Ask HN: What have you achieved in January 2015?
I'll start with me:
* Started keto - 2 weeks now and counting, lost almost 7 pounds.
* Started the Ruby on Rails tutorial by Michael Hartl - I finally want to get serious about it (failed completing it a couple of times).
111 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadMy number one piece of advice to college kids that want to differentiate themselves from the pack is to try get something substantial (i.e. new feature or tough bug fix, not just something small/cosmetic) committed to a prominent open source project (ideally in C or C++). From a hiring perspective, knowing that you were able to get a patch accepted tells me so much more about you and your technical competency than anything else on your resume (or your internships, or your GPA, or which school you went to, etc).
I am from Small (3 Tier City) Of India (Rajkot). We do not have any co-working space here. I am planning to start a Hacker Space soon.
Coffee shops do not have reliable wifi here. Plus I am a contractor so I need proper Wifi to work over VPN,
Tax wise its not that complex in India. You can hire any CA and pay him approx 200$ a year and it can be handled easily.
Since I have a very fluid schedule, I designed the new habits as small "chunks of time" around my only daily constants: breackfast, lunch and dinner. Rather than sticking to "I'm going to exercise at 5:00pm" (who knows, I may be busy then), I prefer "I'm going to practice for 30 min. before breackfast".
http://www.swift-tutorial.io/learn-swift
It's working great; I have a slick kanban workflow on Trello going on, and a (tiny, irrelevant, but useful for this purpose) SaaS app in production.
App #2 is under way ahead of schedule since #1 reached MVP with a full week to spare of January.
It's obviously early days in the project, but I hope to make this my year of sincere effort, and personal growth.
Great username, by the way.
http://icon-sizerator.davidjpeacock.ca/
I know zillions of people have solutions for this, but it was a nice self-contained project.
Very much appreciated!
On my board I have the following lists:
2015 Week N | Now | Today | Tomorrow | Week | Month
Long-term work items originate in the month list, and get moved left as time progresses. Obviously as items come up they can be input whenever is appropriate.
At the end of the week, 2015 Week N is archived (I actually move it to another board), and a new week is created to cover the next week's completed work.
This setup pressures me into meeting my commitments, and allows me to feel accomplished by looking at the previously completed weeks.
I'm thinking one months project might even be a platform to encourage others to do this in 2016...
Additionally, I'm allowing myself to port a previous month's app to another language or environment; January was my first exposure to Node.js for example, but maybe later in the year I'll rework it in Go.
http://tld-list.com
What all is automated? Price querying / updating?
I didn't check, are you monetizing with affiliate links?
[1] http://cascadiajs.com
http://www.joshdoody.com/career/
P.S. Hit me up if you're in Seoul in July-October!
Fun tech too.. using chess.js (https://github.com/jhlywa/chess.js/blob/master/README.md), chessboard.js (chessboardjs.com) and Firebase.com at the moment.
2. Started working on Larameet UK (https://james-brooks.uk/larameet-uk/) which will be a mini-conference/meetup for Laravel and PHP developers alike.
3. Moved back in with my parents so that more of my savings can go towards a house.
4. I reached sixteen weeks of not drinking energy drinks; Monster, Redbull, Lucozade etc and reduced my daily coffee intake to two cups max. I'd rather drink tea and water now. I don't smoke nor do I have a particularly addictive personality, but stopping myself drinking these energy drinks has been really hard and continues to be when I'm near them.
5. Finally (after five years) setup a deployment system for our consumer websites at work. This makes a massive difference and is a step in the direction I want to be doing.
Wrote up an article about getting F# adopted in the work place. It got ~1k views https://medium.com/@the_ajohnston/how-to-get-pragmatists-to-...
Wrote up a very domain specific article on scheduling. It got 8 views https://medium.com/@the_ajohnston/dont-use-the-word-reschedu...
I made significant progress on my sideproject (implemented native mac, linux, and windows clients in addition to the backend!). Shameless plug: It's a filesystem-based time tracker (think dropbox filesystem monitoring + Machine Learning to automatically classify projects = no-hassle, fully automated time tracking) http://moonlighter.io
Personally, we paid off the balances on my wife's car and student loans. Now to continue tackling my own student loans. (Can't wait to only have the mortgage payment...)
FastBoot allows you to boot up your JavaScript application on the server, gather model data, and send the rendered output as HTML to the client. This allows search crawlers, cURL, and people with very slow JavaScript engines to access apps that were previously unavailable. I've had a fire in my belly to make this work since I had a conversation with Dan Webb at Twitter about all of the reasons they switched away from client-side rendering[1].
1: https://blog.twitter.com/2012/improving-performance-on-twitt...
Most people think this problem has already been solved by being able to render templates on the server, but the problem is much harder than that. For example, I learned on HN yesterday that most server-rendered Flux apps can only handle one request a time, due to the reliance on singletons[2]. You really need an application-wide DI system like Angular/Ember to get this working with multiple requests in parallel.
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8989667
I'm really really really excited about this work because I think we can have a single, robust solution for all Ember developers that is dead simple to install and get running. Most importantly, this makes JavaScript apps accessible for everyone, while retaining the UI advantages for those whose devices are capable enough. In other words, I think once this is complete, we can finally put to bed the controversy over whether server-side or client-side rendering is best—we'll have a hybrid that offers the best of both worlds.
A common pattern is to instantiate a new store for every request, to avoid collisions.
I guess the high order bit for me is that developers shouldn't have to worry about stuff like this—picking the "right" implementation of their app architecture. Ideally, everything just works out of the box. The harder it is to do, the less likely people are to do it.
On January I got the video driver (composite video, PAL; rendering from external SRAM) and the keyboard driver (PS2).
Reading and learning about PAL and PS2 has been very interesting, and also I had to learn a EDA software (KiCad) to keep the schematics safe because the Arduino board has now more cables that I can safely track ;)
Besides I had to understand lots of details about the AVR, mainly how SPI and the USART interfaces work.
Good fun!
* Finalized my tax return for 2014 (best year ever for me)
* Tinkered with isomorphic React rendering, and got a working example that loads data asynchronously
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_xNPk2y8N4
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rocket-renegade/id955229059?...
How was developing a game in Swift?
I've been working with Swift since it was launched in the Xcode 6 betas. It has been challenging. Working through all of the betas and going with Swift was probably an insane choice given that Swift was in such a state of evolution. Every beta would cause a sea of red flags. I'd dread having to level-up when a new beta was dropped, but I figured, might as well get it over with than wait until the GM hits and have things really be in a terrible state! My vote for the "best" error that I received during development was in some computational matrix code that calculates flight paths: "Expression was too complex to be solved in reasonable time." Of course, I read that as, "The math is making the room spin up in here."
However, I dig the language, and things have stabilized significantly now.
Hah, sounds like my experience with Rust over the past year or two. But like Swift, Rust is a really cool and innovative language, so I've put up with it (although looking forward to things calming down soon).
Actually, it's my interest in Rust that's propelled my interest in Swift, to the point where I'm considering developing an iOS app in Swift as an experiment. I've done Android development before, but never iOS.
I may even do a game, so I was curious how your app went.
You didn't happen to open source the code, did you? I'm curious what a codebase for a well-received game in Swift looks like.
[1] http://thinklegend.com/commit/
I've been playing both flatpicking guitar and mandolin respectively for 14 and 4 years, but have been in love with the sax for more than 20 years.
At almost 29 years old I decided it was time to take the plunge and learn how to play the thing.
It's going to be a good excuse to finally learn how to actually read music in the process.
I feel motivated like I rarely felt before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_xNPk2y8N4
[1]:http://coderdojochi.org/
[2]:http://www.girldevelopit.com/
[3]:http://codeandcupcakes.net/
http://sendtomycloud.com
Also, gathered a lot of attention for the ANSI & ASCII art communities (and at least 2 new artists!) with my rewrite (and promotion) of http://artpacks.org.
FYI: A new pack full of ANSI art from Blocktronics comes out today, around 2pm eastern. You'll be able to see it at http://artpacks.org/2015