Ask HN: What did you achieve in January 2016?
A month into 2016, I think it's a good think to reflect. I actually followed through and completed my first pet project, a Wordpress plugin. I have also lived together with my wife for a complete month now, and it's going great so far (just married).
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 80.0 ms ] threadFrom Jan 1 to today we tuned our site and put in a lot of grunt work to grow daily organic traffic by 2x, daily uniques on the site by 3x, and average session time by about 20%. Also launched a few really interesting feature experiments that I can't share yet but we're hoping will end up making buying a home significantly less expensive. This week I've been learning about WKWebViews [0] and using them to retool our iOS app detail views to have feature parity with our web app. Work is still fun!
[0]: http://nshipster.com/wkwebkit/
EDIT: Congrats on the marriage!
I have started a 3 days book challenge where i finish a book every 3 days, it's going great so far, also I am refreshing my skills with online education (although I am still following MS degree in Robotics and AI), but still the world is broader than only this, and I programmed few robots and made few contributions to the OSS (talking about ROS here).
EDIT: Congrats ;-)
"Deep work" is more practical. He presents different strategies of working to get more depth. Also, there's a lot about how to stop sabotaging your efforts of working deep.
During the first month we'd released a second alpha of our project that allows to build real-time data processing/visualisation pipelines in the browser. And now we're on track to allow building those pipelines using natural language input (target is to create a pipeline from someone saying, e.g. "what people on twitter think about brand X?")
As someone who struggled a lot with writing anxiety in school, I just feel really good about having gotten this out the door. I also feel like I've learned a bunch about how to push past writing anxiety.
I put "finished" in quotes because I still feel like I have a lot that I want to add and improve:
- I approached this project as a UI design and I feel like I want to do a lot more user testing, especially for folks on Windows or who have poor connections.
- I wrote a line-by-line comments system so that folks could let me know which parts didn't make sense. I want to improve that and turn it into a plugin so that other projects could use it.
- I have some integration tests for some of the parts that I feel like need to be written.
- There are a few trade-offs I made that I suspect I should go back and make the other choice.
- I currently have students only deploy to DigitalOcean. I want to have instructions on how to deploy to AWS, Azure, and a bunch of other services.
But for now, I'm just really happy having gotten this up there. If you have feedback, please let me know.
I recently launched my first ever startup. It's a server hosting company much like DigitalOcean but instead of paying $10 dollars for a 1GB server, you get the ability to create multiple 1GB servers (2, 12, or 32) for less than half the price you would pay if you bought them individually.
It's mostly targeted at businesses who need to spin up a lot of fast servers for their employees and don't want to spend so much money -- but individuals could also take advantage of this.
[0]: https://ramgrid.com
- Also built some Wordpress and Magento plugins
- Took on some freelance clients for advertising and have ramped up their spend, and profits, incredibly
- Joined Dataquest.io in a consultancy capacity
I have yet to determine how I become a multi-billionaire from this achievement :)
Super straw man, not clinically proven, and hacked together - but fun and learned a ton! Built on Redshift with a small R script and a ton of manual data ETL.
2. Started running regularly - 3 days per week. If anyone is looking to get into running I can't recommend the NHS Couch to 5k plan enough.
3. Launched the private beta for my new online learning marketplace - http://learnetto.com and got featured on Betalist.
Pretty excited about February!
I came up with a way of writing front end browser tests that works very well for us. It's based on React simulated events and a test runner that parses English Markdown for general steps, aided by simple data attribute markup that specifies semantic roles for elements. Plus a nice little React HUD for running tests in your browser while developing.
I also joined some friends to play in a band, moved to Stockholm, scheduled a date for this weekend, and mostly replaced coffee with tea.
Next up is an exercise habit...
It's kind of 'niche' in who can use it, but I've got quite a lot of dedicated users.
Learnt to read/write around 250 Chinese characters. It was much easier than I thought it would be and quite fun. Walking around Chinatown is a whole different experience, even with the tiny fraction of characters that I know.
Not much on the techie side accomplished this month, but lots of little things started. Looking forward to some results in February.
Congratulations on the marriage :D
- Read 3 books;
- Studied a lot of math (according to rescue time, something like 100 hours in Khan Academy); and
- Finished a 45 hours/class discipline in Collge (did an intense program for that).