Idea for a piece of software – What now? | Hacker News Reader

Idea for a piece of software – What now?

1 pointtomtoise2 comments

Hi HN.

I'm a guy who browses HN regularly, but the only exposure I've had to programming was a module on Java in University a few years back.

I recently had an idea for a cool piece of software that may have some value to others, but have no idea how to go about making it, marketing it or even releasing it as Open Source.

It should in theory be a fairly simple task to implement this idea, a Google search of this problem just reveals a plethora of requests on freelance sites for people to implement individual versions of the software I have in mind.

How would I go about making this idea into concrete code?

I'm not rich, I work a minimum wage tech support job and I'm not that interested in monetizing it to be honest, I'd be happy to release it as an Open Source project once it was done.

Tell people about it. Write something on (say) Medium explaining what it is, why it would be awesome if it existed, and asking people to get in touch with you if they agree.

Also, what is it?

It's a piece of software for large offices. Working in IT for an office of 170+ users over two floors has given me the idea. Our hard-coded (Names, user profile pictures) visio-based floor-plans are constantly out of date as users leave, move desks, join etc.

I was thinking this piece of software would scrape the Active Directory for names, feed it into an SQL database and then through SharePoint (I only say SharePoint because that's what our Intranet is based on), you could host static Visio-based floor plans of just the desk-spaces.

You could then link the SQL database to the live Visio floorplans and then move the users around as needed on the page, making them up to date for the whole office as soon as one person updates it, rather than having to email the whole office with the updated document, wasting time and effort, as as soon as any personnel changes are made, the document has to be manually re-edited with names and whatnot from scratch.

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