Also a project-based course on entrepreneurship to teach in the fall.
Also a seminar on leadership for General Assembly in New York for later this month.
Why are those things cool?
Because when I started my first company I had plenty of skills with science, technology, and knowledge and facts. I didn't know how to build relationships, work with teams, motivate people, and other business and personal skills I've come to find more important for business and other relationships.
I find very few places teach this stuff effectively. For that matter, few people think it can be taught or learned. Meanwhile people without these skills get promoted to positions where they'd help. Instead the run their organizations into the ground, destroy morale, and things like that.
I'm going to change that.
Fully offline live-USB (Ubuntu) w/ offline Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, OpenStreetMaps, and other public domain / creative common sources, all running on OSS. Just download and toss it on a USB, then use it as you want. I think it's great for those that have/may-have an intermittent internet connection, want to have an offline way to browse wikipedia, want to put it in a time capsule, are going camping but want educational material, etc.
My reasons are:
- I wanted to learn Haskell.
- I wanted to learn more about web stack internals.
- I wanted a web stack that was entirely mine. I know how every single aspect of it works, from low level asynchronous network IO to HTML templating.
Of course, the amount of time I spent frustrated by bugs in my previous Apache/Django stack will certainly be less than 1% of the amount of time I've spent writing my own stack, I have no regrets. I've learned so much doing it.
It's cool because now that I've gotten several thousand lines of Haskell under my belt, I finally know what "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" means.
Why: Englebart's demo made people overlook the chording keyboard, and now we are still mostly stuck with QWERTY, a layout that takes too long to learn and doesn't take much advantage what humans are good at. I'm joking about Englebart, but I do like the line of thinking that computers can be powerful instead of faux friendly.
Why: Because Mint and Credit Karma have horrible interfaces that don't allow me to manage my money and view spending trends in a way that I feel is satisfactory. Prototype for now and using plaid.com API for access to financial institutions.
What is your main goal with the project? Just improvements to the interface?
I have been thinking about downloading all of my financial information and throwing it into a project based upon Elasticsearch and Kibana (http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/). I have been using these tools to process log data at work and I get more and more interested in Elasticsearch the more I read about and play with it. They are both open source, but I have not yet dove into either project in detail (certainly not enough to build something on top of it).
What technology are you using/plan to use for the project? If you are interested in getting input I would love to chat more about it. Feel free to reach out (personal email in my profile).
EDIT: My main motivation for creating a mint-like project is to improve the search and data analysis capabilities so that I can visually explore my spending habits more easily.
Because the viola is cool. Just like fezzes are cool.
Because life cannot be all-tech-all-the-time.
During my day job, key marketing messages, conceptual architecture, and high-level system architecture for an open-source service-to-business platform for governments based on two primary notions, true "tell us once" to ease the burden on business and automated on-boarding of new programs to ease the burden on domain-expert but IT-ignorant (as they should be) program managers.
Why? Coz it's like fezzes. And because after years in business, anything I can do to make dealing with the government easier and cheaper is good for me, good for the government, and good for the economy.
Why cool: We are helping people solving city problems by connecting them to local government. Already live on 25 cities in Brazil
Making games is a lot of fun!
It's cool because it is unreasonable that in this day and age the information that governs the world is controlled by governments and corporations.
it's cool because social media is ridden with lies, errors and propaganda, and it doesn't make sense that those keep spreading without being refuted.
It's cool because it lets you watch any news event develop in real-time from the point of view of the people on the ground.
Why? I went from having about 10 starred repos to 300, and found loads of useful libraries and tools along the way.
It is cool because memory safety is really hard in low-level languages, and Rust helps you out a lot in that department.
I'm also working on a little product on the weekends. A CRM for tattoo shops. It's cool because it'll be a fully Free (AGPL 3'd) Rails app, and there aren't enough of those in the world.
Why it's cool: You get to capture real-life territory by running and walking through it. Just keep your phone in your pocket. Compete with your friends if you want. This is the game I have always wanted, and I get to make it. Feels great.
It's a robotics daughterboards for TI Launchpads.
It's cool because it brings together: a) a travel focused vertical search engine that's categorized 1000+ (sometimes interlinked) variables that can be found without typing a single word (just pick from easily labelled menu options) and presented as highly relevant result shortlists vs 100s of pages of results
and
b) an intelligent itinerary generator that helps you arrive at a realistic final itinerary faster by letting you shortlist content from these results and allowing you to iterate faster by presenting what-if scenarios based on how you construct your final itinerary.
Better Search + Intelligent Itinerary Creation = Faster And Easier Trip Plans
Why: Because pet owners are under served in the App Store. Either the existing apps are poor quality or they focus on being a social media network for pets. I believe a relationship with your pet is a very personal thing and so the focus is simply on your pet, not anyone else's. The target audience clearly enjoy expressing themselves and customising every facet of their digital lives so I provide simple tools to empower them to do that with their pets.
Why cool: Most people nowadays use cars for shorter distances when using their bicycles would be just fine. If we could get more people to use their cycles, not only would we promote health but also lower CO2 emissions.
Why is it cool: In the fifteen months we've been in operation, we've never lost a customer. It just gives everyone a smile on their face and that's the type of businesses that I like to work on.
Out of curiosity: why does your tagline say "makes it easy to put a smile on your employees faces" yet the landing page image features an employee who is not smiling?
I know this seems petty but that employee does not actually look very happy. Small things like this make a difference.
Good question. The broader idea originally was to "uncover employee happiness" but we've held off on the measure/metrics part of the business to build up the perks/rewards side.
It's cool because I am learning about C, a bit about asm, and a bit about how a simple CPU works. Ish.
I also got a bit acquainted with comp.lang.c :)
We are working on some useful features around alerting users when a camera detects movement, and you aren't in the immediate vicinity (I.e. an intruder etc), which will make it a good alternative to conventional alarms. Live view of camera feeds is also coming.
If you have a spare iPhone or Android device, you will also use those as cameras, rather than purchase IP cameras (not yet in production).
Best of all, the app is free. Any feedback?
It is interesting because it's the only algebra system in which the user actually performs the algebra. With practice, edits are as fast as maths on paper, but without all of the redundant re-writing. Similar to the sense of flow you get when programming with Vim, this leads to a sense of immersion in the maths.
A small, fast executable *.jar, check it out at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ket/
Why is it cool.. 1. when I wrote it a month ago it was the only importer for Beats Music (need to look to see if it still is)..
2. I wrote it because I was moving the family from Spotify and Grooveshark to BeatsMusic and I knew my daughters wouldn't manually move their 500+ song playlists.. So everything I do for my daughters is cool.. (well.. maybe not in their eyes. haha)
We're leveraging Microsoft's new Roslyn compiler to break apart software into functions. The user then navigates their code on a function-by-function basis, similar to what was shown off in Code Bubbles a few years ago.
We've got a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuQ8NJOypqs
We're planning to launch our beta for Visual Studio and C# this August.
What's with the bracing style inside these bubbles?? :) Looks normal in Visual Studio, yet the whole body of the method gets an extra indentation in CodeConnect
Haha, yeah that's an artifact that's no longer present in current versions. It was including the tabs as part of the content of the function. So that's why it looks weirdly indented in that video.
Basically: You install it from npm and then run it, then you browse to http://localhost:9000/ and start chatting.
It's responsive and works great on your smartphone.
Repository: https://github.com/erming/shout (star if you like it!)
And of course, a demo: http://shout-irc.com:9000/
Edit: If you can't connect (Freenode only allows ~5 active connections) try "irc.rizon.net".
I'm doing it because I'm a big fan of tools like Olark or Zopim which are essentially the same but for live written communication (chat). Because some people prefer talking rather than typing, I'm selling a live voice communication alternative so websites can tailor to this preference as well.
Why: I wanna be able to reach after my phone and quickly find out where I should go to have fun.
It's not cool at all. All the pain, the damages on the body. Sometimes the amputations. It's a lot of pressure to develop a software which has to decide if you are in danger right now and how to help. Anyway that's what we're doing and we want to do it right.
No link, no demo, no video, it's still pretty confidential, sorry.
Where: http://self-help.tools
Why cool? It aims to help people to take control of their therapy. The evidence indicates that people going through a course of CBT who take more control of their therapy, and take more responsibility for their well being, have better outcomes.
Did you think about making short clips ? Maybe making the font nicer, more healthier ? (no serifs, use the color scheme of the healthcare, put round thing all around)
I don't know, it's like I am opening an encyclopedia rather than a self-help book. Is it the goal you want to achieve ?
Why is it cool: complete beginners are deploying their first ever websites with it, and experienced programmers are building cool stuff with it! I also really like using it for my own stuff and think static site generators and static apps have a huge future ahead of them. Especially if we can help building tooling to make static solutions easier to build and work with.
Why: Some have similar tools, but they all concentrate on the HelpDesk aspect of it. Instead of re-inventing the wheel we simply integrate with popular existing helpdesk apps. Furthermore, we encourage sales and marketing to use our app.
Thanks.
I've been running a successful fundraiser [1] and have just posted a detailed progress report [2].
This might be the first FOSS software-development fundraiser where backers get to decide what features are added.
Why: It works by clustering the users based on their reading history, ranking one's fellow readers, and providing what else they read in order of relevance. Besides the news discovery part, I find it very cool to automatically connect the people with similar interests. Great things may come out of this.
It's a research management service, consolidating submissions, notifications, reviews and revisions across multiple conference systems.
Why: because I was sick of using emails to track these things, and it allows researchers getting fun stats about their work.
Why: Because old school meets new. Also, it is fairly useful for my job as a CICS mainframe programmer.
[Why] Wanted to learn core concepts and coding in both languages at same time is fun.
Why it's cool: gives marketing resources to small businesses who lack the time or expertise
I understand typos, but when it is for someone who wants to run a service which would have very high visibility for a companies image, they really aren't acceptable.
Why cool: To be the best for the roughly 2/3rds (safe for work or not) of Internet content, searches people want to do, and content they want to find at best poorly served now.
Spam? No, not at all. Instead, as I said, searches people want to do and results they want to find, and those are nearly never spam.
Nothing tricky; take my description just the way I gave it.
The content types are primarily still images, recorded music, video clips, i.e., content types where search by keywords/phrases work from poor down to not at all due to far too little text in the content for matching users' keywords/phrases, and a major fraction of blogs and long tail Web sites, that is, where the content is mostly text.
A point is that search by keywords/phrases works well for only about 1/3rd of the content, searches people want to do, and results they want to find. My work is for the other 2/3rds. This description is difficult to understand?
Coolness: Helping people gain value from sharing resources.
We want to improve on current project management tools by giving people more flexibility.
there are best practices that are superior to a traditional education. they are free and totally accessible with an internet connection.
its cool if you believe in everyone being able to self-educate using the internet.
will start applying it in a group context, namely business organizations shortly.
looking for companies of 11+ people to participate.
Sales cycle management tool.
Why Cool: By doctors for doctors. 'Nuff Said'
It's a screenplay search engine. I couldn't find any adequate resources out there so decided to build my own. I've got much loftier goals for it, but all in good time.