happy with that solution, I want to complement it with something more along the lines of blog/publishing. I do have a blog, but I barely write there. I want to find something in between the small notes and the long blog posts. Which serves the purpose of storing thoughts, links, and categorizing it with tags, but without each entry needing to be a post, as we are used to in common blogs. I'm still conceiving it...if that wasn't obvious yet haha
As far as publishing, its mainly for my own personal use, for me to organize my thoughts, bookmarks, aspirations, etc. Im not sure how to integrate that part (what a visitor might see)
I started on this road because I have a lot of notes in a variety of apps/files on different devices and every three months or so, I write them all down on a big whiteboard to see any common threads/themes, and to try and reorganize/prioritize my life. Its very helpful but every time I do it I have re-erase the whiteboard. This is a more permanent tool to replace that need.
However, finding a specific node might be tricky. Maybe something like a search bar up top with a zoom to node function (like google maps). Or a sort by feature? I haven't thought that out yet.
Ill try out your multikanban site and get some feedback to you. My initial impression is that setting up a kanban board is work - work that could be spent doing other things. To use it in the first place is a time investment. I wonder if it could provide intermediary benefits before the long term benefit of getting your work done more efficiently? So for instance, if you were using it to blog somehow, and a kanban board was created just by happenstance, the user could kill two birds with 1 stone! Anyways, Ill give it a go and let you know what I think.
https://github.com/assafmo/DownloadMyEpisodes - Auto-download my shows every day
https://github.com/assafmo/nba-espn-stats-and-info-telegram-... - A telegram bot and channel with cool NBA statistics from eapn
A daily todo that results in long-term stats and habit formation.
Using my own 'product' every day has been a good exercise in thinking about UX and maintenance (I've had the same DB for several years now with little breaking changes). It's also a responsible-way to do resume-driven development and use something weird or unconventional just because.
I'm glad someone is putting it out there because the concept has been very helpful to me. Hope it continues to do well.
Basically it will pull a variety of information and display it on a simple website. Things like notifications for social media, my to do list, sports scores/times, weather, etc.
It's a larger task than I realized. I'll probably never finish it tbh haha.
Not really used that much by other people; didn't click at all with anyone on HN, sadly.