I quit what many would consider a successfull job in programming and had a sabbatical year. Moved to a smaller town and down sized everything in spending to the point where I pay $600 per month for housing, food and bills, so living of my savings haven't been an issue at all.
I have focused on things like reading (read +40 books in 2017, up from 1-2 per year), wood working, sketching, running and skiing. To keep up my programming skills I have done a deep dive in new programming languages and fiddling with some side projects. It has been an incredible year for personal development and it has changed my perspective on what things are important in life (sitting in front of a screen 40-60 hours a week not being one of them). I highly recommend everyone to do this at least once in your career!
Trying to be the world's first person to be cured from autism. I believe my autism is caused by the shape of my forehead, which puts too much pressure on my muscles. Evidence is here: https://corticalchauvinism.com/2017/11/13/yuval-levental-cra...
Also, I have prepared for a potential surgery by getting botox injections in my forehead muscle. So far, my focus at work has dramatically improved: https://corticalchauvinism.com/2016/10/17/yuval-levental-aut...
Left $150k software engineering job (well got fired for making video called "9 Ways to cope with having a boring 9-5 job" which somebody found and sent to HR) to make videos about stuff I think is interesting (https://www.youtube.com/c/JDiculous1 https://www.facebook.com/HonestLogic), with a slant towards addressing wage slavery, basic income, student loans, capitalism, etc. Still in the early stages, but I'll be hitting this hard in 2018.
Quitting my full-time job to pursue my side-projects was the best thing I could have done for my health and sanity this year.
I am now working on a bunch of ideas that I hope will help some people around here:
1. A Pocket-to-Kindle service that syncs (almost) instantly to your Kindle whatever article you save, formats it like a professionally edited book, cleans up ads and takes advantage of the new typesetting engine inside the new Kindle firmware.
2. A Spotify music discovery website. I'm trying to make a two-click-playlist-generator by using Spotify APIs to look at the top artists/genres of a user and create playlists on the fly with tracks that the user could like.
I use Spotify daily and found myself overwhelmed by how much music there is available. Because of that, I'm mostly listening to my saved songs, Discover Weekly/Release Radar and trying out playlists that usually have the same too popular songs.
3. An adaptive brightness/contrast app for external monitors. Adjusting brightness using the monitor's controls is always annoying to do.
4. A morning alarm that starts playing an algorithmically generated Spotify playlist each time, with fade-up volume, external speaker support, adaptive algorithm based on likes/dislikes and self-updating alarm times based on day moments (twilight, sunrise, golden hour, dusk etc.)
5. A detector for processes that eat up all your CPU and battery. I started writing this in Rust so I can make it cross-platform and learn the language at a lower level.
Hosted Comments https://www.hostedcomments.com/ , a Disqus alternative with a focus on privacy. The learning experience of building Hosted Comments was great : using iframes to embed comments in websites, building a commenting system with voting and some features which Disqus does not have : locking comments, hiding comments (not yet deployed https://imgur.com/a/R89Cw ). It started out as a sideproject, then decided to go the SaaS route and now a little confused about whether I want to pursue this as my main project. I'm thinking about releasing an open source self hosted version and continue offering a managed service.
Bored Hackers https://www.boredhackers.com : a public chatroom based community site. Think of it like reddit, but chatrooms insteads of forums. I just deployed the first version a few hours ago. Bored Hackers is an experiment at building the community site that I wish existed : public chatroom based communites, pseudonymous users, transparent moderation logs, an open source code base and a site that is welcoming to non-technical users. Currently, there is a single chat room for all discussions and support for user created chat rooms will be added shortly.
I spent most of the year working my ass off consulting for one of America's most hated companies building an utterly pointless system. My only consolation is knowing that I wasted a ton of their money since there's no chance it will pay any returns.
Holberton School - https://www.holbertonschool.com/ a two-year alternative to college to become a Software Engineer.
The school is free to students until they find a job, then they contribute with a % of their salary. After only 9 months, many students find internships and jobs at companies like NASA, Apple, LinkedIn, Tesla, Dropbox...
It's a life-changing experience for many of our students, and it also changes the Tech industry by bringing folks with an untraditional background. Our students are straight out of high-school, some had a career before: cashier, math teacher, artist, poker player...
We have no formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by working on projects and collaborating with their peers. We are located in San Francisco and looking forward expanding.
Published The Tao of tmux: https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read. Thanks to the HN readers who bought the book!
Created new design for all my open source projects: https://www.git-pull.com (see sidebar at left, e.g. https://libtmux.git-pull.com)
Rebooted CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) language project, cihai: https://cihai.git-pull.com (see also: https://unihan-etl.git-pull.com). Needs funding.
New docutils based website started, https://devel.tech. Example: https://devel.tech/features/django-vs-flask/
I catalog open source contributions I make while working on the website at https://devel.tech/site/open-source
Updates to https://www.hskflashcards.com. Switching from Bootstrap 4 to Bulma
My health https://www.instagram.com/p/BdX6yyInrBD/?taken-by=kthakore2
Took a long break from hacking and staying indoors playing with yet another framework. I am much happier :) my depression is better and I have more balance :) Less likely to burn out.
I left an amazing company with one of the best work environments (https://webflow.com) to work for a non-profit that fights child sexual abuse (https://www.wearethorn.org). The work has been incredibly rewarding, and although I was quite nervous about leaving an awesome job and jumping into an unknown, in hindsight almost everything about the change was a meaningfully positive improvement. Working towards a mission that personally I feel has a lot of value has been an awesome experience.
I continued to work on intercooler.js:
https://github.com/LeadDyno/intercooler-js
I'm trying to get people to reconsider the more traditional web development style of server-side rendering of HTML + HATEOAS.
My friends have been streaming on twitch so I've been writing a bot for them to play overlays/games with their viewers, let viewers earn points, queue up music, etc.
Along the way I brushed up on some es6 concepts, learned React, and was reminded of writing eggdrop bot scripts back in the day :P
Everything is public on github and is somewhat-generic/reusable by others. Hope to complete documentation and make it 100% generic in Jan/Feb so others can use and contribute.
Core bot library: https://github.com/bdickason/hpc-bot Twitch overlay server: https://github.com/bdickason/twitch-overlay Their specific bot files: https://github.com/bdickason/dumbledore
Also helped deploy/ship Tekken Chicken, a framedata app for Tekken 7 (ios: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/t7chicken/id1244210422?mt=8) (android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.t7chicken&...)
I've worked at the highest paying job i ever got in my career. But then i quit in july to focus on a startup I joined after we were featured in techcrunch and received angel investment.
Now i realized that the money was the least of our problem and the startup is on the brink of death.
I replaced the source of my income from job to stock market investments. Now i am focusing on a new side project that poped in my head. For the last 2 months I have built a prototype that works and started to dogfood it.
It's a tag that turns any object into a smart object (still working on my elevator pitch). What it does is allow you to contact the owner of any device. Put the tag on your car and anyone can contact you about your car(i.e. if it is blocking the way or you left your lights on). Put the tag on your keychain and if you lose them people can contact you. You can use the tags on anything really.
I started by building an android app but then realized you can do all this directly from the browser.
Expect the first beta in January.
One project that I really enjoyed working on this year is https://www.meteorshowers.org/. It's a webgl visualization of NASA meteoroid data. Open source here: https://github.com/typpo/showers
I also maintain an open source SMS API called Textbelt, but it became unreliable due to spammers. I launched a paid hosted version and have been steadily improving it: https://textbelt.com/
Lambda School - a rigorous, live online computer science education that’s free until you’re hired. https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science
Started as a side project in January, and I had no idea it would take off like this. We now have 20 employees, including instructors from Google, Apple, Blizzard, etc. and our first graduating students are getting hired for great salaries all over the US. (Average is $85,000 in low cost of living areas)
We offer a free, licensed MBA (working on accreditation process) using an interactive (re: non-video), mobile-centric content platform. In addition, we provide job-matching services for anyone interested in opting in.
I'm proud of what we've built and hoping it continues to see traction in 2018.
I left a very good SW Engineering job in London, travelled for 3 months, pimped up my 2013's side project for 3 months and started selling it. Now I have created a company around it, been profitable for months. Now I carry my boss-less/office-less job around the world as a Digital Nomad. Happy new year from Mexico!
My side project that became my job: https://readonlyrest.com
At the end of 2016 I left contracting gig for a full time position to work on helping solve intermittency problem with solar PV power generation through forecasting.
With a team of 3 including myself, the only professional software developer, we have launched and run a solar radiation and PV power forecasting/observation API (solcast.com.au) that can provide solar radiation and PV power forecasts world wide that update every 10-30 minutes based on satellite coverage.
For the past 10 months this API has been freely accessible whilst we validated our approach and expanded to cover the globe. After great feedback from users, we are now planning a big update to make it even easier to use and to integrate live PV output data into forecasting itself.
The change to work on something that contributes a large net positively to society’s around the world (making solar based electricity generation more financially attractive to operators/home owners a like all over the world) has been hugely rewarding and look forward to the growth of solar power generation in 2018.
Two machine-learning models for the detection of breast cancers from medical imaging of breast cancer biopsy tissue. Big focus on making models accessible to clinicians.
The models are:
(1) PPReCOGG, one of the models based on Gabor filters and k-NN (https://github.com/jszym/pprecogg)
(2) DeepDuct, the second model, based on a pre-trained VGG16 network and the Grad-CAM algorithm, localises lesions _and_ informs clinicians about why the model has chosen the lesion type it did.
You can find more details in my master's thesis, for which the models were written: http://cs.mcgill.ca/~jszymb/thesis/260528685_Szymborski_Jose...
(Edit: Also, if you're hiring machine learning people, medical or otherwise, please get in touch at hn at jszym point com)
Running the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which hosts projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus, has been a very full time job, as we've expanded to include nearly every cloud company, enterprise software provider and startup in our industry. But I have gotten to contribute to a few cool open source projects:
Cloud Native Landscape (now over 350 projects and products) https://github.com/cncf/landscape#current-version
DevStats provides detailed visualizations of Kubernetes contributions https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/
Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/
I launched two projects. 1) http://instant10-k.com/ An efficient way to search 10-k and 10-q filings for publicly listed companies. A Form 10-K is an annual report required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that gives a comprehensive summary of a company's financial performance. 10-Q is the quarterly version. If you have ever purchased an individual stock you should read the 10-k and 10-Q reports. 2. http://datasetapi.com - A platform to host clean curated datasets.An airport dataset is live, More to follow.
A friend and I created https://quicktype.io to generate TypeScript, Swift, Go, C#, C++, etc. from JSON sample data and GraphQL queries.
Many have tried to solve this problem – we've found at least 20 projects that attempt to turn JSON sample data into code to represent that data, but they're almost all abandoned and they all have the same fundamental flaws (they generate invalid code for most non-trivial inputs).
In the past two weeks we've created Xcode and VS Code plugins. I've had so much fun with this project! We'd love to create a business around quicktype but we haven't figured that part out yet.
I worked on two cool open source music technology projects called ListenBrainz [1] (basically an open source version of Last.FM backed by the MetaBrainz Foundation, the people behind MusicBrainz) and AcousticBrainz [2] (a project trying to crowdsource acoustic information about music and release it as public domain). We released a beta for ListenBrainz over the summer and I've been working on data dumps for both ListenBrainz and AcousticBrainz for the past few weeks.
I got a pen plotter (AxiDraw v3) and it's been a great creative outlet. I wrote a couple tutorials on techniques I learned or discovered:
Fractal generation with L Systems: https://bitaesthetics.com/posts/fractal-generation-with-l-sy...
Surface projection: https://bitaesthetics.com/posts/surface-projection.html
In my free time I've been coding a TCP/IP stack in C++(14): https://github.com/ambrop72/aipstack . It uses a single-threaded event-driven architecture, is usable on embedded system (no mallocs), and is header-only.
Much work is yet to me done including docs (lots of Doxygen-based docs exist but introductory and TCP API docs are generally missing). However the TCP implementation should actually be pretty solid.
Built Commento, a privacy-focused alternative to Disqus: https://github.com/adtac/commento
Right now, it exists as a Github project that you can self-host, but I'll soon offer it as a paid service if you don't want to host and maintain servers on your own. (And maybe even apply to YC, who knows :))
It started out with me reading a blog post [1] and thinking "I can write Disqus tonight". And that's how it began; I had a working prototype in 24 hours (at the expense of a final exam I had in two days haha). Posted it on HN, and it blew up. And then I sat down and made it into a serious project that's now actually used by other people. I've had senior devs from huge companies (like Atlassian) contribute to the project, and I think that's amazing.
There were a few other things going on, but mostly I've taken xi editor forward. It's still almost at the point where you'd want to use it for your daily work, but not there just yet. In the last two months, I've had a strong focus on performance, and now it's paying off. A few PR's are still in flight, and there's a write-up than needs to be done, but it's now scrolling smoothly on my 165 Hz gaming monitor (2560x1440 resolution, integrated graphics at that). I'm excited about the progress and feel that it will become a really usable tool fairly soon.
I've worked almost exclusively on https://info-beamer.com, a digital signage service for the Raspberry Pi. It all started as a for fun project while freelancing and turned into a profitable business. All while still being a lot of fun to work on. Unlike other Pi based solutions, info-beamer isn't using a sluggish browser but uses Lua/C at its core to use all the hardware acceleration features while still being pretty simple to program (see https://info-beamer.com/doc/info-beamer). The challenge is always to make all those feature easily available through a web interface. I'm currently improving that a lot by enabling users to create more complicated output without any programming knowledge. Getting to know Vue.js has helped a lot with that.
I was working on LibreTaxi https://github.com/ro31337/libretaxi
it's ride sharing app that works thru Telegram (currently). Surprisingly, it worked really well, there are 100-500 rides in some cities every day
At work I've got more familiar with Terraform, got started with Kubernetes, and contributed significantly to the infrastructure of a few awesome projects.
In my spare time I've been maintaining my Autospotting pet project, which is maturing nicely, growing a lot and already generated savings in the six-seven digits for its users: https://github.com/cristim/autospotting
I also spent time learning to play guitar, made a habit of practicing and working out on a daily basis and towards the end of the year I became a father.
All in all it was likely my best year so far.
I worked on building a python library for automated feature engineering called Featuretools (https://github.com/featuretools/featuretools/). I had been working on it for 2 years, but in 2017 we separated it from the rest of the codebase and made it open source.
Even though feature engineering is crucial for building machine learning pipelines, there are few formal methods for performing feature engineering. We see Featuretools filling a missing component in the software engineering stack for data science.
It has already been put to the test with our customers at my company, but we have also begun to release demos so that others can pick it up https://www.featuretools.com/demos.
I nearly ended up a pancake when my steering failed heading into a turn in February, the day before my birthday. I realized the circumstances that led to me not being able to fix it before it led to near disaster weren't going to change on the path I was heading down largely by habit, so I finally set some priorities.
I decided to focus on making a business out of music. I'm far from where I want to be, but it's been a long time since I was doing Mechanical Turk tasks to pay for junk food. I have savings, my music is improving, and 4 people pay me almost $15 a month through Patreon[1]. Probably not a lot to the crowd here at HN, but it's a peace of mind I never knew before.
The big, super-important lesson I got from that is to not cling to what I wanted at some point in the past and accept how things are. I wanted to be fully financially independent, but had no plans, no goals, no notion of how I might make it happen. I had the desire, but not the will or commitment.
Being two seconds and one failure of attention from the front end of an 18-wheeler has a way of hitting the reset button.
2017 has been an intense, yet extremely rewarding year to say the least. This year I learned the meaning of "grit".
- Launched my startup on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/slackpass-2).
- Interviewed with YC, sadly didn't make the cut.
- Had hundreds of of calls and thousands of chats with founders looking to create paid communities.
- Helped many create their own profitable, paid communities.
- Became a solo founder.
- Became profitable enough to cover both business and personal expenses.
- Rebranded to LaunchPass (https://launchpass.com) due to inevitable trademark issues with the use of "Slack" in our name, and plans to expand beyond Slack. (btw Slack has been awesome regarding the transition)
- And plenty more I intend to write about in a "year in review" post I'm working on.
Becoming a founder this year was one of the most challenging, fascinating, and deeply rewarding experiences I've ever had.
Here's to a happy, healthy, productive, and successful 2018
Happy New Year HN!
Started working on my first side project! It's an alternative way to screen developers that I think is better than anything that's currently out there. I'm interested in hearing feedback on the idea.
You provide JSON data that will be exposed through an API which candidates will use. They are given instructions on how to parse and manipulate the data. Then they POST the response to you. If the response is 200 OK - they've passed and they can upload their code for your team to review and decide if they should go to the interview stage.
I think this has lots of benefits:
- It's gives candidates a real-life problem to solve. Most, if not all software developers will have to interact with API's and manipulate data.
- Candidates can use their own dev environment that they are comfortable using.
- It saves the company time. They can choose to only assess the code of people who pass the test.
- It makes for a good candidate experience. I think it reflects well on a company if their interview process is close to real-life work.
Hoping to ship the beta version of this next month
Taking my company's first product from "demo to industry partner" to "two systems installed and used in production by our end clients".
It's been a rough year financially but we've made a ton of ground and it's looking pretty damn shiny for 2018.
Edit: Since that was pretty vague, it's a system for guarding, automating and remotely operating industrial hydraulic booms (eg. fixed plant rockbreakers, jib and knuckleboom cranes, etc.)
Worked on a dating app http://crushhourapp.com as a side project with a friend of mine.
It took almost 1.5 years to complete, Backend APIs were done with Django, iOS app with Swift. The concept is dating app for London commuters.
I created the whole London Underground maps programmatically in the app. The final result was ok, unfortunately dating market is already saturated, and our market is only limited to London, lesson learned, test your idea first, build a quick prototype, don't spend more than 5-6 months, unless you are really sure.
For the rest of the year, I have concentrated in learning Reactive functional programming, created a small backend app with Clojure, at work I am working on iOS app, which I have architected using, RxSwift, MVVM, it has over 650 tests, with close to 80% test coverage using Quick and Nimble frameworks.
I started a company, Argonomo (https://argonomo.com) and we founded and soft launched two ventures:
- SafeWhistle: An anonymous, encrypted, privacy-focused whistleblowing and incident management application companies and institutions can implement to help cut down on lack of reporting and increase transparency. (https://safewhistle.com)
- Sidepitch: A venture management system targeting private equity groups and venture capitalists. Streamlining the application process for startups and giving investors a central management solution for their investments, instead of a collection of emails, paper documents, and in-face communications. (https://sidepitch.com)
Built a fintech-ish startup all by myself, zero funding. I didn't intend to do it all by myself but it's not a sexy business so no one was jumping to go full-time. It came close to breaking me as a human being, honestly.
Anyway, I went from being a CTO who was constantly being pitched horrible no-good business ideas by first times CEOs - who as a rule, wanted to give me 10% equity but also wanted me to build the project for free - to a CEO who closed countless sales and knows his CAC and LTV like the back of his hand.
If I can, so can you but you have to manage CAC:LTV.
My open source project: building best practiced apis fast with Python3 https://github.com/agconti/cookiecutter-django-rest
I released another iOS app. It has been two years since I released anything. Really lost interest because the market is so large, and it’s hard for a ream of one. However, I’ve decided to write several little apps instead of trying to boil the oceans.
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/12/29/word-search-1-1-rele...
The idea is that quantity trumps quality:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...
I left my full time job about 3 months ago to start my own software consulting venture. Ive maintained projects from old clients I had on the side, and also created and launched a new project for a client (RN mobile app). Still have to get an online presence setup for the company. Its been going well so far, and I am looking forward to new projects and clients in 2018.
I launched ScrumGenius (https://scrumgenius.com). Its a side project I started for fun at my previous job (it was just a simple slack bot script back then) and decided to actually build a service and launch it a few months ago. I did not take it too seriously at first, I was just using it to learn. However, after reading indiehackers and other people launching products I was really inspired to give it a try. Its been steadily growing and it makes around $300/mo.
Hoping to continue to grow it even more in 2018.
If anyone is looking for a end to end consultant that does Full Stack Dev with experience in mobile and web! Please do reach out, would love to talk! I am based in Canada and UK.
A friend and I were concerned that Vimperator would die with Firefox 57, so we made our own version [1]. To our delight, it mostly works and has a few users.
I put time into my search engine for talks (https://www.findlectures.com/). I did two conference talks on it, at Solr/Lucene Revolution (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ia1DRz3l8) and AI With The Best (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvUf9LZxEv8).
I've also been working on extracting the UI components into a library of UI components for Solr (https://github.com/garysieling/solrkit) and a project to generate email alerts of suggested talks based on interests (https://github.com/garysieling/email-alerts).
I started streaming coding on Twitch - https://twitch.tv/mimmingcodes
It’s rekindled my excitement of using the Internet to share knowledge.
Automating more Terraform stuff.
First, a script that calculates what percentage of your AWS resources (15 different resources for now) are managed by the Terraform code in a given directory, and then creates GitHub style badges for each. https://github.com/chrisanthropic/terraform-infra-as-code-co...
Second, a script to fully automate importing an existing GitHub org into Terraform and create a basic Terraform resource block for each resource. Imports teams, users, user memberships, and all repos. https://github.com/chrisanthropic/terraform-import-github-or...
Both scripts are just bash and the AWS API, GitHub API, and Terraform. jq is also required.
https://ossia.io : a visual programming language for interactive shows & music, and its associated network protocols & integrations in creative coding environments (puredata, max/msp, unity3d, openframeworks, etc...)
1. on-device speech recognition and command clasifier. V. Proprietary.
2. antigen target filtering system for a boolean logic platform for using CAR-T with AML.
3. Database and retrieval system for a series of experiments in gerbil and chinchilla cochlea to study wave propagation along the organ of corti.
4. a unity-based traveller RPG character management suite.
5. A system to measure whisker deflection in rats as a proxy for studying Bell's palsy
6. a variety of small silly projects for personal use.
CPU INFOrmation library: a cross-platform library to discover supported instruction sets, microarchitecture, and cache parameters of the CPU. Started as a "oh, I can do it over the weekend" project at first, took close to a year to get to production quality.
I spent some of my time creating realtime procedural animations in 64kB, as part of the demoscene. 64kB is the size of the Windows executable (including all models, textures, music, etc.).
Youtube capture of my last work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27PN1SsXbjM (but please try the executable if you can)
Started my own company as a side gig and started selling my own software. I developed PowerShell Pro Tools for Visual Studio as well as a web site development kit with PowerShell. https://ironmansoftware.com/ It's been super rewarding and a lot of work. Very excited to see how it turns out in 2018.
I open sourced a ZIP library written in Swift for macOS/iOS/tvOS/watchOS and Linux: https://github.com/weichsel/ZIPFoundation and wrote an article about it here: https://thomas.zoechling.me/journal/
Also improved my Mac app to record and export Animated GIFs: https://itunes.apple.com/app/claquette-animated-screenshots/...
I left my old job and built a lot of things, even built some things with friends. A lot of which have become open source. Also did a lot of reverse engineering.
4. https://github.com/Inumedia/NXLDownloader
5. https://labs.crr.io/maplestory/PKG1
Those are the main ones.
As a side project, I worked on https://stayintech.com/ It was fun to explore the Google Maps and Places API.
And also I updated my usability checklist https://stayintech.com/UX
After my former employer had a successful exit, I spent a few months helping to integrate with the new parent company. Once that was done to satisfaction, though, all but four members of our tech department were laid off--including me. I used the bonus payout, my severance and some investment success to finance my own startup...
My first product is meant to help businesses with eCommerce stores (particularly those powered by WooCommerce for now) keep track of inventory counts and locations:
Quit my job (Frontend engineer), moved to the east coast and bought a hotel. I don't think I can go back working for corporation/startup.
My net income reduced (Based on the 2016 P&L) but so far I like it.
Learned about Go and blockchains by combining them in a personal project. For those already seasoned in Go or Blockchains, feedback welcome :) https://github.com/Grrrben/gocoin
I focused on completing my Master's in Biomedical Engineering. I looked at augmented reality for guidance during a surgery itself. The clinical application was the (robot-assisted) laparoscopic partial nephrectomy, aka kidney cancer surgery. Knowing that surgeons use ultrasound imaging during the surgery to scan the kidney, I sought to answer the question of how can we leverage this information to guide the surgeon and inform them of where their tools were in relation to the tumour at any given time?
A relatively easy to read description can be found in [0], while the main paper can be found in [1].
[0] http://stories.innovation.ubc.ca/augmented-reality-in-minima...
[1] Singla, Rohit, et al. "Intra-operative ultrasound-based augmented reality guidance for laparoscopic surgery." Healthcare technology letters 4.5 (2017): 204. http://digital-library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/h...
I worked on my side project, a cross-platform game engine: https://github.com/bioglaze/aether3d
In 2017 I mostly worked on the engine's Vulkan and D3D12 support. In 2018 I plan to add Android support and physically-based rendering.
I sometimes also blog about the development: https://bioglaze.blogspot.fi/
Worked on SMS Privacy (which I actually started towards the end of 2016) offering anonymous SMS connectivity paid in bitcoin: https://smsprivacy.org/
And a small project but a good one: the world's most secure encrypted pastebin (maybe), using ipfs: https://hardbin.com/
Also quit my job and now full-time supported by my own projects.
At my day job (dev consulting), I worked the entire year on a project that our client ultimately decided to shelve, which allowed me to level up my Ember.js, Rails, and Postgres.
On the volunteer front, I ran a computer club at my daughter's middle school for 20 sessions of 2 hours each, teaching kids some basic JavaScript, and taking them on a tour of things like turtle graphics, L-systems, rotoscoping, and a wrote them a simple "get the coins, don't touch the lava" game engine and a text-based level designer for it.
I also took a two week gig for Girls Who Code to run one of their campus summer programs at the University of Minnesota. We used Scratch to cover basic programming concepts, and in the second week they split into teams, each team working on a socially progressive game. One of the teams wrote a two player platformer that had a male and female character. The man had fewer hazards, and picked up money, and the woman had more hazards and picked up hearts. The levels were passed by the man and woman both flipping gender-specific switches. On the last level, the woman character doesn't appear, and the man can't complete all the tasks. Genius, and from a group of middle school kids.
I started coding a platform to save webpages.(Evernote like)
There are two main ideas:
* Build a personal webarchive so that links you like never disapear
* Being able to find any articles you liked in the past by searching them from their title, content or similar sentences of the text (like you can search "wooden house" and it will find an article which contains the sentence "wooden home")
The platform will be available with a montly subscription fee OR for free if you host it by yourself
Suing LinkedIn / Microsoft to protect free speech and the "right to remember" https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/forbestech...
I've been building LiveFeeds (https://www.livefeeds.io/), a platform for helping online retailers keep their affiliate data feeds and ad networks up to date. Currently, many affiliates work from data feeds that are only published once or twice a day, leaving them out of sync on prices and stock levels for many hours every day.
I’ve been working fulltime for an IDE for music. None of the currenct DAW and MIDI editors really understand music. Notepad : IDE = DAW : my thing. Sign up here I’ll ping you when it’s ready https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-aQzVbkbGwv2BMQsvuoneOUPgyr...
Just yesterday I released my first Android application (a game called: "Shades and Hues - a game of color gradients": https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nkcss.shad... never published a mobile app before, so that was fun :)
For my business (I work 32-hours a week and have my own consulting company on the side); I wrote software for a .NET CE Embedded device (Zebra; previously Symbol Kiosk device) that allows customers to price-check in retail stores. A customer of mine put up 4 hardware units in their store, and has been working great. I also wrote the communication software for their PoS cash register to accept PIN+Chip Debit cards, which has also been running for nearly a year without a hitch. Have one offer pending for a big project to write a custom OCR application, which would be the biggest project I've done solo, to hopefull, I can tell you guys about that next year :)
I let a close friend recruit me, after over a year of trying, and have been working on a new project that took on a life of its own. I've been more productive and happy in the past few months than I have been in years. 2017 was the best year ever. Before that, so was 2016, etc., every year better than the last. 2018, I'm sure, will be another new all-time high.
I learned and released my first gamedev project - a multiplayer arena fighter (http://kikiki.io) . Still have a couple hundred people playing per day, but no longer maintained.
These days, I'm learning React/React-Native to build a marketplace that connects photographers with people who want better dating photos.
First things first: for my relationship which I had been working on, I finally got married to the woman I've been with for 7 years now.
My business, NoteToServices ( https://notetoservices.com ) became official this year, though it was registered 2 years ago, I could actually make it legit.
For my side projects, I was happy to release two web apps which I did a Show HN for one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16041245
Call Me Private ( https://callmeprivate.com ) and Text Me Private ( https://textmeprivate.com ) are two services that allow you to purchase virtual numbers to mask your own phone number for more privacy.
I also created a website called ScamShare which allows people to share the latest email and phone scams they've received, explain their situation, or just generally get the word out there about these scams and scammers to fight the good fight! https://scamshare.com
Had some trouble with my turning-5 years old website, Confessions of the Professions ( http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com ), earlier in the year, which were theme-related, so I've been in the works of finding a theme that really stuck with me and lately I've admired Medium.com, who also admitted that they've indefinitely removed custom domains, but I really wanted something similar, for its aesthetic beauty and simplicity, so I managed to update a theme to my needs.
Primarily on my kinda-side project Exoframe [1]. We needed a self-hosted tool that allows simple one-command deployments and I've ended up building it myself using Docker. Seems to work pretty well so far :D
I made the leap and partnered up full time with a friend & former coworker on his indie game "Clone Drone in the Danger Zone", a third-person laser-sword-fighter where any part of your body can be sliced off.
We released on Steam[1] Early Access in March, which was a special moment to be a part of (I grew up as a kid playing games on Steam, the process behind game creation used to be a mysterious fascination!)
In 2017 we built and released a ton of fun updates -- a Steam Workshop integration, Twitch Mode & Twitch Extension (where chatters can spawn enemies), and a super ambitious chapter 3 that added AI allies and a multi-part tower-assault adventure with fun scripted/animated moments.
Coming up next we tackle multiplayer. To do that, we first spent a month "burning a pancake" by making a small free multiplayer game called "Long Live Santa!" [2]. Within 3 days, more players had installed that game than the game we'd spent over a year on... it just hit over 100,000 players, just over a couple weeks after its initial release. We were surprised to see the momentum that releasing something for free generates.
It's been a lot of challenging, varied work, with more autonomy and skin in the game than any previous role and I absolutely love it.
Going in to next year we are going full force on adding multiplayer to Clone Drone, using the lessons learned from Long Live Santa to guide us. (& if you've made a multiplayer game before, would love to chat some time and swap notes!)
[1]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/597170/
[2]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/763410/Long_Live_Santa/
Working for six months on a project that initially sounded awesome, but the combination of the slowness of client feedback (it would take weeks to get signoff on features that would have been days for other projects), and conflicts with the architect (I asked questions regarding the project, he'd complain to my manager that I was asking questions) had me moved onto a legacy maintenance project for three months, then laid off when the budget ran out. Add financial fun and being hospitalised for what turned out to be an uncontrolled blood pressure spike and ya, it was a fun time.
I'm now with another company managing various development teams to add continuous delivery to their projects. Combo of project management, business and system analysts, and a bit of coding and devops knowledge has been making this project challenging, but pretty cool to work on.
Still working on Codeflow - A visual programming platform - http://codeflow.co. Do have a look!
I'm volunteering in a local high school, helping out with a few CS classes. My main focus is an introductory Python class. I've put together a few projects for the students in that class:
http://blog.jrheard.com/watercolorbot
http://blog.jrheard.com/python/passwords
http://jrheard.com/blog-staging/python/caesar.html
I'm excited to see how the rest of this school year goes - by the end of it, I'll have a suite of projects that beginners to Python might find very useful!
Focused mostly on my programming tutorial Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/iamdavidwparker). Started the year ~500 subscribers and ended around ~1200.
Wrote small Go tools related to the language's AST, using the go/ast and go/build packages.
The `predeclared' command finds identifiers that shadow Go's built-in identifiers (make, copy, error, etc.). This type of shadowing results in cognitive overhead when reading code or can lead to unexpected bugs.
https://github.com/nishanths/predeclared
The `dedupimport' command fixes duplicate named import declarations in Go source files; i.e. imports that have the same import path but different import names [2].
Battling mid life crisis this year i suppose, something stirring inside of me lately. Feeling uneasy.. Been in the data analytics industry within corporate America for 20 years.. Never seen such a bifurcation between the statistical analytics practitioners and the compsci crowd with deep nets.
Thinking about the next chapter. A few buddies and I created an outlet for our math and computation hobby. Starting to help traders with stat arb. So we just released a side business site that helps traders who are unfamiliar with all the math - a way to visualize the markets as well as trade pairs or factors in real time. https://raveanalytics.com/
I worked on a small team to produce motion comicbooks for the web:
https://reader.madefire.com/work/w-a52abd89424c4fddb4b040e1d...
Asked 144 people a question ‘What is the most exciting trend in technology for you in next 15 years?’. Got amazing answers. There were many standard ones like ‘AI and Cryptocurrencies’. Most interesting responses started with ‘I am not really a tech-savvy person, but...’.
Try it. Ask personally and select people with different backgrounds. Let people speak and just listen.
I plan to summarize it in an article in 2018. It has been fun to compare this to the current Gartner's Hype Cycle* for example. Automated analysis of such free-form answers (and scaling to millions of answers) would be interesting to work on.
--
Two side projects: a budgeting app that is a fresh take on the problem. I'm currently using it for my family's budgeting and once I feel it's polished enough I plan to open it up to users.
Also working on a closet design app. We bought a house that had completely empty closets (not even a basic closet rod), and learned the hard way that existing closet design solutions are all quite bad. I built a very simple one to meet our needs, then from there kept polishing it. It saved us money as we were able to design a closet that met our exact needs and only buy the needed parts. Most/all closet design apps are "package" oriented, forcing you to commit to less or more than you actually need.
Went back to being an Emerging Markets hedge fund manager after taking 5 years off to research ASD
Created www.ananas.org.uk to map the worlds belief systems using AI and data science incentivised by tax deductible crypto (closed ecosystem Veblen good model supported by ERC-721 sponsorship of scripture)
Worked on finalising specs for www.symmitree.com to give every refugee access to free android smartphones and data in the next two years using functional distributed ledgers combined with biometrics and lots of great partners. Blockchain bonds too based on the IFFIm program, the legal side has been really interesting, as has delving into self sovereign ID with zero knowledge proofs.
Has been a great year, hopefully 2018 will be an even better one.
Potioneer, my VR gardening simulator/Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley game. I had to take a two month hiatus while I switched jobs but I'm back at it every moment I get. I'm hoping to launch the game fully by this time 2018.
If you're interested in this kind of thing, be sure to follow me on GNU Social: https://kwat.chat/focusonfungames
You can find the game on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/544410/Potioneer_The_VR_Ga...
I built a system that takes map data for whole UK topography and produces maps in html/svg, pdf/jpg .. and autocad DXF.
Built with postgres+postGIS and node.js. Around 400Gb dataset, maps generate in around a second.
A lot of time spent on processing data quickly, and on data formats.
Also did a related system that looks up any address in the UK via postcode or keyword, with sub-second response.
In progress, a blockchain simulator in node.js, to test out some scaling ideas...
Also spent time convincing people to teach multiplication in a better way : quantblog.wordpress.com & gridmaths.com ... and about why Bitcoin does need a larger block.
Looking to more consulting work in 2018 working on blockchain tech.
I've been finally making serious progress on my startup, and have been picking up bigger customers lately.
I kind of fucked up and decided to try the whole solo founder thing. I don't recommend it.
I had a few bad experiences with cofounders at previous startups, so my rationale was to wait for the right person to come along. But that never happened... so I decided to just go solo.
Being a solo founder has been by far the hardest thing I've ever done. It's been brutal at times.
So what did I work on in 2017? Keeping the company alive and trying to make shit happen.
I'm now 2 years in, still alive, and 2018 is looking really good.
I'm happy with 2 open source projects I've published:
- ssrf_filter (https://github.com/arkadiyt/ssrf_filter): a ruby gem for preventing server side request forgery attacks
- bounty-targets-data (https://github.com/arkadiyt/bounty-targets-data): an automatically updating repository of all Hackerone/Bugcrowd in-scope domains (for use in scripted bug hunting)
I got a job in New Zealand and moved from China to here.
Also finished up a few small bits I started back in 2016.
One is a side project for writing slides with Swift: https://github.com/Codezerker/Truffaut
Another is `NS[Mutable]AttributedString` in `swift-corelibs-foundation`: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/pull/1378
Human computation! Not to be too #hailcorporate, but my job's pretty fun. It's using machine learning and humans together to solve problems. The fields pretty focused on labelling tasks, but there's much more to it. Having a large human workforce backed by a bunch of engineers and data scientists is like a fast-forward button on machine learning. You use humans and computers together to do things we really can't automate yet (or even ever, without general AI). ML meets cog-sci meets HCI meets crowdsourcing.
Working on an IOS-based dating service which handles your facebook friends, mutual friends and soon to add searching capabilities, people within an 100m radius and people you would meet at events, it has several hundred users right now since beta-launch a couple months back.
Inspired because of things like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16041292
Heres my IOS appstore link: appsto.re/ca/SfGTib.i
Please do check it out and provide feedback!
I started consulting and interviewing prep startup for engineers who want to become PMs. http://bit.ly/2q5APCD
We built a CMS that works anywhere, on any website, on any platform.
Works with React, Angular, Vue, etc., and any server side technology.
http://worldwidewebworks.blogspot.com/
About my 4th or 5th iteration of my desire to help the increasingly disenfranchised and poor in the US to create an income wherever they want to live by using the internet. A little pushback against the trend that all the jobs are moving to the big city and most people can't afford to live there.
Plus various other things, like I got myself off the street and back into housing.
Edits. Cuz auto-correct. Ergh
I made a lot of smoke, but not a lot of fire.
Two years ago I said I was going to clone Berzerk as my second game dev project, and made my first commit[0].
This year I basically tore the entire thing apart several times and wound up just working on general framework and game development code[1]. Some of it still doesn't work. Most of it is probably crap.
I also worked on, and have given up on, a HN-like forum written in Hack[2]. It wasn't very good, though. Just got bored with it.
I've taken a lot of Udemy tutorials for Unity and OpenGL, and gotten some Hello World stuff to run in WebAssembly.
Basically, I've either been very productive, or I've completely wasted the last two years of my life, depending on your point of view.
I also came across a pile of old cd/dvds I kept old code and short stories and things on and archived it. Found some PHP I wrote in 2004, and some old sites from when I used to blog regularly and review movies.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819380
I made (Let's) All Mine, a site that I hoped would pay for a master's degree in statistics. The idea was inspired by The Million Dollar Homepage [2] which was an experiment in what qualifies as a website. Essentially, that site took people's annoyance by ads, and made a site that was entirely ads, a 1000x1000 pixel grid where each square pixel cost $1. And it was successful.
My project takes people's annoyance by browser miners, and is a site whose entire purpose is browser mining. There's nothing else to it. The goal is to mine 1,000 Monero (an altcoin) collaboratively. After taxes and fees, that would cover the approximate cost of 2 years in grad school. I did the math the other day and realized that with about 1 million miners, I could achieve this task in 1 week (or 1 day with 7.5M miners, or 1 month with 250k people).
I've had very little luck getting the word out. While I'd love for the internet's capricious eye to smile on me and make it take off, I'm not optimistic. Nevertheless, it was a fun learning project!
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
With some encouragement from fellow HNers I've been working on startyourownisp.com. It's a free guide to starting a (wireless) Internet Service Provider in your garage.
Spent 9 months of the year developing a REST API for a project that is launching in the coming months whilst finishing my CS degree online (finish in May). Have learned a lot along the way, mainly more about the HTTP protocol in general but also unit testing and working with third-party contractors that are building SDK's to interface with my API. All in all been a very challenging year professionally but have learned a lot of lessons that will help in the years ahead.
This year I ramped up my home projects. I always wanted to create my own game universe with simulated entities (just like in Dwarf Fortress) so my first step towards that is an ASCII/Tile engine, Zircon (https://github.com/Hexworks/zircon). I have 4 releases now, several contributors, and a small community. I really enjoy the interaction with the other guys in this niche market (mainly on Reddit and Discord).
Another project is funktion (https://github.com/Hexworks/funktion) which is basically a wrapper for some of Clojure's nicesities (persistent data structures, STM, Refs).
I started to grow an umbrella "company" for my projects: Hexworks (https://github.com/Hexworks) and another one with a friend: AppCraft (https://github.com/AppCraft-Projects).
Almost everything I do is open source and is on GitHub.
I also started my own blog (http://the-cogitator.com/) and its Medium counterpart (https://medium.com/@addamsson).
There is some other stuff which I did not mention here, these are the things I focus on.
- left my old job like every year or so
- commenced an MSc course focussing on AI and Machine Learning
- according to GitHub I've created 624 commits and 35 new repositories in 2017
- built Botlang (https://botlang.org/), a scripting language for conversational chatbots
- have begun blogging about this and that (https://www.matchilling.com/blog/)
Most of the startups that I have been a part of have been deeply dysfunctional. I wanted to document this, by describing what I'd seen, so I wrote "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps". The intro is here:
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/how-to-destroy-a-tech-s...
I built https://conjure.sh in my spare time, which watches github pull requests and spins up containers, so that engineers can review quickly without as much context switching. Still putting final touches on it (working out kinks with AWS Fargate).
Also led an engineering team at a startup that is seeing some good growth, but left it at the end of the year after some internal drama.
Spent the first half at a startup I'd been working at for about a year before getting acquired by Amazon and joining the Alexa org. Made peanuts on my options and left after a few months to start a cannabis company. Our aim is to manufacture and distribute high quality vape cartridges and pre rolls while contributing to the liberation and well-being of the drug war's many victims and their communities. So far, so good! :)
I built and launched two projects:
https://docsift.com, which was a tool for journalists and legal teams to help smooth fact discovery from large document dumps. I ultimately benched it because I'm not a lawyer or a journalist and couldn't find a motivated group of users to provide good feedback.
While I was building Docsift, I'd built a Slack integration to get nice-looking cryptocurrency quotes, and it was growing on its own after sharing it in a single team; I decided to switch gears and work on that. It turned into https://www.CoinAlerts.io, which is a quoting tool and alerting service for cryptocurrency hobbyists, investors, and speculators. It's been growing pretty strongly on its own, and I'm having a great time hacking away at it. I'm building another thing in that space right now, splitting some of my time off from CoinAlerts to work on it; ultimately they'll go together. No comment on whether or not I think BTC or crypto in general are a bubble, but I'm really enamored with the space.
This year I finished my project GeoJS. I want to open source it in the next couple of months and try and find sponsorship through Digital ocean or Vultr so I can place some more nodes around the world.
Also on my roadmap is updating the stack to use the newer versions of maxminds geoip dbs. This requires custom compiling some software I haven't got around to yet.
I worked on various toy projects mainly in Scheme but also in Python:
- Scheme: I learned more ReactJS+Redux and implemented a similar framework using BiwaScheme and snabbdom. Here is an example app: https://github.com/amirouche/scheme-todomvc
- Python: I started a project but without a good idea of where it will go. It's based on asyncio, aiohttp and a custom ReactJS based framework inspired from my Scheme work (read the point above). The project served me well, as template for asyncio+aiohttp based projects: https://github.com/amirouche/xp-socialite
- Scheme GNU Guile: I slowly improved my search engine, I reworked the database schema and querying algorithm: https://github.com/a-guile-mind/Culturia
- Scheme GNU Guile: I create binding for termbox and made a tiny editor https://github.com/a-guile-mind/azul.scm
- Scheme GNU Guile: I added ffi to Guile JavaScript backend https://gitlab.com/amirouche/guile/tree/compile-to-js-2017
- Scheme: I started a dynamic blog engine (a la wordpress) https://github.com/a-guile-mind/presence
We are mobile development agency, so most of the work we did was client work
- NFL, MLB & Basketball teams coaching iPad applications
- Worked on Productivity application for Singapore based startup
- Worked on Gifting application for USA based startup
Apart from client work here are the interesting things we did:
- Grown Apple Developers Club to 1000+ members on meetup [https://www.meetup.com/Apple-Developers-Club-Ahmedabad/]
- Started AI & ML Developers meetup group [https://www.meetup.com/Artificial-Intelligence-and-Machine-L...]
- Open sourced MFCard on GitHub [https://github.com/MobileFirstInc/MFCard]
- Provided 4 paid Internship to college students
- Launched App Fixers & Shots on Product Hunt
Dealt with fulfilling my last Kickstarter. Which was initially going to be "ship books to Amazon, have them send them out, and then leave them on Amazon's store" until it turned out that Amazon is bureaucratically incapable of doing anything to an oversized paperback book than slipping it into a bubble envelope. I finally got the high-tier books drawn in and shipped out this month. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egypturnash/decrypting-...
Intermittently poked at the TV show proposal I made a couple years back that's turned into a comics project: http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/
Drew a couple eight-page comics for anthologies - one book on Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1855150928/were-still-h...), one is in a four-issue series Image is putting out this February (https://imagecomics.com/content/view/what-the-world-needs-no...).
Started running a Mastodon instance: https://dragon.style/
Started getting back to work on my next graphic novel, after a two-year hiatus due to a death in the family and that Kickstarter mentioned at the top of this comment.
Attempting to ramp up my OSS involvement. I made a small contribution to CoreDNS and, encouraged by the friendly and welcoming maintainers, got System.HashCode committed to .Net. It proved what I've known all along: there's much more to learn and people who know way more than me out there - I've found a second love for programming. I can't recommend getting involved in any project enough.
teaching AIs how to touch and interact with the environment (not officially released yet): https://github.com/jtoy/sensenet
I set up my own consulting company and, when not working for clients, I am trying to work on some of the common issues I found in businesses I worked in.
I just launched a simple tool: http://stackbiller.com - it's a tool to keep track of all the SAAS subscriptions a company may have. It's a small tool but hopefully will be useful.
My little side project is News Uniter [1], and it's an attempt to break out of your news media-consuming bubble and help read different news sources.
The most recent update shows the home page of each news site side by side, so you can see what media outlets focus on different headlines. It's interesting to see what is considered "important news" at various places - it can sometimes help better reveal media biases, and, I think, can help people with other political leanings understand those biases more.
At least one friend could not believe another friend of mine when he claimed that Fox News did not have a particular very important headline at the top of their page. This app could help show, "Here's what each news site thinks is important, and how it may be different from what you think it might be."
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-uniter/id1182818371?mt=...
Building out CloudSploit (https://cloudsploit.com) to help improve AWS cloud security.
One highly-used tool we released this year was an S3 Bucket security scanner. We made it after reading article after article featuring companies who lost customer data because they failed to properly secure their S3 buckets.
System for automating perception using Deep Learning - computer vision, natural language processing, text to speech, advanced speech recognition. For robotics and artistic purposes. The pace in this area is simply stunning and it's unbelievable what a talented kid can do with it these days. Maybe I'll release parts of it as open source someday.
Spent the last 9 months on a startup I co-founded, https://carbonstate.com
We are producing an ECM system aimed at the SMB market.
The short feature list is:
- Configuration driven; no coding required to create management systems
- Complex schema support ( nested and linked types )
- Automatic data entry/modification form creation
- Workflow support
- Compiled templating with fragments and support for reverse proxy cache invalidation on data change
- Horizontal scaling ( nanomsg based node interactions )
- Vertical scaling ( new event based http server translating http messages to nanomsg )
- Script driven installer system with UI ( smaller and more flexible than NSIS - <100k installers containing XML parsing and a general purpose scripting language )
Kickstarter to fund finishing the project is in the works.
Before the startup, at the beginning of the year, I rewrote a new version of Apache Avro in C, C++, Perl, and Java to replace all of the event logging within Amazon. The code runs billions of times per day across 4 major web platforms and 20+ component systems.
I published my first book C# And XML Primer (https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484225943) and wrote my second book Pro Windows 10 Development in C# 7 (https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484229330).
I started learning Elixir and wrote Plsm (https://github.com/jhartwell/Plsm/) which is my highest starred github repo with a whopping 86 stars (my previous highest was only 7).
Finishing up 2017, I'm working on my first mobile app using Xamarin Forms and Elixir + Phoenix for the server side. It is a simple train schedule app for the Chicago Metra but it is something that will help me and hopefully others.
I have been working on pet project since July, 2016, quitted the daily job and turned that into SaaS startup [1] in 2017, raised funding and built a team. At the end of 2017, we got 10X growth in terms of data size, having 5 paying customers with $24K ARR.
A new kind of UX tool. The first version uses text-commands to create and edit wireframes. These articles are about the progress of the prototype: https://medium.com/proof-of-concept
In a week or two there will be an online sandbox version for people to play with.
I released my first ever big project this year. Learn Anything (https://learn-anything.xyz).
It's pretty amazing to see how fast it evolved and how much there is still to do. Can't wait to see what will happen to it in 2018 and what we will be able to do with it.
Built a home office v2 after working a couple years in various offices, coworkings or in my living room (couch != home office).
Single best decision I've done in my career. Finally I'm in control of lighting conditions, noise level, ergonomics, schedule.
The number of hours/day (secret) I am able to comfortably deliver has literally doubled.
I'm making an affiliate platform that only charges a commission on the commissions. It lets businesses sign up affiliates (bloggers, news sites, comparison sites, aggregators etc) and pay commissions for sales that affiliates refer. Commissions can be paid with a credit card and don't need a connected bank account or upfront funding (lots of existing affiliate platforms require this and have minimums).
The idea is that businesses who don't know yet if affiliate marketing will work can try it without too much upfront investment or commitment. If it does work, then we can help it grow with predictable unit-pricing. And if it does not work, then you didn't need to spend any money or do anything complicated to find that out.
We'll be looking for beta testers soon. If you might be interested in trying it out, feel free to email me: steve AT referberry.com
Started the year taking CS232n deep learning course. Then I started looking into spaces and markets to build something in, and get loads of practice doing customer dev. I looked at CSV tools, amazon seller tools, data cleaning services, VR game spectating, sushi collection mobile game, but none of them seemed right for one reason or another.
After that, I just wanted to build something I wanted to use, so I built Helmspoint—it helps you deploy Keras image recognition machine learning models to the web. Just upload the trained keras model, and it generates the web app and API. I’ve always found it maddening to configure servers, set up TLS, domain names, environment variables, etc, just to get something to show or share models with other people, so that’s why I built it.
It's an easy to use, bookmark manager. I was disappointed in how bloated pocket became and opted in to make my own solution. It's still in early stages right now but a lot more features (and at least an Android app) are coming.
I continued working on my modem https://github.com/quiet
This year I got it and its dependencies to compile in Windows (MSVC) which was a major undertaking. I also got underway on creating better documentation and bindings in Python.
Happy New Year HN!
This year has been full of surprises and challenges, but it was also one of the most rewarding.
- Started building Taskade (https://www.taskade.com) with my friends Stan (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lxcid) and Dionis (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sntk).
- Launched our MVP on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/taskade).
- Raised funding from incredible investors and advisors to help us scale the business.
Here's to an amazing 2018!
I worked on https://www.pagedash.com, bookmarking with the content if you will.
I also launched https://themalaysianpulse.com, a Malaysian news aggregator.
I designed and implemented an in-house timeline system, which collects communications with our customers across all channels (chat, email, sms, phonecalls etc). Learned a lot, but also almost burned out closer to the end of the year. I was working remotely and mostly alone. Scope creep and lack of proper management has bitten me really hard. When I finally launched the app into production, I felt nothing but tiredness.
I still can't wrap my head around the React ecosystem. Front-end part was the most time consuming (probably because before this project I did only backend stuff). I enjoy react, but the whole game "build your own build system", "build your own framework" is beyond me. I hope the new year will bring more solutions like nextjs.
I improved a lot my side project called @whattheshot, a Twitter Bot that features a quiz around cinema since 2010: https://twitter.com/whattheshot.
It tweets a movie frame every 10 minutes and people have 5 min to guess the movie (from where the frame was taken). I improved a lot of things during 2017. It now interacts in three different languages (English, French, Spanish), accepts requests in DM from regular players, can be controlled by myself through DMs.
The bot can change behavior according to the news/day (like right now, it features shots from movies with fireworks, make-ups, to prepare for the New Year's Eve).
It is based on whatthemovie.com, which I co-develop as well.
I launched my startup http://www.manypixels.co - a design service for bootstrapped startups (though we have a few VC funded ones as clients) and agencies. On the way to hit $10k MRR this month!
of my own projects:
finished my book (3½ years in the making, so my new years resolution 2015, 2016, 2017): https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/b/understanding-seo now in a second print
my obtrusive live testing app (chrome extension) now v 1 0.1.5:(so, ready for production) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/f19n-obtrusive-liv...
next year: book marketing & distribution and a focused mini community around obtrusive live testing
I had a bad burn out and had to quit my job to keep my sanity. I've always had the habit of sharing interesting tech articles with my friends, so I launched https://discoverdev.io as a side project. It's basically a no BS curated daily list of good engineering articles that I feel would be worth your time! Had to teach myself some web dev and some basic design.
Right now working on a platform for developers to explain the internal workings of their projects. This would help a lot of new comers understand how a particular project works as opposed to being asked to read it's source code.
All on all 2017 was a meh year, hoping for a brighter 2018.
http://playquest.io A minimalist create-your-own adventure RPG/interactive story using nothing but text and emoji. Started as a simple exercise to learn more about front-end development and to build out my portfolio of personal projects. tried to do a kickstarter that was not successful. put together with Django, jQuery, Bootstrap and some JS libraries including underscore and hammer.js and an API for text to speech. For the most part it is spaghetti code and it made me realize that I should really start working on a front end framework, so I’ve been working on ReactJS and will possibly rewrite the game in React.
Music was my passion before I went to college for CS and pursued software engineering and eventually product management. For some reason I all but completely abandoned music while focussing on becoming a software developer...
this year I decided to launch my own solo music project, recording and producing a 5 song EP on Logic Pro. It was fun blending my 'engineering' chops with my music as i dusted off my songwriting/piano/guitar skills.
I am in the process of wrapping up a static site generator I made. https://github.com/sachleen/Steady I used it as an opportunity to refresh my PHP skills and start using Composer. In the process, I also made and published my first package on packagist. https://packagist.org/packages/sachleen/twig-truncatep that allows you to truncate a block of HTML (say an article) to a fixed number of paragraphs in a Twig template.
Started an initiative which will allow to tick "{machine, deep} learning, computer vision" checkbox in company's product feature-list.
Technically that means designing an FPGA-based vision system which interfaces with existing control system.
I finished Data Commander (MVP) - http://conceptoriented.com - A web-app for column-oriented data transformations.
After getting some feedback I decided to position this technology differently. Instead of exposing the functionality via web app, I started implementing a Java library http://github.com/asavinov/bistro - an alternative to map-reduce. In 2018 I am going to develop a server for IoT and stream analytics - an alternative to kafka stream analytics based on Bistro.
Playing around with combining music composition, math and programming.
In 2017 I started working on the 'reboot' of the Kurento project, an open-source WebRTC media server (http://www.kurento.org)
It's been quite a busy year because a new team had to be formed almost from the start -due to the previous team leaving the ship- and also over the months I've been slowly getting in charge of all maintenance and development work.
Progress is slow but steady, last couple months have been dedicated to prepare a new release that will be the first step in the way of recovering contact with the community, and keeping the project relevant and useful.
I bootstrapped and launched my Customer Success Management app Akita - https://www.akitaapp.com
It's been a LONG road but we've finally got happy customers and revenue.
I had a busy year. I converted a major auction site to fully responsive as the sole front-end developer and interface designer, learned Java and started doing full stack development at work, and then quit my job when they moved the offices too far away.
After quitting I decided to start my own company and began developing next generation assistive devices for the blind. I actually got pretty far along that path when I thought of an idea in a different realm that had much larger potential and required much less development. I can't talk about the specifics yet, but I'm getting very close to launching a new type of mapping service.
I seriously started pursuing Python, did number of freelance projects and managed to write a few blog posts at http://www.kashifaziz.me
2018 will be the year of Python for me.
I held a full time crm position while working 100 hours a month doing laravel development for a local startup. Created php websites and implemented features for other client. Watched 500+ laracast videos, went to my first online conference. Tried to re learned react instead learned vue. Tried to reimplement a movie game in vue / quasar framework with some success from a half finished react project which was from a 1/4 finished angular project.
Also moved around a few hundred websites from mostly hostgator accoints to a droplet setup.
The one area I struggled with was what to build next last year. I hope to get more clarity this year.
I left my job to work full-time on https://sublimefund.org, with the goal of getting more people involved in philanthropy.
I'm working on donation matching right now.
I worked mainly on open source side projects such as:
Sandglass https://github.com/celrenheit/sandglass a distributed, horizontally scalable, persistent, time ordered message queue. It was developed to support asynchronous tasks and message scheduling which makes it suitable for usage as a task queue.
Sandflake https://github.com/celrenheit/sandflake decentralized, sequential, lexicographically sortable unique id.
Wrote, and still working on a personal music streaming web app. Started this with the intention of learning some new tech and seeing if I could really see a project through. Its functional but still in progress. Its been great and I learnt tons from it, highlights include: - My first serverless app - First project without any css frameworks - Got to try out vue.js and loved it - my first app to use aws cognito - or any aws services for that matter, got to work with s3, api gateway and lambda too.
Overall a great learning experience. Its free to use if anyone wants to try it out: tuneco.logikgatemusic.com
The Rakudo compiler: https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/
Feeling a lot more optimistic about it today than a year ago. \o/
Had my first full year working on my startup https://www.taskade.com/
It have been challenging. I switch from being an iOS engineer to a full stack web developer. I always thought its easy to manage a team but I was so wrong. Struggling between doing and delegating.
I hope to I learn and improve going forward into 2018, trying to be good at enabling my teammates more. Hope we make Taskade becoming great.
I'm grateful I have good relationship with my co-founders though and still enjoy very much working with them. Hope we achieve great things together.
Happy New Year HN!
Cheers, Stan
My wife and I worked remotely (~4 days a week) and we traveled the world. South east Asia, Europe, US and back via Asia to end the year home in Australia. It was an awesome year, saw some incredible places and also got to work on some interesting Dev projects. I had a chance to get a few open source PRs through to a Python CMS and towards the end of the year got invited to join the core development team. Getting more involved with open source has been lots of fun, seeing how bigger teams work together and also actually contributing some complex (for me) fixes has been great.
Fixed: Spelling
After a 10-years-or-so hiatus I finally got back at composing music, and completed 29 songs and 4 albums, this fall only: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4nxDh1lPq0EclBPMNXnYa3 and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgNm_EwMyLBrKp_kmdU3XoA. Doing this in parallel to going through a divorce with three kids has been quite a ride.
Not as cool as a lot of these, but I built https://voyagefound.com as a react learning project. It's a filterable interface for viewing random pages on WikiVoyage.org.
It's one of those projects that I got 95% done in a few weekends early this year, then lost interest. I spent some holiday time last week wrapping it up and deploying it. Actually finishing projects (especially learning projects) is something I often struggle with, so it felt good to get over the finish line on this little project.
Landed a new job in a new (to me), hard to enter industry making 2x what I used to make. Also achieved 2 new certifications. Personally I finally have a good management of my migraines and starting toward veganism.
Worked on Safepay, (Venmo for Pakistan). Got the iOS app built and integrated it with Cybersource for visa/MasterCard transactions, and all the banks in Pakistan for bank-to-bank transfers. Currently working on the Android app. Great way to learn how money moves in traditional finance
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/safepay-pakistan/id123442758...
Biggest thing seems to be writing non-trivial GraphQL + Rails backend. It was quite interesting work: there is still not really much best practices for this combination, so just to make it work in a Rails way did take some time and trial and error. At the end I am happy with results and I hope to find some time to publish blog post on it.
Other than that: I did some face lift for my side project http://notationtraining.com and implemented new MIDI API to connect midi (piano) keyboard directly to web app.
I keep a growing library of little one-page javascript apps for illustrating concepts and educating my two boys. Reviewing my commit history for the year, I was pleased to find I've added nearly 20 apps to it in 2017. I wouldn't have been able to build so many 20 years ago, but there's so much code available out there to copy-paste, programming often feels like playing with building blocks.
There a lot of Stock Sites for After Effect Templates but nobody renders in the Cloud and is geared to the Instagram or Youtube Crowd. I don't want to offer an online Videomaker. But a solution that allows artists to improve their Videos with professional Titles, Lower Thirds, Intros and Transitions. I am almost finished. And launching soon.
Interested? You can leave your Email or take a short Survey here: https://goo.gl/forms/wyaDctXiybuj8YIE3
I’ll notify you when it’s ready.
This year has been the year of blockchain for me. I have worked on several blockchain projects.
Documentation for blockchain tech is not that great, so I created a screencast for ethereum / blockchain devs:
Utube channel: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZM8XQjNOyG2ElPpEUtNasA
Website: http://eattheblocks.com
Looking forward to keep posting one new video a week. Hopefully it will help more devs to come in this industry :)
Usability Testing Exchange — where other people will do usability testing of your website, for free, and give feedback to you. You give feedback to others too, and get back as much feedback as you give, counted in characters.
https://usability.testing.exchange
And EffectiveDiscussions, a discussion forum that brings together the best from Slack, Discourse, StackOverflow, HackerNews, Disqus.
I started learning Elixir/Pheonix and React for a project in my company. Elixir/ Phoenix didn't take much time but React gave me some hiccups initially but seems good now.
Really loved way functional programming works and also how Elixir handles things . Later I was able to relate Elixir concepts with ES6 features in React. Loved this stack. Hoping to get better in them as the time passes.
Looking forward to contributing to an open source project in these technologies this year.
Any recommendations for Elixir/Phoenix would be highly appreciated to begin with.
Since the last quarter of 2017 I'm working during my free time on Raita - a static site generator with web interface, built with Express.js and Vue.js.
It's still in baby steps, but I'm already building my personal website using it (so I can see what features I'm still missing), then I plan to build a starter theme and in the end official site.
If You're interested, You can see the actual code here: https://github.com/mrmnmly/raita
I've been making a soon to be released 7th Guest-esque haunted mansion puzzle game! http://www.doctorarcana.com
Recently, we released RsRelayJS, a small RxJS lib that provides 'Relay' types. These are analogous to Subject types, but without the ability to call complete() or error(). Therefore, they are stateless in the sense that they cannot enter a terminal state. I've found myself using these more than Subjects in our code, to bridge non-Rx code to Rx.
Check it out here - https://github.com/Microsoft/RxRelayJS
Deep Video Analytics: https://www.deepvideoanalytics.com Github : https://github.com/akshayubhat/deepvideoanalytics
A large scale visual data analytics platform, think SQL/MapReduce/Full-text search but for images and videos using Deep Learning. Now writing few papers on/using it to finish and get my PhD.
I created meli[1], which is a faster alternative to docker-compose.
I also created sewer[2], which is a letsencrypt client library and command-line application.
In 2018, I want to create a highly available, fault tolerant, strongly consistent and durable messaging broker/queue. yeah, I'm aiming big.
We’ve been working on a mobile app that helps people connect locally to conversations. https://imgur.com/a/lJnLe
We would love to get a few early adopters and happy to pay people for their contributions.
If you value connectivity, commerce & trade we would love to work with you
Pilot program application form https://goo.gl/forms/9S7jopCiIVrbiMdt2
Spent much of my spare time working on https://github.com/justwatchcom/gopass
- https://nulis.io - tree text editor for writers
- https://helix.startuplab.io - habit tracker
- https://fictionhub.io - fiction publishing platform
- https://startuplab.io/blog - started writing articles on startups/tech
Also a few smaller projects.
I spent quite some time researching new web technologies, the result of which is a neat forward-looking Javascript framework[0] (yes, I know) that I'm currently using to build all kinds of fun projects like this Overwatch UI reproduction[1]
[0]: https://github.com/ruphin/gluonjs [1]: https://overwebs.ruph.in
1) Got engaged :) 2) I built my own invoicing web app(breakdeck.com). 3) Developed an Electron app aimed at developer's productivity that I actually use 4) I published my first native Electron/Node.js module https://github.com/bithavoc/node-desktop-idle 5) Read 4/7 books I intended to read throughout the year. 6) Visited a new country
https://www.qkast.com the most influential web app of our time that almost nobody cared about in 2017.
1) Finally go the sign off on our new server infrastructure
2) Waste a lot of time trying to get an ePOS solution from our ERP supplier, whilst also looking at alternative ERP suppiers!
3) Got our eCommerce doing double digit growth
4) Developed lots of quirky adhoc tools for keeping addresses tidy in CRM that need writing properly
5) Got better at Python
I am now really in need of a new job, something in business/IT consulting. I want to be my own boss, but don't have the resources to start my own business right now. Tired and unfulfilled
I finally released my full stack Clojure framework: Coast on Clojure, tepid response so far probably because the community doesn’t really like frameworks, but I’m a rebel
Created a passion of mine and finally overcame the fear of launching! BetterSelf is a side-project that's used to track supplements and medications and how it impacts your sleep and productivity.
Site : https://betterself.io/ GitHub : https://github.com/jeffshek/betterself
I worked on meditations, the app I use to manage my daily habits: https://github.com/ioddly/meditations
So far as I know, I'm still the only user, which is fine by me. I tried working on other things with my spare time, but the lesson I learned was that it's a lot easier and more fun to work on something that you're personally invested in using.
A fun way to follow sports on your phone, when you can't watch the actual game. The game tracker always starts at the beginning and never 'spoils' the result.
I've put more work into NFL lately, but I'll likely improve NBA basketball next. There are a slew of other sports too - soccer, MLB, NHL - although the degree of upkeep has been varied.
My own projects:
- Ask The Caterpillar: a chatbot that gives harm reduction information about substances/drugs
https://www.askthecaterpillar.com/home.html
- Some API wrappers and Slack add-ons, one that just lets me control Sonos from Slack.
- I taught myself Elm and wrote a little app that lets you use the Spotify magic algorithm for finding similar tracks
--
At work:
Learned a lot more about building a clean API, and some stuff about React on the front end
1. Start to build a service to continously give you weekly hotel recommendations via email for a Paris, Rome, London and New York. Did this to learn about webscraping and machine learning. Got as far as performing reliable webscraping on several hotel sites. Started to learned about the ML but have not got so far yet.
2. Started to learned about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and came to the realisation that it is like gambling in the wild west.
I wrote scripts to stream cryptocurrency trade data from exchanges into databases for long term storage and analysis. I had lots of fun analysing patterns and identifying trends that normally not seen in regulated exchanges.
If you are keen to grab those data, ping me at derek[at]coindatafeed.com and I'll give you FTP access to them (free limited period).
I built an MIT licensed Open Source decentralized graph database built on CRDT primitives for doing P2P apps that are end-to-end encrypted.
~7K stars on GitHub: https://github.com/amark/gun
It can do 20M reads/sec, 20K writes/sec, and 2K sync/sec (verified table inserts across 4 network hops).
It's like of IPFS and Firebase had a love child.
I launched a farm management software tool in Dec 2016 and spent 2017 iterating on it. Hired two developers in the last 5 months and made a big hire last week, myself. I'm going to transition out of my consulting business into this full time. Bootstrapped with $300k of revenue in '17. https://www.harvestprofit.com
Started 2017 working remotely, from home, in a rather depressing environment. Through this year I rented an office space and hired 3 other people.
Hookdoo: SaaS that allows you to create incoming webhook endpoints to run shell scripts on your remote servers. https://www.hookdoo.com/
And of course my open-source webhook server project: https://github.com/adnanh/webhook
I built and HN-launched Vexlio (https://www.vexlio.com), a technical diagramming tool with embedded LaTeX equations, an interactive Lua-drawing mode, and other assorted neat features. It's finally reached a fairly stable point in the last few months or so, so I can start looking ahead to more interesting features!
Slowly building a generative music system in ClojureScript: http://ivanish.ca/diminished-fifth/
Not sure if that counts as "work", but it's certainly taken a lot of iteration to get it to where it is today. Here's hoping 2018 leaves me enough free time to keep chipping away at it.
open source stuff i've done:
* release ghostdriver 2.0.0 [1]. this is the implementation of the webdriver protocol for phantomjs. unfortunately phantomjs 2.5 was never released :(
* create chrominator [2] a high level api for chrome remote debugger. now defunct... use puppeteer
* created chromedriver-proxy [3] to help me extend chromdriver without having to recompile the c++ project. it also handles pooling browsers. the coolest extension i've built so far is recording video on headless chrome. still a work in progress but has proven stable for the real world test suite i support.
[1] https://github.com/detro/ghostdriver/releases/tag/2.0.0
I've been working on a flash card app. The app imports Anki (apkg) cards, but is easier to use and based on multiple choice questions. I'm hoping it will find use in literacy. I'm using Cordova to compile the app: https://github.com/phil4literacy/LWimport
Quit my job and created Filterbot, a free personalized news aggregator that uses ML on the users' votes to find the best articles for them. It didn't get as much attention as I hoped, but I'm learning and improving.
I'm now also working on a "radio" music player based on the same concept.
Automatic scheduling in your calendar for your to-do list.
This past year we added a ton of new integrations with project management tools as well as support for calendars beyond Google (eg. Apple iCloud, Microsoft Exchange, etc).
It has been a ton of work but very satisfying! Would love to connect with other bootstrapped SaaS founders.
I had some free time between switching a jobs and I filled it building ProtonMail Desktop Client https://github.com/vladimiry/protonmail-desktop-app There simply was no usable client for desktop. That's actually my first open source experience.
Entry -17 (-437 - -420) @ 4:43pm-5:00pm PST: Wrote response below. Realized I could use this as a journal & started it by editing and adding metadata. #hnjournal
I registered wwpjd.com, which my partner paid for as a gift to me. I renewed ourfirstmind.com. I'll develop them in 2018 & track my progress in this thread.
-1 (-367 - -366) 5:53pm-5:54pm PST: Updated to add timezone data.
An automated system to drown the competition on Google and review sites... Hey, no one else offered me money for something else, so...
I worked on an open source project at the end of the year to help track your Coinbase profits: https://www.profbit.info/ https://github.com/joshblum/profbit/
Still working on https://gimmeproxy.com and https://www.npmjs.com/package/check-proxy
Besides that launched https://ip-api.io
- had my first child (now 3 mo's)
- published my first open-source repo[1] (concurrent headless browser testing)
- remained really burnt out at work
- put lots of work in on my side project (journaling app) and am finally close to releasing it
I tried to create a new programming language, Toy Santa, but I became too demotivated to finish it. But I feel the codebase of toysanta is the best I've been doing to date. It's in C++, using Direct2D. One day, I will release it on github. But until then, I will try to create a presentable version.
(yes, I am a tad attention-grabbing here;-)
...I an autodidact, I work for myself.
Nearly finished up Chat & Slash, an RPG you play in Slack: https://www.chatandslash.com
I hope to finish up the "official" release early in 2018, but in the meantime, all that knowledge about Node and JS helped me land my current job, so it's a solid win in my book.
I shelved a startup I worked on for over a year due to failing to gain any traction or raise any funding.
I started tutoring students in Python, JS, and Java on Wyzant. I enjoy teaching, and it helps pay the bills.
I applied to Fullstack Academy and have an interview in a few days. I want to stop spinning my wheels and become employable as a professional Software Engineer.
Bettering my sleeping habits, sharpening my modern C++ skills, starting a blog, and analyzing high energy physics collisions.
At work I worked on and helped ship a video game. At home I worked on my life simulation, learning Go, and personal fitness.
A place where musicians work on a song every week.
It's been super fun to build out. I started about 8(!) months ago and I've been working steadily on it ever since. Now we have a small and steady community and we've made a lot of really good music!
I built a system for Linear Genetic Programming (LGP) as part of my Bachelor's degree Honours project [0]. I tried to make a framework that is modern and easy to use, but also has great performance.
I worked on these, for example: https://chttr.co/ (a social network) and http://embed.rocks/ (Embedly alternative).
Currently I'm working on something based on the Chttr.co code.
Continued my solo journey on Micro - OSS tools to simplify distributed systems development. It's been over 2 years full time now.
I worked on my first side project, XBRLStudio [1]. It's a Windows desktop application that allows users to organize and view XBRL quarterly and annual financial filings.
I'm traveling today, but would love to hear any feedback on the project.
I spent a good deal of my spare time on a side project in 2017: https://www.contabulo.com
I'm actually removing all the "Coming Soon" verbiage from the landing page tonight. It's (at least in a mimimally viable sense) ready to go now :)
I worked on and will be open sourcing a framwework for developing CQRS/Event Sourced applications in .NET Core.
I wrote a few free SaaS-like services that combined have over a million users. Sadly, due to the nature of them / the "niche" that they're in (LOTS of competition in this space...), monetization is incredibly hard so I don't profit a ton - maybe a few hundred dollars per month.
I built a SaaS product. Got to YC video interview stage and rejected. Eventually failed and closed up shop.
Now I'm building an Indie Hackers style site geared towards e-commerce and consumer product makers. (https://www.starterstory.com)
I spent a lot of time experimenting with developing web applications without needing to be online, and I recently published Laurence, a cache to make that a little easier.
Launched a new web app in late 2016 so this year (2017) was all about improvement, refinement and listening to customers to ensure it truly is the best way to report build status and automated test results.
Check it out: https://www.tesults.com
Left my job and legal security behind, and decided to take the full startup plunge. Started a project that will increase sex worker safety while providing a smoother, faster experience for everyone involved: https://pinkdate.is.
Left a career as an IT Architect to begin a new life as a Ethereum developer. I'm so much happier now :-)
Lots of things but regarding side projects I built http://mockrest.com which allows people to implement json APIs for testing. It doesn't have much traction but works by itself and I use it for my web development classes..
A bunch of little JavaScript+Canvas prototype games on the way to a game about programming I still haven't conceived fully: http://gashlin.net/games/ (top five items on that list were this year).
I had a hypothesis that the company where I work could benefit greatly from machine learning to replace some human labor. I spent the early part of the year teaching myself enough to be dangerous and the latter part of the year designing, building, and deploying our first deep learning system.
Worked on a side project to automate getting refunds when a price of an item you bought drops. IT has taken too long for my appetite, but i think i am close to launching it.
Switched from a web app to mobile app to ease UX and automate things like SMS retrieval, but boy, was it hard - ux is not my strong suit.
1. A real time chat app to lean more about Socket IO.
2. A link shortener to learn about Redis and atomic transactions.
3. An interpreter for Pascal (based on the "How to build an interpreter" series of blog posts)
4. And many more..
Summary is here: https://sayan98.github.io
Had a great (and often stressful!) time helping raise my first son over the past four months and learning Python and Django developing Baby Buddy - https://github.com/cdubz/babybuddy
I started working at my first job as a software engineer, in my free time I spent time building game AIs.
https://introspected.rest/ a kind-of publication and self-research around REST and APIs. One thing that I definitely learned is that these kind of things are much harder than writing some code.
I worked on https://hook.io this year.
http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/assets/portfolio.html#mes...
Wrote this a couple of weeks before Mozilla removed the XUL/XPCOM add-on APIs
This year, I dedicated more time to open source projects, mostly to scratch my own itch.
In particular, I learned how to use Electron and capture video for Repro Steps.
Joined HyperionDev[0] and helped them transition their business model and product to focus on Coding Bootcamps (Web Dev, Mobile Dev, Comp Sci) instead of short courses
Finished the entirely custom 3D Printer I've been building for 2.5 years. It's just swell.
I have been working on a document management system: https://github.com/bgroff/kala-app in Django. Still needs some work, but it is getting closer to a big release.
I started this year making tools for the team, then I got put on a project where I mocked up an AR experience using VR hardware ("AR in VR").
Then I programmed the Lightsaber combat in an officially licensed Star Wars AR game. Pretty good on the professional side this year.
Did two remote internships for software developers in Africa - each with about 1000 participants.
Moved to Quebec; learned(-ing) French while living with a host family. Worked on my first Haskell backend project[1] and found a remote job.
I built https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/
It was a site I put together to help me understand myself a lot better by asking myself the hard questions in life, and constantly reiterating it.
8 months of life without alcohol, pot, meat.
Launching an agency/consultancy with a sister company that resells hosting and optimization.
Cryptocurrency exchange. I genuinely believe in a healthy competition and the goal is to create a digital asset exchange with features for professional traders.
2017 was fully dedicated to working on Appure ( https://appure.io ). This is screenshot generator for iTunes and Play stores. Probably will be adding some new things to it in 2018 too
I made a service to help people exchange paper books. I still need to populate it, and then I can start using it with friends.
JavaScript; Server side rendering an app shell (React / Redux) that uses the WordPress REST API:
Started a blog looking at interesting companies and trends. I admit I'm having a lot more fun with it than I first thought I would.
A bunch of Enterprise projects I can't talk about ;(
But also https://bibres.com a publishing platform that is trying a different way to monetize txt content. Think quora + Kickstarter
http://store.steampowered.com/app/652000/Quantum_Pilot/ + video streaming apps for clients
For open source, I built a browser, a native JVM tool in Rust, and a WebAssembly backend for the JVM among other things at https://github.com/cretz.
I grew the team for our startup. We hired more people with distinct and complementary skills. Our startup develops virtual reality social productivity applications. We are totally bootstrapped and will officially launch this year.
Much more VR than I expected to, and it was more interesting than I expected as well.
Growing a business around selling online courses[0] focused on helping developers get things done.
I was busy working on my food site bestfoodnearme.com but my efforts have been slow in the last quarter. I am not yet sure where I will take it in 2018. Right now, I am working on finding a way to get more dishes listed.
Mostly box-js, a JavaScript emulator used for malware analysis: https://github.com/CapacitorSet/box-js/
Production ready tool for Mutation Testing targeting compiled languages (C, C++, Rust, Swift):
Happy new year, HN.
The major highlight is the launch of http://pxlet.com. Apart from this, focus was on work and hope there will be some surprises in 2018.
Launched a tool I used in my other startups. A tool to help companies reduce churn using sentiment analysis. https://churnops.com
Released and updated a pixels-based collaborative cross-platform audiovisual live coding environment : https://www.fsynth.com
I helped ramp up the development team of a small startup to achieve a record year in monthly recurring revenue and sales.
I started learning Haskell in earnest.
I recorded one small album per month. 4 songs, at least one original.
I began learning PHP, wrote Kowope, an enterprise tool and launched it.
Listen Notes, a podcast search engine that actually works. I'm working on it full-time now.
Generating large amounts of banking/credit card data in a fixed width format in Go and python.
In an effort to reduce technical debt I've deleted 40-50K of lines of code in my work code base.
our website https://collate.cc - want to make it easy to shop baby products and cosmetics with safe ingredients
Started a Saas for active monitoring of API's and browser click flows: https://checklyhq.com
I've been working on a media player/browser. I'm going to put it on the shelf and move to the crypto currency stuff to get rich. See you next year!
Among others a Cryptocurrency Portfolio Tracker that doesn't track you
I was dabbing with this for the last quarter of 2017: https://www.getfrills.com
A 3D design platform for education built on top of https://3dc.io, launching in January.
A great weather extension https://weatherextension.com/
Establishing offensive infrastructure, threat intel collector systems and honeynets for research. Also, lots of RFID/BLE experiments.
Buckets, private desktop budgeting app.
I worked on a bitcoin trading startup (part of that was the timequerylog module on npm) and a lua-programmable 3d libretro front-end.
Part time, and now working on the V2 table detection algorithm.
Goldenbird (www.flygoldenbird.com) - a place for people to browse and contribute to a collection of evergreen tweets about startups.
All of that is my own projects (in random order):
1. I made LILGUI[1], an API specification for host programs that use my LIL[2] scripting language to expose simple UI. Also includes LazLILGUI, a Lazarus[3] implementation.
2. Wrote an OpenGL binding generator [4] for Free Pascal and Lazarus that parses the official XML file. Lazarus comes with OpenGL bindings but they are ancient and i wanted to try out some new 4.6 stuff.
3. Wrote a simple audio player for X called LFPlayer [5] that uses my Little Forms [6] GUI toolkit and GStreamer as a backend. Note however that some months later i decided to create a new desktop environment and forked off Little Forms to a new (yet unpublished) toolkit that expands a bit the functionality. This is a decision that comes mainly out of frustration with the tech GNOME and KDE use which also covers basically 99% of alternative DEs since they either use GNOME or KDE/Qt tech. But that is something that i'll hopefully expand on next year (or in 2019... or whenever i get around working on it, it isn't a big priority anyway :-P).
4. I started a VB1 clone in Windows 3.1 for fun [7] although it has very dim chances of being finished. I also did a blunder with this by first starting it in DOSBox, then due to some DOSBox shortcomings i moved it to VirtualBox, left it untouched for like a month and then coming back to it - but i had forgotten that i moved to VirtualBox and continued working on it in DOSBox pretty much redoing most of the work until at some point i encountered a bug and as i solved it i thought "wait a minute, didn't i already fixed this bug?". On the bright side the new solution was better.
5. Wrote a reusable unit in Free Pascal for winged edge mesh edit operations [8]. If you have used Wings3D, you know what i am talking about. I'll use this at some in the future in my generic 3D world editor either in addition or as a replacement for brushes for world geometry [9]
6. Wrote a reusable control for 3D viewports in Lazarus [10]. Each one of those viewports is a separate instance of the control with a shared viewport renderer, viewport manager, 3D widget manager and transformation 3D widget.
7. Wrote a very simple scenegraph library in C for fun, inspired (from a functional standpoint) by the old Direct3D retained mode API and made a Python module with it using SWIG [11]. At some point i should upload this somewhere, it is neat.
8. I'm still spending most of my time working on my 3D retro top down-ish shooter [12]. No i don't use that monitor all the time, only when i need to feel that extra oldschool power (and when playing some old 2D games that simply display better on a CRT :-P).
I probably forgot some stuff, i mainly looked through my repositories [13] and images in imgur to see what i did. I think i haven't done much this year, but hopefully in 2018 i'll get around making the first versioned stable release for LIL (which will mark the day the API will remain backwards compatible for the future) and release LIL Studio [14], a simple IDE for LIL that allows remote editing of scripts (mainly useful for editing the game scripts remotely [15]) and perhaps release a preview of my desktop environment, although most of the stuff i focus on revolve around my game so the DE (and other unrelated stuff) only takes a back seat most of the time (i tend to work on it whenever i see something in /r/linux or news about current DEs that make my blood boil or something :-P). But since i use Little Forms for the launcher of the game, i'll need to have at least the forked version working since unlike Little Forms, the fork supports custom styles and i'd like to have that.
[1] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lilgui [2] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lil [3] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [4] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/gl2unit [5] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lfplay [6] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lforms [7] https://i.imgur.com/QQOzvOU.png [8] https://i.imgur.com/4Zk9Td7.png [9] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/rtworld [10] https://i.imgur.com/0AXjCsp.gif [11] https://i.imgur.com/xu7kKu9.png [12] https://i.imgur.com/BKk3RX0.jpg [13] http://runtimeterror.com/reps.php [14] https://i.imgur.com/tCd64Wh.png [15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpKV3Sy-mYw
I worked on https://wakatime.com, which measures your work.
Mostly maintaining and improving https://www.libhunt.com
Remarkbox hosted comments (https://www.remarkbox.com)
https://www.prerender.cloud/ it makes server-side rendering for React and Angular easy. Also works with CloudFront via Lambda@Edge - https://github.com/sanfrancesco/prerendercloud-lambda-edge
learned RESTful apps in Ruby, Sinatra, and sequel.
built an api wrapper in Python serverless for our ecom website.
trying to smooth out the api for the new react frontend we built. imagine a 10 year old java api where every endpoint is extremely different and behaves in magical ways (or not at all) if magic cookies are present.
nightmare.
Kozmos: https://getkozmos.com
Just for fun, made an anti-forensic tool to help out my pentesting team. Also found more vulns :D
Clojure! Datomic!
www.iterary.com a prototyping board game site. Mainly A Java/Android developer, so wanted to branch out into the web. Polymer started the journey, but really the last year has made me start to really appreciate web components for my spare time.
Quit my job and been working on codingdictionary.com while trying to find a job abroad.
Got a job. Various small DIY projects around the house. Nothing software though really.
Distributed system using Akka/Java, and a related ML platform in Python.
I gained 30 lbs (on purpose)
Ftom scratched my videogame engine project...for a third time.
Much better this time around
Met my goal of becoming proficient in OCaml and finding work in it.
Application security for NOAA and obtaining my OSCP certification.
Working on an anti-forensic tool just for the fun of it.
A Haskell http-client generator for swagger-codegen
I started an algorithm that trades on Ethereum.
Expanding Fellowship.AI to New York and London
designing the next level serverless platform, and trying to prove at the same time that we live in a simulation. xd
Xtomp, github.com/teknopaul/xtomp
A STOMP broker written in C using nginx core without the HTTP or SMTP modules. 2017 and wrote more C than JavaScript.
Ran my first 2 ultras.
Also boring enterprise work.
AWS Lambda, a lot
baking
exercise
relationships
I made a new HN client for iOS, 8chen!
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/8chen-for-hacker-news/id1308...
My 2017: a) My business https://escuelainformatica.cl . This small IT School has 7 years. I am the owner and the trainer.
b) My second business http://acaciapointservice.com/ I started 6 months ago. I am developing a SCADA system in PHP and C# and i am finishing it. I am coded 200k lines of code alone! ;-). For the 2018, i want to develop an ERP for SMB (dual license, gplv2 and commercial).
During the 2017, i got sick, i had some legal troubles (certification) but i survived and earned money.
I spent most of 2017 reflecting on the direction programming/languages/communities are going and finding ways to move the needle the other way. It seems to me that there's a lot of pressure to turn programmers to soul-less robots with zero integrity and self-esteem who will do anything for money. I quit selling my skills a long time ago to get out of that mess, now I'm spending most of my time empowering others to do the same thing.
Cixl is my latest kick in the face to the status quo: https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl
This year we launched a new service [1] unlimited UI design for startups. What started as an experiment, completely shifted our business and became the core of what we do. Wrote about it on reddit [2]
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6wz5d5/10kmrr....
This year we launched a new service with unlimited UI design for startups. (http://fairpixels.pro)
Added 1,344 email examples to http://reallygoodemails.com/
कुछ बताने लायक नहीं :( ---- nothing worth telling :(
I quit my job as a software engineer at Google early this year to teach people how to code. I started paying people $15/hr to learn so they can make ends meet while learning instead of working at Walmart.
I thought about all the missing pieces in my engineering growth and created a curriculum that welcomes students from 0 engineering background and plugs in all the holes that were black boxed to me in my engineering growth: We host our own servers, allowing students configure nginx and create ssl certs themselves for the apps they build. Our projects mimick existing well known companies (netflix, dropbox, gmail, google docs clones).
Our curriculum is largely project based, so students work together on projects that they would be using themselves: building their own email client, chat client, filestorage/backups, firebase, etc. From day 1 of a students journey, their code is thoroughly code reviewed by other students.
2 months ago, Calworks, a local government assistance program, offered to send students to us and pay each students $13/hr for up to 6 months. Unfortunately, to make this deal work, we needed a commercial office (my wife and I teach out of our apartment) and we did not have the financial resources.
Last month, we finally got approved as a tax exempt non-profit so I can reach out to my friends for donations (but donations take time, I have to set up a bunch of fundraising tools first). My savings ran out so I started applying for jobs and landed a full-time position at Paypal starting in January.
Moving forward into 2018, a few of the senior students are going to be leading the non profit. 100% of my salary and equity is going into the non-profit so existing students would not only continue to be paid, but we now also have the financial resources to get an office and push the Calworks deal through to help more people! 2018 is looking to be a great year.
We do not have any internet presence at the moment because this year our focus had largely been testing and iterating our curriculum as well as our financial model. 2018 will be different and if you want to help, our non-profit is called GarageScript.
https://www.facebook.com/garagescript/