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Ask HN: Ideas for weekend projects?

31 points by CGamesPlay ↗ HN
I'm wondering if anyone knows of any idea pools for weekend projects, or if anyone has any small projects that they haven't implemented yet. I have a lot of down time over the next two weeks, and I would love to put the time to good, creative use. Note, I'm not looking for startup ideas, although the two are obviously not mutually exclusive.

14 comments

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retroafroman
I've got lots of little ideas I haven't had time to implement (most of them are pretty goofy). Tell us more about your skills and what you'd like to work on if you have any ideas-games, webapps, open source stuff, whatever.
CGamesPlay
My skills are pretty typical: I'm versed in the web technologies, C++, and .NET. Notably I'm not familiar with XNA or Flash, but the underlying technology isn't really important to me.

I just want to do something creative that is "interesting". If there's a novel idea for a game, or a utility, or a visualization, or something else entirely; I'd like to hear it.

dkarl
Visualization for C++ code metrics, specialized for C++, would be interesting. The C++ code metric visualizations I've seen have hooked into visualization front-ends designed for Java code.

P.S. This probably isn't a weekend project, but you might get something useful done in a week.

[dead] growl
lazy breakfast a walk in a nice open view rest
noahc
What is your goal?

Is it to learn a new technology?

Pick up chicks?

Be featured on RWW, Wired, HN, Reddit, etc, etc?

It seems like a good formula for hit and run success is popular new feature/gimmick from facebook, twitter, google, youtube add your own twist to it and then watch the traffic come in for 2 days and then die off.

[deleted]
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iamgabeaudick
Reverse Craigslist - Allow a user to enter an anonymous Craigslist email address (that they had previously replied to) and their city, and then return the post that contained the email.

The reason being: When looking for something on Craigslist, I often send similar emails to several potential sellers. But then, when they reply, I have no way of knowing which posting was theirs (and the link to it). (Of course, you could contain the link to the posting you're referring to in each email, but that's a hassle that I'm sure most forget to do.)

vbhavsar
You can just enter the url of the Craigslist post at the end of your mail.
blehn
If you click the mailto link in the listing (not copy and paste it), your email will be pre-populated with title of the listing as your subject line, and the URL in the body.
photon_off
I've got 2 ideas for you, which I would absolutely do if I had the time to do them.

1) Feedback Loop: Users submit URLs and ask for feedback on them. Each time they provide a feedback for an other submission, they get to view a feedback provided on theirs (hence the loop).

You can fine tune the system by having feedback receivers rate the feedback they've recieved (better feedback = more points for the person who wrote it = they get to see more feedback on their post or their post gets pushed to top).

I think it's a beautiful and self-enforced "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" idea.

2) Graffiti: This is a bookmarklet that allows a user to draw on top of a webpage (probably requires transparent flash). Of course, they can view other people's graffitis as well.

This would be pretty awesome, and has a lot of game aspects to it that would make it extremely addictive. For example, you could notify a user if anybody writes over their graffiti (eg, starting turf wars), and you could keep a record board for "most pages graffiti'd" and "most area covered", etc.

I feel like there's a very real possibility this could go viral and stay popular. And, I've got an awesome domain name for it. E-mail me if you're interested.

d4ft
Sidebar for gmail that recommends quora responses based on email content