Ask HN: What is a project I can complete in a night? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is a project I can complete in a night?

I have 8 hours to kill, and I can't work on any of my other code. I would like to be somewhat productive and build something. I know there is lots of 'weekend coding projects' but is there anything that you can attempt to build in a night?

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A simple game for smart phones.

Draw a pipe on the screen. First pipe is short and straight. They get longer and have more curves. "Drop" a ball into the pipe. The user tilts their phone clockwise or anti-clockwise to guide the ball through the pipe. That tilting is the only control the user has. Each pipe should be short enough to create the "I nearly did that; just one more go" effect.

You could try contributing to some open source projects instead.

http://up-for-grabs.net/ has a list of projects with issues/tasks that are easy for new contributors to pick up.

That would be such an awesome site if practically everything wasn't on a Microsoft platform. I'd love to contribute towards some Objective-C but everything I see is .NET/F#

A Raspberry Pi with motion detection and SMS.

I've built one using an old nokia that supports AT commands.

Pretty fun stuff and no soldering required. Next up I'll try adding a camera and send MMS messages through the mobile phone with photos when motion is detected.

Helpful links:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Emgreat-Detecting-Pyroelectric-HC-SR...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pyroelectric-Infrared-Motion-Sensor-...

http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2013/01/cheap-pir-sensors-a...

http://www.adafruit.com/products/189

https://www.modmypi.com/blog/raspberry-pi-gpio-sensing-motio...

http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/13334/how-can...

Something that doesn't involve much user interface.

I have been working an a side project recently. The guts of the code is very simple and done already. Getting all the surrounding framework to serve it up as a web page and do input validation is taking forever (mainly because I only get an hour or two at a time to work on it). Its all the "polish" that takes the time. So something command line based would be easier.

URL shortener

Flickr creative commons image search engine

Twitter bot

Quote scraper

Deal alerter for craigslist

IFTTT on a scale relevant to you

Twitter Bot sounds good, like that Idea. Really like the idea of automation.

They're not allowed and if it's detectable as a bot it'll get shut down.

But they're still fun.

Actually they are allowed.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/76915#

Good call.

My bots have always been @reply bots, hence my confusion.

In particular, I was doing stuff like this: "For example, sending automated @replies based on keyword searches is not permitted."

I feel like anything related to twitter is very troublesome. They are very restrictive.

I tried to make an agregation of all the people I was following, and mining their 'about' text, and right off ran out of api requests quota.

If you are interested in mathematics and algorithms, you can solve Project Euler problems projecteuler.net/problems

Yeah was thinking of that, there's currently an Algorithms Course on Coursera so might have a look at that.

"Yo" app :) It took 8 hours to build it. Then someone invested $1M. I don't get the world.

http://yopeoplefinder.appspot.com took 1 hour to build...

I'll second the "find a bug to fix". There are a lot of projects out there that are welcoming to newbies.

If you are using emacs, you can try to write some ELisp code to fix something you don't like or automate something you do often.

Try learning and hacking on some new technology you are not familiar with.

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