What project are you working on during the upcoming holidays? | Hacker News Reader

What project are you working on during the upcoming holidays?

myholidayapp.com

31 pointssecos26 comments

Modern Warfare 2 and whatever beer I receive for Christmas. Holidays aren't meant for working.

Fall season has been incredible this year in regard to games. CoD MW2, Borderlands, Dragon Age, L4D 2, Assassins Creed 2, the list goes on.

This is when I wish I was still working in the gaming industry: game purchases were expensed, playing was considered "research", and we had "gaming holidays" when hot titles were released so we could spend all day playing. :)

I wrote a god awful seismic tomography tool for geologists the past few months. The gory details: Written in Java, exposed as a web service that takes a path on the server that hosts the seismic tomography tool. The tool is accessed using a swing front end. So the user has to upload their files to the server using ftp or whatever, then login with remote desktop to the server and start the swing app.

These were all my bosses ideas. So I've decided to redo this project the right way over the break and come back to work with a solution I can be proud of! I'm thinking a basic PHP and html/css web app.

> These were all my bosses ideas.

When you already know a better, simpler, cheaper, and faster way to meet the stated goals, you can email your boss a counter-proposal, clearly outlining the advantages to your proposed approach.

This might be risky in highly political work environments (or with touchy bosses), but in general, they are paying for your expertise, not your typing skills, and a decent boss will recognize and appreciate your initiative.

I'm guilty of this also, although yesterday when a consultant educated my boss about the existence of Virtualization (which my boss apparently knew nothing about) and I replied "oh yeah, I've got VirtualBox running on my dev machine, I do all of my coding on VM's", I realized that I am doing him a great disservice by not interjecting more. Part of my problem is that my boss tends to interrupt people when they are talking, which puts me off a little bit when I'm trying to explain an alternative technology or method to him. I don't think that he intends to be rude, and at first I thought that he was picking up on what I was saying and making a quick decision, and that is why he tended to shift the conversation or ask an unrelated question. I now realize that he probably doesn't always follow what I'm saying, he just thinks of something else and blurts it out in the middle of my explanation, so I need to be more forceful in getting my point across so that he can make a fully educated decision.

You don't necessarily want to be forceful, but you DO want to be concise. The biggest problems I see programmers/engineers/IT folks have is they tend to ramble on and on about the topic at hand. Managers, and non-technical people, want a relevant, but concise, explanation. Think elevator pitch. What can you explain in 1 minute? In 5 minutes?

That is excellent advice! I am (unfortunately) a 5 minute voice mail rambler, which my wife often makes fun of me for. Make it an elevator pitch, I'm going to remember that.

30s to get your point across. Time for the point plus 2-3 key supporting arguments.

I hope it's ok to drop a small advert in here, it seems to be on topic.

If a good artist, designer or usability engineer is looking for a project over Christmas week then I and a friend(1) are going to be building a web app and would love a third partner. E-mail christmas09 at theplanis.com

(1) I'm a systems engineer who dabbles in marketing, Java Script, DBs and web apps - if you want a reference I can send you a beta invite for my current project. He is a lawyer who specialises in scripting languages and CSS.

I am working on AppRabbit.com (sorry, just a landing page right now), a database web app composer. I'd love to be to Microsoft Access what Google Docs is to Word and Excel. There are numerous other offerings available right now (including Zoho Creator), so I am really focusing on being the simple, straight forward, and functional. I'm doing it on my own right now, but I'm not apposed to taking on a cofounder. Truth be told I'm not much of a designer or a UX expert, although I'm moderately handy with jQuery/Ajax, so I could really use some help in that regards.

We are beta launching www.nixty.com. I've got a # of interviews scheduled with people in New England to demo the product and get initial feedback. If you live in New England and are interested in seeing NIXTY, then shoot me an email at glen at nixty.com. To borrow Fred Wilson's term, our BHAG is to become the "educational operating system of the web", just as Amazon is the default shopping system and google is the default search operating system -- we want to become the default educational platform for individuals, trainers/educators, and institutions.

— Lisp compiler (ambitiously, an Arc/GOAL inspired dialect for games/multimedia, initially to target a Lua-like niche)

— TIGsource "Assemblee" game competition entry

— Client-side Javascript/canvas pixel art editor

— Playing with Adobe's Flex SDK

— Productivity application (as you may have guessed, it involves methods for keeping track of multiple parallel projects ;)

— Actual holiday stuff

— Clearing some of my backlog of video games I've been meaning to play. Top of the list is Uncharted 2.

I just finished updating Phonalyzr to support Android 1.6+ devices, with a few more graphs and options thrown in:

http://mld.dreamhosters.com/phonalyzr.apk

I need to test it a bit more, but hopefully I'll put in on the Market tonight.

Oh, so many ideas, if only I could focus.

- Slime Volleyball in Clojure

- Some text-based game or simulation to take advantage of Ruby's metaprogramming abilities

- Improving an existing online game I run with AJAX/Facebook Connect.

Here's a suggestion for a project to work on this upcoming holiday. Freeciv web client: http://code.google.com/p/freeciv-forever/

Mornings - Project Sleepalot.

Afternoons - build something fun using OpenGL, as I've always wanted to learn it properly. Ideas welcome.

Palm webOS application. It's top secret :)

I thought I'd get out and meet new people by working as a department store Santa. It's so different to what I'd normally do that it's bound to be... fun... right?

PHP port of PHPXref. Alpha is done already :)

http://elev.at

Replaying Uncharted 2 at higher difficulty level.

A Maemo app for my soon-arriving N900.

What holidays?

Take your pick:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:December_observances

Festivus.

I have 8 siblings, and several years ago, I took it upon myself to organize the our gift exchange. Every since then, it's been my responsibility to come up with the list of who buys for who.

At first I just randomly generated the list of buyers and recipients using a python script, but last year I got creative and made a puzzle website for my siblings to solve:

http://markpneyer.com/christmas08/

I had fun working on it, and [some of them] had fun solving the puzzle, so I'm doing it again this year. Oh, the possibilities.

I also have 8 siblings (and my name is also Mark, that's interesting). We do the gift exchange thing every year too, shopping for 8 kids is easy, shopping for 8 adults with spouses and children gets really expensive! I just have to say that your approach is awesome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com