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Ask HN: What have you been working on this summer?

18 points by endriju ↗ HN
A lot of us spend summer time working on a side project, be it a business idea, meme generator or OS project.

What have you been working on this summer? How many days did you spend working? Was it worth it?

37 comments

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nkoren
I quit my day job to work on http://www.podaris.com/ full-time. (It's like Google Docs for transport planning). It's going great -- in closed beta now. Hoping to have a public release by the end of September, and turn it into a real business!
endriju
When looking at your site, i realized how important the video is - it provides comprehensive explanation, especially when considering the product complexity. Anyway that's from June so I guess you've done a lot of progress since then.
nkoren
Too busy to cut another video, yes! Progress was somewhat interrupted by a month-long road trip in America, but is still going strong.
michaelbuckbee
Finally got my side project (a SSL add-on for Heroku) launched: https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl - It had been kicking around as half finished for almost 6 months.

"Worth It" is a tough one as it's still mostly losing money even though people constantly complain about how expensive it is.

endriju
Would be great to see an addon like this for OpenShift, too. Even though the ssl cert. setup there is quite simple, one still have to be careful.
michaelbuckbee
It's on my list - I'm working on Azure right now and then probably OpenShift after that.
bsenftner
Adding automated lip sync and remote developer access to www.3d-avatar-store.com.
fundamental
I rewrote an older llvm/clang based static analysis tool for asserting properties about a given callgraph for use with C/C++ programs http://github.com/fundamental/stoat

This one only really took a few days to get it working to a reasonable degree and it was worth every minute to replace the older project with maintenance issues. Other projects were worked on of course, but none of them are at a nicely completed stage.

JoeAltmaier
Rewrote the media path in a product to have single-allocation zero-copy for video frames. Avoids media node memory ballooning and saves CPU so more clients per node.
abstrct
I have been working on a robot battle game that uses cryptocurrency transactions as the main game action mechanic. We call the game Coindroids.

It is currently only available to play with Defcoin but it is pretty fun so far. It's kind of like satoshi dice but with tactics/strategy instead of luck.

https://def.coindroids.com

yodaiken
Trying to help high school students learn about all the steps in higher education with a nonprofit -- http://www.realitystep.org. We haven't launched our main product yet but just conversations with students and teachers have made it worth it so far.
tindrlabs
An app to help people keep track of their raised bed gardens.
tekknolagi
I have been working on a small virtual machine called Carp. Right now I am working on writing my own tokenizer (as opposed to relying upon strtok()) and lexer, and then also a bytecode reader/writer.

http://github.com/tekknolagi/carp

andrewflnr
Fractal rendering and Perlin/simplex noise in Julia. Definitely worth it. I learned a lot, since I basically had to write everything from the ground up except the image handling. I couldn't say how long I spent on it.
hashtag
Had an idea a few days ago. Spent the next couple days after that validating and iterating through mockups on first build. Just literally started coding it 2 days ago. Haven't really gotten very far so can't say much but for now I'm excited
OGiR
As a CS student entering into my second year and feeling a little drained from studying theory, this summer I spent a lot of my time learning practical skills and technologies and coding for fun.

I've been learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, PHP, Apache, MySQL, Bash, Ruby, and Android. I've also been using Linux regularly for the first time, as well as Vim.

The main projects I have been working on are my personal website/blog, a text-adventure game in Ruby, A js game using Canvas, and working through the chapters and exercises of "Beginning Android 4 Application Development" (feels like a tome).

atmosx
Sorry but having a hard time mastering only 3 of the words that you've put together here (being already familiar with Linux and vim), how exactly do you "learn" JQuery, PHP, Ruby and Android in 3 months?!??!?!?!

I'm asking out of real curiosity, I'm not judging or anything.

OGiR
Well, for JQuery I have been reading tutorials on W3schools and practicing with toy web pages and using some for my personal website. For Ruby, I have been reading the pragmatic programmers book, as well as documentation, and I was playing around with the language by writing a text-based RPG. For PHP I needed to learn some basics to get my wordpress site online, but I also have been reading a book on the LAMP stack, and the w3schools tutorials are very helpful. For Android, I am already familiar with Java, so I have been reading the book I mentioned, as well as the documentation, and working through the practice exercises, as well as tinkering with them.

I don't work on these all at the same time, but since I am out of school for 4 months in the summer I have had a lot of time to spend a couple weeks working on one project, and then a couple working on another, and so on. I don't have a schedule for myself, but I try to do some programming every day. There are a lot of technologies I would like to learn; I have a whole career in the future to specialize and learn something VERY in depth.

Also, I'm a quick learner ;)

EDIT: Forgot to add Git to the list in the first post. Something else I started using this summer.

atmosx
You are a quick learner :-) ... Nice!
mcintyre1994
I hate to discourage someone whose obviously a really practical learner but just a note that last I checked a fair amount of w3schools things on particularly php were a bit dodgy around security and dealing with now deprecated things.

Php has says to make things really insecure and unlike your book on Ruby which probably shows you the right way to do things there, w3schools doesn't tend to. It's not a huge deal while learning if you're a quick learner and don't get bad habits but it's worth being aware of and looking into if anything gets serious.

If you want a really over the top look at why some people don't recommend w3schools, check out w3fools.com

If you're looking for a solid php resource with a more modern and secure approach I'd recommend http://www.phptherightway.com

Overall it's probably just worth noting that wherever w3schools recommends something you wouldn't do in Ruby it's not because you should do that in PHP - and it'd be worth looking in your php book or other resources for the right approach in PHP.

OGiR
Thanks for the words of caution mcintyre. I am pretty new to all this, and my approach for learning outside of school is to just build things, and figure out the bits I don't know along the way. So when I need a quick reference to something, the w3schools tutorials are always a quick easy way to look at code snippets.

I have been spending a lot of time lately studying outside of school, but it can be difficult to know what to read, what to code, what to learn. So I appreciate the feedback from knowledgeable people very much.

I have seen that the pragmatic programmers write very good books that have great reviews so I will stick with them for sure. I will look a bit more critically at w3schools, though, and I will definitely check out the php site you recommended.

I would love to hear more advice from people in the industry on what I should be learning and how I should be learning. If you have any ideas about how I should work on more practical things outside of school to give me real world skills I would be grateful for an email: bcgir87@gmail.com

jtfairbank
I launched a new version of the Election Analytics project for the 2014 Senate elections. electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu I've spent 230 hours on the project since January, its definitely been worth it. I've learned project architecture, automation with Grunt.js, leadership skills, and lotsa others in my role of undergraduate team lead. I am looking to transition out of the project tho... its time to move on to the next thing. :)

I also learned how to business in preparation for founding a startup. Probs spent 100 hours on reading, discussions, and practice pitches.

anderspetersson
I built a marketplace for horseback riding tours [1]

Tried to get stable owners to sell their tours on the site, failed.

Probably closing it down soon if nothing magically happens.

[1] https://www.rida.nu

endriju
What I miss on the site is current offer of tours. Sometimes you have to "fake it before you make it". If that doesn't work out you can always switch to maintenance mode and come back to the project once you figure out what to do next.
funtober
Build consumer demand on the site first and you'll be able to sell something in the long term. At least that's what I'm hoping works with my current project.
ac360
JSON Archetypes – Open-source JSON Models For Popular Types Of Data!

https://github.com/servant-cmes/json-archetypes

I've been writing these non-stop for a few weeks now. Let me know what you guys think. A simple star on github could help get this project some traction and perhaps we can one day come up with the best possible representations of every type of data there is :)

zindlerb
A port of Bret Victors Drawing Dynamic Visualizations tool
alok-g
I would like to hear when you have something. Email is in my profile. Thanks.
motyar
I am a LAMP developer. I learned NodeJS, MongoDB, AngularJS, Bootstrap. Spoken english.

I still have plan to learn PhoneGap, GruntJS and Jade ( and ? )