Ask HN: I was made redundant yesterday, and I want some coding ideas | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I was made redundant yesterday, and I want some coding ideas

51 pointscoughlanio24 comments

I was made redundant yesterday, and I've found myself with some free time, and a woefully empty Github account.

I published my first npm module today, https://github.com/coughlanio/pocketcasts and I'd like to write a few more to help beef up my portfolio.

Any ideas or fun things you can think of?

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Somewhat off topic, though perhaps something for consideration...

Whichever job I had, I always considered it my prime objective to make my own position obsolete. In other words, I measured my personal success to whether or not I had made myself redundant.

At first glance, one might think it contradictory that - save one exception - I was never laid off, found it easy to navigate to (more) interesting projects, etc.

I also live by this rule. And as a manager even more so. The more I put my coworkers in a situation where they can work and I become useless the better I am being as a manager.

Forgive the super generalization, but The manager role is to facilitate and not to strictly give orders. At least it shouldn’t be in the knowledge work space.

Organize and facilitate. Become useless.

Exactly!

some thoughts

As a manager, becoming completely redundant can only be truly achieved by coaching a replacement. I would advocate in stead of using phrases such as 'useless' or 'corporate fat', to adopt 'retained managerial expertise.'

Finding people who can both manage teams effectively and train new managers are extremely valuable. In larger organizations they would be promoted to 'managers of managers.' Smaller organizations might have no immediate need for such talent, though, those people are crucial if they want to scale. In other words - you should either become a management consultant for small businesses, or help a small business grow.

Same rule here!

My prime objective is to be able to go on vacation without any call of emergency, but the point is I showed that I was not necessary when I was ill and not at work for a month.

Two weeks after my return, the up management shows me the door...

Nevertheless, I think it is my best move to make my own position useless. I need peace of mind in vacation, I need autonomous coworkers, I need challenging problems to solve, and more, my whole team is happier that way.

The up management did not understand that... too bad for them.

Most valuable is the fact that one can only make oneself redundant when the role and expectation is completely understood.

Best part is; when interviewing for your next position you can explain how you improved the operations and saved (at least) one full time employee.

EDIT: Just wanted to add that openly discussing the above opened the door to job opportunities which traditionally weren't listed in my day (>20 years ago, in Belgium). Roles, which for political (sometimes even legal) reasons required direct employment (as opposed to being externally contracted), though without the possibility of this employment to indefinite.

edit2: Some clarification... I might be remembering things incorrectly, perhaps someone can enlighten me. I was very young and perhaps only had the impression I was offered special roles. I recall - perhaps incorrectly - that employment contracts were usually of indefinite duration. Any employment contract with limited duration put an employee in a completely different class, a class which could not be made accountable for business decisions. Anyway, not having worked in Belgium for over a decade, it feels very odd to think that truly was the case...

So - take the 'edits' with a sizable grain of salt ;-)

Not sure how that works for a developer, as there is usually more work to do, a big backlog etc. I could only make myself redundant by stopping progress in software.

Very good point. When I was a developer myself, I implemented that philosophy by making sure that whatever knowledge or expertise I had, which distinguished me from the other developers in my team was shared and distributed to my colleagues.

So - in stead of making myself redundant, I endeavored made myself replaceable.

Note: Though, the only time I worked as a developer, I was more experienced and knowledgeable than my team members (very junior team); I was never a great or experienced developer. In retrospect, I probably wasn't even a good developer.

How does one become redundant?

Were you in a position that wasn't a developer and that got automated?

It's British English for 'laid off' or 'staff reduction'.

The only real way to get fired without cause in the U.K. on a proper employment contract basically staff reduction.

there is a failed kickstarter from five years ago[1] which imagined an alternative to the traditional spreadsheet software. I imagine it would be fun to work on building such a thing, and I already know it would be more usable than Excel etc for many situations.

e.g. the company I work for give me a credit card to use to buy fuel for my car, with a soft limit (i.e. nothing technical to stop me spending more, but they may revoke this privilege if I abuse it), and there is an additional discount which is not displayed at the pump or on the receipt. I track how many litres I purchase, along with the pump price at the time, and currently use Excel for this. But it's not really designed to show me how many litres I can still spend before the end of the month, based on recent fuel prices etc. I believe such a solution could help with this, but the dev that had this idea only wrote a UWP app, nothing cross platform or super fleshed out...

[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/395431036/threads-a-mod...

I'm actually thinking of building an airtable clone, on the back of a graphdb like arrango possibly, where you can actually embed other sheets in a field in a table, or link to other sheets, or just pull data from other sheets or 'bases', so that ALL data across multiple spreadsheets is accessible across all spreadsheets in one way or another.

On top of that more data types including : binaries, images, passwords/crypto-hashed fields, pdfs, markdown -- with popup markdown editor.

I'd also like to have some cool integrations ready to go like - being able to convert a spreadsheet of product listings into a complete shopify-like store. Add a product to spreadsheet, it shows up in store. (Similar concept but for Blogs). I'd also like to build in a very versatile 'event' system and api that basically makes everything zapier-ified, when data changes other things can happen.

On top of that I'd like to add some app builder that can take data 'bases' and turn them into ios/android apps, similar to Bubble.us.

Fun.... ok...

Make an asmjs implementation of https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/projects/13-4-bit-processor/134-v...

Complete with an old skool disasambler to code up the typed array in.

Also think up some method to populate the webpage with text using canvas and some way to call the mothership using Victors amazing.

Here's something I think ought to be more or less straightforward but don't yet know any of the relevant machine learning theory for and so I've been putting it off. I could find a variety of handy uses for it if implemented the way I'm imagining. If it exists already, I don't know how to search for it.

It should ideally be a simple/minimal-dependencies CLI program that can take a command and arguments for that command, go ahead and run the command with given arguments, and record those arguments in relation to each other. When called with any of the command arguments missing, it will run the command filling in the blanks with a prediction for the best values for the missing arguments, based on the historical usage patterns.

My example use case is that I currently manually run a terminal command to adjust my external monitor brightness to a comfortable level at various times of day, and I would love to have a simple cron task scheduled to have it auto adjust throughout the day based on time of day and possibly other variables I can retrieve such as ambient brightness or whatever else. The dumb version would just be a predefined lighting schedule hardcoded in cron, but I specifically want to continue making adjustments as needed based on comfort and have the automation trend towards optimum over time, minimizing the frequency that I need to adjust without replacing my option to do so temporarily. The ML part I don't have the education for yet and I've been putting it off, but I can imagine a lot of other use cases for something like this implemented in a very generic way. The way I first imagined this working, I'm not entirely sure any sophisticated algorithm is even necessary, it might be doable with some high school level math run against the stored data. I presume that with such a generic approach it won't perform impressively well right out of the gate but with an accumulation of training data can be coerced into remembering what the user wants/expects gradually. As I said, I'm not educated in machine learning but I suspect this should be straightforward to do at least a crude version of given some of the libraries available.

Here's something that could be relatively easy (there may be a good library out there already, I haven't looked to hard for it though). Create a node.js module that takes as input the results of an SQL one-to-many join, along with a description of the key fields in each level, and outputs the results in a nested JSON object. So for an example, an output of a customer <= invoices <= invoice_detail would have an array of objects containing customer info, each which has an array of child objects one for each invoice, and the invoice objects have a child object array for each line item.

Would be nice if it was abstracted enough to work with any database driver, and also have bindings for the node Oracle, Postgres, and MySQL drivers.

I think you could do this very easily using the Pandas API in Python.

Have you considered looking for a freelance project? You'll get given the idea and get paid for it. Try messaging friends and people you've worked with for leads along with your story.

Webauthn is pretty popular these days, and there’s little built in terms of ecosystem.

I’m sure there’s plenty of opporunities for modules. One silly example: I bet everyone in the world has uint64 for user ids... webauthn wants a byte array... good luck with that.

If you end up doing anything in the space please lmk, we want to highlight it!

You know javascript and live in London, I wouldn't worry about it - you can get a new job easily.

Make a program that converts Prolog queries into CSS selectors. Then add a nice syntax so it can be used as a preprocessor.

I jest, but that almost sounds like an idea made with one of those online generators :)

Resurrect a beloved thing that was shut down. Google Reader, perhaps.

Google Reader has closed a long time ago, people have moved on a long time ago. Wasn‘t feedly built short before closing?

Google Inbox is closing in a few weeks and many people like it. Maybe copying it would be a nice idea, but much of work i guess

Google reader with filters to stop seeing Ariane grande stories in the news feed.

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