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Ask HN: Weekend update -- What weekend projects are you up to?

27 points by sunir ↗ HN
Many of us draw on Hacker News for inspiration on our ongoing evening and weekend projects. I'd bet most of us are soloing on our projects too.

Since weekends are a bit slow around here, I thought it would be fun and useful to have a weekly or biweekly open thread to talk about how your project is doing this week. I'd be interested to know what people are spending their time on and I'm sure it'd be nice to have a place to talk about our projects.

I'll start with mine in the comments. If it goes well, we can do this again next week.

50 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] thread
sunir
I'm working feverishly over the holidays to get my project, Bibdex, running on production legs. It's an online bibliography service meant for collecting and sharing references and notes.

http://www.bibdex.com

One of my personal goals for the project is to spend absolutely no money on it except for servers, domains, lawyers, and accountants. While seemingly insane, I wanted to do this project to learn the full 360 degrees of how to create and launch a web product so it could help me in my day career. No better way to learn than to just dive right in and do it yourself, eh? It's a slower process, but rewarding. (Also, I'm cheap.)

Here's an example of why it's valuable. Over the last year, I got pretty far except for the logo, which used to look like I drew it in MS Paint. In fact, the old one is still here: http://bibdex.com/images/logo.png . I was hunting around on BrandStack (http://www.brandstack.com) and LogoPond (http://www.logopond.com) and contemplating spending up to $1000 on a logo designer when I realized a common theme to all the logos I liked.

  1. They all looked good in black and white because they were simple geometric forms.
  2. They only had two elements that played off each other.
If you go through those two logo sites, you'll see what I mean. Complicated logos are worse. Logos by their nature are small, short attention span, high impact communication forms. Keep it simple and deliver the message through some tension.

I decided I'd try my hand at it, so after a few hours of sketches, I loaded up Paint Shop Pro (yes, PSP. I mentioned I'm cheap, right?) and drew the new logo myself. The constraints of simple geometric forms and limiting it to two concepts led to something I'm happy with: a book that is also a rocketship to demonstrate 'bibliographies in action'. Even if I ultimately find it an unsatisfying implementation, I like the core idea and can later hire a designer to redraw it.

So, what did you do this weekend?

skip
This is actually not a bad idea. I've graduated now, but I would always start taking notes on each reference at the end of my paper. So it's definitely fulfilling a need.

But I wish there was a lower threshold of participation--couldn't I sign up for an anonymous account, and then attach my name to it once I decide that it's useful for me?

Also, Inkscape and GIMP are free, and just as powerful as the Adobe suite, especially for making more basic stuff like icons or logos. Perhaps if you are into photo manipulation or use Fireworks for web design there is some benefit to getting the Adobe stuff.

sunir
Thanks for the vote of confidence! After months working quietly, it is very relieving to hear someone else understands what I'm trying to do.

A few answers regarding anonymity:

You can create an account and your personal bibliography remains private.

What I haven't done yet is implement privacy controls on your profile, but that is certainly in the cards.

Currently, you can post anonymously to public spaces (i.e. without an account). I'll see how that goes. To be honest, it could completely suck because of spammers, griefers, trolls, flamers, etc. However, creating an account that can post anonymously but trackably is an interesting idea I'll roll over in my mind.

csytan
This could potentially save a lot time for TAs who have to summarize papers for their professors.

It bothers me to no end that research publications are geared more towards gaining reputation (and funding) than sharing information.

Best of luck!

vorador
By the way, I found a typo in your terms of service : 1. You must intentionally and maliciously disrupt the reasonable enjoyment of others using the Service.

This is probably not what you wanted.

sunir
Hah. Well, that would help me go after the 4chan market. Thanks! Fixed.
csytan
I worked on http://www.webnodes.org/ - it's a proggit visualization.
sunir
I love the tree builder. How does it decide there is enough space to expand to two (or more) columns and conversely when to collapse columns?
spiralhead
I like the minimal UI and the tree view is interesting. I would be interested in learning more about the background of this project but there's no "about" link anywhere.
lw0x15
Hey dude, that's an awesome web app you got there, im loving it.
r11t
Not only is this useful for visualizing proggit but I am guessing it would work nicely for visualizing any other sub-reddit also!
mquander
I'm working on a piece in Inform 7 for this interactive fiction design comp:

http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/11/game_design_competiti...

sunir
So, what's the story about?
mquander
Since the theme is "escape" and the target is a short, casual game, I'm trying to stick to something puzzle- and event-oriented, and drive the game with the player's curiosity rather than with a strong plot. The theme of the puzzles is frame of reference; you have the ability to manipulate alternate copies of the small, cozy environment in which you find yourself, and move things (and yourself) between those copies in useful ways. I'm still experimenting with different objects and mechanics on top of that.

The narrative and setting alludes strongly to William Blake's poem, "The Tyger," but one wouldn't need to know it to enjoy the game, I hope.

jacquesm
Busy trying to implement an automated image tagger.

It's probably going to last me a bit longer than the weekend though :)

Most fun I've had coding in a while.

sunir
Tagging based on context, or from the image itself? Semantically, or on graphical metrics?
jacquesm
From the image itself.

A combination between the two.

If I get it to work I'll do a write-up on it. It's not going to be an elegant solution, I can already tell you that, more of a brute force approach.

thomasswift
A small web scraper to get my gears of war 2 multiplayer stats.
jberryman
working on a befunge-93 interpreter in haskell... that sounds epically useful, no?
sammcd
I'm working on a Mac GUI to control Django and Rails local development servers. Hoping to really take log viewing to the next level.

If you are interested: http://141312.com

I hope to launch in March.

steveklabnik
I put in some documentation for Hackety Hack, and started a new Secret Project.

Should be fun.

technomancy
Integrating package.el into the main Emacs codebase.
warfangle
My toy twitter app. Trying to teach myself Scala/Lift and collaborative filtering techniques at the same time. Good times :)
thaumaturgy
So far this weekend I've lapped in most of the valves for the new engine for my truck, worked on some parts for my model T speedster, done a little work in the garden, and worked on some advanced features for the $5/month unlimited domain mail hosting service that's getting turned on in a couple of days.
cmars232
Ported Mafia Wars autoplayer to Google Chrome. Doing Little Schemer in Clojure, converting to use tail-call recur. Mowing the laundry.
rodyancy
I'm building a photo subject generating/photo sharing app for the iPhone.
pclark
Writing an e-book on managing your social identity.

Creating a twitter "I just had sex" bot.

stevejohnson
Regular expression parser and compiler for a VM regex implementation similar to the one described in [1]. Part of a larger project, and the VM doesn't actually operate on a normal string data structure.

[1] http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html

stevejohnson
Update: The parser is generating a correct AST. I mean, not that anyone really cares, but I am getting some work done, which is nice.
sunir
Hey, sweet. High five!

Now I'm very curious. What kind of underlying string representation does your VM have that you require your own regexp engine? Actually, more importantly, what is the VM for?

stevejohnson
Thanks! But you misunderstand me. The VM is the thing that is executing the DFA which represents the regular expression. That's what the paper I linked to explains. The DFA is represented by simple instructions like char, split, and jump (see the paper). Actually, I originally found that paper via - you guessed it - HN! It applies directly to the problem I am trying to solve.

The VM was already implemented. I had to compile a canonical regular expression into the instructions I listed.

Why? Well, let me see if my partner will let me talk about it. For now, I'll just say that we are using a completely un-string-like data structure, and we might use this engine for things which actually aren't strings. But it works on strings for now.

Our demo code will currently take a regular expression (supported operators are (), ?, *, +, and |) and a list of strings, and return the strings which match the expression. I had never written a compiler before, but the code is very clean, well-documented, and doesn't have any grammar issues. So I consider this a productive week already!

Next up: character classes, and maybe some character class shortcuts (\d, etc).

thibaut_barrere
I've been working on http://www.learnivore.com (my ruby/rails/iphone screencasts aggregator) - more specifically:

- an iphone specific version (using jQtouch)

- better ways to share the site (using topsy + facebook widgets, instead of addthis and sharethis that proved uneffective here after a few weeks of testing)

- a more responsive site (using google cdn for jquery for instance + other tweaks)

- some bits of SEO

Btw, I'm now tracking my time for this kind of side-projects using Freckle. Good to know how much time you spent at the end of the month!

savant
I'm working on a few things, both spanning at least two weekends.

The first is my baby, a project management tool built in PHP. Tired of messing with slow trac installs on PHP or fugly-looking/complicated PHP tools (I'm watching you, bugzilla!). It is mainly targeted towards the types of projects I've seen were useful for development with the clients and staff I work with as a student working in a university and freelancing on the side. It will definitely allow me to sleep a little better on the weekends and keep everyone on my team up to date as to what they need to get done and where projects stand.

The second is a generic file upload system that will likely be used within the android hacking community to track resources etc. This one is actually very far along it's development after only two days of real development, and I am quite happy with it. Hopefully it will be of use to people in other communities/companies looking for a collaborative alternative to dropbox. I'm a fan of minimalism, so while the app will have many features, you wouldn't notice them all immediately. Hope to launch this within a week if everything goes well with development.

Klondike
Finishing up an Android app for Campfire, a web-based chat service. I did the app before they released an official API, and then rewrote it all. I think it'll end up on the Market this week. It's been a lot of fun.
nostrademons
Playing around with Haskell LLVM bindings for a compiler of a small experimental language.
dangrossman
I'm working on a fraud management tool for ecommerce sites that integrates the Twilio API to automatically call customers' phones to verify orders and record voice authorizations.
sunir
When you get it working, we should talk. My day job is being the head of integrations at FreshBooks. I'm also one of the leaders of the Small Business Web (http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com) and know about a trillion e-commerce ISVs.

Email me at FreshBooks: sunir splat freshbooks dot com