Ask HN: Weekend update -- What weekend projects are you up to?

[sunir]

Many of us draw on Hacker News for inspiration on our ongoing evening and weekend projects. I'd bet most of us are soloing on our projects too.

Since weekends are a bit slow around here, I thought it would be fun and useful to have a weekly or biweekly open thread to talk about how your project is doing this week. I'd be interested to know what people are spending their time on and I'm sure it'd be nice to have a place to talk about our projects.

I'll start with mine in the comments. If it goes well, we can do this again next week.

[sunir]

I'm working feverishly over the holidays to get my project, Bibdex, running on production legs. It's an online bibliography service meant for collecting and sharing references and notes.

http://www.bibdex.com

One of my personal goals for the project is to spend absolutely no money on it except for servers, domains, lawyers, and accountants. While seemingly insane, I wanted to do this project to learn the full 360 degrees of how to create and launch a web product so it could help me in my day career. No better way to learn than to just dive right in and do it yourself, eh? It's a slower process, but rewarding. (Also, I'm cheap.)

Here's an example of why it's valuable. Over the last year, I got pretty far except for the logo, which used to look like I drew it in MS Paint. In fact, the old one is still here: http://bibdex.com/images/logo.png . I was hunting around on BrandStack (http://www.brandstack.com) and LogoPond (http://www.logopond.com) and contemplating spending up to $1000 on a logo designer when I realized a common theme to all the logos I liked.

  1. They all looked good in black and white because they were simple geometric forms.
  2. They only had two elements that played off each other.

If you go through those two logo sites, you'll see what I mean. Complicated logos are worse. Logos by their nature are small, short attention span, high impact communication forms. Keep it simple and deliver the message through some tension.

I decided I'd try my hand at it, so after a few hours of sketches, I loaded up Paint Shop Pro (yes, PSP. I mentioned I'm cheap, right?) and drew the new logo myself. The constraints of simple geometric forms and limiting it to two concepts led to something I'm happy with: a book that is also a rocketship to demonstrate 'bibliographies in action'. Even if I ultimately find it an unsatisfying implementation, I like the core idea and can later hire a designer to redraw it.

So, what did you do this weekend?

[vorador]

By the way, I found a typo in your terms of service : 1. You must intentionally and maliciously disrupt the reasonable enjoyment of others using the Service.

This is probably not what you wanted.

[skip]

This is actually not a bad idea. I've graduated now, but I would always start taking notes on each reference at the end of my paper. So it's definitely fulfilling a need.

But I wish there was a lower threshold of participation--couldn't I sign up for an anonymous account, and then attach my name to it once I decide that it's useful for me?

Also, Inkscape and GIMP are free, and just as powerful as the Adobe suite, especially for making more basic stuff like icons or logos. Perhaps if you are into photo manipulation or use Fireworks for web design there is some benefit to getting the Adobe stuff.

[csytan]

This could potentially save a lot time for TAs who have to summarize papers for their professors.

It bothers me to no end that research publications are geared more towards gaining reputation (and funding) than sharing information.

Best of luck!

[savant]

I'm working on a few things, both spanning at least two weekends.

The first is my baby, a project management tool built in PHP. Tired of messing with slow trac installs on PHP or fugly-looking/complicated PHP tools (I'm watching you, bugzilla!). It is mainly targeted towards the types of projects I've seen were useful for development with the clients and staff I work with as a student working in a university and freelancing on the side. It will definitely allow me to sleep a little better on the weekends and keep everyone on my team up to date as to what they need to get done and where projects stand.

The second is a generic file upload system that will likely be used within the android hacking community to track resources etc. This one is actually very far along it's development after only two days of real development, and I am quite happy with it. Hopefully it will be of use to people in other communities/companies looking for a collaborative alternative to dropbox. I'm a fan of minimalism, so while the app will have many features, you wouldn't notice them all immediately. Hope to launch this within a week if everything goes well with development.

[thibaut_barrere]

I've been working on http://www.learnivore.com (my ruby/rails/iphone screencasts aggregator) - more specifically:

- an iphone specific version (using jQtouch)

- better ways to share the site (using topsy + facebook widgets, instead of addthis and sharethis that proved uneffective here after a few weeks of testing)

- a more responsive site (using google cdn for jquery for instance + other tweaks)

- some bits of SEO

Btw, I'm now tracking my time for this kind of side-projects using Freckle. Good to know how much time you spent at the end of the month!

[stevejohnson]

Regular expression parser and compiler for a VM regex implementation similar to the one described in [1]. Part of a larger project, and the VM doesn't actually operate on a normal string data structure.

[1] http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html

[stevejohnson]

Update: The parser is generating a correct AST. I mean, not that anyone really cares, but I am getting some work done, which is nice.

[technomancy]

Integrating package.el into the main Emacs codebase.

[mquander]

I'm working on a piece in Inform 7 for this interactive fiction design comp:

http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/11/game_design_competiti...

[sunir]

So, what's the story about?

[leftnode]

Working on my new shopping cart software. I've grown pretty disgusted with most shopping cart options out there, so its time to finally buckle down and finish mine.

IONCart

On Github: http://github.com/leftnode/ION-Cart

My blog: http://leftnode.com/progress-on-ioncart-basic-mockups-starte...

[csytan]

I worked on http://www.webnodes.org/ - it's a proggit visualization.

[spiralhead]

I like the minimal UI and the tree view is interesting. I would be interested in learning more about the background of this project but there's no "about" link anywhere.

[sunir]

I love the tree builder. How does it decide there is enough space to expand to two (or more) columns and conversely when to collapse columns?

[r11t]

Not only is this useful for visualizing proggit but I am guessing it would work nicely for visualizing any other sub-reddit also!

[lw0x15]

Hey dude, that's an awesome web app you got there, im loving it.

[kd5bjo]

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027418

[thaumaturgy]

So far this weekend I've lapped in most of the valves for the new engine for my truck, worked on some parts for my model T speedster, done a little work in the garden, and worked on some advanced features for the $5/month unlimited domain mail hosting service that's getting turned on in a couple of days.

[tobtoh]

I've been working on my own personal expense tracking software. Not just because it will have exactly the features I'm after, but also as an exercise to re-aquaint myself with php/mysql, then moving to make it iphone friendly (as a web app) and finally to produce a iphone app version.

[sammcd]

I'm working on a Mac GUI to control Django and Rails local development servers. Hoping to really take log viewing to the next level.

If you are interested: http://141312.com

I hope to launch in March.

[jberryman]

working on a befunge-93 interpreter in haskell... that sounds epically useful, no?

[Klondike]

Finishing up an Android app for Campfire, a web-based chat service. I did the app before they released an official API, and then rewrote it all. I think it'll end up on the Market this week. It's been a lot of fun.

[dangrossman]

I'm working on a fraud management tool for ecommerce sites that integrates the Twilio API to automatically call customers' phones to verify orders and record voice authorizations.

[sunir]

When you get it working, we should talk. My day job is being the head of integrations at FreshBooks. I'm also one of the leaders of the Small Business Web (http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com) and know about a trillion e-commerce ISVs.

Email me at FreshBooks: sunir splat freshbooks dot com

[dangrover]

Building the online store component to my sheet music reader for the iPhone: http://www.wonderwarp.com/opus

[guiseppecalzone]

Wow. Really cool app. I could see musicians loving this.

[jacquesm]

Busy trying to implement an automated image tagger.

It's probably going to last me a bit longer than the weekend though :)

Most fun I've had coding in a while.

[sunir]

Tagging based on context, or from the image itself? Semantically, or on graphical metrics?

[cosmok]

I had just finished on this: http://www.goopendb.org - Elastic Lists for movies. Back to work from today ;(

[cosmok]

I submitted the site earlier here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028410, I have some background info there.

[cmars232]

Ported Mafia Wars autoplayer to Google Chrome. Doing Little Schemer in Clojure, converting to use tail-call recur. Mowing the laundry.

[warfangle]

My toy twitter app. Trying to teach myself Scala/Lift and collaborative filtering techniques at the same time. Good times :)