Ask HN: What did you do this year? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What did you do this year?

mikeryan's question (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967727) was rhetorical but mine isn't. So, what did you guys do this year? Building things, picking up new skills, traveling, learning to ride narwhals ... everything counts.

I've had a terrible year in terms of productivity. I picked up some much-needed web development skills, built some toy projects that never left ~/Source/ and buried an old project that was going nowhere. That's pretty much it. Now I'm finally starting something big; perhaps some of you could inspire me :)

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* Evaded a "real job" for another year

* Redesigned the admin interface for Tender (http://tenderapp.com)

* Worked with some amazingly talented people at ENTP, makers of Tender and Lighthouse (http://lighthouseapp.com)

* Moved to downtown Portland. First time in my life I've been able to walk to an office. It's a GREAT feeling.

* Refined the design of my work blog (http://neatfocus.com/blood) and food blog (http://cutandtaste.com)

* Spent too much time on Hacker News, Quora, Dribbble and Forrst

Nice work on that UI, simple, elegant and functional.

Lets see,

I finally started to grow my main business beyond me, by which I mean for the first time in a long while I'm able to let go of certain things and have other people responsible for them - historically clients still came to me regardless of what I wanted.

This year I finally started a side project (http://www.minklinks.com/), my first thing in 8 years that has nothing to do with information security for a change. It didn't quite get to beta for HN November but I'm going to work on that this month.

I guess overall this year things stabilised at the main job, I got more time to do the things I love doing, more opportunities to spend time with those I love and managed to do new things that pushed my boundaries. I think that's really all I can ask for in life and in that respect I've had a better year this year than in a long time (touch wood).

* Continued for another year on the roller coaster ride that is mobile services + applications, im now not sure its actually possible for me to get of this roller coaster so hanging on for and enjoying the ride!

* Fortunate to work with and meet some great people

* iPhone apps:

* Bath Rugby http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/bath-rugby/id391265972?mt=8

* Jeego premium core application http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/jeego-ecards/id387728936?mt=8

* Three Disney Ecards applications http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/disney-ecards/id398500671?mt=... http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/disney-christmas-ecards/id405... http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/disney-spooks/id398583345?mt=...

* Work with two startups and help from the mobile side of things - http://bardowl.com/ - http://www.vpar-golf.com/

* Two other iPhone apps that should be in the store in the new year

* Launched http://www.jeego.me and mechanised its maintenance

* Launched our consumer focused site creator http://www.sitetaga.com and heavily testing its two complementary sister products for launch in the new year

* Spoke at and attended some great mobile conferences including Openmic, GoogleIO and Droidcon

* Taught myself Rails + Sinatra

* Drove down the PCH from SFO to LAX

Took and passed the two hardest math and CS courses offered at my university: advanced calculus and algorithms.

Learned OpenGL.

Placed highly in the regional ACM coding competition.

Landed exactly the job I wanted out of college.

Most importantly, started a relationship with the most amazing female hacker I've ever met.

Left my job to make Forrst (http://forrst.com) full time. Generating meaningful revenue and growing the team. It's been an adventure.

I think I saw your site on smashing magazine once. That is some great graphic design- did you do that or did someone do it for you?

It's been a good year. I bought and renovated a 2-flat, started a startup, passed the FE exam, and began learning Rails. I also went to two 3 day music fests: Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits. I did/do all this while working a 40+ hr/week job and still have plenty of time to spend with family, friends, and to do occasional volunteer work.

- mountains of work on Playtomic, it started the year with 40m events/month, uglier, slower, smaller and with less users, now it's doing 300m/day, real time and gorgeous

- released 7 Flash games (2 are pending release but pushing publish isn't up to me)

- got some travelling in, had a couple weeks in the US and a little more kicking around in latin america

Had my 2nd child. Quit my job to work on my startup full-time. Had a very 'lean' summer. Finally closed a great round of funding. It has definitely been an interesting year :)

Graduated (again), work in a VC backed AM firm in London, paid off my parents mortgage and now fixing up the property outside of work. Started researching Venture Capital careers as its what I want to get involved in long-term. If anyone has any thoughts on this please do get in touch with me.

After a depressingly latent period of non-doing in 2009, I broke out of my shell and kicked some ass in 2010. May and after was the period of "getting shit done" as I kicked in to full throttle and overcame my fear of not-wanting-to-code-anymore. Protip: Just get started making something that's interesting to you, and you'll naturally get hooked. Starting is the hardest part, so just realize you need to bite the bullet. Also, if you're stuck, then paint something.

Launched http://www.moreofit.com. It currently gets over 2k unique visits per day, and that figure has doubled every two weeks for the past 12 weeks. Nearly each day is a record day, and day-to-day increase in visits is what used to be my total amount of visits just a short while ago. Running on one instance barely breaking 1% CPU. I don't foresee that growth slowing until about the 20k/day range, maybe I can get 40k/day if I'm lucky, in which time I can try to monetize it and make maybe $40-100/day -- if only there were an ad network that let me define keywords on a per-page basis (rather than crawl my page [adwords] or just define the general keywords for my site).

Also launched http://www.dashler.com, and the bookmarklet, http://www.dashler.com/toolbar, which I think is just ahead of its time and/or is not nearly marketed as well as it could be. I use it daily to get traffic stats on webpages I visit, connect pages with their comments, shorten URLs, etc. Too high of a learning curve for it to be successful, and competitors like Glue make a much more compelling social and viable business out of a similar idea. But still was an amazing learning experience to make javascript+css which runs on any page in a performant manner.

Never got to launch "forums for anything" which I think is a hugely under served market. Just search for "<anything> forums" and see the massively successful vBulletin site set up for it. Why should the web rely on somebody setting up a domain and host, and plopping forum software onto it? Huge barrier to entry for something that the internet was essentially built for. If I could create a forum instantly and without an account, then share that URL with others to use, that would be immensely valuable for organizing any number of events, ideas, projects, etc.

Besides that, got employed at a mid-sized start-up which I'm happy with, and expect to learn a hell of a lot and gain some management or team lead experience, and be part of the growth phase from "something big" to "something huge". The job search process was both fun and stressful (negotiating always presents the possibility of having to walk away), but I'm happy to have gone through the experience; in particular meeting with various start-ups was quite refreshing to realize that I'm not alone in my quest for making something big. Also built some confidence in going essentially 4 for 4 in phone interviews to interviews to offers. All in all, not a bad year for me, despite being broke for 11/12ths of it.

Quit my job and walked away from 50% pay-rise to build my own startup instead.

Spent two months in Berlin.

What have I done this year? Wow... a lot and nothing, depending on how you look at it. It's been a weird year. But I guess the biggest thing is all the work I've put into the ScrewPile projects... ScrewPile [1] being a suite of open-source tools centered around knowledge management / information retrieval / search. As far as generic infrastructure stuff goes, I moved all the code to GitHub[2], moved the project website to Google Code, installed Bugzilla[3], wrote some blog entries[4], etc.

On a more technical level, I wrote a modest amount of code for Neddick[5], opened a lot of bugs, fixed a few bugs, and setup a Neddick demo server[6].

Created the http://www.fogbeam.org/ website.

Outside of ScrewPile related stuff, I spent a lot of time learning Lucene, read parts of a couple of books on Machine Learning / Collective Intelligence, read Steven Pinker's "How The Mind Works," read the "Swarm Intelligence" book by Russell C. Eberhart, Yuhui Shi, & James Kennedy, and started Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid." I also managed to read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," watched "The Social Network" twice, and read "The Accidental Billionaires." Organized a few "JVM Hack Night"[7] events locally, one "Hackers & Founders"[8] meetup and one Semantic Web[9] meetup.

Went to a VC event where Mark Cuban was the keynote speaker and got to meet Mark, which was kinda neat.

Took an Improv 101 class at DSI Comedy Theater.

Oh, and also read Steve Blank's book "The Four Steps to the Epiphany."

All in all, I did a lot of stuff, but - in a lot of ways - I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped for. I'm hoping to turn these ScrewPile projects into something usable enough to productize eventually; but I got a little stalled out in the 2nd half of the year, after a huge flurry of activity from March-August or so. Still, I'm sitting here tonight hacking away on the Quoddy[10] stuff, and since 2010 isn't over yet, I hope to bang out some more good stuff before Jan 1 rolls around.

[1]: http://code.google.com/p/screwpile/

[2]: https://github.com/fogbeam

[3]: http://dev.fogbeam.org/bugzilla/

[4]: http://screwpiledev.blogspot.com/

[5]: http://code.google.com/p/neddick/

[6]: http://spdemo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1/

[7]: http://www.meetup.com/TriJVM/

[8]: http://www.meetup.com/RTP-Hackers-Founders/

[9]: http://www.meetup.com/RTP-Semantic-Web-Group/

[10]: http://code.google.com/p/quoddy/

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