Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

Changed jobs 3 times, including a return to the 1st job of the year. Added 30% to my annual salary in the process.

Wrote a massive iOS Application (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zonas-find-explore-connect/i...)

Attended WWDC for the first time, and in doing so, finally met a friend of mine whom I've only ever known as a screen name.

Completed my first major freelance project. (First 5-digit invoice.)

Congratulations on your progress! What's your plan for 2015 (more iOS, fulltime or freelance)?

Hoping to stick it out at the full-time job for a whole year. Something I haven't done since 2011, while building a freelance network to keep side income flowing.

Recovered from a traumatic brain injury from a motorcycle accident. Moved from Melbourne to Seattle. Got a job at Amazon. Most importantly though, understood myself, the people around me and the world much better. :)

Sounds like a busy year! Sorry to hear about the accident, but congrats on all the accomplishments! All the best to you.

Got to early revenue and some pretty encouraging sustained compounding growth in my side-project-turned-startup: https://www.zerotier.com/

This is a three year old project. 2014 saw the first auto-updating binary releases on three platforms, the first commercial users, and the first revenue. It also made HN's front page twice: once for the site itself, and once for a blog entry that I wrote on the mechanics of NAT traversal.

Currently working on a lot of prep for a possible seed round in early-mid 2015. If all keeps going well it might happen.

Wow, congratulations on your success! Have you maybe thought about redesigning your homepage? I'm certainly not in your target audience, but it was a little bit hard to understand your value proposition - maybe think whom you are selling to (CTOs, CEOs etc.) and adjust your copy accordingly. Good luck and hope you succeed in fundraising!

I'm working on a home page redesign right now, so yeah I'll have that done fairly shortly... probably a few weeks. The new version is a bit more "pro" or "enterprisey" looking and tries to clarify things a bit while continuing to keep it simple.

Clarifying the message has been tough overall. In some ways it's so simple it's hard to convey. "Connect ALL THE THINGS!!#$!#$!#4!11" ?

I got my first job in the tech industry after leaving hospitality. It was the most difficult and most rewarding thing I've done in my career.

Sounds like something I would dream of doing - I am currently in accounting. What is your roadmap in tech? And congrats on succeeding!

Wasnt on HN this weekend. I started really simple with HTML/CSS. Then I moved on to Ruby, and then learned the Ruby on Rails framework. Now I write apps that analyze web data.

Start with CodeCademy.com. It's a great intro for people who want to get started. There are also classes on Udacity you can check out. Feel free to email me if you want to connect further. My contact info is on my profile.

Congrats!I can imagine. I'm currently trying to get a job and its quite challenging

Networking is what got me this job. I am admittedly lucky that the network I built was as well connected as it was. Now that I'm in I'm just making sure I keep up. So much to learn. I love it.

Wrote a book (non-technical). A very interesting experience indeed. I used LeanPub for the content and then CreateSpace for the deadtree version.

Super cool! Would love to hear more about your self-publishing experience -- mind if I shoot you an email?

Sorry for the delay. I generally abstain from HN over the weekends.

Feel free to email me, there are several addresses in my profile entry. I reply fastest to the GMail one.

I really should blog about my experience of writing a book. Some parts were easier than I expected, while others were about as hard as I expected. All together, I think with the facilities available through services like LeanPub and CreateSpace, it was easier and smoother than I initially expected.

Sorry for the second reply, but I have written a blog entry on my book writing experience. It ended up larger than I expected, yet still doesn't exhaust all that I would want to say, so more may follow.

http://simonpeter.org/mechanics-of-writing-a-book/

What I did in 2014

I travelled to China (Hangzhou), Thailand (Phuket), Sardinia, Berlin and Copenhagen for both work and leisure.

I presented my Master thesis and the associated poster to the VLDB '14 conference in China (major Big Data conference).

I also presented at PyData and two more local meetups on Big Data topics, including PostgreSQL.

I wrote a paid tech report on Big Data.

I contributed python code to three open source projects: OpenBazaar, TimeManager, Doge Terminal (:P)

I learned Scala, Ansible, PostgreSQL and PostGIS, better OOP Python, Guava, better testing, better bash, better javascript, Vagrant, vim, better git.

I understand the steps involved in setting up very complex systems and system adminstration a lot better now.

I worked on some personal projects in Python and javascript, the most important of which were a web scraper to search for flats in Switzerland, an online regex tester and a tool that uses the last.fm API to return statistics about users

I also tried my hand at CoffeeScript and configured a chat bot (Hubot) to optimize chatting with my boyfriend.

I amassed a big collection of cookie cutters for any occasion (even 3D ones) and baked cookies for my friends.

I read at least 3 proper books in German and improved my vocabulary.

Also read more than 5 programming books to improve my craft, and a lot of fiction (also some in a non-Western context which was very eye opening) and some non-fiction on economics, politics, poverty, women's issues and math.

I went to three job interviews but ended up choosing to stay at my current job. Valuable experiences, nevertheless, which made me learn more things about interviewing and negotiating which kindof contradict the popular advice one can find online.

I produced more than 10 data reports for customers all over the world.

I finally finished an SaaS product that I plan to start selling in early January, once I get back from a holiday break.

Pretty excited to have a side-project that I think can generate revenue.

Very cool! If I may, what niche is your SaaS product in?

Its a tool for freelancers and agencies to make a certain bit of client communication better.

Other uses are plenty, but this one is my focus.

Quit my job to start a company. Failed, but learned a lot of important lessons. Got back to a well paid job. Probably most important - got back to a very good shape.

Could you share some of the lessons learned?

Sure, some of the most important ones are below:

- ideas are worthless without execution

- focus on the product - doing anything else before having at least an mvp is dumb

- focus on one thing at a time

- never lie to yourself

- we usually hugely overestimate what we can achieve in a short period of time, but also hugely underestimate what we can do in a long one

- being in good shape greatly improve my mood and performance at work

- don't mistake activity for achievement

And some more. Of course most of this stuff is obvious and I have always thought I knew them. This was in theory - this year I have 'learned' them the hard way.

- Completed university with a 1st class degree in Computer Science.

- Developed a prototype eCommerce website (not live yet) In PHP(CodeIgniter) for my final year project. (Which I am currently working on porting to Django)

- Deployed a website (Actually took a lot more time than I thought it would.)

- Finally took a break and went on vacation with 10-20% of good online availability for 2 months.

- Lost 11 kilograms (24.25 pounds), although I think it was mostly due to final year stress.

- Attended https://www.siliconmilkroundabout.com/, my first ever technology focused meetup/job fair.

- Started watching my first anime(Naruto) after overhearing conversations from my friends about how good it is.I finally understand why they enjoy it.

- Got my first job as a software developer.

- Finally met my father.

- Realized that I'm a much better programmer than I thought.

- Realized how quickly I can learn new things.

- Started knowing myself.

I spoke at a conference for the first time and spoke at a total of two conferences. Both conferences were for languages I really enjoy: Elixir and Ruby.

This is cliche, but I met a ton of really nice people that I enjoy being around, especially programmers!

I think I've expanded my mind drastically this year. I've learned to enjoy building again and not stressing over OOP pedantry. I also finally think I'm understanding the value of functional programming.

I learned to not be dogmatic about testing or project management. Everything is so fluid. I'm learning to be patient and thoughtful.

I'm most happy that my wife and I are finally living in the same country as one another.

-Have teached and tutored people in programming, for free.

-Organized an event for +200 people with +10 sponsors for a non-profit.

-Read amazing books, most notably: Zero to One, The Innovator's Dilemma, Good to Great and A Brief History of Time; among others.

-Considerably improoved my competitive programming skills

-Made various sites, I'm rocking on front-end dev

-Went to India to teach various subjects to unprivileged kids

-Went to Dubai to share time with my dad after having him away for 19 years

-Traveled to the US 2 times (Florida and North Virginia)

-Have written essays which really smart people are debating around the internet

-Despite the heavy workload, I'm keeping up with college

A lot for the DayJob, unfortunately little more than nothing for side projects.

Moved to a new job, finished a degree, found love and lost it as well

I've managed to fix a few low-profile security bugs in various projects.

I switched jobs to one that pays double what I was making at my last one... which isn't saying much because I was being royally screwed.

I did not manage to do anything I had actually planned to do at the precipice of 2014, however.

I've been meaning to launch a product per year. 2013 was SideProjectors (http://sideprojectors.com) - which is still going quite well, plenty of people posting their projects for sale.

2014 was Postatic (http://postatic.com) - allowing people to create their HN clone (or Reddit clone or online communities, however you call it) - it's been rewarding to get so much feedback from users and improving the product.

Let's see what I can build next year. :)

Created a pet project this year, it has ~400k hits/month and I earn more than $1k/month with ads. It is completely passive outcome.

- Finally got a junior dev position! Took 3 years, I already gave up when I got the email out of the blue.

- Made an android app

- Made a game

- Went back to school for Software Engineering

Released my first two side projects and presented at the largest Android conference in the U.S.

Awesome! Your side project are Android apps, correct? How did you start in Android dev?

Went on a long job hunt, resulting in 6 offers, with the best one paying more than 5x my current current salary. Got a much better understanding of the professional landscape and the opportunities out there.

Doubled the sales of Candy Japan.

Went back to school and completed my M.Sc.

Regular employment.

I grew a side project (appointment scheduling) 150% and even scored a large multinational corporation as a customer.

Worked remotely for the whole year. It has been an interesting ride.

- Finished a software engineer in product security internship at Twitter.

- Ran a security class [0] in Greece.

- Presented my master thesis on decentralized transaction identity and trust [1] for my Electrical and Computer Engineering degree, but didn't complete the degree yet.

- Talked about BREACH [2] at the SFHMMY [3] and FOSSCOMM [4] conferences.

- Did a talk about computer security at a local community high school.

- Attended FOSDEM [5]

- Invented an anonymous decentralized marketplace system [6] and joined the OpenBazaar [7] team as a core developer.

- Traveled to the Turkey (Istanbul), Greece (Alexandroupolis, Ioannina, Athens, Ikaria, Thessaloniki, Lamia, Corfu, Drama, Komotini), Austria (Salzburg, Vienna), UK (London), Belgium (Brussels).

- Hiked through the Vikos Gorge, the Astraka Refuge and Drakolimni in Greece. Sailed in Preveza and in the Saronic Gulf in Greece [8]. Snowboarded in Zell am See in Austria.

- Tried two different interesting mind-altering chemical substances.

- Spent quite a long and nice time with friends, family, and lovers often doing nothing at all with them.

- Bungee jumped for the second time in my life, this time in Corinth and double the height (78m) of my previous jump.

- Got hired as a full-time software engineer at Google.

- Moved from San Francisco, US to Zurich, Switzerland.

- Started my private pilot license.

- Taught math, physics, programming, algorithms, web development, and security to many students privately for free.

- Donated more money than any other year in my life to charity.

- Started learning guitar.

- Lived in a share-house for the first time.

- Learned many things about security and software engineering, realized I'm a noob in so many things and fields and I want to improve a lot!

[0] http://security-class.gr/

[1] https://gist.github.com/dionyziz/e3b296861175e0ebea4b

[2] http://breachattack.com/

[3] http://www.sfhmmy.gr/

[4] http://lamia.fosscomm.gr/

[5] https://fosdem.org/2014/

[6] https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2014-M...

[7] https://openbazaar.org/

[8] https://mapsengine.google.com/map/viewer?hl=en&authuser=0&mi...

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