Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

350 pointsfreeelncer562 comments

I quit my job as a software engineer at Google early this year to teach people how to code. I started paying people $15/hr to learn so they can make ends meet while learning instead of working at Walmart.

I thought about all the missing pieces in my engineering growth and created a curriculum that welcomes students from 0 engineering background and plugs in all the holes that were black boxed to me in my engineering growth: We host our own servers, allowing students configure nginx and create ssl certs themselves for the apps they build. Our projects mimick existing well known companies (netflix, dropbox, gmail, google docs clones).

Our curriculum is largely project based, so students work together on projects that they would be using themselves: building their own email client, chat client, filestorage/backups, firebase, etc. From day 1 of a students journey, their code is thoroughly code reviewed by other students.

2 months ago, Calworks, a local government assistance program, offered to send students to us and pay each students $13/hr for up to 6 months. Unfortunately, to make this deal work, we needed a commercial office (my wife and I teach out of our apartment) and we did not have the financial resources.

Last month, we finally got approved as a tax exempt non-profit so I can reach out to my friends for donations (but donations take time, I have to set up a bunch of fundraising tools first). My savings ran out so I started applying for jobs and landed a full-time position at Paypal starting in January.

Moving forward into 2018, a few of the senior students are going to be leading the non profit. 100% of my salary and equity is going into the non-profit so existing students would not only continue to be paid, but we now also have the financial resources to get an office and push the Calworks deal through to help more people! 2018 is looking to be a great year.

We do not have any internet presence at the moment because this year our focus had largely been testing and iterating our curriculum as well as our financial model. 2018 will be different and if you want to help, our non-profit is called GarageScript.

https://www.facebook.com/garagescript/

Would love to donate to such projects (and already have, but you sound neat too).

Thanks for the support! Would love to share donation link but it has not been set up yet :)

(Moral of story: don't announce genuinely amazing new initiatives without taking the time to get the donation links working first!)

Curious how/why something like PayPal/Stripe integration couldn't be done in a short amount of time. Not as a criticism, just "is this actually technically hard?" (or is it just a time issue?)

1. I was genuinely sharing what I did this year, was not hoping for any positive financial outcomes.

2. Integration with non-profits donations is not trivial. After registering as a non-profit, it takes some time for the list of registered non-profits to propagate through to donation tools (facebook, gofundme, etc). Sometimes, I have to fax in documents to prove legitimacy, and it takes a few days for that to process. I could easily create a gofundme for "help me do x" in my name instead of the non-profit's, but I didn't want to do that.

Hope that clears things up.

Check out givelively.org for (free) Stripe-based nonprofit fundraising and payment tools. I used to work there and they are doing a great job simplifying the process. I'm happy to put you in touch with the team if it's helpful.

givelively.org is amazing. Signed up and would love to be put in touch. song garagescript org

I see. Thanks for the clarification, very interesting.

If at all possible, let me respectfully suggest you make that a priority. I realize with an NPO it is a bit more complicated than for an individual.

Thank you, I'm on the same page. And you are correct that NPO takes longer and is a more complicated process, but we are diligently working to make it happen.

This is absolutely awesome. Sounds like a really great way to make the world a better place.

Not everybody is using fb, I hope you'll finish your http://garagescript.org/ website soon because now most links don't seem to be working. When you provide more details I think you may find some people who are willing to donate. E.g. is non-profit registered under garagescript? I couldn't find it. Well at least make contact and linkedin links working now that you are going to get some exposure from HN frontpage.

Got a bit too much into details, but what I meant to say, really great initiative, kudos.

Thank you! Non-profit is registered under 'garage script', here is the info on GuideStar: https://www.guidestar.org/profile/82-3129102

All of the points you mentioned is in our top priority list for early 2018, thank you for pointing them out!

This is awesome! Please keep us posted on where we can donate in the near future.

Will do! I'll respond back to this thread when things are all set up.

I would love to donate time to build you a website/online presence if you need it. email is in my profile if interested!

Responded, I think donating time is the best form of donation. Students want mentorship from industry veterans but its hard to find people willing to commit the time to mentor. Thank you for offering!

While your post is getting lots of reads, you should set up a landing page to collect email addresses. That way, when you have your non-profit set up, you send an email out asking for donations.

This is a great idea! Adding this now.

You know Wo/Man I think you should put up a page and ask for people to donate as sponsors. I think HN users alone, if we come together, could send 10,20,50,100 people through your program. I would be proud to know my few dollars helped in this way.

Yeah! Thats the plan for next year. It takes time to set up a donation platform as an NPO and we are working on it. In the meantime, I put an email signup (per baron816's suggestion) and will send out an email when donation tools are ready).

I would like to put some of my time helping your initiative. Do let me know. Email in my bio

Thank you, reached out.

Hey, I tried doing something similar in my city. I found designing a useful curriculum a challenge. I would love to ask a few questions. Couldn't get hold of your email. My email is raghav.toshniwal at google's service.

Thanks!

Love to give you some feedback/pointers, shot you an email. We plan to open source our curriculum and make adjustments as we go :)

What you're doing sounds great. I'm on the board of HackerDojo, our mission sounds pretty aligned to yours and you are not too far away - so get in touch, I'm sure we can figure out a way to support what you're doing! (will send pm also)

https://hackerdojo.com/

Making their own pools reminds me of PARC, and minimizing black boxes/assumptions must be very satisfying.

There's so many assumptions in mathematics, I've always assumed it must just take too much time/expertise to cover them properly. Engineering != math, but accomplishing that is revolutionary.

> all the holes that were black boxed to me in my engineering growth

What were the holes that black-boxed you in your engineering growth?

Here are a few off the top of my head.

1. Servers. I've always 'pushed to heroku' without really knowing how servers worked.

2. Git. I've always just used gitlab or other git hosting services without knowing how to build it.

3. File hosting. I've always just uploaded files without knowing how files are processed / stored.

4. Email. SMTP is like a big unknown, I've never really cared about how emails worked.

5. SSL. This was always done for me, I've never had to create and manage my own certificates.

i admire what you're doing but I wonder why spend any significant amount of time on most if not all points on this list? if the goal is "couch -> working developer" then I don't think they're relevant to getting ramped up and working as a programmer/dec/swe who can deliver value. the black boxes you talk about might be better off taught in a lazy fashion so to speak.

a lot of these seem devopsy. I've definitely delved into a lot of these as an extracurricular activity over the years or have had to learn for work reasons (like being the only guy willing to take on the devops type work) but I'm not sure it belongs in a boot camp type curriculum.

You are right, we actually don't put much effort teaching these things, its pretty much lazy learning when it comes to devops. However, I make it a point to host and handle everything in-house so students see the whole picture of how the internet works. The alternative is to push to heroku or host code on github, which introduces black box.

Its just like Udacity.

I quit what many would consider a successfull job in programming and had a sabbatical year. Moved to a smaller town and down sized everything in spending to the point where I pay $600 per month for housing, food and bills, so living of my savings haven't been an issue at all.

I have focused on things like reading (read +40 books in 2017, up from 1-2 per year), wood working, sketching, running and skiing. To keep up my programming skills I have done a deep dive in new programming languages and fiddling with some side projects. It has been an incredible year for personal development and it has changed my perspective on what things are important in life (sitting in front of a screen 40-60 hours a week not being one of them). I highly recommend everyone to do this at least once in your career!

> I pay $600 per month for housing, food and bills

Is that in the US? Sounds really low...

>smaller town and down sized everything

You can very much pull that off in lots of small towns in the US, but yeah, you're living a close to thread bare lifestyle.

Not really. My girlfriend and I together make more than 200k/y and spend less than 1k/month on expenses while we prepare for her to launch a business. We cook food from CSA and our Farmer's market, have a cozy 2 bedroom in a quiet city and generally just don't buy a lot of things we don't need.

Which city? And 1k includes rent?

it's incredibly how much you can spend on take out, drinks and useless knicknack/gadgets. It was easily $300-800 for me before (camera geek).

But made an active choice to cut them out. And it hasn't been a loss for me, instead of take out I make exactly what I want (and no stress now that I have time to cook), instead of drinks out invite friends over and have a drink (cheap) at home, instead of useless things try to realize that you don't actually need them. Also living in a place with public transport helps, but I mostly bike everywhere.

Nope, in Sweden

What did you do about your social life? Isn’t that lonely to be away from friends and family for so long?

actually I moved back to friends and family. But it does get lonely sometimes when you don't have a strict schedule and lots of free time when people are locked in at their 9-5 jobs..

Do you mind sharing the town?

Curious if you'd like to share your age and when you started your professional career? Do you recommend doing this earlier or later in one's career?

I am in my mid 30s, started my professional career in 2008. Hard to tell if when is a good time for doing it. My feeling is I should have done it earlier but I guess it depends on your situation. Maybe if you have an active social life and hobbies you love it will be easier at any point. If you have worked a lot and over long time I think friends/hobbies can fade, and it will be easier to fall into loneliness/depression if you quit working.

But, I think doing it early (say after ~3 years) has the advantage of settling/deepening the understanding of your work. Often the early years are super hectic and you try to be your best, neglecting things like mindful reflection. I believe sabbatical can help this, kind of like how sleep organizes and "cleans up" thoughts/memories. We need both the short sleep and "long" sleep.

I'm 27 and I did the similar thing last year. Having plenty of time for personal development is indeed great. But to be honest, I'm anxious about the limited social networking in smaller town from time to time.

Hi I've also recently (re)discovered reading books. What books do you recommend?

I use GoodReads a lot for discovery. See what friends are reading and browse lists that people make (https://www.goodreads.com/list)

Trying to be the world's first person to be cured from autism. I believe my autism is caused by the shape of my forehead, which puts too much pressure on my muscles. Evidence is here: https://corticalchauvinism.com/2017/11/13/yuval-levental-cra...

Also, I have prepared for a potential surgery by getting botox injections in my forehead muscle. So far, my focus at work has dramatically improved: https://corticalchauvinism.com/2016/10/17/yuval-levental-aut...

This is fascinating!

The link in your article no longer works (http://www.abaphysicaltherapy.com/2011/10/what-is-craniosacr...).

I really like your analytical approach to solving this, e.g. https://corticalchauvinism.com/2017/11/13/yuval-levental-cra...

Most people suffering from this condition don't have a physics background and wouldn't think to apply Hooke's law here.

Thank you :). The external link was only to source one of the images, so I'm not sure if I should bother replacing it.

I actually know quite a lot about math and science, but my major difficulty is not being able to hold down a career where I have to apply math/science (though I have difficulty staying focused at most jobs that require substantial abstract ability).

In addition to Hooke's law, I simply felt a lot of muscle tension on my forehead growing up. Because I essentially had that feeling from birth though, I didn't consciously notice it until recently.

Yuval, are you familiar with Barry Neil Kauffman’s work? Specifically, his book Son Rise. It tells the story of how he and his wife cured their son of his autism.

https://www.amazon.com/Son-Rise-Barry-Neil-Kaufman/dp/091581...

I have heard about it, but I'm not sure it would help me. Thank you anyway though.

This sounds cool! You seem high functioning. I know someone who's low functioning, about grade 2-3 mentality and can't keep conversations going for long. No savant level skills either. How does your work affect people on that end of the spectrum? Do you see any of your work applying to them? Sorry if you've answered any of this in your research. I'll check your site out more tomorrow.

It will have little to no impact on low-functioning autism, unfortunately :(. Researching low functioning autism is far more complicated than the type of research I am doing.

BTW, I am diagnosed as high-functioning, but I am not so high-functioning that I can "pass" for normal or even close to normal in public. That is starting to change though.

From all of the research I've read, autism seems to be a neurological disorder. Is this not the case? Genuinely curious what led you down this road rather than others as I've been struggling to reason about similar issues and tendencies I've had.

What I am trying to do is change the contour of my forehead muscles so they don't feel as intense. The forehead muscle has nerves, so it is part of the nervous system.

What led me down this road is I found a study that said that people on the spectrum may have different facial features (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/children-with-autism-have-disti...). I reasoned my face looks very similar, and then realized that I experienced lots of muscle tension on my forehead.

In my work I identified roughly 16 major drivers of ASD, but most of them tend to manifest as a GABA/Glutmate imbalance or GABA dysfunction.

Lots of people have been cured depending on if their ASD was caused by biological dysfunction - for example I know one who had biontidinase dysfunction so biotin supplementation cured all symptoms.

Hopefully you’ve identified the driver of your ASD and it will help you achieve your goals!

I learned to deal with my personal Aspergers but despite the social issues it caused earlier in my life deeply value the weird thinking processes it has given me.

Interesting. I know an autistic person with cerebral folate deficiency who takes medication for it, and it has significantly improved his symptoms. I wouldn't call it a permanent cure, however.

As mentioned, I believe the driver is my facial structure. I know that normally, facial structure is not the cause of a condition, but the muscle tension on my forehead is caused by my facial structure, and I suspect that muscle tension is most likely the cause of the symptoms I face.

Interesting. Have you found a difference in your sleep patterns since getting the treatment? One anecdote I've heard is that people on the spectrum have difficulty entering REM sleep[1]. Since REM sleep is partially initiated by eye movement, it makes sense that forehead and sinus shape could impact it.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...

Love to learn more about this. Super neat.

Left $150k software engineering job (well got fired for making video called "9 Ways to cope with having a boring 9-5 job" which somebody found and sent to HR) to make videos about stuff I think is interesting (https://www.youtube.com/c/JDiculous1 https://www.facebook.com/HonestLogic), with a slant towards addressing wage slavery, basic income, student loans, capitalism, etc. Still in the early stages, but I'll be hitting this hard in 2018.

Annoying that somebody rolled on you for that.

Yea it's pretty lame seeing as how the video was posted under a pseudonym, meaning that person did some serious digging and clearly had an agenda (I'm 95% sure who it was). It's all good though, I had been wanting to leave for a long time but had kept putting it off for the "right moment". I'm glad that that decision was made for me because now there's nothing to regret.

You must have pissed that person off at some point. Without knowing the context though, that's a very low road move to take on their part.

In any event, I enjoyed the couple of videos of yours I watched.

Your Twitter is under your real name and in the About section though. Was it there when you got fired?

Wow, is it even legal in your country? What was the official reason mentioned? Maybe you can sue them?

In the US this would be 100% legal. For almost all jobs, you can fire someone for any reason (I don't like your shirt, your jokes weren't funny, it's a Tuesday) or literally no reason at all. The exceptions are few and far between - unions provide additional protection via collective bargaining agreements; you can't fire someone for being in a protected class (i.e. because of their race or gender); and you can't fire someone in retaliation for something like a wage complaint. You could almost certainly fire someone for making a video you don't like (unless they're in a union, which is very few tech employees.)

While it is true that most employment is “at-will” (which means that both sides voluntarily choose to employ/be employed) for both sides, in a friendly employee state like California, there are numerous wage claims and employment law suits that come with doing business. It’s not as easy to fire in some states.

Yea it's legal here in the U.S. since it was at-will employment. They tried to play down the effect of the video and made up some vague performance-related reasons.

It's all good though, I was planning to leave anyways.

Did you speak to a lawyer? Firing you for that sounds illegal.

It was at-all employment so they can fire me for any reason here in the USA.

That’s not quite true. There are still illegal reasons for firing (discrimination, retaliation for whistleblowing, etc) though fighting back can be difficult and costly. But if you’re okay with the current state of affairs (I was with my own previous incident - the company was awful) it can make sense to just move on.

That's true. I should've mentioned that they tried to play down the effect of the video and made up some vague performance reasons. But yea I'm fine with it and had been planning to leave for a while, so no hard feelings. The best retaliation would be me achieving success in my new endeavors.

You will get the experiences you need to go where you're going; being fired for pointing out obvious is not that bad, you did nothing wrong, it's their shitty karma. Can't you see the irony in doing something like that on facebook? The solution starts with making the right choices yourself.

Videos are pretty funny! Keep it up :D

That's ridiculous.

Awesome videos man! Resonated with me since I live in the East Village as well

Sounds like wonderful co-workers to have. Probably a matter of time before being stabbed in the back in such a work environment.

Can you link to the vid that got you fired?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGTfP2jvpeU

Quitting my full-time job to pursue my side-projects was the best thing I could have done for my health and sanity this year.

I am now working on a bunch of ideas that I hope will help some people around here:

1. A Pocket-to-Kindle service that syncs (almost) instantly to your Kindle whatever article you save, formats it like a professionally edited book, cleans up ads and takes advantage of the new typesetting engine inside the new Kindle firmware.

2. A Spotify music discovery website. I'm trying to make a two-click-playlist-generator by using Spotify APIs to look at the top artists/genres of a user and create playlists on the fly with tracks that the user could like.

I use Spotify daily and found myself overwhelmed by how much music there is available. Because of that, I'm mostly listening to my saved songs, Discover Weekly/Release Radar and trying out playlists that usually have the same too popular songs.

3. An adaptive brightness/contrast app for external monitors. Adjusting brightness using the monitor's controls is always annoying to do.

4. A morning alarm that starts playing an algorithmically generated Spotify playlist each time, with fade-up volume, external speaker support, adaptive algorithm based on likes/dislikes and self-updating alarm times based on day moments (twilight, sunrise, golden hour, dusk etc.)

5. A detector for processes that eat up all your CPU and battery. I started writing this in Rust so I can make it cross-platform and learn the language at a lower level.

Dude, LINKS! My mate was looking for almost that exact spotify thing!

None of those ideas are ready for public use yet. I mean they work, I use them daily, but the interface for non-programmers is still in the works.

https://github.com/alin23/spfy is the core of that idea. If you want I can help you or your friend set it up. Or I can let you know when the finished website is ready.

I just recently joined Spotify. I have found their "we will play similar music after your music ends" feature to enable me to discover lots of new artists. I find it interesting you found Spotify lacking here, because I am finding the opposite.

I'm a long time Spotify user. I love that feature too and it worked very well for me when it first launched. But after a while it started playing the same songs that I have already heard many times. Spotify's algorithm is very unpredictable so I can't say it will work out the same for you. But if it will, at least you can have another try with what I'm trying to build ^_^

Gotcha. That makes sense. I could see how over time that feature gets less useful. Looking forward to trying your tool, if you have a website or mailing list for it, please share.

I found it ate so much data that I had to turn it off :/

I agree! I love this feature. It's so good that I sometimes don't even notice that my music ended.

I would pay for that pocket-to-kindle service

Have you tried https://p2k.co/?

Yes, I've used it for a few months. That's the reason I've started working on my thing. I felt that it didn't have the features that I needed the most (hyphenation, dropcaps, ad removal etc.) and I would have felt like a jerk to ask for these things from the developer. These are not common needs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They're my needs haha, I sent you an email to become a beta tester

do you need any more beta testers?

Nice and good luck!

I've started working on a similar service but didn't ship. I'd love to chat (email in profile).

I would let you pay for it if it was ready

I can make you an (unofficial, free) beta tester if you want. I'll have most of the basic functionality by the end of January. If you're interested let me know here: alin.p32@gmail.com

Instapaper have a send to Kindle option on a daily or weekly frequency.

What did you do to prepare for leaving your job? Do you have another source of income?

I don't have any other source of income. I had a pretty good paying job for the past year and managed to save one year worth of savings. I can survive with what I have until June (I think). I'm doing my best to create something that helps at least a few people, and maybe get some money from that too. Even if I don't, I have already learned and practiced so much more skills than I could if I had a full time job and that makes it worth it.

I would consider offering Instapaper as well as Pocket. I generally find Instapaper does a better job overall.

The number of times Pocket just either redirects to the original article, or drops salient bits of text (in particular, unordered list items) is really annoying.

It already works with Instapaper too, I just explain it as a Pocket to Kindle service because that's what people use the most these days.

Personally I use Instapaper more for reading because of all the premium features being free and keep Pocket in sync using IFTTT for their good recommendations.

Ad 1. I am really interested of about the progress of development of your service. I would love to see it as "Show HN" submission.

Personally, I am thinking about developing an online service, which will be offerring general-purpose providing distribution of content to Kindle or other ebook-readers. Initially, I thought about creating only a app which will extract a article tag from website and create ebook from it (pandoc) or exactly a Pocket-to-Kindle. But when I was thinking more about it more ideas had come to my mind, HN-frontpage scrapper, simple notebook/orgmode adapted to Kindle Experimental Browser, markdown-files-to-ebook, arxiv-to-ebook converter, some kind of IFFTT pipeline (stream X from Y and save it as a ebook) and even trying to implement most of features known from Calibre application... If I could somehow help you as a developer or you are interested in bootstrapping some online service together I really would like to receive an e-mail from you. My e-mail address: (put my HN nickname here) at gmail.com

Was looking for same Poket->Kindle app, found nothing appropriate. Spent some time googling to gave up with idea of building such app. I thought nobody use kindle to read web this days. Solve my problem with push-to-kindle browser extension and manual file copying.

Hosted Comments https://www.hostedcomments.com/ , a Disqus alternative with a focus on privacy. The learning experience of building Hosted Comments was great : using iframes to embed comments in websites, building a commenting system with voting and some features which Disqus does not have : locking comments, hiding comments (not yet deployed https://imgur.com/a/R89Cw ). It started out as a sideproject, then decided to go the SaaS route and now a little confused about whether I want to pursue this as my main project. I'm thinking about releasing an open source self hosted version and continue offering a managed service.

Bored Hackers https://www.boredhackers.com : a public chatroom based community site. Think of it like reddit, but chatrooms insteads of forums. I just deployed the first version a few hours ago. Bored Hackers is an experiment at building the community site that I wish existed : public chatroom based communites, pseudonymous users, transparent moderation logs, an open source code base and a site that is welcoming to non-technical users. Currently, there is a single chat room for all discussions and support for user created chat rooms will be added shortly.

> using iframes to embed comments in websites

why an iframe?

Cross origin cookie stuff can get pretty narly. Using iframes makes things easier

Suggestion: Put registration forms in the main page. Put simple captcha. Remove whatever barriers to encourage registration

I spent most of the year working my ass off consulting for one of America's most hated companies building an utterly pointless system. My only consolation is knowing that I wasted a ton of their money since there's no chance it will pay any returns.

Lol. I had a good laugh.

How do you manage to continue working on something you know is a dead end though? Is the money that good? Would the money go away if you worked on another project at the same firm?

Yes, money. Also, I quit that job.

Same here! Good luck

Oh man, I don't think I've ever laughed this much on anything I've read on HN. Thanks for making my day. :)

I'm glad you enjoyed it, but it certainly wasn't funny while it was happening to me :)

Holberton School - https://www.holbertonschool.com/ a two-year alternative to college to become a Software Engineer.

The school is free to students until they find a job, then they contribute with a % of their salary. After only 9 months, many students find internships and jobs at companies like NASA, Apple, LinkedIn, Tesla, Dropbox...

It's a life-changing experience for many of our students, and it also changes the Tech industry by bringing folks with an untraditional background. Our students are straight out of high-school, some had a career before: cashier, math teacher, artist, poker player...

We have no formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by working on projects and collaborating with their peers. We are located in San Francisco and looking forward expanding.

% of their salary for how long after they have graduated?

"That is why there is no upfront cost to attend Holberton School. Once our graduates find a job, we only charge 17% of your internship earnings and 17% of your salary over 3 years."

https://www.holbertonschool.com/education#tuition

17% for three years according to their website.

How does this work for someone who already has a full-time job and mortgage? We would still need to take out a loan, right?

Cool that I stumbled across this, I'll be attending Holberton beginning next week.

Published The Tao of tmux: https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read. Thanks to the HN readers who bought the book!

Created new design for all my open source projects: https://www.git-pull.com (see sidebar at left, e.g. https://libtmux.git-pull.com)

Rebooted CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) language project, cihai: https://cihai.git-pull.com (see also: https://unihan-etl.git-pull.com). Needs funding.

New docutils based website started, https://devel.tech. Example: https://devel.tech/features/django-vs-flask/

I catalog open source contributions I make while working on the website at https://devel.tech/site/open-source

Updates to https://www.hskflashcards.com. Switching from Bootstrap 4 to Bulma

hsk flash cards seems really cool.

do people pay you for this? seems like a service and content that people would pay for, but i couldn't find any sign that this is being monetized on the site.

That's a great list. How was your experience with self-publishing? Any stats you can share?

Discovered Bulma few month ago. Like it much but have no chance to use in project. What was your point to chose it over bs?

My health https://www.instagram.com/p/BdX6yyInrBD/?taken-by=kthakore2

Took a long break from hacking and staying indoors playing with yet another framework. I am much happier :) my depression is better and I have more balance :) Less likely to burn out.

Awesome to hear. Mental health is something that is overlooked by a lot of people in this industry until it's too late. Ran into that a few years back and like yourself, have been working to make it better.

I left an amazing company with one of the best work environments (https://webflow.com) to work for a non-profit that fights child sexual abuse (https://www.wearethorn.org). The work has been incredibly rewarding, and although I was quite nervous about leaving an awesome job and jumping into an unknown, in hindsight almost everything about the change was a meaningfully positive improvement. Working towards a mission that personally I feel has a lot of value has been an awesome experience.

I had an opportunity to work for them but declined because I didn't want to look at the content. Tell me: how much of that do you have to actually go through? And to other devs: if you have thick skin and an iron stomach, go work for them.

It’s definitely a factor to be aware of. We are legally not allowed to be exposed to image content, as developers, but personally I do have some exposure to text content as part of my role. Thorn has an excellent support / wellness system, with professional counselors, in place though for proactively staying healthy and processing what exposure we do experience.

I’m very glad they have such a good support network. A close friend of mine got a job out of law school prosecuting child sex crimes, and there was absolutely no support. After a year, he couldn’t take it any more and left public service altogether. Even a decade later, you can tell he’s still bothered by it. I have an incredible amount of respect for people who can do that work; I’m absolutely certain that I don’t have what it takes.

Definitely, I think support is crucial. I work around people who have victim ID experience (reviewing abuse material with the goal of locating children) and strongly share your respect. It’s so impactful in the lives of the victims, but you are exposed to a very dark side of humanity and are unlikely to know the eventual outcomes of the children’s lives.

No chance of contributing without a thick skin? e.g. maybe there are some infrastructure or generic dev needs as well, which do not involve working on actual "content"?

It’s a small team, so as a developer I’m not working “on content”, but definitely working “around” it if that makes sense. It’s not as bad as it could be, but I’d say somebody should at least be aware of the potential and take it seriously, for personal wellness sake.

Jacob, are you remote? This sounds like fulfilling work.

I am remote, yes! Thorn has a SF office, but the team is almost 50% remote.

I continued to work on intercooler.js:

https://github.com/LeadDyno/intercooler-js

http://intercoolerjs.org

I'm trying to get people to reconsider the more traditional web development style of server-side rendering of HTML + HATEOAS.

Yes! There’s nothing wrong with traditional web dev architecture!

Nice, I like it.

I remember seeing this last year too, I like it. This is a good reminder for me to try using it in side projects.

I fear though that you're swimming against the currents (obviously, speaking about the current trends of everyone using React or one of the other frameworks for frontend development). I hope you'll gain traction in creating a trend of a different path, making traditional web development style a viable alternative for modern web apps.

I don't mind going against the current, I'm a contrarian by nature. :)

I hope you find it useful, and good luck in 2018.

My friends have been streaming on twitch so I've been writing a bot for them to play overlays/games with their viewers, let viewers earn points, queue up music, etc.

Along the way I brushed up on some es6 concepts, learned React, and was reminded of writing eggdrop bot scripts back in the day :P

Everything is public on github and is somewhat-generic/reusable by others. Hope to complete documentation and make it 100% generic in Jan/Feb so others can use and contribute.

Core bot library: https://github.com/bdickason/hpc-bot Twitch overlay server: https://github.com/bdickason/twitch-overlay Their specific bot files: https://github.com/bdickason/dumbledore

Also helped deploy/ship Tekken Chicken, a framedata app for Tekken 7 (ios: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/t7chicken/id1244210422?mt=8) (android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.t7chicken&...)

this is really cool thanks for sharing the code!

I've worked at the highest paying job i ever got in my career. But then i quit in july to focus on a startup I joined after we were featured in techcrunch and received angel investment.

Now i realized that the money was the least of our problem and the startup is on the brink of death.

I replaced the source of my income from job to stock market investments. Now i am focusing on a new side project that poped in my head. For the last 2 months I have built a prototype that works and started to dogfood it.

It's a tag that turns any object into a smart object (still working on my elevator pitch). What it does is allow you to contact the owner of any device. Put the tag on your car and anyone can contact you about your car(i.e. if it is blocking the way or you left your lights on). Put the tag on your keychain and if you lose them people can contact you. You can use the tags on anything really.

I started by building an android app but then realized you can do all this directly from the browser.

Expect the first beta in January.

Can you tell me more about the problems you faced with your startup? My experience with 2017 has been the same in terms of working at the highest paying job I've had in my career. However, I AM thinking about leaving the traditional job market at some point to start my own start up in the next 3 years. I want some reality checks though.

The main problem we had is over promising. For every client we had, the CEO promised some features we cannot deliver.

Many of the financial decisions made wasted tons of money. (Microsoft Azure is not for your up and coming start up, too expensive)

I tend to favor meeting one customer at a time to understand the problem we are trying to solve, but we went for bulk email and spamming. The few clients I met one on one still believe in us today.

The startup idea was good. The solution was poorly executed, and we had too many chefs in the kitchen (5 co-founders).

I hope this makes sense.

Did they try getting bizspark? Or did they have it but overuse their limits?

We used bizspark. But that only lasts a while then you are left with a huge bill every months.

Hah that happened at the startup I worked at. Between Sales and CEO they were promising the moon. At one point the CEO said our product used block chain in his slide deck. Not a single Dev has ever discussed block chain it was just out of nowhere.

Interesting. Any link or place to watch the product at?

It's an before alpha product, your feedback is very welcomed.

https://www.ottomon.net

Any details on the hardware? Passive RFID, NFC, BLE or something else?

I've been playing with NFC tags, but QRcode has been working pretty well for me so far.

> It's a tag that turns any object into a smart object (still working on my elevator pitch). What it does is allow you to contact the owner of any device. Put the tag on your car and anyone can contact you about your car(i.e. if it is blocking the way or you left your lights on). Put the tag on your keychain and if you lose them people can contact you. You can use the tags on anything really.

Did you just invent a QR code with contact details? (Edit: Not saying it's a dumb idea, sounds useful.)

Yes, most of the time qrcode is seen as a gimmick, ie you might as well write the url instead of downloading a qr reader app.

Here is my hope for making good use of it.

One project that I really enjoyed working on this year is https://www.meteorshowers.org/. It's a webgl visualization of NASA meteoroid data. Open source here: https://github.com/typpo/showers

I also maintain an open source SMS API called Textbelt, but it became unreliable due to spammers. I launched a paid hosted version and have been steadily improving it: https://textbelt.com/

Beautiful. Excellent work.

Lambda School - a rigorous, live online computer science education that’s free until you’re hired. https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science

Started as a side project in January, and I had no idea it would take off like this. We now have 20 employees, including instructors from Google, Apple, Blizzard, etc. and our first graduating students are getting hired for great salaries all over the US. (Average is $85,000 in low cost of living areas)

Whats the deal after you are hired? a %? for how long?

17% for 2 years not exceeding 30k

And only if you’re making $50k/yr or more

Is this after tax income? Who pays the taxes?

The amount is pre tax. Students still pay taxes.

> Started as a side project in January, and I had no idea it would take off like this

Would be interested in learning about the backstory. Did you blog about it somewhere?

It was on HN early into its life, I recall seeing it posted here. I also recall being solidly impressed by the quality of the presentation for what it was and how it worked. The value proposition clicked immediately. I think they did a pretty good job of hooking people on the concept quickly (ultimately it's pay for results, which can be a potent offer when education is increasingly expensive).

Have been too busy building it.

Started with 20 students, they performed remarkably well, started adding classes each month, got into YC and raised a large seed round, solved 2 or 3 other problems that hadn’t been solved before, and now we’re ready to open the gates to more people (our acceptance rate right now is right around 2%)

Plus you sold the shit out of it. Like seriously, quality work.

Do you accept international applicants and are the classes online or a traditional classroom setup?

https://smart.ly

We offer a free, licensed MBA (working on accreditation process) using an interactive (re: non-video), mobile-centric content platform. In addition, we provide job-matching services for anyone interested in opting in.

I'm proud of what we've built and hoping it continues to see traction in 2018.

why was this down-voted? someone here work on a competing product in 2017 or something?

Didn't downvote you, but I would guess it's because the post sounds like an advertisement.

I left a very good SW Engineering job in London, travelled for 3 months, pimped up my 2013's side project for 3 months and started selling it. Now I have created a company around it, been profitable for months. Now I carry my boss-less/office-less job around the world as a Digital Nomad. Happy new year from Mexico!

My side project that became my job: https://readonlyrest.com

I wish such boss-less/self-employed/self-sufficient traveling was more available for developing country citizens as well (with a relatively lower rank passports).

Where did you travel? About to set off on a trip of roughly the same length in Europe. Any recommendations?

At the end of 2016 I left contracting gig for a full time position to work on helping solve intermittency problem with solar PV power generation through forecasting.

With a team of 3 including myself, the only professional software developer, we have launched and run a solar radiation and PV power forecasting/observation API (solcast.com.au) that can provide solar radiation and PV power forecasts world wide that update every 10-30 minutes based on satellite coverage.

For the past 10 months this API has been freely accessible whilst we validated our approach and expanded to cover the globe. After great feedback from users, we are now planning a big update to make it even easier to use and to integrate live PV output data into forecasting itself.

The change to work on something that contributes a large net positively to society’s around the world (making solar based electricity generation more financially attractive to operators/home owners a like all over the world) has been hugely rewarding and look forward to the growth of solar power generation in 2018.

What model do you use for power forecasting? Do you use different models for different forecast horizons e.g 1h, 1day, etc. or did you find that (recursive) multi step forecasting with the same model produces better results?

We forecast radiation just radiation data as the base for all power forecasting (conversion from solar radiation -> PV power done on the fly)

Solar radiation forecasting incorporates a few models for 1-7 days, and for now casting (0-4 hours) is based on NWP wind forecasting combined with our own cloud tracking, ML and blending with NWP models from 4-24 hours.

Some of the above might be slightly off as I’m not a meteorologist or study solar radiation modelling. Luckily Solcast founders are and we are also partnered with a project at the Australian National University working with some extremely bright people to get the science right.

If you want to get further into the details, feel free to email Nick Engerer or James Luffman (contacts on our website) about the science, or post on our community forums (forums.solcast.com.au).

That's really cool. I'd love to work on something like this.

Two machine-learning models for the detection of breast cancers from medical imaging of breast cancer biopsy tissue. Big focus on making models accessible to clinicians.

The models are:

(1) PPReCOGG, one of the models based on Gabor filters and k-NN (https://github.com/jszym/pprecogg)

(2) DeepDuct, the second model, based on a pre-trained VGG16 network and the Grad-CAM algorithm, localises lesions _and_ informs clinicians about why the model has chosen the lesion type it did.

You can find more details in my master's thesis, for which the models were written: http://cs.mcgill.ca/~jszymb/thesis/260528685_Szymborski_Jose...

(Edit: Also, if you're hiring machine learning people, medical or otherwise, please get in touch at hn at jszym point com)

Running the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which hosts projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus, has been a very full time job, as we've expanded to include nearly every cloud company, enterprise software provider and startup in our industry. But I have gotten to contribute to a few cool open source projects:

Cloud Native Landscape (now over 350 projects and products) https://github.com/cncf/landscape#current-version

DevStats provides detailed visualizations of Kubernetes contributions https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/

Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/

I launched two projects. 1) http://instant10-k.com/ An efficient way to search 10-k and 10-q filings for publicly listed companies. A Form 10-K is an annual report required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that gives a comprehensive summary of a company's financial performance. 10-Q is the quarterly version. If you have ever purchased an individual stock you should read the 10-k and 10-Q reports. 2. http://datasetapi.com - A platform to host clean curated datasets.An airport dataset is live, More to follow.

Interesting, how is instant10-k different from EDGAR Fast Search[0]?

[0]: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html

Thank you! Its more efficient. Here is the sec search process 1. Visiting sec.gov 2. Clicking on Company Filings 3. Typing the ticker on Fast Search 4. Visually searching for 10-k's and 10-Q's 5. Opening in another tab. 6. Clicking on it again. 7. Finally clicking on the actual document. http://instant10-k.com takes you to the actual document instantly.

Instant 10k is useful and efficient, thank you

thank you!

Insta10K is amazing. Using EDGAR was a huge pain in the ass; this is so much easier. Thank you!

thank you! I Want to make filings accessible for all!

1) is so great -- thanks for making/sharing. I run into the clunky search process for 10k's once in a while and think your site does a great job improving that experience.

In case you're taking feature requests, these are some things I'd love to see in a 10k site (order in relevancy):

  autocomplete in search
  see recently released 10k's
  browse functionality
  10k specific discussions (e.g., annotating similar to RapGenius as well as longform analysis)

Some/all those may not be relevant for your site, just things I've always thought would be cool to see. And again, nice job with the site!

thank you for your feedback @liampronan! Autocomplete is in the works and I will give others consideration. Please spread the word.

I liked your first project's fast response time. Would be nice if you included 20-F filings as well. Otherwise from a usability standpoint, multiple sorting / grouping options for different forms would be helpful, as well as an error message for those searching for companies which don't file under 10-K (like Amdocs).

A friend and I created https://quicktype.io to generate TypeScript, Swift, Go, C#, C++, etc. from JSON sample data and GraphQL queries.

Many have tried to solve this problem – we've found at least 20 projects that attempt to turn JSON sample data into code to represent that data, but they're almost all abandoned and they all have the same fundamental flaws (they generate invalid code for most non-trivial inputs).

In the past two weeks we've created Xcode and VS Code plugins. I've had so much fun with this project! We'd love to create a business around quicktype but we haven't figured that part out yet.

What is the best C# GraphQL back end?

There is probably a small market for quickly translating SQL Server DB schema into a C# GraphQL provider with easy authentication/filtering hooks. Not sure if the market would be any bigger cross-platform since the momentum follows free open source options.

I looove it! Used it multiple times this year (Typescript / C# generator)

Woot! Glad you found it useful.

Is there anything we can improve?

I worked on two cool open source music technology projects called ListenBrainz [1] (basically an open source version of Last.FM backed by the MetaBrainz Foundation, the people behind MusicBrainz) and AcousticBrainz [2] (a project trying to crowdsource acoustic information about music and release it as public domain). We released a beta for ListenBrainz over the summer and I've been working on data dumps for both ListenBrainz and AcousticBrainz for the past few weeks.

[1] https://listenbrainz.org/

[2] https://acousticbrainz.org

Both projects look fantastic!

How does listenbrainz differ-from / compare-to Libre.fm?

We wanted to take our own shot at building a reliable open service with new tech. We're also much more focused on providing open and easy access to the data we have as conveniently as possible, so that people can build cool stuff with it. Right now, we provide a Google BigQuery dataset [1] that you can run any queries on. It has around 70M listens from 1300 users.

[1] https://blog.musicbrainz.org/2017/08/05/listenbrainz-data-is...

I got a pen plotter (AxiDraw v3) and it's been a great creative outlet. I wrote a couple tutorials on techniques I learned or discovered:

Fractal generation with L Systems: https://bitaesthetics.com/posts/fractal-generation-with-l-sy...

Surface projection: https://bitaesthetics.com/posts/surface-projection.html

This is so cool! I've been following Inconvergent's work (https://twitter.com/inconvergent). This seems like something I might be interested in.

Thanks for sharing!

In my free time I've been coding a TCP/IP stack in C++(14): https://github.com/ambrop72/aipstack . It uses a single-threaded event-driven architecture, is usable on embedded system (no mallocs), and is header-only.

Much work is yet to me done including docs (lots of Doxygen-based docs exist but introductory and TCP API docs are generally missing). However the TCP implementation should actually be pretty solid.

Built Commento, a privacy-focused alternative to Disqus: https://github.com/adtac/commento

Right now, it exists as a Github project that you can self-host, but I'll soon offer it as a paid service if you don't want to host and maintain servers on your own. (And maybe even apply to YC, who knows :))

It started out with me reading a blog post [1] and thinking "I can write Disqus tonight". And that's how it began; I had a working prototype in 24 hours (at the expense of a final exam I had in two days haha). Posted it on HN, and it blew up. And then I sat down and made it into a serious project that's now actually used by other people. I've had senior devs from huge companies (like Atlassian) contribute to the project, and I think that's amazing.

http://donw.io/post/github-comments/

There's a product named Hosted Comments mentioned in another comment on this post with a similar goal.

https://www.hostedcomments.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16042162

Yep, I am aware. In fact there's a bunch of other offerings as well (someone else with a similar product once posted a summary comment; can't find it right now).

I just quickly registered and it appears the moderation/dashboard functionality is slightly limited in HostedComments. I only have the option to view all the comments. But with SaaS commento, you'll have a full fledged dashboard. Here's a sneek peak: https://i.imgur.com/j23BfKN.png

And EffectiveDiscussions, https://www.effectivediscussions.org/blog-comments (I'm developing it), it's also no-ads and no-tracking (& open source).

I really enjoyed reading your code, it's got a great style. Play on :D

Thank you! :)

This was only possible because of all the contributors [1]: some of the design paradigms were entirely their ideas, so credits to them as well.

[1] https://github.com/adtac/commento/graphs/contributors

There were a few other things going on, but mostly I've taken xi editor forward. It's still almost at the point where you'd want to use it for your daily work, but not there just yet. In the last two months, I've had a strong focus on performance, and now it's paying off. A few PR's are still in flight, and there's a write-up than needs to be done, but it's now scrolling smoothly on my 165 Hz gaming monitor (2560x1440 resolution, integrated graphics at that). I'm excited about the progress and feel that it will become a really usable tool fairly soon.

I've worked almost exclusively on https://info-beamer.com, a digital signage service for the Raspberry Pi. It all started as a for fun project while freelancing and turned into a profitable business. All while still being a lot of fun to work on. Unlike other Pi based solutions, info-beamer isn't using a sluggish browser but uses Lua/C at its core to use all the hardware acceleration features while still being pretty simple to program (see https://info-beamer.com/doc/info-beamer). The challenge is always to make all those feature easily available through a web interface. I'm currently improving that a lot by enabling users to create more complicated output without any programming knowledge. Getting to know Vue.js has helped a lot with that.

I was working on LibreTaxi https://github.com/ro31337/libretaxi

it's ride sharing app that works thru Telegram (currently). Surprisingly, it worked really well, there are 100-500 rides in some cities every day

I was excited about this project when i first saw it here but i have to say the setup instructions are very confusing. It would be nice if the documentation had step by step installation and first boot instructions. Many months after cloning the repo, i have never managed to set it up.

The instructions are all over the place. The NodeJS instructions say you can run npm -i after installing node. Then you get to Getting Started and it seems like a detached process altogether. The getting started section should start from either installing the dependencies or cloning the repo. Right now it just starts with renaming some file.

Good work, though, at least from what i can see on the site once it actually does run it is a beautiful thing.

Thanks, I know, some setup is required. I ask everyone who had any issues to update instructions in confusing places. So you may want to check it again.

Also, I'm going to add docker image soon, so it will just work with few commands

At work I've got more familiar with Terraform, got started with Kubernetes, and contributed significantly to the infrastructure of a few awesome projects.

In my spare time I've been maintaining my Autospotting pet project, which is maturing nicely, growing a lot and already generated savings in the six-seven digits for its users: https://github.com/cristim/autospotting

I also spent time learning to play guitar, made a habit of practicing and working out on a daily basis and towards the end of the year I became a father.

All in all it was likely my best year so far.

I've been working with Terraform and Kubernetes a bit as well. Their strengths seem to be very complimentary when aiming for a platform agnostic system.

I worked on building a python library for automated feature engineering called Featuretools (https://github.com/featuretools/featuretools/). I had been working on it for 2 years, but in 2017 we separated it from the rest of the codebase and made it open source.

Even though feature engineering is crucial for building machine learning pipelines, there are few formal methods for performing feature engineering. We see Featuretools filling a missing component in the software engineering stack for data science.

It has already been put to the test with our customers at my company, but we have also begun to release demos so that others can pick it up https://www.featuretools.com/demos.

I nearly ended up a pancake when my steering failed heading into a turn in February, the day before my birthday. I realized the circumstances that led to me not being able to fix it before it led to near disaster weren't going to change on the path I was heading down largely by habit, so I finally set some priorities.

I decided to focus on making a business out of music. I'm far from where I want to be, but it's been a long time since I was doing Mechanical Turk tasks to pay for junk food. I have savings, my music is improving, and 4 people pay me almost $15 a month through Patreon[1]. Probably not a lot to the crowd here at HN, but it's a peace of mind I never knew before.

The big, super-important lesson I got from that is to not cling to what I wanted at some point in the past and accept how things are. I wanted to be fully financially independent, but had no plans, no goals, no notion of how I might make it happen. I had the desire, but not the will or commitment.

Being two seconds and one failure of attention from the front end of an 18-wheeler has a way of hitting the reset button.

[1] https://www.patreon.com/digitalscofflaw

Music is sooooo hard to make a living at. I burned through my savings and am getting back into engineering. I love music, but it won’t feed 4 kids, even if the music is stellar. Cheers to you!

I'm more on the tools and services side. I make melodies, synth presets, sound effects, and stuff like that. Still hard, but less of a gamble. I tried the other side before, and you're right. I just barely made enough to pay for the headphones I use for mixing.

2017 has been an intense, yet extremely rewarding year to say the least. This year I learned the meaning of "grit".

- Launched my startup on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/slackpass-2).

- Interviewed with YC, sadly didn't make the cut.

- Had hundreds of of calls and thousands of chats with founders looking to create paid communities.

- Helped many create their own profitable, paid communities.

- Became a solo founder.

- Became profitable enough to cover both business and personal expenses.

- Rebranded to LaunchPass (https://launchpass.com) due to inevitable trademark issues with the use of "Slack" in our name, and plans to expand beyond Slack. (btw Slack has been awesome regarding the transition)

- And plenty more I intend to write about in a "year in review" post I'm working on.

Becoming a founder this year was one of the most challenging, fascinating, and deeply rewarding experiences I've ever had.

Here's to a happy, healthy, productive, and successful 2018

Happy New Year HN!

Started working on my first side project! It's an alternative way to screen developers that I think is better than anything that's currently out there. I'm interested in hearing feedback on the idea.

You provide JSON data that will be exposed through an API which candidates will use. They are given instructions on how to parse and manipulate the data. Then they POST the response to you. If the response is 200 OK - they've passed and they can upload their code for your team to review and decide if they should go to the interview stage.

I think this has lots of benefits:

- It's gives candidates a real-life problem to solve. Most, if not all software developers will have to interact with API's and manipulate data.

- Candidates can use their own dev environment that they are comfortable using.

- It saves the company time. They can choose to only assess the code of people who pass the test.

- It makes for a good candidate experience. I think it reflects well on a company if their interview process is close to real-life work.

Hoping to ship the beta version of this next month

This approach shifts the effort on constantly changing the source JSON data and specification on how it needs to finally look to the client. Lazy devs will inevitably post solutions online.

This approach also requires the client to implement ratelimiting, but you could fix that by having the data POSTed to your servers instead.

I unfortunately can't remember the name of it, but a service was presented on here a while ago that presented a series of security challenges then connected successful applicants with employers and managed the whole process. Methinks that's the right way to do this kind of thing.

You're thinking of Matasano?

Taking my company's first product from "demo to industry partner" to "two systems installed and used in production by our end clients".

It's been a rough year financially but we've made a ton of ground and it's looking pretty damn shiny for 2018.

Edit: Since that was pretty vague, it's a system for guarding, automating and remotely operating industrial hydraulic booms (eg. fixed plant rockbreakers, jib and knuckleboom cranes, etc.)

Worked on a dating app http://crushhourapp.com as a side project with a friend of mine.

It took almost 1.5 years to complete, Backend APIs were done with Django, iOS app with Swift. The concept is dating app for London commuters.

I created the whole London Underground maps programmatically in the app. The final result was ok, unfortunately dating market is already saturated, and our market is only limited to London, lesson learned, test your idea first, build a quick prototype, don't spend more than 5-6 months, unless you are really sure.

For the rest of the year, I have concentrated in learning Reactive functional programming, created a small backend app with Clojure, at work I am working on iOS app, which I have architected using, RxSwift, MVVM, it has over 650 tests, with close to 80% test coverage using Quick and Nimble frameworks.

How do you feel about RxSwift and MVVM so far? Do you see it becoming increasingly more widespread in production code?

I think RxSwift and MVVM architecture work great together. I know some large companies that would keep it simple, would not use any framework. Some are stuck with legacy code, that requires lots of effort to change, but most of the time you will be asked about different architectures during an interview.

I would say it does not really what architecture is used, as long as it is easy to test, simple to add new features, any architecture will be fine.

From my point of view, I probably have a bit different approach to MVVM where we have Service layer (similar to Java Spring), below View Model, stick to the simple rules like single responsibility, separation of concerns, define your rules about communication between the architecture layers. RxSwift makes the communication between the layers so much easier, the old alternative would be using delegation pattern, notifications. In a large project over 30k lines delegation pattern will become painful to manage. Choose the right architecture for your project and don't be scared to add additional mechanisms, layers, because there is no solution that fits all.

With RxSwift concurrency is handled for you, you can do the heavy duty tasks in the background, observe on the main thread for ui updates. You can run multiple tasks in parallel and return the combined result. Things like these, become trivial to work with. Another benefit is that you will strive to write more functional code, functions that return observable that does one thing, and chain other observables, It wont be pure functional since most of the you will have side effects, which is fine. But still it is a good fight between the Object oriented paradigm vs Functional programming paradigm, finally you will settle with both and find a good balance.

I started a company, Argonomo (https://argonomo.com) and we founded and soft launched two ventures:

- SafeWhistle: An anonymous, encrypted, privacy-focused whistleblowing and incident management application companies and institutions can implement to help cut down on lack of reporting and increase transparency. (https://safewhistle.com)

- Sidepitch: A venture management system targeting private equity groups and venture capitalists. Streamlining the application process for startups and giving investors a central management solution for their investments, instead of a collection of emails, paper documents, and in-face communications. (https://sidepitch.com)

Built a fintech-ish startup all by myself, zero funding. I didn't intend to do it all by myself but it's not a sexy business so no one was jumping to go full-time. It came close to breaking me as a human being, honestly.

Anyway, I went from being a CTO who was constantly being pitched horrible no-good business ideas by first times CEOs - who as a rule, wanted to give me 10% equity but also wanted me to build the project for free - to a CEO who closed countless sales and knows his CAC and LTV like the back of his hand.

If I can, so can you but you have to manage CAC:LTV.

Do you have a link where we can learn more about you / your startup?

My open source project: building best practiced apis fast with Python3 https://github.com/agconti/cookiecutter-django-rest

I released another iOS app. It has been two years since I released anything. Really lost interest because the market is so large, and it’s hard for a ream of one. However, I’ve decided to write several little apps instead of trying to boil the oceans.

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/12/29/word-search-1-1-rele...

The idea is that quantity trumps quality:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...

I left my full time job about 3 months ago to start my own software consulting venture. Ive maintained projects from old clients I had on the side, and also created and launched a new project for a client (RN mobile app). Still have to get an online presence setup for the company. Its been going well so far, and I am looking forward to new projects and clients in 2018.

I launched ScrumGenius (https://scrumgenius.com). Its a side project I started for fun at my previous job (it was just a simple slack bot script back then) and decided to actually build a service and launch it a few months ago. I did not take it too seriously at first, I was just using it to learn. However, after reading indiehackers and other people launching products I was really inspired to give it a try. Its been steadily growing and it makes around $300/mo.

Hoping to continue to grow it even more in 2018.

If anyone is looking for a end to end consultant that does Full Stack Dev with experience in mobile and web! Please do reach out, would love to talk! I am based in Canada and UK.

A friend and I were concerned that Vimperator would die with Firefox 57, so we made our own version [1]. To our delight, it mostly works and has a few users.

[1]: https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl

This has allowed me to keep my sanity (and for the most part keybindings) in the newer FF releases; many thanks!

I put time into my search engine for talks (https://www.findlectures.com/). I did two conference talks on it, at Solr/Lucene Revolution (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ia1DRz3l8) and AI With The Best (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvUf9LZxEv8).

I've also been working on extracting the UI components into a library of UI components for Solr (https://github.com/garysieling/solrkit) and a project to generate email alerts of suggested talks based on interests (https://github.com/garysieling/email-alerts).

I started streaming coding on Twitch - https://twitch.tv/mimmingcodes

It’s rekindled my excitement of using the Internet to share knowledge.

I've never watched anything on twitch, but I just sat through a bunch of your old recordings, and really enjoyed it! I'm a dev and really like pairing, where I work now they hate it, this was kinda nice to relive that pairing-ish vibe :D good work :D

Automating more Terraform stuff.

First, a script that calculates what percentage of your AWS resources (15 different resources for now) are managed by the Terraform code in a given directory, and then creates GitHub style badges for each. https://github.com/chrisanthropic/terraform-infra-as-code-co...

Second, a script to fully automate importing an existing GitHub org into Terraform and create a basic Terraform resource block for each resource. Imports teams, users, user memberships, and all repos. https://github.com/chrisanthropic/terraform-import-github-or...

Both scripts are just bash and the AWS API, GitHub API, and Terraform. jq is also required.

https://ossia.io : a visual programming language for interactive shows & music, and its associated network protocols & integrations in creative coding environments (puredata, max/msp, unity3d, openframeworks, etc...)

1. on-device speech recognition and command clasifier. V. Proprietary.

2. antigen target filtering system for a boolean logic platform for using CAR-T with AML.

3. Database and retrieval system for a series of experiments in gerbil and chinchilla cochlea to study wave propagation along the organ of corti.

4. a unity-based traveller RPG character management suite.

5. A system to measure whisker deflection in rats as a proxy for studying Bell's palsy

6. a variety of small silly projects for personal use.

where are you doing this ?

links/info for 2&3 please! Sounds really interesting.

2. https://github.com/gvoysey/tetrad (in development)

3. code forthcoming after publication :)

mostly, this is work done at BU and it’s spinoffs.

Thanks!

CPU INFOrmation library: a cross-platform library to discover supported instruction sets, microarchitecture, and cache parameters of the CPU. Started as a "oh, I can do it over the weekend" project at first, took close to a year to get to production quality.

https://github.com/Maratyszcza/cpuinfo

I spent some of my time creating realtime procedural animations in 64kB, as part of the demoscene. 64kB is the size of the Windows executable (including all models, textures, music, etc.).

Youtube capture of my last work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27PN1SsXbjM (but please try the executable if you can)

Started my own company as a side gig and started selling my own software. I developed PowerShell Pro Tools for Visual Studio as well as a web site development kit with PowerShell. https://ironmansoftware.com/ It's been super rewarding and a lot of work. Very excited to see how it turns out in 2018.

I open sourced a ZIP library written in Swift for macOS/iOS/tvOS/watchOS and Linux: https://github.com/weichsel/ZIPFoundation and wrote an article about it here: https://thomas.zoechling.me/journal/

Also improved my Mac app to record and export Animated GIFs: https://itunes.apple.com/app/claquette-animated-screenshots/...

I left my old job and built a lot of things, even built some things with friends. A lot of which have become open source. Also did a lot of reverse engineering.

1. https://labs.maplestory.io

2. https://maplestory.design

3. https://maplestory.wiki

4. https://github.com/Inumedia/NXLDownloader

5. https://labs.crr.io/maplestory/PKG1

Those are the main ones.

This is cool! I didn't realize people were still playing maple story :O

As a side project, I worked on https://stayintech.com/ It was fun to explore the Google Maps and Places API.

And also I updated my usability checklist https://stayintech.com/UX

After my former employer had a successful exit, I spent a few months helping to integrate with the new parent company. Once that was done to satisfaction, though, all but four members of our tech department were laid off--including me. I used the bonus payout, my severance and some investment success to finance my own startup...

My first product is meant to help businesses with eCommerce stores (particularly those powered by WooCommerce for now) keep track of inventory counts and locations:

https://stime.tech/yoink/

Quit my job (Frontend engineer), moved to the east coast and bought a hotel. I don't think I can go back working for corporation/startup.

My net income reduced (Based on the 2016 P&L) but so far I like it.

Learned about Go and blockchains by combining them in a personal project. For those already seasoned in Go or Blockchains, feedback welcome :) https://github.com/Grrrben/gocoin

I focused on completing my Master's in Biomedical Engineering. I looked at augmented reality for guidance during a surgery itself. The clinical application was the (robot-assisted) laparoscopic partial nephrectomy, aka kidney cancer surgery. Knowing that surgeons use ultrasound imaging during the surgery to scan the kidney, I sought to answer the question of how can we leverage this information to guide the surgeon and inform them of where their tools were in relation to the tumour at any given time?

A relatively easy to read description can be found in [0], while the main paper can be found in [1].

[0] http://stories.innovation.ubc.ca/augmented-reality-in-minima...

[1] Singla, Rohit, et al. "Intra-operative ultrasound-based augmented reality guidance for laparoscopic surgery." Healthcare technology letters 4.5 (2017): 204. http://digital-library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/h...

I worked on my side project, a cross-platform game engine: https://github.com/bioglaze/aether3d

In 2017 I mostly worked on the engine's Vulkan and D3D12 support. In 2018 I plan to add Android support and physically-based rendering.

I sometimes also blog about the development: https://bioglaze.blogspot.fi/

Worked on SMS Privacy (which I actually started towards the end of 2016) offering anonymous SMS connectivity paid in bitcoin: https://smsprivacy.org/

And a small project but a good one: the world's most secure encrypted pastebin (maybe), using ipfs: https://hardbin.com/

Also quit my job and now full-time supported by my own projects.

At my day job (dev consulting), I worked the entire year on a project that our client ultimately decided to shelve, which allowed me to level up my Ember.js, Rails, and Postgres.

On the volunteer front, I ran a computer club at my daughter's middle school for 20 sessions of 2 hours each, teaching kids some basic JavaScript, and taking them on a tour of things like turtle graphics, L-systems, rotoscoping, and a wrote them a simple "get the coins, don't touch the lava" game engine and a text-based level designer for it.

I also took a two week gig for Girls Who Code to run one of their campus summer programs at the University of Minnesota. We used Scratch to cover basic programming concepts, and in the second week they split into teams, each team working on a socially progressive game. One of the teams wrote a two player platformer that had a male and female character. The man had fewer hazards, and picked up money, and the woman had more hazards and picked up hearts. The levels were passed by the man and woman both flipping gender-specific switches. On the last level, the woman character doesn't appear, and the man can't complete all the tasks. Genius, and from a group of middle school kids.

I started coding a platform to save webpages.(Evernote like)

There are two main ideas:

* Build a personal webarchive so that links you like never disapear

* Being able to find any articles you liked in the past by searching them from their title, content or similar sentences of the text (like you can search "wooden house" and it will find an article which contains the sentence "wooden home")

The platform will be available with a montly subscription fee OR for free if you host it by yourself

I believe Pinboard.in offers these features.

Yes exactly, that's the service that is closer to what I want to build, but it is not open source

I wasn't saying you shouldn't do it, just mentioning so you'll be aware. I think we need something else than Pinboard.

Suing LinkedIn / Microsoft to protect free speech and the "right to remember" https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/forbestech...

I've been building LiveFeeds (https://www.livefeeds.io/), a platform for helping online retailers keep their affiliate data feeds and ad networks up to date. Currently, many affiliates work from data feeds that are only published once or twice a day, leaving them out of sync on prices and stock levels for many hours every day.

Ok so - I am your target customer exactly. My team is responsible for generating product feed files to give to agencies and engines. The process is extremely painful and usually ends up wasting the time of up to 10 people in the company for what should be some automated process. And here’s the thing - because it’s revenue generating, finding the budget to pay for your service is super duper easy.

So with that in mind, here’s some unsolicited feedback -

* I need you to state your limitations up front. How many products can you handle, what is the size of data you can handle?

* What platforms do you integrate with? This wasn’t obvious to me after quickly scanning the site

* Do you let me dedupe, aggregate, or create new data attributes in your platform?

> I need you to state your limitations up front. How many products can you handle, what is the size of data you can handle?

We're not in production yet, so we're still testing with some friendly merchants, but the largest dataset we've encountered is 1.3M rows (approx 900MiB of CSV). That's for a mobile phone retailer, and it's essentially the cross product of all the variables in their deals. To answer your other question, for that reason a longer-term goal is to introduce a format for aggregating multiple product options. That requires buy-in, though.

> What platforms do you integrate with? This wasn’t obvious to me after quickly scanning the site

After talking to some of our potential customers, most of them seem to be lacking in very technical staff. One of the larger ones has a brand new GBP 20M web site that they have no internal control over. For that reason, we've developed a couple of solutions that can be implemented in the web layer instead of the inventory layer. We'd be happy to work with any merchant who wants us to integrate with their e-commerce backend, though; in fact, it makes things a lot easier for us.

> Do you let me dedupe, aggregate, or create new data attributes in your platform?

We don't do deduping yet (no one has asked for it so far), but we allow you to create new data attributes in your product schema. The primary motivation for this is to generate product IDs for feeds that don't have an explicit ID column, but do have one in, say, the product URL. We'll be extending it as use cases come along, for things like extracting attributes from product titles or descriptions, and fixing up data to meet the requirements of particular ad networks.

I’ve been working fulltime for an IDE for music. None of the currenct DAW and MIDI editors really understand music. Notepad : IDE = DAW : my thing. Sign up here I’ll ping you when it’s ready https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-aQzVbkbGwv2BMQsvuoneOUPgyr...

Just yesterday I released my first Android application (a game called: "Shades and Hues - a game of color gradients": https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nkcss.shad... never published a mobile app before, so that was fun :)

For my business (I work 32-hours a week and have my own consulting company on the side); I wrote software for a .NET CE Embedded device (Zebra; previously Symbol Kiosk device) that allows customers to price-check in retail stores. A customer of mine put up 4 hardware units in their store, and has been working great. I also wrote the communication software for their PoS cash register to accept PIN+Chip Debit cards, which has also been running for nearly a year without a hitch. Have one offer pending for a big project to write a custom OCR application, which would be the biggest project I've done solo, to hopefull, I can tell you guys about that next year :)

I let a close friend recruit me, after over a year of trying, and have been working on a new project that took on a life of its own. I've been more productive and happy in the past few months than I have been in years. 2017 was the best year ever. Before that, so was 2016, etc., every year better than the last. 2018, I'm sure, will be another new all-time high.

I learned and released my first gamedev project - a multiplayer arena fighter (http://kikiki.io) . Still have a couple hundred people playing per day, but no longer maintained.

These days, I'm learning React/React-Native to build a marketplace that connects photographers with people who want better dating photos.

>> multiplayer arena fighter

I'm curious - are there a lot of tutorials or learning resources out there for this kind of game? I feel like I see a lot of them. modd.io is a whole platform for making these kinds of games almost exclusively.

I basically used two open source projects as learning resource . I recommend checking out https://github.com/huytd/agar.io-clone and https://github.com/ahung89/bomb-arena . Simply playing around with those code, tweaking them, and modding them, allowed me to go from knowing nothing about gamedev, to learning about how to create one.

First things first: for my relationship which I had been working on, I finally got married to the woman I've been with for 7 years now.

My business, NoteToServices ( https://notetoservices.com ) became official this year, though it was registered 2 years ago, I could actually make it legit.

For my side projects, I was happy to release two web apps which I did a Show HN for one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16041245

Call Me Private ( https://callmeprivate.com ) and Text Me Private ( https://textmeprivate.com ) are two services that allow you to purchase virtual numbers to mask your own phone number for more privacy.

I also created a website called ScamShare which allows people to share the latest email and phone scams they've received, explain their situation, or just generally get the word out there about these scams and scammers to fight the good fight! https://scamshare.com

Had some trouble with my turning-5 years old website, Confessions of the Professions ( http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com ), earlier in the year, which were theme-related, so I've been in the works of finding a theme that really stuck with me and lately I've admired Medium.com, who also admitted that they've indefinitely removed custom domains, but I really wanted something similar, for its aesthetic beauty and simplicity, so I managed to update a theme to my needs.

Primarily on my kinda-side project Exoframe [1]. We needed a self-hosted tool that allows simple one-command deployments and I've ended up building it myself using Docker. Seems to work pretty well so far :D

[1] https://github.com/exoframejs/exoframe

I made the leap and partnered up full time with a friend & former coworker on his indie game "Clone Drone in the Danger Zone", a third-person laser-sword-fighter where any part of your body can be sliced off.

We released on Steam[1] Early Access in March, which was a special moment to be a part of (I grew up as a kid playing games on Steam, the process behind game creation used to be a mysterious fascination!)

In 2017 we built and released a ton of fun updates -- a Steam Workshop integration, Twitch Mode & Twitch Extension (where chatters can spawn enemies), and a super ambitious chapter 3 that added AI allies and a multi-part tower-assault adventure with fun scripted/animated moments.

Coming up next we tackle multiplayer. To do that, we first spent a month "burning a pancake" by making a small free multiplayer game called "Long Live Santa!" [2]. Within 3 days, more players had installed that game than the game we'd spent over a year on... it just hit over 100,000 players, just over a couple weeks after its initial release. We were surprised to see the momentum that releasing something for free generates.

It's been a lot of challenging, varied work, with more autonomy and skin in the game than any previous role and I absolutely love it.

Going in to next year we are going full force on adding multiplayer to Clone Drone, using the lessons learned from Long Live Santa to guide us. (& if you've made a multiplayer game before, would love to chat some time and swap notes!)

[1]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/597170/

[2]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/763410/Long_Live_Santa/

Working for six months on a project that initially sounded awesome, but the combination of the slowness of client feedback (it would take weeks to get signoff on features that would have been days for other projects), and conflicts with the architect (I asked questions regarding the project, he'd complain to my manager that I was asking questions) had me moved onto a legacy maintenance project for three months, then laid off when the budget ran out. Add financial fun and being hospitalised for what turned out to be an uncontrolled blood pressure spike and ya, it was a fun time.

I'm now with another company managing various development teams to add continuous delivery to their projects. Combo of project management, business and system analysts, and a bit of coding and devops knowledge has been making this project challenging, but pretty cool to work on.

Still working on Codeflow - A visual programming platform - http://codeflow.co. Do have a look!

I'm volunteering in a local high school, helping out with a few CS classes. My main focus is an introductory Python class. I've put together a few projects for the students in that class:

http://blog.jrheard.com/watercolorbot

http://blog.jrheard.com/python/passwords

http://jrheard.com/blog-staging/python/caesar.html

I'm excited to see how the rest of this school year goes - by the end of it, I'll have a suite of projects that beginners to Python might find very useful!

Focused mostly on my programming tutorial Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/iamdavidwparker). Started the year ~500 subscribers and ended around ~1200.

Wrote small Go tools related to the language's AST, using the go/ast and go/build packages.

The `predeclared' command finds identifiers that shadow Go's built-in identifiers (make, copy, error, etc.). This type of shadowing results in cognitive overhead when reading code or can lead to unexpected bugs.

https://github.com/nishanths/predeclared

The `dedupimport' command fixes duplicate named import declarations in Go source files; i.e. imports that have the same import path but different import names [2].

https://github.com/nishanths/dedupimport

Battling mid life crisis this year i suppose, something stirring inside of me lately. Feeling uneasy.. Been in the data analytics industry within corporate America for 20 years.. Never seen such a bifurcation between the statistical analytics practitioners and the compsci crowd with deep nets.

Thinking about the next chapter. A few buddies and I created an outlet for our math and computation hobby. Starting to help traders with stat arb. So we just released a side business site that helps traders who are unfamiliar with all the math - a way to visualize the markets as well as trade pairs or factors in real time. https://raveanalytics.com/

I worked on a small team to produce motion comicbooks for the web:

https://reader.madefire.com/work/w-a52abd89424c4fddb4b040e1d...

Asked 144 people a question ‘What is the most exciting trend in technology for you in next 15 years?’. Got amazing answers. There were many standard ones like ‘AI and Cryptocurrencies’. Most interesting responses started with ‘I am not really a tech-savvy person, but...’.

Try it. Ask personally and select people with different backgrounds. Let people speak and just listen.

I plan to summarize it in an article in 2018. It has been fun to compare this to the current Gartner's Hype Cycle* for example. Automated analysis of such free-form answers (and scaling to millions of answers) would be interesting to work on.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

When I ask people about the future of tech, most of them just end up listing their wish list. I wish in future we can do XYZ... Or they end up talking about human accomplishments (space, medical etc.) that they most likely don't get to partake in closely.

So last week I asked a bunch of people (techies and non-techies alike) what current tech they regularly use that they couldn't have imagined 10 years ago. Got some really interesting thoughts. Retina displays and 4k displays were definitely unexpected. Complete phone backup to cloud would've surprised many. Same with mostly waterproof phones.

One trend I noticed that people are way more surprised with hardware than software, even though AI/ML software has made huge leaps in the last decade. Maybe because sci-fi has raised our expectations for human-life AI and until we achieve that in code, it just won't be enough. But hardware innovations continue to amaze people.

Two side projects: a budgeting app that is a fresh take on the problem. I'm currently using it for my family's budgeting and once I feel it's polished enough I plan to open it up to users.

Also working on a closet design app. We bought a house that had completely empty closets (not even a basic closet rod), and learned the hard way that existing closet design solutions are all quite bad. I built a very simple one to meet our needs, then from there kept polishing it. It saved us money as we were able to design a closet that met our exact needs and only buy the needed parts. Most/all closet design apps are "package" oriented, forcing you to commit to less or more than you actually need.

Went back to being an Emerging Markets hedge fund manager after taking 5 years off to research ASD

Created www.ananas.org.uk to map the worlds belief systems using AI and data science incentivised by tax deductible crypto (closed ecosystem Veblen good model supported by ERC-721 sponsorship of scripture)

Worked on finalising specs for www.symmitree.com to give every refugee access to free android smartphones and data in the next two years using functional distributed ledgers combined with biometrics and lots of great partners. Blockchain bonds too based on the IFFIm program, the legal side has been really interesting, as has delving into self sovereign ID with zero knowledge proofs.

Has been a great year, hopefully 2018 will be an even better one.

Potioneer, my VR gardening simulator/Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley game. I had to take a two month hiatus while I switched jobs but I'm back at it every moment I get. I'm hoping to launch the game fully by this time 2018.

If you're interested in this kind of thing, be sure to follow me on GNU Social: https://kwat.chat/focusonfungames

You can find the game on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/544410/Potioneer_The_VR_Ga...

I built a system that takes map data for whole UK topography and produces maps in html/svg, pdf/jpg .. and autocad DXF.

Built with postgres+postGIS and node.js. Around 400Gb dataset, maps generate in around a second.

A lot of time spent on processing data quickly, and on data formats.

Also did a related system that looks up any address in the UK via postcode or keyword, with sub-second response.

In progress, a blockchain simulator in node.js, to test out some scaling ideas...

Also spent time convincing people to teach multiplication in a better way : quantblog.wordpress.com & gridmaths.com ... and about why Bitcoin does need a larger block.

Looking to more consulting work in 2018 working on blockchain tech.

.. and some paintings : gordart.wordpress.com

I've been finally making serious progress on my startup, and have been picking up bigger customers lately.

I kind of fucked up and decided to try the whole solo founder thing. I don't recommend it.

I had a few bad experiences with cofounders at previous startups, so my rationale was to wait for the right person to come along. But that never happened... so I decided to just go solo.

Being a solo founder has been by far the hardest thing I've ever done. It's been brutal at times.

So what did I work on in 2017? Keeping the company alive and trying to make shit happen.

I'm now 2 years in, still alive, and 2018 is looking really good.

Being a solo founder is only hard in the beginning. If you survived the first two years then you are over the hump. Good luck for 2018.

Thanks man.

I'm happy with 2 open source projects I've published:

- ssrf_filter (https://github.com/arkadiyt/ssrf_filter): a ruby gem for preventing server side request forgery attacks

- bounty-targets-data (https://github.com/arkadiyt/bounty-targets-data): an automatically updating repository of all Hackerone/Bugcrowd in-scope domains (for use in scripted bug hunting)

I got a job in New Zealand and moved from China to here.

Also finished up a few small bits I started back in 2016.

One is a side project for writing slides with Swift: https://github.com/Codezerker/Truffaut

Another is `NS[Mutable]AttributedString` in `swift-corelibs-foundation`: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/pull/1378

Human computation! Not to be too #hailcorporate, but my job's pretty fun. It's using machine learning and humans together to solve problems. The fields pretty focused on labelling tasks, but there's much more to it. Having a large human workforce backed by a bunch of engineers and data scientists is like a fast-forward button on machine learning. You use humans and computers together to do things we really can't automate yet (or even ever, without general AI). ML meets cog-sci meets HCI meets crowdsourcing.

I understand the excitement :) - working on ML+human workers product too, but in customer support space. It is always fun to talk to people working on similar problems, especially in different markets. Would you like to chat? Please reply to my email (eugene.mandel at gmail) - I am in SF 2-3 times a week.

Working on an IOS-based dating service which handles your facebook friends, mutual friends and soon to add searching capabilities, people within an 100m radius and people you would meet at events, it has several hundred users right now since beta-launch a couple months back.

Inspired because of things like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16041292

Heres my IOS appstore link: appsto.re/ca/SfGTib.i

Please do check it out and provide feedback!

I started consulting and interviewing prep startup for engineers who want to become PMs. http://bit.ly/2q5APCD

We built a CMS that works anywhere, on any website, on any platform.

Works with React, Angular, Vue, etc., and any server side technology.

https://anymod.com

http://worldwidewebworks.blogspot.com/

About my 4th or 5th iteration of my desire to help the increasingly disenfranchised and poor in the US to create an income wherever they want to live by using the internet. A little pushback against the trend that all the jobs are moving to the big city and most people can't afford to live there.

Plus various other things, like I got myself off the street and back into housing.

Edits. Cuz auto-correct. Ergh

I made a lot of smoke, but not a lot of fire.

Two years ago I said I was going to clone Berzerk as my second game dev project, and made my first commit[0].

This year I basically tore the entire thing apart several times and wound up just working on general framework and game development code[1]. Some of it still doesn't work. Most of it is probably crap.

I also worked on, and have given up on, a HN-like forum written in Hack[2]. It wasn't very good, though. Just got bored with it.

I've taken a lot of Udemy tutorials for Unity and OpenGL, and gotten some Hello World stuff to run in WebAssembly.

Basically, I've either been very productive, or I've completely wasted the last two years of my life, depending on your point of view.

I also came across a pile of old cd/dvds I kept old code and short stories and things on and archived it. Found some PHP I wrote in 2004, and some old sites from when I used to blog regularly and review movies.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819380

[1]https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/gamedevprojects

[2]https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/basedforum

Sounds like you're preparing/triangulating to me, give it a few years and I can almost promise it will all make sense. Just accept that you're not in control and follow your intuition and all will be fine :)

Thanks.

I feel slightly less embarrassed at having spent three months and counting on Pong.

You're welcome :) If you had any idea how many hundreds of thousands of locs I've thrown away over 30 years. Yet I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, and it was all leading here. These days I'm comfortable just going with the flow without rationalizing, it's not as if my stubborn attempts at controlling life were working out that well anyways...

I made (Let's) All Mine, a site that I hoped would pay for a master's degree in statistics. The idea was inspired by The Million Dollar Homepage [2] which was an experiment in what qualifies as a website. Essentially, that site took people's annoyance by ads, and made a site that was entirely ads, a 1000x1000 pixel grid where each square pixel cost $1. And it was successful.

My project takes people's annoyance by browser miners, and is a site whose entire purpose is browser mining. There's nothing else to it. The goal is to mine 1,000 Monero (an altcoin) collaboratively. After taxes and fees, that would cover the approximate cost of 2 years in grad school. I did the math the other day and realized that with about 1 million miners, I could achieve this task in 1 week (or 1 day with 7.5M miners, or 1 month with 250k people).

I've had very little luck getting the word out. While I'd love for the internet's capricious eye to smile on me and make it take off, I'm not optimistic. Nevertheless, it was a fun learning project!

[1] https://allmine.io

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

The current reward for mining is super lame, just a few characters in a leaderboard.

If I were implementing something like this, I'd do something like a crossover between Reddit's Place project and the million dollar homepage, where you mine x amount of coin in order to place a pixel on a shared canvas.

Right now there's no psychological motivation to continue mining, especially because if someone arrives late in the game, they have almost 0 chance of rising to the top of the leaderboard, so why even bother?

That's a really cool idea. Thanks!

With some encouragement from fellow HNers I've been working on startyourownisp.com. It's a free guide to starting a (wireless) Internet Service Provider in your garage.

https://startyourownisp.com/

Spent 9 months of the year developing a REST API for a project that is launching in the coming months whilst finishing my CS degree online (finish in May). Have learned a lot along the way, mainly more about the HTTP protocol in general but also unit testing and working with third-party contractors that are building SDK's to interface with my API. All in all been a very challenging year professionally but have learned a lot of lessons that will help in the years ahead.

This year I ramped up my home projects. I always wanted to create my own game universe with simulated entities (just like in Dwarf Fortress) so my first step towards that is an ASCII/Tile engine, Zircon (https://github.com/Hexworks/zircon). I have 4 releases now, several contributors, and a small community. I really enjoy the interaction with the other guys in this niche market (mainly on Reddit and Discord).

Another project is funktion (https://github.com/Hexworks/funktion) which is basically a wrapper for some of Clojure's nicesities (persistent data structures, STM, Refs).

I started to grow an umbrella "company" for my projects: Hexworks (https://github.com/Hexworks) and another one with a friend: AppCraft (https://github.com/AppCraft-Projects).

Almost everything I do is open source and is on GitHub.

I also started my own blog (http://the-cogitator.com/) and its Medium counterpart (https://medium.com/@addamsson).

There is some other stuff which I did not mention here, these are the things I focus on.

- left my old job like every year or so

- commenced an MSc course focussing on AI and Machine Learning

- according to GitHub I've created 624 commits and 35 new repositories in 2017

- built Botlang (https://botlang.org/), a scripting language for conversational chatbots

- have begun blogging about this and that (https://www.matchilling.com/blog/)

Most of the startups that I have been a part of have been deeply dysfunctional. I wanted to document this, by describing what I'd seen, so I wrote "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps". The intro is here:

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/how-to-destroy-a-tech-s...

I built https://conjure.sh in my spare time, which watches github pull requests and spins up containers, so that engineers can review quickly without as much context switching. Still putting final touches on it (working out kinks with AWS Fargate).

Also led an engineering team at a startup that is seeing some good growth, but left it at the end of the year after some internal drama.

Spent the first half at a startup I'd been working at for about a year before getting acquired by Amazon and joining the Alexa org. Made peanuts on my options and left after a few months to start a cannabis company. Our aim is to manufacture and distribute high quality vape cartridges and pre rolls while contributing to the liberation and well-being of the drug war's many victims and their communities. So far, so good! :)

I built and launched two projects:

https://docsift.com, which was a tool for journalists and legal teams to help smooth fact discovery from large document dumps. I ultimately benched it because I'm not a lawyer or a journalist and couldn't find a motivated group of users to provide good feedback.

While I was building Docsift, I'd built a Slack integration to get nice-looking cryptocurrency quotes, and it was growing on its own after sharing it in a single team; I decided to switch gears and work on that. It turned into https://www.CoinAlerts.io, which is a quoting tool and alerting service for cryptocurrency hobbyists, investors, and speculators. It's been growing pretty strongly on its own, and I'm having a great time hacking away at it. I'm building another thing in that space right now, splitting some of my time off from CoinAlerts to work on it; ultimately they'll go together. No comment on whether or not I think BTC or crypto in general are a bubble, but I'm really enamored with the space.

This year I finished my project GeoJS. I want to open source it in the next couple of months and try and find sponsorship through Digital ocean or Vultr so I can place some more nodes around the world.

Also on my roadmap is updating the stack to use the newer versions of maxminds geoip dbs. This requires custom compiling some software I haven't got around to yet.

https://geojs.io

I worked on various toy projects mainly in Scheme but also in Python:

- Scheme: I learned more ReactJS+Redux and implemented a similar framework using BiwaScheme and snabbdom. Here is an example app: https://github.com/amirouche/scheme-todomvc

- Python: I started a project but without a good idea of where it will go. It's based on asyncio, aiohttp and a custom ReactJS based framework inspired from my Scheme work (read the point above). The project served me well, as template for asyncio+aiohttp based projects: https://github.com/amirouche/xp-socialite

- Scheme GNU Guile: I slowly improved my search engine, I reworked the database schema and querying algorithm: https://github.com/a-guile-mind/Culturia

- Scheme GNU Guile: I create binding for termbox and made a tiny editor https://github.com/a-guile-mind/azul.scm

- Scheme GNU Guile: I added ffi to Guile JavaScript backend https://gitlab.com/amirouche/guile/tree/compile-to-js-2017

- Scheme: I started a dynamic blog engine (a la wordpress) https://github.com/a-guile-mind/presence

We are mobile development agency, so most of the work we did was client work

- NFL, MLB & Basketball teams coaching iPad applications

- Worked on Productivity application for Singapore based startup

- Worked on Gifting application for USA based startup

Apart from client work here are the interesting things we did:

- Grown Apple Developers Club to 1000+ members on meetup [https://www.meetup.com/Apple-Developers-Club-Ahmedabad/]

- Started AI & ML Developers meetup group [https://www.meetup.com/Artificial-Intelligence-and-Machine-L...]

- Open sourced MFCard on GitHub [https://github.com/MobileFirstInc/MFCard]

- Provided 4 paid Internship to college students

- Launched App Fixers & Shots on Product Hunt

[1] https://app-fixers.com

[2] https://mobilefirst.in/shots

Dealt with fulfilling my last Kickstarter. Which was initially going to be "ship books to Amazon, have them send them out, and then leave them on Amazon's store" until it turned out that Amazon is bureaucratically incapable of doing anything to an oversized paperback book than slipping it into a bubble envelope. I finally got the high-tier books drawn in and shipped out this month. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egypturnash/decrypting-...

Intermittently poked at the TV show proposal I made a couple years back that's turned into a comics project: http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/

Drew a couple eight-page comics for anthologies - one book on Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1855150928/were-still-h...), one is in a four-issue series Image is putting out this February (https://imagecomics.com/content/view/what-the-world-needs-no...).

Started running a Mastodon instance: https://dragon.style/

Started getting back to work on my next graphic novel, after a two-year hiatus due to a death in the family and that Kickstarter mentioned at the top of this comment.

Attempting to ramp up my OSS involvement. I made a small contribution to CoreDNS and, encouraged by the friendly and welcoming maintainers, got System.HashCode committed to .Net. It proved what I've known all along: there's much more to learn and people who know way more than me out there - I've found a second love for programming. I can't recommend getting involved in any project enough.

teaching AIs how to touch and interact with the environment (not officially released yet): https://github.com/jtoy/sensenet

I set up my own consulting company and, when not working for clients, I am trying to work on some of the common issues I found in businesses I worked in.

I just launched a simple tool: http://stackbiller.com - it's a tool to keep track of all the SAAS subscriptions a company may have. It's a small tool but hopefully will be useful.

My little side project is News Uniter [1], and it's an attempt to break out of your news media-consuming bubble and help read different news sources.

The most recent update shows the home page of each news site side by side, so you can see what media outlets focus on different headlines. It's interesting to see what is considered "important news" at various places - it can sometimes help better reveal media biases, and, I think, can help people with other political leanings understand those biases more.

At least one friend could not believe another friend of mine when he claimed that Fox News did not have a particular very important headline at the top of their page. This app could help show, "Here's what each news site thinks is important, and how it may be different from what you think it might be."

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-uniter/id1182818371?mt=...

Building out CloudSploit (https://cloudsploit.com) to help improve AWS cloud security.

One highly-used tool we released this year was an S3 Bucket security scanner. We made it after reading article after article featuring companies who lost customer data because they failed to properly secure their S3 buckets.

This looks great! How many people do you have working on this? How does it compare to something like Evident?

System for automating perception using Deep Learning - computer vision, natural language processing, text to speech, advanced speech recognition. For robotics and artistic purposes. The pace in this area is simply stunning and it's unbelievable what a talented kid can do with it these days. Maybe I'll release parts of it as open source someday.

Spent the last 9 months on a startup I co-founded, https://carbonstate.com

We are producing an ECM system aimed at the SMB market.

The short feature list is:

- Configuration driven; no coding required to create management systems

- Complex schema support ( nested and linked types )

- Automatic data entry/modification form creation

- Workflow support

- Compiled templating with fragments and support for reverse proxy cache invalidation on data change

- Horizontal scaling ( nanomsg based node interactions )

- Vertical scaling ( new event based http server translating http messages to nanomsg )

- Script driven installer system with UI ( smaller and more flexible than NSIS - <100k installers containing XML parsing and a general purpose scripting language )

Kickstarter to fund finishing the project is in the works.

Before the startup, at the beginning of the year, I rewrote a new version of Apache Avro in C, C++, Perl, and Java to replace all of the event logging within Amazon. The code runs billions of times per day across 4 major web platforms and 20+ component systems.

> ECM

Electronic counter measures?

Do you build content management systems? Both the website and this comment are a bit confusing to me. Maybe doing usability testing of the homepage would be a good idea? to see if people understand what it is about. You can submit your site for free here: https://usability.testing.exchange — it's a feedback exchange place (I'm developing it). Also look at the Alternatives page, there you'll find lots of other places to get even more feedback.

I published my first book C# And XML Primer (https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484225943) and wrote my second book Pro Windows 10 Development in C# 7 (https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484229330).

I started learning Elixir and wrote Plsm (https://github.com/jhartwell/Plsm/) which is my highest starred github repo with a whopping 86 stars (my previous highest was only 7).

Finishing up 2017, I'm working on my first mobile app using Xamarin Forms and Elixir + Phoenix for the server side. It is a simple train schedule app for the Chicago Metra but it is something that will help me and hopefully others.

I have been working on pet project since July, 2016, quitted the daily job and turned that into SaaS startup [1] in 2017, raised funding and built a team. At the end of 2017, we got 10X growth in terms of data size, having 5 paying customers with $24K ARR.

[1] https://juicefs.io/

A new kind of UX tool. The first version uses text-commands to create and edit wireframes. These articles are about the progress of the prototype: https://medium.com/proof-of-concept

In a week or two there will be an online sandbox version for people to play with.

I released my first ever big project this year. Learn Anything (https://learn-anything.xyz).

It's pretty amazing to see how fast it evolved and how much there is still to do. Can't wait to see what will happen to it in 2018 and what we will be able to do with it.

I think Google is a tough competitor — typing e.g. "I want to learn Javascript" gives seemingly good results I think.

Built a home office v2 after working a couple years in various offices, coworkings or in my living room (couch != home office).

Single best decision I've done in my career. Finally I'm in control of lighting conditions, noise level, ergonomics, schedule.

The number of hours/day (secret) I am able to comfortably deliver has literally doubled.

I'm making an affiliate platform that only charges a commission on the commissions. It lets businesses sign up affiliates (bloggers, news sites, comparison sites, aggregators etc) and pay commissions for sales that affiliates refer. Commissions can be paid with a credit card and don't need a connected bank account or upfront funding (lots of existing affiliate platforms require this and have minimums).

The idea is that businesses who don't know yet if affiliate marketing will work can try it without too much upfront investment or commitment. If it does work, then we can help it grow with predictable unit-pricing. And if it does not work, then you didn't need to spend any money or do anything complicated to find that out.

We'll be looking for beta testers soon. If you might be interested in trying it out, feel free to email me: steve AT referberry.com

Started the year taking CS232n deep learning course. Then I started looking into spaces and markets to build something in, and get loads of practice doing customer dev. I looked at CSV tools, amazon seller tools, data cleaning services, VR game spectating, sushi collection mobile game, but none of them seemed right for one reason or another.

After that, I just wanted to build something I wanted to use, so I built Helmspoint—it helps you deploy Keras image recognition machine learning models to the web. Just upload the trained keras model, and it generates the web app and API. I’ve always found it maddening to configure servers, set up TLS, domain names, environment variables, etc, just to get something to show or share models with other people, so that’s why I built it.

https://www.helmspoint.com

https://markerbox.co

It's an easy to use, bookmark manager. I was disappointed in how bloated pocket became and opted in to make my own solution. It's still in early stages right now but a lot more features (and at least an Android app) are coming.

I continued working on my modem https://github.com/quiet

This year I got it and its dependencies to compile in Windows (MSVC) which was a major undertaking. I also got underway on creating better documentation and bindings in Python.

Happy New Year HN!

This year has been full of surprises and challenges, but it was also one of the most rewarding.

- Started building Taskade (https://www.taskade.com) with my friends Stan (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lxcid) and Dionis (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sntk).

- Launched our MVP on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/taskade).

- Raised funding from incredible investors and advisors to help us scale the business.

Here's to an amazing 2018!

I worked on https://www.pagedash.com, bookmarking with the content if you will.

I also launched https://themalaysianpulse.com, a Malaysian news aggregator.

> I also launched https://themalaysianpulse.com, a Malaysian news aggregator.

Wonderful work! Any chance you could talk more about how you built this website? For example, where do you get your news from, how do you aggregate it, and which technology stack do you use on the server side?

Thanks :) Yup, I source news from local news portals as shown in the website. Hourly, each source is crawled in each relevant category to get the latest news items, and stored into a database. Another job then goes and fetches the body of all these articles. (I use https://github.com/robfig/cron for cron jobs). Server and HTML templates are both Golang. As for the aggregation (grouping) algorithm, I'll just say that it's straight out of the textbook http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds/ch3.pdf

Thanks for the detailed reply. :-)

> As for the aggregation (grouping) algorithm, I'll just say that it's straight out of the textbook http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds/ch3.pdf

So, in other words, you're using the MinHash algorithm as well as Locality-sensitive hashing (LSH)? How much volume are you able to process in how much time?

By the way, I first learned about this topic through Stanford’s “Mining of Massive Datasets” (MMDS) course that used to be free on Coursera. So it's thrilling to see someone put it to use in the real world and talk about it, too! :-)

Yup, MinHash with LSH. It's quite fast and low compute intensive, because articles shown are limited by recency (e.g. past 24 hours), say order of hundreds and thousands in a few seconds. Someone wrote an open source LSH on github on Golang, so no credits to me :) Probably would not have been able to code LSH myself.

It would be awesome if you blogged about your entire experience setting up your news aggregator. But I guess your first priority is PageDash these days so I can keep dreaming. :-)

I designed and implemented an in-house timeline system, which collects communications with our customers across all channels (chat, email, sms, phonecalls etc). Learned a lot, but also almost burned out closer to the end of the year. I was working remotely and mostly alone. Scope creep and lack of proper management has bitten me really hard. When I finally launched the app into production, I felt nothing but tiredness.

I still can't wrap my head around the React ecosystem. Front-end part was the most time consuming (probably because before this project I did only backend stuff). I enjoy react, but the whole game "build your own build system", "build your own framework" is beyond me. I hope the new year will bring more solutions like nextjs.

I improved a lot my side project called @whattheshot, a Twitter Bot that features a quiz around cinema since 2010: https://twitter.com/whattheshot.

It tweets a movie frame every 10 minutes and people have 5 min to guess the movie (from where the frame was taken). I improved a lot of things during 2017. It now interacts in three different languages (English, French, Spanish), accepts requests in DM from regular players, can be controlled by myself through DMs.

The bot can change behavior according to the news/day (like right now, it features shots from movies with fireworks, make-ups, to prepare for the New Year's Eve).

It is based on whatthemovie.com, which I co-develop as well.

I launched my startup http://www.manypixels.co - a design service for bootstrapped startups (though we have a few VC funded ones as clients) and agencies. On the way to hit $10k MRR this month!

of my own projects:

finished my book (3½ years in the making, so my new years resolution 2015, 2016, 2017): https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/b/understanding-seo now in a second print

my obtrusive live testing app (chrome extension) now v 1 0.1.5:(so, ready for production) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/f19n-obtrusive-liv...

next year: book marketing & distribution and a focused mini community around obtrusive live testing

I had a bad burn out and had to quit my job to keep my sanity. I've always had the habit of sharing interesting tech articles with my friends, so I launched https://discoverdev.io as a side project. It's basically a no BS curated daily list of good engineering articles that I feel would be worth your time! Had to teach myself some web dev and some basic design.

Right now working on a platform for developers to explain the internal workings of their projects. This would help a lot of new comers understand how a particular project works as opposed to being asked to read it's source code.

All on all 2017 was a meh year, hoping for a brighter 2018.

http://playquest.io A minimalist create-your-own adventure RPG/interactive story using nothing but text and emoji. Started as a simple exercise to learn more about front-end development and to build out my portfolio of personal projects. tried to do a kickstarter that was not successful. put together with Django, jQuery, Bootstrap and some JS libraries including underscore and hammer.js and an API for text to speech. For the most part it is spaghetti code and it made me realize that I should really start working on a front end framework, so I’ve been working on ReactJS and will possibly rewrite the game in React.

Music was my passion before I went to college for CS and pursued software engineering and eventually product management. For some reason I all but completely abandoned music while focussing on becoming a software developer...

this year I decided to launch my own solo music project, recording and producing a 5 song EP on Logic Pro. It was fun blending my 'engineering' chops with my music as i dusted off my songwriting/piano/guitar skills.

https://MusicFromJohn.com

https://open.spotify.com/artist/29faobre3yzdnIDjcZHCkj

I am in the process of wrapping up a static site generator I made. https://github.com/sachleen/Steady I used it as an opportunity to refresh my PHP skills and start using Composer. In the process, I also made and published my first package on packagist. https://packagist.org/packages/sachleen/twig-truncatep that allows you to truncate a block of HTML (say an article) to a fixed number of paragraphs in a Twig template.

Started an initiative which will allow to tick "{machine, deep} learning, computer vision" checkbox in company's product feature-list.

Technically that means designing an FPGA-based vision system which interfaces with existing control system.

I finished Data Commander (MVP) - http://conceptoriented.com - A web-app for column-oriented data transformations.

After getting some feedback I decided to position this technology differently. Instead of exposing the functionality via web app, I started implementing a Java library http://github.com/asavinov/bistro - an alternative to map-reduce. In 2018 I am going to develop a server for IoT and stream analytics - an alternative to kafka stream analytics based on Bistro.

Playing around with combining music composition, math and programming.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxhopAH-8PKhcJ6pXkyc1Xw

In 2017 I started working on the 'reboot' of the Kurento project, an open-source WebRTC media server (http://www.kurento.org)

It's been quite a busy year because a new team had to be formed almost from the start -due to the previous team leaving the ship- and also over the months I've been slowly getting in charge of all maintenance and development work.

Progress is slow but steady, last couple months have been dedicated to prepare a new release that will be the first step in the way of recovering contact with the community, and keeping the project relevant and useful.

I bootstrapped and launched my Customer Success Management app Akita - https://www.akitaapp.com

It's been a LONG road but we've finally got happy customers and revenue.

I had a busy year. I converted a major auction site to fully responsive as the sole front-end developer and interface designer, learned Java and started doing full stack development at work, and then quit my job when they moved the offices too far away.

After quitting I decided to start my own company and began developing next generation assistive devices for the blind. I actually got pretty far along that path when I thought of an idea in a different realm that had much larger potential and required much less development. I can't talk about the specifics yet, but I'm getting very close to launching a new type of mapping service.

I seriously started pursuing Python, did number of freelance projects and managed to write a few blog posts at http://www.kashifaziz.me

2018 will be the year of Python for me.

I held a full time crm position while working 100 hours a month doing laravel development for a local startup. Created php websites and implemented features for other client. Watched 500+ laracast videos, went to my first online conference. Tried to re learned react instead learned vue. Tried to reimplement a movie game in vue / quasar framework with some success from a half finished react project which was from a 1/4 finished angular project.

Also moved around a few hundred websites from mostly hostgator accoints to a droplet setup.

The one area I struggled with was what to build next last year. I hope to get more clarity this year.

I left my job to work full-time on https://sublimefund.org, with the goal of getting more people involved in philanthropy.

I'm working on donation matching right now.

I worked mainly on open source side projects such as:

Sandglass https://github.com/celrenheit/sandglass a distributed, horizontally scalable, persistent, time ordered message queue. It was developed to support asynchronous tasks and message scheduling which makes it suitable for usage as a task queue.

Sandflake https://github.com/celrenheit/sandflake decentralized, sequential, lexicographically sortable unique id.

Wrote, and still working on a personal music streaming web app. Started this with the intention of learning some new tech and seeing if I could really see a project through. Its functional but still in progress. Its been great and I learnt tons from it, highlights include: - My first serverless app - First project without any css frameworks - Got to try out vue.js and loved it - my first app to use aws cognito - or any aws services for that matter, got to work with s3, api gateway and lambda too.

Overall a great learning experience. Its free to use if anyone wants to try it out: tuneco.logikgatemusic.com

The Rakudo compiler: https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/

Feeling a lot more optimistic about it today than a year ago. \o/

Which part have you worked on? I've seen some interesting blog posts on Rakudo. I'd like to see more written about how the JIT works though.

Had my first full year working on my startup https://www.taskade.com/

It have been challenging. I switch from being an iOS engineer to a full stack web developer. I always thought its easy to manage a team but I was so wrong. Struggling between doing and delegating.

I hope to I learn and improve going forward into 2018, trying to be good at enabling my teammates more. Hope we make Taskade becoming great.

I'm grateful I have good relationship with my co-founders though and still enjoy very much working with them. Hope we achieve great things together.

Happy New Year HN!

Cheers, Stan

My wife and I worked remotely (~4 days a week) and we traveled the world. South east Asia, Europe, US and back via Asia to end the year home in Australia. It was an awesome year, saw some incredible places and also got to work on some interesting Dev projects. I had a chance to get a few open source PRs through to a Python CMS and towards the end of the year got invited to join the core development team. Getting more involved with open source has been lots of fun, seeing how bigger teams work together and also actually contributing some complex (for me) fixes has been great.

Fixed: Spelling

After a 10-years-or-so hiatus I finally got back at composing music, and completed 29 songs and 4 albums, this fall only: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4nxDh1lPq0EclBPMNXnYa3 and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgNm_EwMyLBrKp_kmdU3XoA. Doing this in parallel to going through a divorce with three kids has been quite a ride.

Hey! I'm enjoying some of your music on spotify. Going to be added to my work + relaxation playlists! Really nice ambiance. What are some pointers on getting started? I really don't have any background but interested.

Not as cool as a lot of these, but I built https://voyagefound.com as a react learning project. It's a filterable interface for viewing random pages on WikiVoyage.org.

It's one of those projects that I got 95% done in a few weekends early this year, then lost interest. I spent some holiday time last week wrapping it up and deploying it. Actually finishing projects (especially learning projects) is something I often struggle with, so it felt good to get over the finish line on this little project.

Landed a new job in a new (to me), hard to enter industry making 2x what I used to make. Also achieved 2 new certifications. Personally I finally have a good management of my migraines and starting toward veganism.

What causes your migraines?

For me it was stress. I could always kind of tell but since I've been working for myself for the past few years I have had hardly any migraines.

An acquaintence gets them very often and they are extremely severe---incapacitating her for a day or more at a time. She has been battling this for decades and has been unable to find any causes.

Edit: does the veganism have anything to do with the migraines?

It’s a daily learning and reacting experience. The latest neurologist has me on Botox (for migraine), a sleep aide, and muscle relaxers. Many of them seem to be a muscle spasm in my trapezius, but not all. The muscle relaxers have done an amazing amount of help for me. Also learning the “crocodile” yoga position. That pose relaxes the trapezius muscle seemingly immediately.

Headaches are incredibly complex. They can be related to sleep issues, stress, hormones, muscular, and probably many more things I don’t know. I’d suggest your friend find a neurologist who specializes in migraines.

Veganism, I think, helps. Apparently there is a tie between the gut and the brain that can trigger migraines. Personally I’ve had severe migraines seemingly resolve after a sudden sharp stomach pain, for instance. That, I think, has only happened once or twice. I’m going vegan primarily for unrelated reasons. My bet is it probably helps as a plant based diet (for me) stresses the body less than meat/Dairy.

I hope your friend can get her migraines under control. They robbed me of a masters degree and many other things through the years. Let me know if she wants to compare notes with me on this.

Worked on Safepay, (Venmo for Pakistan). Got the iOS app built and integrated it with Cybersource for visa/MasterCard transactions, and all the banks in Pakistan for bank-to-bank transfers. Currently working on the Android app. Great way to learn how money moves in traditional finance

https://getsafepay.com

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/safepay-pakistan/id123442758...

Biggest thing seems to be writing non-trivial GraphQL + Rails backend. It was quite interesting work: there is still not really much best practices for this combination, so just to make it work in a Rails way did take some time and trial and error. At the end I am happy with results and I hope to find some time to publish blog post on it.

Other than that: I did some face lift for my side project http://notationtraining.com and implemented new MIDI API to connect midi (piano) keyboard directly to web app.

I keep a growing library of little one-page javascript apps for illustrating concepts and educating my two boys. Reviewing my commit history for the year, I was pleased to find I've added nearly 20 apps to it in 2017. I wouldn't have been able to build so many 20 years ago, but there's so much code available out there to copy-paste, programming often feels like playing with building blocks.

http://ideonexus.github.io/Explorable-Explanations/

As a programmer with a young child who loves screens, this is a lovely idea.

great work, i was looking for something like this. Thanks for sharing

There a lot of Stock Sites for After Effect Templates but nobody renders in the Cloud and is geared to the Instagram or Youtube Crowd. I don't want to offer an online Videomaker. But a solution that allows artists to improve their Videos with professional Titles, Lower Thirds, Intros and Transitions. I am almost finished. And launching soon.

Interested? You can leave your Email or take a short Survey here: https://goo.gl/forms/wyaDctXiybuj8YIE3

I’ll notify you when it’s ready.

This year has been the year of blockchain for me. I have worked on several blockchain projects.

Documentation for blockchain tech is not that great, so I created a screencast for ethereum / blockchain devs:

Utube channel: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZM8XQjNOyG2ElPpEUtNasA

Website: http://eattheblocks.com

Looking forward to keep posting one new video a week. Hopefully it will help more devs to come in this industry :)

Usability Testing Exchange — where other people will do usability testing of your website, for free, and give feedback to you. You give feedback to others too, and get back as much feedback as you give, counted in characters.

https://usability.testing.exchange

And EffectiveDiscussions, a discussion forum that brings together the best from Slack, Discourse, StackOverflow, HackerNews, Disqus.

https://www.effectivediscussions.org

Awesome concept on usability testing exchange! This reminds me of the interviewing.io model, which I also highly regarded.

I think this sort of karma-enforced-sharing model could work in a lot a fields, but the big disadvantage I anticipate is not having any experts in the mix. Do you have any ideas for how to minimize this disadvantage?

I've been thinking about gamification, like at StackOverflow and StackExchange. There, talented people sometimes spend lots of time helping others. (To get more reputation points?)

Maybe there could be some "high score" list, showcasing the people who have contributed the most, and also have given a high ratio of Like-vote-upvoted feedback. Then people might want to contribute, and include the high-score-presence in their resume / online portfolio.

Or maybe some people to via sth like Patreon would want to pay talented people in low-living-cost-countries, to spend some of their time at Usability Testing Exchange, helping others.

Do you have any thoughts about this or additional ideas? :- )

I started learning Elixir/Pheonix and React for a project in my company. Elixir/ Phoenix didn't take much time but React gave me some hiccups initially but seems good now.

Really loved way functional programming works and also how Elixir handles things . Later I was able to relate Elixir concepts with ES6 features in React. Loved this stack. Hoping to get better in them as the time passes.

Looking forward to contributing to an open source project in these technologies this year.

Any recommendations for Elixir/Phoenix would be highly appreciated to begin with.

Since the last quarter of 2017 I'm working during my free time on Raita - a static site generator with web interface, built with Express.js and Vue.js.

It's still in baby steps, but I'm already building my personal website using it (so I can see what features I'm still missing), then I plan to build a starter theme and in the end official site.

If You're interested, You can see the actual code here: https://github.com/mrmnmly/raita

I've been making a soon to be released 7th Guest-esque haunted mansion puzzle game! http://www.doctorarcana.com

Recently, we released RsRelayJS, a small RxJS lib that provides 'Relay' types. These are analogous to Subject types, but without the ability to call complete() or error(). Therefore, they are stateless in the sense that they cannot enter a terminal state. I've found myself using these more than Subjects in our code, to bridge non-Rx code to Rx.

Check it out here - https://github.com/Microsoft/RxRelayJS

Deep Video Analytics: https://www.deepvideoanalytics.com Github : https://github.com/akshayubhat/deepvideoanalytics

A large scale visual data analytics platform, think SQL/MapReduce/Full-text search but for images and videos using Deep Learning. Now writing few papers on/using it to finish and get my PhD.

I created meli[1], which is a faster alternative to docker-compose.

I also created sewer[2], which is a letsencrypt client library and command-line application.

In 2018, I want to create a highly available, fault tolerant, strongly consistent and durable messaging broker/queue. yeah, I'm aiming big.

1. https://github.com/komuw/meli

2. https://github.com/komuw/sewer

We’ve been working on a mobile app that helps people connect locally to conversations. https://imgur.com/a/lJnLe

We would love to get a few early adopters and happy to pay people for their contributions.

If you value connectivity, commerce & trade we would love to work with you

Pilot program application form https://goo.gl/forms/9S7jopCiIVrbiMdt2

I completed the registration process. Can you explain more about what the app does?

Thanks Stuart, well we have a basic value proposition. We believe that online trust is the most important factor for success. Our app is designed to understand the content of people’s character through community moderation.

Once the trust is established we believe this will enable a whole new world of service offerings. Imagine if you could hire a CPA at an affordable rate similar to how you can hire a car today at an affordable rate using Uber.

Below is a visual representation https://imgur.com/a/WYSfy

If you’d like to learn more my skype armin.nehzat

What do you need from the early adopters who register?

We basically need some fresh eyes to look at what we’ve built and provide us with honest brutal feedback. Like all parents we think our baby is amazing but good testers are like good teachers. They can tell us about all the imperfections & we must listen with diligence :)

Spent much of my spare time working on https://github.com/justwatchcom/gopass

- https://nulis.io - tree text editor for writers

- https://helix.startuplab.io - habit tracker

- https://fictionhub.io - fiction publishing platform

- https://startuplab.io/blog - started writing articles on startups/tech

Also a few smaller projects.

Hmn, Helix means I'm probably going to stop work on the project I started this week. :) I shall need some tool to ensure that I replace it with something equally virtuous. Oh, look, Helix!

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it!

Don't let it stop you from making your own app, though. There are thousands of similar apps out there, doing your own take on it can still be valuable and resonate with some people more than other apps.

You won't dominate this niche by being first to the market, but you can still have a successful project by building a good product and marketing it well.

I spent quite some time researching new web technologies, the result of which is a neat forward-looking Javascript framework[0] (yes, I know) that I'm currently using to build all kinds of fun projects like this Overwatch UI reproduction[1]

[0]: https://github.com/ruphin/gluonjs [1]: https://overwebs.ruph.in

1) Got engaged :) 2) I built my own invoicing web app(breakdeck.com). 3) Developed an Electron app aimed at developer's productivity that I actually use 4) I published my first native Electron/Node.js module https://github.com/bithavoc/node-desktop-idle 5) Read 4/7 books I intended to read throughout the year. 6) Visited a new country

Excellent!

Couple of mistakes on BreakDeck website

- SuperHey is linked to SuperKey.com

- SuperHey website's Contact us link can be improved

What is the best way to reach out you?

hey, thanks for the feedback, I guess linking to my product can be considered as soft-launching it(both my company website and invoicing app at the same time). I fixed the typo, the contact form is on the works. You can reach me out by email: im at bithavoc dot io

https://www.qkast.com the most influential web app of our time that almost nobody cared about in 2017.

1) Finally go the sign off on our new server infrastructure

2) Waste a lot of time trying to get an ePOS solution from our ERP supplier, whilst also looking at alternative ERP suppiers!

3) Got our eCommerce doing double digit growth

4) Developed lots of quirky adhoc tools for keeping addresses tidy in CRM that need writing properly

5) Got better at Python

I am now really in need of a new job, something in business/IT consulting. I want to be my own boss, but don't have the resources to start my own business right now. Tired and unfulfilled

I finally released my full stack Clojure framework: Coast on Clojure, tepid response so far probably because the community doesn’t really like frameworks, but I’m a rebel

Cool! Will have an in-depth look at it as I also love both Rails and Clojure (which can get you strange looks from both camps).

TBH I have pretty clear that my next Clojure project will use https://github.com/arachne-framework given its robust architecture / baked-in best-practices.

But yeah always valuable to know how are people writing their backends.

I have mixed feelings about Arachne. I like the stated purpose, and agree that there's many reasons for a Rails-like framework to exist in Clojure. But Luke seemingly hasn't worked on it in months. It seems like the project is in limbo — it's not finished enough to be usable, and it's not finished enough for other folks with time and willingness to lend a hand. Bummer.

Yeah just realised that... Last time I checked it seemed alive, now not so much.

Fingers crossed

[Edit] Here's the link for others who are curious: http://coastonclojure.com

Yay for Clojure frameworks! I've done the framework thing, and I've done the library thing, and there is absolutely room and reason for both. I'll take a look at this and keep it in mind when I start my next project.

Good name, by the way.

Haha thanks, definitely taking an alliteration heavy approach, just like my inspiration, Ruby on Rails

Created a passion of mine and finally overcame the fear of launching! BetterSelf is a side-project that's used to track supplements and medications and how it impacts your sleep and productivity.

Site : https://betterself.io/ GitHub : https://github.com/jeffshek/betterself

I worked on meditations, the app I use to manage my daily habits: https://github.com/ioddly/meditations

So far as I know, I'm still the only user, which is fine by me. I tried working on other things with my spare time, but the lesson I learned was that it's a lot easier and more fun to work on something that you're personally invested in using.

http://www.replayray.com/

A fun way to follow sports on your phone, when you can't watch the actual game. The game tracker always starts at the beginning and never 'spoils' the result.

I've put more work into NFL lately, but I'll likely improve NBA basketball next. There are a slew of other sports too - soccer, MLB, NHL - although the degree of upkeep has been varied.

My own projects:

- Ask The Caterpillar: a chatbot that gives harm reduction information about substances/drugs

https://www.askthecaterpillar.com/home.html

- Some API wrappers and Slack add-ons, one that just lets me control Sonos from Slack.

- I taught myself Elm and wrote a little app that lets you use the Spotify magic algorithm for finding similar tracks

At work:

Learned a lot more about building a clean API, and some stuff about React on the front end

1. Start to build a service to continously give you weekly hotel recommendations via email for a Paris, Rome, London and New York. Did this to learn about webscraping and machine learning. Got as far as performing reliable webscraping on several hotel sites. Started to learned about the ML but have not got so far yet.

2. Started to learned about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and came to the realisation that it is like gambling in the wild west.

I wrote scripts to stream cryptocurrency trade data from exchanges into databases for long term storage and analysis. I had lots of fun analysing patterns and identifying trends that normally not seen in regulated exchanges.

If you are keen to grab those data, ping me at derek[at]coindatafeed.com and I'll give you FTP access to them (free limited period).

http://coindatafeed.com

I built an MIT licensed Open Source decentralized graph database built on CRDT primitives for doing P2P apps that are end-to-end encrypted.

~7K stars on GitHub: https://github.com/amark/gun

It can do 20M reads/sec, 20K writes/sec, and 2K sync/sec (verified table inserts across 4 network hops).

It's like of IPFS and Firebase had a love child.

I launched a farm management software tool in Dec 2016 and spent 2017 iterating on it. Hired two developers in the last 5 months and made a big hire last week, myself. I'm going to transition out of my consulting business into this full time. Bootstrapped with $300k of revenue in '17. https://www.harvestprofit.com

Started 2017 working remotely, from home, in a rather depressing environment. Through this year I rented an office space and hired 3 other people.

Hookdoo: SaaS that allows you to create incoming webhook endpoints to run shell scripts on your remote servers. https://www.hookdoo.com/

And of course my open-source webhook server project: https://github.com/adnanh/webhook

I built and HN-launched Vexlio (https://www.vexlio.com), a technical diagramming tool with embedded LaTeX equations, an interactive Lua-drawing mode, and other assorted neat features. It's finally reached a fairly stable point in the last few months or so, so I can start looking ahead to more interesting features!

Slowly building a generative music system in ClojureScript: http://ivanish.ca/diminished-fifth/

Not sure if that counts as "work", but it's certainly taken a lot of iteration to get it to where it is today. Here's hoping 2018 leaves me enough free time to keep chipping away at it.

open source stuff i've done:

* release ghostdriver 2.0.0 [1]. this is the implementation of the webdriver protocol for phantomjs. unfortunately phantomjs 2.5 was never released :(

* create chrominator [2] a high level api for chrome remote debugger. now defunct... use puppeteer

* created chromedriver-proxy [3] to help me extend chromdriver without having to recompile the c++ project. it also handles pooling browsers. the coolest extension i've built so far is recording video on headless chrome. still a work in progress but has proven stable for the real world test suite i support.

[1] https://github.com/detro/ghostdriver/releases/tag/2.0.0

[2] https://github.com/jesg/chrominator

[3] https://github.com/ZipRecruiter/chromedriver-proxy

I've been working on a flash card app. The app imports Anki (apkg) cards, but is easier to use and based on multiple choice questions. I'm hoping it will find use in literacy. I'm using Cordova to compile the app: https://github.com/phil4literacy/LWimport

Quit my job and created Filterbot, a free personalized news aggregator that uses ML on the users' votes to find the best articles for them. It didn't get as much attention as I hoped, but I'm learning and improving.

https://filterbot.news

I'm now also working on a "radio" music player based on the same concept.

https://focuster.com

Automatic scheduling in your calendar for your to-do list.

This past year we added a ton of new integrations with project management tools as well as support for calendars beyond Google (eg. Apple iCloud, Microsoft Exchange, etc).

It has been a ton of work but very satisfying! Would love to connect with other bootstrapped SaaS founders.

Not bootstrapped, but am a year in having raised seed funding in May. Would still love to connect. Email is in my profile.

I had some free time between switching a jobs and I filled it building ProtonMail Desktop Client https://github.com/vladimiry/protonmail-desktop-app There simply was no usable client for desktop. That's actually my first open source experience.

Entry -17 (-437 - -420) @ 4:43pm-5:00pm PST: Wrote response below. Realized I could use this as a journal & started it by editing and adding metadata. #hnjournal

I registered wwpjd.com, which my partner paid for as a gift to me. I renewed ourfirstmind.com. I'll develop them in 2018 & track my progress in this thread.

-1 (-367 - -366) 5:53pm-5:54pm PST: Updated to add timezone data.

An automated system to drown the competition on Google and review sites... Hey, no one else offered me money for something else, so...

Interesting, how is that possible?

I worked on an open source project at the end of the year to help track your Coinbase profits: https://www.profbit.info/ https://github.com/joshblum/profbit/

Thanks for building this! I've been using it since it was posted as a show hn and have enjoyed the straightforward interface and steady improvements. Keep it up!

Still working on https://gimmeproxy.com and https://www.npmjs.com/package/check-proxy

Besides that launched https://ip-api.io

- had my first child (now 3 mo's)

- published my first open-source repo[1] (concurrent headless browser testing)

- remained really burnt out at work

- put lots of work in on my side project (journaling app) and am finally close to releasing it

https://github.com/cloverich/headless-concurrent-mocha

I tried to create a new programming language, Toy Santa, but I became too demotivated to finish it. But I feel the codebase of toysanta is the best I've been doing to date. It's in C++, using Direct2D. One day, I will release it on github. But until then, I will try to create a presentable version.

(yes, I am a tad attention-grabbing here;-)

...I an autodidact, I work for myself.

You’ve got to self promote. So what’s it capable of doing? Now/planned/hoped for

It can't do a lot. The language 'specification' is just a buch of lined paper sheets. What I want my language to do, is a layer between the core of a C++ program, and the user-customizable side.

I'm using it to call a zoom function in my skeleton image program.

  void toysanta() {  
    toy	*nbzoom = nullptr;  
    nbzoom = isVerb(L"setzoomlevel");  
    if(nbzoom) {  
        if(nbzoom->hasClaus && nbzoom->sled == toy::integer) {  
            bool	k = false;  
	    POINT	pt = {0,0};  
            toy *xt = getToy(L"x");  
            toy *yt = getToy(L"y");  
            if(xt && yt && xt->canNumber() && yt->canNumber()) {  
                pt.x = xt->getInteger();  
                pt.y = yt->getInteger();  
                k = true;  
            }  
            setzoomlevel(nbzoom->claus.integer, k, pt);  
        }  
    }  
  }

The toysanta() member function is from the VerbCommand class. From the zoom widget, there's

  void ZoomWidget::sendzoom_to_target(bool k, POINT pt) {  
    if(target) {  
        std::wstring	cc = L"setzoomlevel ";  
        int		zoom = realZ;//(zPos-32)/3;  
        cc += std::to_wstring(zoom);  
        if(k) {  
            cc += L" x " + std::to_wstring(pt.x);  
            cc += L" y " + std::to_wstring(pt.y);  
        }  
        target->receive(&cc);  
    }  
  }

The receive() member function calls the toysanta() function from the target.

What I plan, is for it to just be perfect, to be honest. I hope it may help others create better software one day.

Nearly finished up Chat & Slash, an RPG you play in Slack: https://www.chatandslash.com

I hope to finish up the "official" release early in 2018, but in the meantime, all that knowledge about Node and JS helped me land my current job, so it's a solid win in my book.

I shelved a startup I worked on for over a year due to failing to gain any traction or raise any funding.

I started tutoring students in Python, JS, and Java on Wyzant. I enjoy teaching, and it helps pay the bills.

I applied to Fullstack Academy and have an interview in a few days. I want to stop spinning my wheels and become employable as a professional Software Engineer.

Bettering my sleeping habits, sharpening my modern C++ skills, starting a blog, and analyzing high energy physics collisions.

At work I worked on and helped ship a video game. At home I worked on my life simulation, learning Go, and personal fitness.

https://www.chipscompo.com

A place where musicians work on a song every week.

It's been super fun to build out. I started about 8(!) months ago and I've been working steadily on it ever since. Now we have a small and steady community and we've made a lot of really good music!

I built a system for Linear Genetic Programming (LGP) as part of my Bachelor's degree Honours project [0]. I tried to make a framework that is modern and easy to use, but also has great performance.

[0] https://www.github.com/JedS6391/LGP

I worked on these, for example: https://chttr.co/ (a social network) and http://embed.rocks/ (Embedly alternative).

Currently I'm working on something based on the Chttr.co code.

Continued my solo journey on Micro - OSS tools to simplify distributed systems development. It's been over 2 years full time now.

https://micro.mu/ https://github.com/micro

I worked on my first side project, XBRLStudio [1]. It's a Windows desktop application that allows users to organize and view XBRL quarterly and annual financial filings.

I'm traveling today, but would love to hear any feedback on the project.

[1] https://XBRLStudio.com

I spent a good deal of my spare time on a side project in 2017: https://www.contabulo.com

I'm actually removing all the "Coming Soon" verbiage from the landing page tonight. It's (at least in a mimimally viable sense) ready to go now :)

I worked on and will be open sourcing a framwework for developing CQRS/Event Sourced applications in .NET Core.

I wrote a few free SaaS-like services that combined have over a million users. Sadly, due to the nature of them / the "niche" that they're in (LOTS of competition in this space...), monetization is incredibly hard so I don't profit a ton - maybe a few hundred dollars per month.

Sorry but could you be more specific and perhaps tell us what kind of Saas app they are and what services they provide.

I built a SaaS product. Got to YC video interview stage and rejected. Eventually failed and closed up shop.

Now I'm building an Indie Hackers style site geared towards e-commerce and consumer product makers. (https://www.starterstory.com)

I spent a lot of time experimenting with developing web applications without needing to be online, and I recently published Laurence, a cache to make that a little easier.

https://github.com/salemhilal/laurence

Launched a new web app in late 2016 so this year (2017) was all about improvement, refinement and listening to customers to ensure it truly is the best way to report build status and automated test results.

Check it out: https://www.tesults.com

Left my job and legal security behind, and decided to take the full startup plunge. Started a project that will increase sex worker safety while providing a smoother, faster experience for everyone involved: https://pinkdate.is.

Left a career as an IT Architect to begin a new life as a Ethereum developer. I'm so much happier now :-)

Are these private apps based on Ethereum or public facing apps? I'm curious at this early stage of the ecosystem what an "Ethereum Developer" does in terms of active projects.

Well, as far as paid work goes, I've wrote a few ERC20 token / ICO contracts and I've done a few PoCs with private chains.

I'm also focusing on open-source projects, hackatons and bug bounties simply because I've spent the last 20 years of my life working in corporate and anything that feels "real" I'm game.

Lots of things but regarding side projects I built http://mockrest.com which allows people to implement json APIs for testing. It doesn't have much traction but works by itself and I use it for my web development classes..

A bunch of little JavaScript+Canvas prototype games on the way to a game about programming I still haven't conceived fully: http://gashlin.net/games/ (top five items on that list were this year).

I had a hypothesis that the company where I work could benefit greatly from machine learning to replace some human labor. I spent the early part of the year teaching myself enough to be dangerous and the latter part of the year designing, building, and deploying our first deep learning system.

Worked on a side project to automate getting refunds when a price of an item you bought drops. IT has taken too long for my appetite, but i think i am close to launching it.

Switched from a web app to mobile app to ease UX and automate things like SMS retrieval, but boy, was it hard - ux is not my strong suit.

1. A real time chat app to lean more about Socket IO.

2. A link shortener to learn about Redis and atomic transactions.

3. An interpreter for Pascal (based on the "How to build an interpreter" series of blog posts)

4. And many more..

Summary is here: https://sayan98.github.io

Had a great (and often stressful!) time helping raise my first son over the past four months and learning Python and Django developing Baby Buddy - https://github.com/cdubz/babybuddy

I started working at my first job as a software engineer, in my free time I spent time building game AIs.

https://introspected.rest/ a kind-of publication and self-research around REST and APIs. One thing that I definitely learned is that these kind of things are much harder than writing some code.

I worked on https://hook.io this year.

http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/assets/portfolio.html#mes...

Wrote this a couple of weeks before Mozilla removed the XUL/XPCOM add-on APIs

oooooooo. I really really like this webpage :) full of interesting things. The click-to-change background FTW. (Is... are some of the bitmaps from DESQView/X?)

Thanks so much for the Apple fonts, I've been meaning to poke the Alto source for ages!!

Hmm. This idea I've had for a while may interest you, and you may have more success with it than I have: I want to get the fonts off a Psion MC400. https://sites.google.com/view/psionmc400

(I don't have one.) I found whiffs of conversation about ROM dumping one somewhere, but nothing substantive. I'm not sure how the author of that page obtained their screenshots, but if it's possible to convince the UI to display every possible char from every possible font (telnet, anybody? :D) it seems the process wouldn't be too hard.

The chances are if I pipe up in a bunch of retrocomputing forums someone will probably turn out to have one or two, but all my assistance would be remote unless there was a unit in Australia (I wouldn't want to risk mailing one here and back).

No, but I just extracted the deskview patterns and added them to the site! Thanks for the info. http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/patterns/OEM/DVX/

hmm, I'll ask around about the Psion MC400

Wow, that was fast! I had no idea they were XPMs, but that makes sense. (I think my favorites are SHADES{1,2}.)

I'll keep an eye out for interesting things happening with the MC400 in the future :) FWIW a ROM dump would probably let MAME start headscratching their way through it, and I'd love to plau with the UI (it looks really unique), but dumping just the fonts is a very workable start.

(I forgot to mention that that webpage has the images fractionally enlarged for some reason, making them blurry - opening them in a new tab makes them pixel-perfect.)

This year, I dedicated more time to open source projects, mostly to scratch my own itch.

In particular, I learned how to use Electron and capture video for Repro Steps.

https://github.com/styfle/magnemite

Joined HyperionDev[0] and helped them transition their business model and product to focus on Coding Bootcamps (Web Dev, Mobile Dev, Comp Sci) instead of short courses

[0] https://www.hyperiondev.com/

Finished the entirely custom 3D Printer I've been building for 2.5 years. It's just swell.

I have been working on a document management system: https://github.com/bgroff/kala-app in Django. Still needs some work, but it is getting closer to a big release.

I started this year making tools for the team, then I got put on a project where I mocked up an AR experience using VR hardware ("AR in VR").

Then I programmed the Lightsaber combat in an officially licensed Star Wars AR game. Pretty good on the professional side this year.

Did two remote internships for software developers in Africa - each with about 1000 participants.

Moved to Quebec; learned(-ing) French while living with a host family. Worked on my first Haskell backend project[1] and found a remote job.

[1] https://github.com/srid/slownews

I built https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/

It was a site I put together to help me understand myself a lot better by asking myself the hard questions in life, and constantly reiterating it.

8 months of life without alcohol, pot, meat.

Launching an agency/consultancy with a sister company that resells hosting and optimization.

Very impressive. Controlling yourself is way harder and far more rewarding than controlling others.

Thanks. I've learned to accept that I can't do anything about most of what's happening around the world but I can do something about my daily decisions.

How did it go with the alcohol? I am going to try from Jan 1. Plan is to do at least 2 months. Do you think its better to cut it off in stages or just abruptly?

If you’re an alcoholic and drink daily, it can be very dangerous to stop cold turkey. If this is more of a lifestyle change, where you drink a few times a week but want to cut it out, I’d say (with zero scientific justification whatsoever) it’s sort of up to the person. Dietary and habitual changes for me have been easiest when made dramatically, but I know for many others that reduces quality outcomes. This is probably one of those scenarios where you need to know which side of the spectrum works best for you from past experiences.

> If you’re an alcoholic and drink daily, it can be very dangerous to stop cold turkey.

Could you elaborate? I have plans to do exactly that Jan 1.

You'll get into withdrawal which results in mental (anxiety, paranoia, etc...) and physical effects (tremors, nausea, vomiting, sleeping disorder, etc...).

Depending how hooked you are it could be a real physical dependency which can be harmful.

That being said, its just the same as the effects of alcohol in general, they are just stacking up when you have withdrawal. If you have truly decided to stop/lower your drinking - and you actually have what you consider a problem - its wiser to tapper it off, but it does require actual will to do it...

Below is a link that describe the withdrawal you can go through (found after a quick search, looks fairly accurate): https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/alcohol-abuse/withdrawal-...

Hey there. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I hope you still see this.

Alcohol has very dangerous withdrawal for those who are daily drinkers. I’ve witnessed this first hand with a father who was a daily drinker that was forced into stopping due to medical issues.

There are multiple risks during severe alcohol withdrawal, including heart failure, seizures, and more. I cannot stress enough that if you are a daily drinker over a long period of time, you need to seek medical assistants from at least your primary care. Do not stop unless you are being supervised. Not only are you reducing your risk for success, but also you’re putting your life at risk. Quit, but please quit responsibly.

My email is in my profile name. Happy to talk more in detail. Here for you my friend.

How much do you drink a day? a week?

What made you want to stop?

I can help you out based on your responses.

It's doable, the first few days can be rough for the body but after that it's mostly in our heads. I've learned that people who are enthusiastic about drinking and getting others drunk usually have some other issues going on under the surface. Some people can just drink a few times a year or month, not me. I'm an all or nothing person, life got easier once I accepted that.

As for how I did it, it boils down to just making two columns on a sheet of paper and listing how alcohol has helped and how alcohol has hurt you. It became an easy decision after I did that.

Hi, I've replied to wjossey's comment but no response so far, did you just woke up one morning and decided enough is enough (without any inner monologue and stuff like that?). What do you think about trying to quit right there just like that?

Last year I started meditation and as a part of it, I quit alcohol and pot. I wish I can quit my bad habits.

Cryptocurrency exchange. I genuinely believe in a healthy competition and the goal is to create a digital asset exchange with features for professional traders.

https://www.bithubhq.com/

2017 was fully dedicated to working on Appure ( https://appure.io ). This is screenshot generator for iTunes and Play stores. Probably will be adding some new things to it in 2018 too

I made a service to help people exchange paper books. I still need to populate it, and then I can start using it with friends.

http://marginalia.porcupinefactory.org/

JavaScript; Server side rendering an app shell (React / Redux) that uses the WordPress REST API:

https://github.com/kherrick/postpress/

Started a blog looking at interesting companies and trends. I admit I'm having a lot more fun with it than I first thought I would.

https://www.startupsilike.com/

A bunch of Enterprise projects I can't talk about ;(

But also https://bibres.com a publishing platform that is trying a different way to monetize txt content. Think quora + Kickstarter

http://store.steampowered.com/app/652000/Quantum_Pilot/ + video streaming apps for clients

For open source, I built a browser, a native JVM tool in Rust, and a WebAssembly backend for the JVM among other things at https://github.com/cretz.

I grew the team for our startup. We hired more people with distinct and complementary skills. Our startup develops virtual reality social productivity applications. We are totally bootstrapped and will officially launch this year.

Much more VR than I expected to, and it was more interesting than I expected as well.

What sort of VR stuff we're you getting into, if you don't mind me asking?

It's a pretty cool space, but I don't see to many people playing in it (maybe because of the barrier to entry).

I have worked on some for the Rift, the Gear and the Daydream. I think the reason why not a lot of people are in the space is that customers aren't there yet. It's one of those things that doesn't live up to the hype, but it is getting better fast.

Growing a business around selling online courses[0] focused on helping developers get things done.

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/courses/

I was busy working on my food site bestfoodnearme.com but my efforts have been slow in the last quarter. I am not yet sure where I will take it in 2018. Right now, I am working on finding a way to get more dishes listed.

Mostly box-js, a JavaScript emulator used for malware analysis: https://github.com/CapacitorSet/box-js/

Production ready tool for Mutation Testing targeting compiled languages (C, C++, Rust, Swift):

https://github.com/mull-project/mull

Happy new year, HN.

The major highlight is the launch of http://pxlet.com. Apart from this, focus was on work and hope there will be some surprises in 2018.

Launched a tool I used in my other startups. A tool to help companies reduce churn using sentiment analysis. https://churnops.com

Released and updated a pixels-based collaborative cross-platform audiovisual live coding environment : https://www.fsynth.com

I helped ramp up the development team of a small startup to achieve a record year in monthly recurring revenue and sales.

I started learning Haskell in earnest.

I recorded one small album per month. 4 songs, at least one original.

I began learning PHP, wrote Kowope, an enterprise tool and launched it.

Listen Notes, a podcast search engine that actually works. I'm working on it full-time now.

https://www.listennotes.com

Generating large amounts of banking/credit card data in a fixed width format in Go and python.

In an effort to reduce technical debt I've deleted 40-50K of lines of code in my work code base.

our website https://collate.cc - want to make it easy to shop baby products and cosmetics with safe ingredients

Started a Saas for active monitoring of API's and browser click flows: https://checklyhq.com

I've been working on a media player/browser. I'm going to put it on the shelf and move to the crypto currency stuff to get rich. See you next year!

Among others a Cryptocurrency Portfolio Tracker that doesn't track you

http://www.cryptoport.net

Great. Https against MITM?

WIP :)

I was dabbing with this for the last quarter of 2017: https://www.getfrills.com

A 3D design platform for education built on top of https://3dc.io, launching in January.

A great weather extension https://weatherextension.com/

Establishing offensive infrastructure, threat intel collector systems and honeynets for research. Also, lots of RFID/BLE experiments.

Buckets, private desktop budgeting app.

https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com

I worked on a bitcoin trading startup (part of that was the timequerylog module on npm) and a lua-programmable 3d libretro front-end.

https://pdfcrun.ch

Part time, and now working on the V2 table detection algorithm.

Goldenbird (www.flygoldenbird.com) - a place for people to browse and contribute to a collection of evergreen tweets about startups.

All of that is my own projects (in random order):

1. I made LILGUI[1], an API specification for host programs that use my LIL[2] scripting language to expose simple UI. Also includes LazLILGUI, a Lazarus[3] implementation.

2. Wrote an OpenGL binding generator [4] for Free Pascal and Lazarus that parses the official XML file. Lazarus comes with OpenGL bindings but they are ancient and i wanted to try out some new 4.6 stuff.

3. Wrote a simple audio player for X called LFPlayer [5] that uses my Little Forms [6] GUI toolkit and GStreamer as a backend. Note however that some months later i decided to create a new desktop environment and forked off Little Forms to a new (yet unpublished) toolkit that expands a bit the functionality. This is a decision that comes mainly out of frustration with the tech GNOME and KDE use which also covers basically 99% of alternative DEs since they either use GNOME or KDE/Qt tech. But that is something that i'll hopefully expand on next year (or in 2019... or whenever i get around working on it, it isn't a big priority anyway :-P).

4. I started a VB1 clone in Windows 3.1 for fun [7] although it has very dim chances of being finished. I also did a blunder with this by first starting it in DOSBox, then due to some DOSBox shortcomings i moved it to VirtualBox, left it untouched for like a month and then coming back to it - but i had forgotten that i moved to VirtualBox and continued working on it in DOSBox pretty much redoing most of the work until at some point i encountered a bug and as i solved it i thought "wait a minute, didn't i already fixed this bug?". On the bright side the new solution was better.

5. Wrote a reusable unit in Free Pascal for winged edge mesh edit operations [8]. If you have used Wings3D, you know what i am talking about. I'll use this at some in the future in my generic 3D world editor either in addition or as a replacement for brushes for world geometry [9]

6. Wrote a reusable control for 3D viewports in Lazarus [10]. Each one of those viewports is a separate instance of the control with a shared viewport renderer, viewport manager, 3D widget manager and transformation 3D widget.

7. Wrote a very simple scenegraph library in C for fun, inspired (from a functional standpoint) by the old Direct3D retained mode API and made a Python module with it using SWIG [11]. At some point i should upload this somewhere, it is neat.

8. I'm still spending most of my time working on my 3D retro top down-ish shooter [12]. No i don't use that monitor all the time, only when i need to feel that extra oldschool power (and when playing some old 2D games that simply display better on a CRT :-P).

I probably forgot some stuff, i mainly looked through my repositories [13] and images in imgur to see what i did. I think i haven't done much this year, but hopefully in 2018 i'll get around making the first versioned stable release for LIL (which will mark the day the API will remain backwards compatible for the future) and release LIL Studio [14], a simple IDE for LIL that allows remote editing of scripts (mainly useful for editing the game scripts remotely [15]) and perhaps release a preview of my desktop environment, although most of the stuff i focus on revolve around my game so the DE (and other unrelated stuff) only takes a back seat most of the time (i tend to work on it whenever i see something in /r/linux or news about current DEs that make my blood boil or something :-P). But since i use Little Forms for the launcher of the game, i'll need to have at least the forked version working since unlike Little Forms, the fork supports custom styles and i'd like to have that.

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lilgui [2] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lil [3] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [4] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/gl2unit [5] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lfplay [6] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lforms [7] https://i.imgur.com/QQOzvOU.png [8] https://i.imgur.com/4Zk9Td7.png [9] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/rtworld [10] https://i.imgur.com/0AXjCsp.gif [11] https://i.imgur.com/xu7kKu9.png [12] https://i.imgur.com/BKk3RX0.jpg [13] http://runtimeterror.com/reps.php [14] https://i.imgur.com/tCd64Wh.png [15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpKV3Sy-mYw

I worked on https://wakatime.com, which measures your work.

Mostly maintaining and improving https://www.libhunt.com

Remarkbox hosted comments (https://www.remarkbox.com)

https://www.prerender.cloud/ it makes server-side rendering for React and Angular easy. Also works with CloudFront via Lambda@Edge - https://github.com/sanfrancesco/prerendercloud-lambda-edge

learned RESTful apps in Ruby, Sinatra, and sequel.

built an api wrapper in Python serverless for our ecom website.

trying to smooth out the api for the new react frontend we built. imagine a 10 year old java api where every endpoint is extremely different and behaves in magical ways (or not at all) if magic cookies are present.

nightmare.

Kozmos: https://getkozmos.com

Just for fun, made an anti-forensic tool to help out my pentesting team. Also found more vulns :D

http://hyperfiddle.net

Clojure! Datomic!

www.iterary.com a prototyping board game site. Mainly A Java/Android developer, so wanted to branch out into the web. Polymer started the journey, but really the last year has made me start to really appreciate web components for my spare time.

Quit my job and been working on codingdictionary.com while trying to find a job abroad.

Got a job. Various small DIY projects around the house. Nothing software though really.

Distributed system using Akka/Java, and a related ML platform in Python.

I gained 30 lbs (on purpose)

Congrats! That's definitely harder than it may sound to some.

Ftom scratched my videogame engine project...for a third time.

Much better this time around

Met my goal of becoming proficient in OCaml and finding work in it.

Application security for NOAA and obtaining my OSCP certification.

Working on an anti-forensic tool just for the fun of it.

A Haskell http-client generator for swagger-codegen

I started an algorithm that trades on Ethereum.

How good is it going?

Expanding Fellowship.AI to New York and London

designing the next level serverless platform, and trying to prove at the same time that we live in a simulation. xd

Xtomp, github.com/teknopaul/xtomp

A STOMP broker written in C using nginx core without the HTTP or SMTP modules. 2017 and wrote more C than JavaScript.

Ran my first 2 ultras.

Also boring enterprise work.

AWS Lambda, a lot

baking

exercise

relationships

I made a new HN client for iOS, 8chen!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/8chen-for-hacker-news/id1308...

I spent most of 2017 reflecting on the direction programming/languages/communities are going and finding ways to move the needle the other way. It seems to me that there's a lot of pressure to turn programmers to soul-less robots with zero integrity and self-esteem who will do anything for money. I quit selling my skills a long time ago to get out of that mess, now I'm spending most of my time empowering others to do the same thing.

Cixl is my latest kick in the face to the status quo: https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl

This year we launched a new service [1] unlimited UI design for startups. What started as an experiment, completely shifted our business and became the core of what we do. Wrote about it on reddit [2]

[1] http://fairpixels.pro

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6wz5d5/10kmrr....

A service where you look at an existing site and suggest how to make it look better would be great.

Ping me. We might have a new service for you then :)

Your profile doesn’t have your email.

This year we launched a new service with unlimited UI design for startups. (http://fairpixels.pro)

Been following you guys for a while and will connect in the new year! Love the work you’ve been producing for a friend.

कुछ बताने लायक नहीं :( ---- nothing worth telling :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com