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Ask HN: What is a project I can complete in a night?

19 points by newaccountfool ↗ HN
I have 8 hours to kill, and I can't work on any of my other code. I would like to be somewhat productive and build something. I know there is lots of 'weekend coding projects' but is there anything that you can attempt to build in a night?

19 comments

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iroot
If you are interested in mathematics and algorithms, you can solve Project Euler problems projecteuler.net/problems
newaccountfool
Yeah was thinking of that, there's currently an Algorithms Course on Coursera so might have a look at that.
sejje
URL shortener

Flickr creative commons image search engine

Twitter bot

Quote scraper

Deal alerter for craigslist

IFTTT on a scale relevant to you

newaccountfool
Twitter Bot sounds good, like that Idea. Really like the idea of automation.
sejje
They're not allowed and if it's detectable as a bot it'll get shut down.

But they're still fun.

marvy
Actually they are allowed.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/76915#

sejje
Good call.

My bots have always been @reply bots, hence my confusion.

In particular, I was doing stuff like this: "For example, sending automated @replies based on keyword searches is not permitted."

pgcosta
I feel like anything related to twitter is very troublesome. They are very restrictive.

I tried to make an agregation of all the people I was following, and mining their 'about' text, and right off ran out of api requests quota.

DanBC
A simple game for smart phones.

Draw a pipe on the screen. First pipe is short and straight. They get longer and have more curves. "Drop" a ball into the pipe. The user tilts their phone clockwise or anti-clockwise to guide the ball through the pipe. That tilting is the only control the user has. Each pipe should be short enough to create the "I nearly did that; just one more go" effect.

HarshaThota
You could try contributing to some open source projects instead.

http://up-for-grabs.net/ has a list of projects with issues/tasks that are easy for new contributors to pick up.

bennyg
That would be such an awesome site if practically everything wasn't on a Microsoft platform. I'd love to contribute towards some Objective-C but everything I see is .NET/F#
clark-kent
Try learning and hacking on some new technology you are not familiar with.
[dead] templeos2
Adults don't play games.

Adults write hymns for God. The Bible says "Sing a new song" 9 times.

Use the Psalmody application to randomly make a melody. Make a few, choose good one. Generate a random word for the title with F7. Create words for the song in psalmody. When finished, edit the program for the song and make animated graphcs.

When finished with your offering, get God's response with F7 and SHIFT-F7.

collyw
Something that doesn't involve much user interface.

I have been working an a side project recently. The guts of the code is very simple and done already. Getting all the surrounding framework to serve it up as a web page and do input validation is taking forever (mainly because I only get an hour or two at a time to work on it). Its all the "polish" that takes the time. So something command line based would be easier.

msantos
A Raspberry Pi with motion detection and SMS.

I've built one using an old nokia that supports AT commands.

Pretty fun stuff and no soldering required. Next up I'll try adding a camera and send MMS messages through the mobile phone with photos when motion is detected.

Helpful links:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Emgreat-Detecting-Pyroelectric-HC-SR...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pyroelectric-Infrared-Motion-Sensor-...

http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2013/01/cheap-pir-sensors-a...

http://www.adafruit.com/products/189

https://www.modmypi.com/blog/raspberry-pi-gpio-sensing-motio...

http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/13334/how-can...

S4M
If you are using emacs, you can try to write some ELisp code to fix something you don't like or automate something you do often.
dllthomas
I'll second the "find a bug to fix". There are a lot of projects out there that are welcoming to newbies.