Ask HN: What’s the coolest thing you have built | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What’s the coolest thing you have built

22 pointsmraza00725 comments

Hi HN, As I’m getting more involved in HN community. I would love to see the coolest side project you have built since this will inspire me others to start building side projects

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I created one of the most popular Elasticsearch plugins, Elasticsearch Learning to Rank[1], which uses machine learning to optimize search results.

HN helped make this happen - I built a 0.1 version for one client (Snagajob). I encountered someone from Wikimedia Foundation on Hacker News who was going to build something similar. We ended up partnering after meeting on Hacker News, and now work together on version 1.0 of Elasticsearch Learning to Rank which ultimately has been used on Wikipedia's search[2].

Wikimedia Foundation ultimately had super deep Elasticsearch internal knowledge which helped tremendously, whereas I mostly worked on building out the docs after the initial prototype[3]. I'm rather proud of the docs as it's a bit of a mini book on Learning to Rank :)

[1] - Plugin itself http://github.com/o19s/elasticsearch-learning-to-rank

[2] - WMF article on the plugin https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/10/17/elasticsearch-learning...

[3] - Docs http://elasticsearch-learning-to-rank.readthedocs.io

SmartEdit Writer, a desktop app for creative writers. Not a commercial success, though the Microsoft Word add-in does sell a few copies a month. The editing functionality is unique.

https://www.smart-edit.com/Writer/

A lesson I've learned is that coolness and commercial success are not tightly connected. You can build something great that users still will not be prepared to pay for.

B2B is the way to go, not B2C.

Really good project and looks very similar to word If its okay to share can I ask what technologies did you use

C#/.Net. I've outlined the tech stack in more detail here (aimed at a non-techie reader): https://www.smart-edit.com/Blog/Post/TechOverview/

A few years ago I built a virtual cycling platform connecting ANT+ to Google Streetview. It was before the current breed of indoor cycling platforms like trainerroad and zwift. I ended up using it for my own training

I regret not trying to market it more, or moving into the virtual cycling space -

https://dzone.com/articles/virtually-cycling-the-alps-with-a...

I just released my first programming language called Berlin: http://berlinlang.org

I had no idea what I was doing but it was super fun. Hopefully it's useful to some.

Oh wow that’s pretty cool. I’m pretty sure you learned alot while doing this project

Poor and sexy too?

Xmysql, an instant REST API generator for MySQL was a side project which led to XgeneCloud[1]

XgeneCloud now generates REST & GraphQL APIs on any SQL Database. Plus there is much more! :)

Supported databases : MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, SQLite, MariaDB & AWS Aurora

[1] : https://github.com/xgenecloud/xgenecloud

http://artbuffer.com/

I made Artbuffer to create my own wall art without having to spend years learning to paint. I've successfully used it to create my own :-)

Some examples:

https://www.artbuffer.com/view?a=wslyHCoGjqoA3ZKgsQ_hNAlnshT...

https://www.artbuffer.com/view?a=-9Wr6aLtgF383zsAWxchXJbt8CW...

https://www.artbuffer.com/view?a=OuIs3I6vHAyqV-PoMb6EFiRVAFw...

I built three cigar box guitars for my son, my father, and myself make from repurposed wood from my son's', my father's and my baby cribs.

Coolest computer related thing? I used to run http://uptime.openacs.org (which I port from Oracle -> Postgres) and http://myturl.com (a tinyurl clone written in AOLserver). But as things tend to do, both projects are shutdown.

I still find the cigar box guitars the cooler thing.

Cigar box guitars are really fun and they sound neat! They look like toys but they actually do something.

Six Degrees of Kanye West, a fun little website that lets you search for a muscical artist to see how closely they're connected to Kanye West through collabs.

https://sixdegreesofkanyewest.com/

I built it back in 2016 and haven't updated it since so newer artists don't show up.

Looks really cool How did you do it since I love music

Thanks! I posted about it in my blog [1] at a very high level.

To summarise, I used a Python library called Spotipy to request track information from Spotify and then stored a big list of artists based on who has collaborated with Kanye and built that web outwards.

[1] https://blog.sunnyamrat.com/six-degrees-of-kanye-west/

I'm happy with my work on Checkbot, a Chrome extension that checks multiple pages at a time for SEO, speed and security best practices:

https://www.checkbot.io/

I also wrote up a concise guide on everything the extension checks for and why those checks are important: https://www.checkbot.io/guide/

I found working on the above solidified by existing knowledge I'd picked up as a web developer and filled in the gaps. It's satisfying to know the extension is helping people identify website problems every day and teaching them tips they didn't know before.

Also, I've been wary of what seems like SEO snake-oil advice in the past (like a lot of developers) so it was good to digest all the evidence-based SEO advice I could find and condense it into small actionable tips most developers would agree with.

that's really helpful.Looking forward to use your extension

Contextualise, a (personal and collaborative) knowledge management system: https://contextualise.dev/

It's open source: https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise

Really interesting project. Love your idea since managing knowledge is the best thing and I keep a small blog to keep things I learned

I've been working on a fast typo tolerant search engine (https://github.com/typesense/typesense) for 4 years.

It initially started off with a question of "Why is ES so difficult to grok and manage?". Then I started researching around various data structures for efficiently storing text and numerical values and various algorithms for sorting the data in real time to surface relevant documents.

After 4 years of development, the project is pretty stable but I'm still adding features and has been getting some traction finally. I recently added a raft based replication aka clustering. I used a production ready Raft library for that, but it was still very nice to understand the nitty gritties of the Raft implementation.

I doubt I would build something more complicated ever, but who knows right :)

I made a card game (www.intrapreneurs-game.com) to teach innovation to the corporate crowd (I teach MBA classes part time and do speaking engagements here and there). Building the mechanics of the rules and the game content was fun and I tried to balance actual gaming entertainment with actual learning and even built a companion app with supporting material for every concept in the game.

My most recent is a keyboard layout (Qwickly) because Colemak/Tarmak was too slow to learn.

https://github.com/qwickly-org/Qwickly

A bench for bench-pressing. It’s the single thing that I built and actually use. I built a lot of software and never cared to use it myself (it never solved my own problems, always a customer/user.. )

A library (macOS, iOS) that converts the files supported by Assimp to Scene Kit scenes. [1]

[1] https://github.com/dmsurti/AssimpKit

futuretodo, a little software project management app. It can be useful especially if you want to keep your notes, tasks, and the project progress in order. https://futuretodo.org

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