Ask HN: Weekend Project Suggestions/Review

Hello everyone,

How is everyone doing? Weekend is almost here, so kind of excited. Though, not sure if weekends are any different for most hackers, eh?

The thing is I want to spend my time this weekend building a web-app. But I don't want to work on something useless. I was wondering what do you guys think about having a hulu like service for programing screencasts, not just related on pure languages but also like learning Photoshop, WordPress blogs and what not. There are tons of these screencasts out there available freely but I think it would be nice to have it aggregated at one place with a clean UI. I know there are kinda related services out there, but most are paid and the free ones are just...Or maybe I haven't found the right one yet.

So, back to the question. Do you think it's worth it to spend my weekend on it? Would you use it? I think I should be able to build a functional prototype pretty easily in a weekend.

I would also love to hear if you have any ideas you want to give away for a weekend project :)

Thanks!

6 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 22.5 ms ] thread

waterside81 15y ago ↗

I think this is a great idea. Do you intend to spider the web (or use YouTube's API) for existing ones and archive them in addition to allowing people to upload their own?

For bonus points, if you could create a speech-to-text version of each of the screencasts and then index that text and make it searchable on your site, then it'll really be easy to find a screencast that somebody is interested in. For example, I'd search "merging layers" and you could find me the corresponding Photoshop screencast that happened to show how to merge layers.

Let us know how it goes once it's up.

sandipagr 15y ago ↗

thanks for the response. Yeah I was thinking of using the mix of spider web and available api's on different video platforms. I have also emailed lot of people about having their content on this service, just to gauge the interest. I hadn't thought about allowing people to upload their own but it would be definitely nice to have screencast makers submit it to the site making life of web spider a bit easy.

The speech-to-text is another great feature. I think there are api's available that I could potentially use for this. I will look into what Synergy uses to do this. It would definitely enhance user's experience a lot.

Thanks again for your feedback!

charliepark 15y ago ↗

This would be a really useful service. And there are enough paid screencasts out there that you could probably develop relevant advertising on the site once it gets traction.

sandipagr 15y ago ↗

True. I don't think viewer will mind a 10-15sec commercial in the middle of the video, as long as its just once or twice in an hour long video. Maybe even can have premium account holders who don't want ads and such.

I'd love to know if you had any particular feature you'd want to see, beside the obvious playlist capability, favorites, comments, rating and likes.

charliepark 15y ago ↗

I think the two really killer features are probably the most obvious one: searching and rating. If I know that the thing I'm looking for ... whether it's learning ruby or implementing something in jQuery, or plugging a hole in my car's tire ... is easy to find, and that what I find is going to be quality, then that site is going to come to mind quickly when I'm looking for instructions on how to do something. Stack Overflow's done this well, in that their content is so good, and so easily discoverable, that it's a no-brainer as my first go-to place for figuring out coding problems.

amccloud 15y ago ↗

I think http://showmedo.com/ is what you have in mind. It's not really sexy. Then again, programmers don't need sexy design.

I have tons of ideas on hand. I'll email you one or a dozen.