(Where I live it’s a common thing to ask of friends or family or lovers, and I find it quite charming, so I thought I’d ask it of the HN community.)
EDIT: She had some end of life arrangements in place (like a will) to make things easier. She had cancer, so this wasn't unexpected, but it doesn't make the feelings any less chaotic.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
I'm building a "sneaky" mental health app. It presents as if it were a modern, sci-fi take on Tamagotchi coupled with a daily self-reflection routine. You find yourself surprisingly compelled to nurture your virtual pet, commit to the routine, and then the software nudges you to journal and meditate since you're already showing up for your pet.
I'm excited to see how I improve myself with my software and if I can touch others who might typically be reticent of adopting additional self-care habits.
Sorry, I didn't mean to turn this into a pitch, but now you know where my head is at. :)
Thanks for the words of encouragement.
The largest difference is how our audiences discover and think about us. Finch users feel they need help and seek out Finch. Finch understands this, calls attention to the needing help, and presents itself as an anxiety-free warm hug. Finch wants users to "come out of their shell" and to engage with the world. Then, Finch nudges that engagement towards self-improvement. It's great.
Symbiant users think they're fine as-is (but are underappreciating how far from the ceiling they are), frequently lean into gaming to wind-down and as a means of escapism, and are more likely to adopt concepts that make themselves feel "smart" rather than applying labels to themselves that make them feel like they need fixing. Symbiant strives to talk about mental health at a higher level of abstraction, hinting at the complexities of psychology, and allows the user to feel like they are discovering knowledge by connecting all the dots. It then provides tools to allow the user to apply their new knowledge.
Think of how Papers, Please or This War of Mine strive to educate users about political tyranny and war, but do so in atypical ways. You're not the tyrant or war hero - you're a pawn in the overarching story. After playing, the user is touched with an understanding that feels more well-rounded having learned from a unique, atypical perspective. My goal is to construct and provide a similar learning experience around mental health, self-reflection, and habituation.
There is a Discord invite in my profile. It's quiet, aside from my monologue rambling about lore, functional requirements, etc. The community is all of my current and ex-coworkers who are following the project. You're welcome to join, but it's not a great source of information right now.
Thanks for asking! I found your questions exceptionally motivating. :)
I am heading to Recurse Center in January and thinking about what I am going to do. Reading more HN than usual seeking inspiration and/or confirmation.
I keep circling around computer graphics and flow based programming. I have been following Ben Houstons work with his behavior graph library and I dont think I want to built Yet Another Node Based Execution engine. But building a poor-man's frankenstein houdini clone might tickle my brain.
But I also want to explore how flow based programming could related to infrastructure management tools.
Choices... choices...
I need to start writing. It seems like lots of folks write about their RC experience. I plan to stream a little bit when I am coding and I started a podcast which will start publishing in 2023 and I plan to recording some vlogs and hopefully some podcast interviews.
I need to do better about finishing what I start so I am trying to commit to things I know I will accomplish / finish.
For those interested, i'm using PCSOFT Windev.
Unfortunately, I can feel the momentum and enthusiasm slowing down after a couple weeks of this. I'm tired, but I'm still trying to write goals and give myself some foundation for my work (Substack, and Twitch, pretty separately). I'm pretty happy with this "elevator pitch", which is something I've never really been able to do:
"I'm writing about the relationships people have with the Internet, and how it changes over time. I want to focus on the effects of fandom on marketing, creativity, competition, and personal identity. The Internet has been an enabler of dreams for a lot of people, and I want to explore how people use that for better or worse."
I totally get the difficulty of focusing on creative work. I can manage to paint, and do software work for money, but I really struggle to tackle the dozens of other things on my creativity/content backlog.
Good luck with it!
But that was really just procrastinating designing an authorization model for an object database.
1. I run a blog that is about 4 years old. I spend maybe 5 hours or so each month writing a new post to keep it fresh, and an additional 2-3 doing generic maintenance work (responding to comments, SEO checks, etc). This generates good income for me.
2. I am working on a saas project that fixes a simple but very important problem. Cloud functions make my life so much easier, it's incredible. This generates no income, but probably will.
3. I run https://contractrates.fyi. We are a crowdsourced dataset of freelancing hourly rates. I don't know why this site didn't exist already because it's such an obvious problem. Anyway, I built it and the reception has been insane. It makes zero money because I can't charge people to share information, but it's a nice resume boost site and a joy to work on. This is the only one I'm okay to share :)
I am just obsessed with building stuff. Adhd is a significant advantage if you can harness it correctly shrug.
(Probably frustrating her a little that I'm on HN at the same time)
I'm also trying to get back into Software after an injury that left me in a wheelchair for 7 months and walking again just as COVID hit. I got into volunteer work and eventually ended up doing COVID vaccination and testing for the few jobs I've held since. The work gap is hard to explain for me personally.
It's likely I'll end up in a low skilled position for a while as I continue the full interview processes needed now that I have a stable place to live again.
I like the question - and wish I had a more positive response to it.
Nobody will know homelessness until they experience it. My life has ended up in 2 storage units, my car, and the room I'm now renting. Don't think it's impossible that it could happen to (some of) you. Many people are much closer than they ever realize.
At this point I am still looking in software dev / database roles. I am a published author, and have been working with SQL since the 90's. I started at a dial-up ISP in 1994 when RADIUS still meant what it stands for :)
No real reason for writing this other than prompted by a question. I am likely a bit of an outlier in this situation.
And browsing HN, eh!
There are lots of professional grade live video tools with great features and steep learning curves, I'm aiming to create a dead-simple, WYSIWYG tool for people who want audio-reactive live video effects at their events. The dream is for non-technical artist types to be able to pick a playlist, add a video source (stream, file, webcam, etc), choose some effects, plug in a projector and watch the magic - all with 0 knowledge of shaders or color theory.
A long time ago I thought about becoming a VJ (as we called them, Google suggests this is not the term anymore). I had some ideas about generating video and how to control it, and I was spending enough time at electronica shows that I felt it would work. But it never went anywhere due to procrastinating and stage fright.
Now it’s all way more sophisticated, back then most people were either doing the equivalent of Winamp visualizations or cutting video streams with some simple effects.
I’d love to try out your app! Is there a mailing list or something?
Got the 'rona this weekend, and while I'm a lot better (as in no longer sleeping 22 hours a day), I'm still pretty messed up.
Get well soon.
It's ironic too, I actually got my booster shot last week. Like a day before I came down with covid. Just a hair too late :-/
I tried some toy examples for Python and was impressed but I haven’t tried to do anything useful yet.
I suspect it's related to LTO.
there are posts all the times in coding sub-reddits asking what people should charge and 1 post in particular literally asked for a "levels.fyi for contractors" so I made it.
My specialties are everything but front end, but it's fun to start learning.