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Show HN: Coding noob - first weekend project

aflanagan.com

I think every programmer made their own task manager at least once in their life.. welcome aboard :)

Also, don't be to hard on yourself, creating a real project from scratch takes time and passion. I understood in half a second what your app was about and why I should use it.. What many apps/site cannot even do in weeks :)

Finally, I like the idea about adding/removing stuff by replying by email.. so intuitive but I never thought of it. Maybe a kind of "delayer" might be useful:

- Do that tomorrow night

- Do this next week

So at least, if your 'digest' is empty, you don't get an email but you're sure that you will receive it when it matters.

Thanks a lot for the feedback. I like the idea of having some sort of scheduling/reminder feature. I was wondering if I could set up a simple way to do SMS reminders. There could be a special code to set an SMS reminder (like * SMS 7pm) to get a reminder at 7pm.

That was a friend's idea though so I can't take credit for it ;)

Twilio SMS is super easy. Documentation is here: http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/sending-sms. And there's a python library to help you get started. (Full disclosure: I work at Twilio)

Do you guys have any timetable when to better support the german market? I really would like to use your products, but since most german carriers do not accept SMS from your system right now, it is not feasible.

First off, great weekend project.

While Twilio would be a surefire way to do it. You can also hack up a small script that will use sms gateways to send the email, but then you would have to know the person's carrier in advance. I find this way more interesting, but not nearly as robust. You can do some interesting things when you are sending text messages through gateways.

- Do that tomorrow night

- Do this next week

Fantastic idea. I just signed up. I hope August adds the feature soon. Nice app.

http://boingboing.net/2007/11/14/i-want-sandy-perfect.html

I Want Sandy was pretty cool in it's day. (Till it was bought out by twitter at least)

I think every programmer made their own task manager at least once in their life..

True. Before that it used to be "write your own Tetris".

And before that, it was write your own hex editor.

I feel old, as I never wrote tetris or task manager, but have large collection of hacked-up hex-editors :)

Great job! I also used GAE to build ThatHigh.com and it's working pretty well.

But like you're probably aware, GAE has a learning curve in addition to python/django/whatever. The datastore, mainly. This is a shameless plug, but I'm the co-founder of Djangy.com and we're in private beta. We're doing Heroku except for python/django. we'll support other wsgi frameworks in the future, but for now we make deploying almost any django app instant and painless.

in private beta now, but email me and we can set something up if you're interested.

May I ask why you didn't go with just php for thathigh.com?

What kind of question is that? Why not go with language x for any project y?

Maybe he prefers python to PHP?

Regarding Djangy (and all apologies for how offtopic this is), you REALLY need to give some idea of what pricing is going to be.

The "only pay for what you use" statement only works when I have a relative idea of how much a given computational unit costs, or how much the average customer is paying.

EC2 could make the same statement, but there's a huge difference between a small and medium instance, cost-wise.

Yeah, we're rolling out a ton of changes in the next week, so expect that. RE: pricing, it'll be comparable to heroku. I JUST finished building the billing system two days ago :-)

You should make something happen when the Konami code is entered on your website.

Yes, I completely agree! I had that planned, and just decided to launch this before completing that. It will happen soon.

Like make your page break ;) http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/gravity/

Definitely tried it as soon as I saw mention. Extremely easy to implement and fun to boot.

Reminds me - one of the things on my list is to build (yet another) chore tracker with that gaming incentive everyone's done (earn points of some sort) but avoiding the fault those all have: too easy to cheat yourself.

I envisaged multiplayer action, even just with a wife, for example, where each person would allocate 'points' to be earned and traded for chores. She might be more likely to avoid creating a floordrobe if she could trade the resulting points for dinner out, making me watch rom-coms with her, etc. It's a little juvenile, but I would get a lot of house cleaning done were there sexual favours up for grabs.

What do people think?

Also been thinking that there seem to be few/no decent to-do apps out there with 'dependency trees'. We've just built a house and have progressed to the landscaping - every thing seems to hinge on something else. As an example, we can't put in plants until the driveway is done and can't do that until the water meter has been relocated. Or can't clear out weeds until I've bought fuel for the lawnmower, etc.

Sounds good. Have you seen Epic Win or Chore Hero? Both are iPhone apps that seem to do most of what you say here (haven't used them myself).

Chore Hero talks about reward points, but doesn't mention what's done with them. Epic Win seems to be the one that made me think "XP, for what?".

I've seen a few of these sorts of sites around, but they seemed to lack incentive or real motivation. How many people have tried a bunch of To Do apps and never stuck with any of them? I just keep going back to scraps of paper.

Of course, to-do apps and choretrackers are like black holes for developers but I can't help but wonder if there's a tack yet to be tried with both.

Sex after taking the garbage out is really the best sex. Or not - I think a "punished by rewards" mechanism might kick in, that is, rewards kill intrinsic motivation.

The email address validation is incorrect. Neither test+foo@gmail.com, test+foo@gmail.com., test@io, test@io., test@::123, test@[::123], or test@[::123]:456 are accepted, and likely other cases. I suggest you take the easy route and just only check `emailAddress.indexOf("@") !== -1`.

This point should really be made more to web developers. Nothing annoys me like yet another website which tells me myname+filter@example.com is not a valid address and ruins my nice mail filtering...

Or have a look at the full RFC 2822 regular expression for matching email addresses: http://code.iamcal.com/php/rfc822/full_regexp.txt

I'd personally stick with Sephr's advice, though ;-)

There are SMTP addresses that are perfectly valid, non-local and yet does not contain '@'. But in practice that could be probably ignored.

But if you want to verify email address, then going with must contain '@' is probably one of the more reasonable routes (you should probably also ban few characters like newlines and ';').

I've jsut started using it. It would be nice if it were easy for my wife could email things to be added to my queue. (Then again, maybe that wouldn't be so nice...)

Thanks for the suggestion. I hadn't thought about letting other people add stuff to your list, but it's a great idea.

Just make sure it is not anyone who can add something to your list. Great job on the app.

Great Job! I also wanted to let you know that your website, seems slightly broken in chrome: http://imgur.com/liF73.png

I am not sure if it is due to being in chrome-dev, but it took me a second to understand that the actual content was down the page. After widening up the browser the main content div popped into the right place.

Thanks, I had never noticed that before.

I have question about the Google App engine. How does pricing work? Their webpage says that you pay $8 per user per month, which seems pretty high for any webapp.

And how do they decide how many users you have? I am sure here you are not counting each person that submits their email for chore reminders as a user or this would bankrupt you pretty quickly. So how does it work?

That's App Engine for Business which is determined by "intranet users in your Google Apps domain." The service is free for a fixed quota set by App Engine, you pay extra for a billable quota, for resources used above the fixed quota.

App Engine for Business: http://code.google.com/appengine/business/

Terms:http://code.google.com/appengine/terms.html

Quotas:http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html

Billing FAQ:http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/billing.html

One thing noobs don't realize is that every project takes vastly more time than you think it will. Seems like you've learned that lesson.

Good job. Even if you ended up not finding the application as useful as you had imagined it, the fact that you built it has to be satisfying enough. Plus, you gained valuable experience. It's stuff like this that make me wish I was not so busy with classes and work so that I could work on projects like this. Hopefully soon I will be able to. And again, nicely done.

Great job! Can't wait to see what your next project is. I'm also learning python and your post has inspired me to take a look at GAE.

Awesome work making it happen, I know many people who have been professional programmers for years who never created anything outside of their jobs. Love the design too, how did you go about coming up with it?

Nice job! I just tested it out and it works great. I see you're using google app engine, I'm building a couple of apps on it and love working with. My platform of choice for sure.

Thanks! GAE is definitely a great way to get something up and running fast.

After spending a few months with RoR though I definitely am enjoying writing in Ruby more so than Python. I might try JRuby next time I do something on app engine - http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/

congrats on the launch, it's really great for a first effort!

I also hear app engine can tolerate a fairly large amount of traffic before you have to pay, so it seems like a solid choice to start on.

Sorry for my n00b-ness, but how do people know he's using app engine?

Edit: Oops.. I jumped straight to the app and only later noticed the "How I Built It" note on the post...

You can view the response headers for a page and GAE will list the server as "Google Frontend"

Do all of these "daily" chores extend on the weekend? I feel that would be a good distinction between chores, as I don't do most of my weekday "chores" on the weekend.

Great job on your first project! I think a cool next step would be to use twilio so that users could add lifechores through text message.

The site doesn't seem to accept myname+lifechore@gmail.com as a valid address. Could you update your validation logic?

+1 for being honest about the pitfalls about your application and your ideas to improve it.

Kudos for launching - nice one!

Reminds me of my first coding project, Wipee List. Congrats, it's a great feeling!

Congrats man! I'll try to use this as motivation to code something myself.

Looks like a simpler version of streak.ly

I like this project with the email replies, I use gmail so labelling and filters etc don't make it spammy

I put "buy my girlfriend a new ring" hopefully that will annoy that crap out of me until I do it lol

adding and optimizing the email replies would be great, its a great idea

How do we know this guy's not a spammer collecting email addresses?

How do we know anyone's not a spammer collecting addresses?

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