I know this question has been asked before in one way or another, but in the mean time projects have been started and finished. People have changed jobs or even fields, etc...
What are you working on? And where? Start-up? Academia? Your favorite MegaCorp?
I am doing something slightly weird. (I can talk about this on HN, but I am keeping it quiet otherwise).
I read an article on Slashdot about John Carmack where he said, (emphasis mine)
" After I took the job at Softdisk, I was happy. I was programming, or reading about programming, or talking about programming, almost every waking hour. It turned out that a $27k salary was enough that I could buy all the books and pizza that I wanted, and I had nice enough computers at work that I didn't feel the need to own more myself (4mb 386-20!).
I could still clearly remember my state of mind when I viewed other people as being ignorant about various things, but after basically doubling my programming skills in the space of six months, I realized how relative it all was. That has been reinforced several additional times over the seven years since then. "
The phrase "doubling my programming knowledge in 6 months" caught my eye and I thought I'd take a crack at it. I've set aside 6 months to do this. Given my smaller "quantum" of knowledge as a compared to Carmack it should be easier :-P.
So anyway, I've set a fairly ambitious(for me) agenda
(1)work completely through Algorithms by Cormen et al and Randomized Algorithms by Prabhakar and Raghavan, doing every exercise in each book,
(2)become really good at lisp and Forth - write about 10,000 "lines of code" in each language, versions of the HRL library (see below)
(3) release an Open Source java library of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms (something extracted from a consulting project I recently completed.).
I've taken a 6 month sabbatical from my consulting work. It was kind of weird explaining to my clients that I am completely unavailable for the next 6 months, but I think it is worth a try. The bank account looks healthy enough (touch wood). I've been working on this for the last 10 days, averaging 12 hours a day and loving it. .
What kind of pace are you setting yourself? A month ago I started a routine of doing a few math problems each day, and reading a Japanese article every day that contains at least 10 new kanji characters. I'm testing the tip I heard somewhere that instead of doing huge chunks and then forget about your goals for a while, it's better to do a bit every day. At least it feels nice, as if I'm traveling on a road that will lead to a nice place. Looking forward to reading books and playing games in Japanese, if not earlier then at least during my retirement days =)
I'm trying to develop my own mobile device. Going to be fun. Intel Atom 1.6ghz, Ubuntu-based, hopefully some kind of 5" capitative touch, software written in Qt/C++ (for lack of a better framework/X drawing option). http://avecora.com
Also working with hnuser://jasonlbaptiste on Ramamia (beta), which lets you keep in touch with your family. http://ramamia.com -- as well as status updates for sports games at http://tickrtalk.com (we were launched, but the data source pulled the plug on our API access...)
...and Classleaf, http://classleaf.com - bringing education a bit more into the 21st century by helping teachers create class websites, with homework, test and due dates, events, file attachments, email lists, pages, and more, and class tracking for students. (You can tell I say that pitch too much.) Mostly managing sales staff (they're working on commission, $1000 per sale) to make sales to high schools primarily.
Lastly, working to study/improve SAT/ACT/SATIIs/my abysmal GPA so I can actually get into a decent college come this fall... sigh. Anyway, overview's mostly at http://markbao.com.
Besides YC, I've been working on Arc. (No writing lately. I can't seem to focus on more than 2 things at once, so it's always a choice of Arc xor essays.)
Specifically, I've been trying to do things to Arc that will make News shorter. I'm running out of room, though: News is 1886 LOC, and it's rare now when I can find something that will cut as many as 5. So I'm going to try writing some other types of applications to make short.
I'm playing with keyword extraction algorithms in arc. Yesterday I discovered it was super easy to pull the classic porter stemmer C library (http://tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/c_thread_safe.txt) through mzscheme's foreign-function interface and into arc. That's not really about the language, but it suggests arc made a really good platform choice. Just by making mzscheme salient it's responsible for getting me hacking more on lisp.
> Besides YC, I've been working on Arc. (No writing lately. I can't seem to focus on more than 2 things at once, so it's always a choice of Arc xor essays.)
Fatherhood, Arc and YC are three things, though:-) Don't know if it's your intention to share anything about the first one, but I'd be curious if you did, and very understanding if you didn't.
I'm working on newer and better software for controlling stage and club lighting. It's still in the early stages, so the final form of the product(s) isn't clear to me yet. A likely initial release will be aimed at the club market, currently dominated by Martin LightJockey since a decent offering there won't require any custom hardware.
I'm using Haskell and functional reactive programming. I intend to expose some sort of programming language (probably graphical) to the user so they can extend the effects engine[0] in ways I probably haven't thought of. Internally, I'm going for a very abstract design so I can build several types of control interface on top of one core.
[0] To oversimplify a bit, effects engines in lighting controllers allow the application of functions of time to any of several attributes of an automated light. A simple example would be a sine wave applied to tilt to make it swing back and forth.
I've done this before profitably. I ended up leaving the market in frustration. I can give you one piece of advice, don't deal with club owners. They are the scum of the earth.
Owners of night clubs don't get into the business for profit, but rather for lifestyle. Your fancy code will just be seen as "huh it lights some shit up".
If you can put yourself above dealing with individual owners, more power to you.
Wow, awesome to hear there are other people into lighting on here. I'm spending my weekend working on a Max/MSP patch that spits out patterns onto an LED grid controlled by a 4/4 time signature. I plan to tie these patterns to music clips within Ableton once Max for Live comes out later this year. The idea is to have layered patterns corresponding to my layered music clips (minimal techno) during my dj performances.
Slightly off the beaten track - I'm currently in a small developing country in Southeast Asia working on renewable energy projects for rural villages. I've been here for 4 months and am absolutely loving it... it's actually a satisfying use of an electrical engineering degree!
I've been working on a global model of epidemic spreading for about a year now (the project was actually started about 3 years ago). The idea is to be able to forecast the progression of the disease across the globe as in where it will hit next, how many cases, there will be, the efficacy of possible governmental interventions, etc... (think weather forecast for disease spreading)
Swine flu came around just when we had finished testing a more detailed traveling model. It's been holding up pretty well so far!
Do you mind if I pass your info to someone working on a similar, but more general framework? He is a fellow Lisper of mine and published a book on the subject as well. NYC based.
As is the theme with the hackers here, I gave my letter of resignation last week to my employers and will be working full time on some underground/blackhat technology that I've developed.
I will also be working on a few of my startup ideas; I am also going to pursue my self-education full time (as in 2 days per week). I have a rigorous self-made curriculum worked out.
My strongest startup idea is to create a pornography web application that uses an in-house ontology to describe the media in-depth. User interaction will be a simple "I like this" or "I don't like this" system to refine individual user's results. The ontology is the key though, most of the creative and foot work will be in that.
I'm also going to be building an RDF Triple Store using Clozure CL; complete with graph inference, a RESTful API, and built to operate as a distributed system.
My self-education entails all of the classic subjects: Mathematics, Rhetoric, Writing, Greek as a foreign language, Logic, and the Sciences. Some of the more specific subjects include: Knowledge Engineering, comp-sci, &c...
Trying to make building customized websites suck less. Have you ever tried to build a MediaWiki site with extensions, or an osCommerce/Zencart site with contributions? It sucks so bad, I'd rather claw my eyes out. Most of the installation instructions consist of:
Open this file.
Find this code.
Paste this code before it.
Paste this code after it.
Save the file.
Rinse and repeat for 10 more files.
Upload and pray.
Error
Troubleshoot
Insert the missing semi-colon
Upload and pray.
Rinse and repeat.
On top of that, you have thousands of people all over the internet doing exactly the same thing. again. and again. and again. What a waste of human effort!
Choose your app, choose your add-ons, build it, install it, done. So easy anyone can do it. No downloading, unzipping, reading instructions, opening files, copying, pasting, comparing, merging, uploading, etc... Just clicking. Uploading addons is as easy as filling out some form info and uploading a zip file.
The site is live, but I have not yet "launched", meaning that I haven't done an ounce of marketing. I had actually planned a "Please review my app" post on HN on Tuesday, but I couldn't resist this tread.
I just launched the online version of Bingo Card Creator and am busy iterating as fast as I possibly can before the school year starts. This weekend I added breadcrumb navigation to the main workflow, put in spinners for some of the AJAX interactions, built in some more analytics into the backend, and finished the Mailchimp integration.
Next (workable) weekend: finish QA on Windows version 3.0 of the desktop app, and get it in the hands of Mac testers.
I'm working on a solution to unify all the major SCMs (ClearCase, Git, Perforce, Subversion, etc.) and abstract the data it in such a way that I can provide information that can be digested by all levels of an organization. I'm calling this my full spectrum tool as it's intended to be as useful for developers as it is for executives and everybody in between. Basically I'm trying to change how we communicate and access information when it comes to software development.
I've been working on this fulltime for over a year now and it seems like I can't make a dent in it. Don't get me wrong, I have a very solid foundation so far that includes an indexer and a very flexible server/client framework that should work for any organization. However, even with this I still have a boat load of work to do.
There are definitely days where I think I've gotten way over my head, but I figure I've invested too much to walk away now.
I just got Ming, the Flash library, working in Ruby. I'm instrumenting the pure-ruby Ruby-AES library to "snapshot" each transformation of the AES round function, and playing with different ways to visualize substitution and permutation. I'm hoping to lay out step-by-step transformation of AES blocks, left-to-right, on a 34"x24" poster for Black Hat.
Our Chicago intern, who we found on Hacker News, is going to be helping me with this project this week. He doesn't know it yet, though.
I'm also finishing our "official" poster for Black Hat, which is a hex/ASCII chart with "interesting" characters highlighted (like a calendar with holidays).
Starting sometime in the next couple weeks, I'm coming off a solid 18+ months of back-to-back consulting projects and moving back to product work for Playbook (http://runplaybook.com), Matasano's product. I have a lot of customer calls to make. Another thing that entails: recruiting a jQ/frontend Ruby developer in Chicago. Leads welcome!
I'm working on a startup that's, well, it's a secret. Not everybody is going to tell. ;)
Last November I was laid off from my job. Haven't been able to find a new one, so I've been teaching myself to code in the meantime. It's a completely different field but I'm in love with it. :) I come from a mixed business/finance/IT (Win sys admin) background. I've run several self-employed small businesses which weren't scalable.
Amazoned about $400 in coding books and am chewing through them nicely. Struggled for months but eventually built a partial working prototype for my startup, and know that I can finish and launch it. If it fails miserably, well damn, I'm going to walk away smarter than I've ever been before, and am going to be well positioned to go on and do it all over again.
Definitely looking for a partner or two in the Boston, MA area. Ideally someone with experience in, or willingness to learn:
- Python w/Django 1.x
- Windows App development (C# I think???)
- Linux/Apache/PostgreSQL Stack
- Objective-C w/Cocoa (App Kit) | PyObjC
But I'm not set in-stone on the technologies. Whatever is easiest and most time/cost-effective. Ping me if you're interested and we can discuss further. I don't bite, except for apple's. Contact info here: dave-gallagher.net
"Find out what you can not do, and then go, and do it!"
I'm trying to solve, once and for all, the problem of hacking music on a computer, using Lisp and a couple venerable libs. You'll all be the first to know when I release the alpha (very soon).
Working on my first startup after spending 11 years designing web sites. My startup is a time tracking application called Minuteglass. It's been an adventure. I can't wait to do one of those posts on HN where I ask people to review it.
As has been for a while, my primary personal activity is developing the x264 video encoder, for fun and for profit. I work on ffmpeg as well from time to time.
Some current commercial activities:
Working on optimizing CoreAVC video decoder for CoreCodec.
Working (9-5) at Facebook, primarily on video and photo-related stuff.
Working on the encoding backend for ShowReelPlayer.
Just resigned from my 9-5 to focus full time on my baby GMTV, a sketch comedy series on YouTube, and other fun projects. Currently, Building a sound stage in my loft for filming.
project 2 - a music aggregator that delivers new hip-hop tracks being discussed on twitter, the goal is to rank based on conversational patterns. m.grownmantv.com
for fun, I help students make sense of financial aid through video, twitter, and the good ol telephone. stuffa.org
Justin.tv. Who would have guessed that 2.5 years after putting a camera on Justin's head, we'd still be going strong? I was really expecting more of a blaze of glory followed by immediate failure, not a sustainable business.
Also look at http://hashpage.com (mashup builder on top bespin, github and google app engine) code: "michael" -> click to generate homepage -> woid -> "edit"
Continuing on with my console editor ( http://purepistos.net/diakonos/ ). Aiming to get it to live up to being billed "A Linux editor for the masses". A recent version formalized an extension system (even though it has been extensible with Ruby for a long while now). Upcoming roadmap items: modes; window splitting; further development of the git extension; ...
[+] [-] plinkplonk|16 years ago|reply
I read an article on Slashdot about John Carmack where he said, (emphasis mine)
" After I took the job at Softdisk, I was happy. I was programming, or reading about programming, or talking about programming, almost every waking hour. It turned out that a $27k salary was enough that I could buy all the books and pizza that I wanted, and I had nice enough computers at work that I didn't feel the need to own more myself (4mb 386-20!).
I could still clearly remember my state of mind when I viewed other people as being ignorant about various things, but after basically doubling my programming skills in the space of six months, I realized how relative it all was. That has been reinforced several additional times over the seven years since then. "
The phrase "doubling my programming knowledge in 6 months" caught my eye and I thought I'd take a crack at it. I've set aside 6 months to do this. Given my smaller "quantum" of knowledge as a compared to Carmack it should be easier :-P.
So anyway, I've set a fairly ambitious(for me) agenda
(1)work completely through Algorithms by Cormen et al and Randomized Algorithms by Prabhakar and Raghavan, doing every exercise in each book,
(2)become really good at lisp and Forth - write about 10,000 "lines of code" in each language, versions of the HRL library (see below)
(3) release an Open Source java library of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms (something extracted from a consulting project I recently completed.).
I've taken a 6 month sabbatical from my consulting work. It was kind of weird explaining to my clients that I am completely unavailable for the next 6 months, but I think it is worth a try. The bank account looks healthy enough (touch wood). I've been working on this for the last 10 days, averaging 12 hours a day and loving it. .
[+] [-] staunch|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bemmu|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prakash|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markbao|16 years ago|reply
Also working with hnuser://jasonlbaptiste on Ramamia (beta), which lets you keep in touch with your family. http://ramamia.com -- as well as status updates for sports games at http://tickrtalk.com (we were launched, but the data source pulled the plug on our API access...)
...and Classleaf, http://classleaf.com - bringing education a bit more into the 21st century by helping teachers create class websites, with homework, test and due dates, events, file attachments, email lists, pages, and more, and class tracking for students. (You can tell I say that pitch too much.) Mostly managing sales staff (they're working on commission, $1000 per sale) to make sales to high schools primarily.
Lastly, working to study/improve SAT/ACT/SATIIs/my abysmal GPA so I can actually get into a decent college come this fall... sigh. Anyway, overview's mostly at http://markbao.com.
[+] [-] jrockway|16 years ago|reply
Enjoy having no time for your personal projects and instead having to do mindless "introduction to cutting-and-pasting java 1.1".
[+] [-] apu|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] defen|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geeko|16 years ago|reply
Interesting intro :)
[+] [-] pg|16 years ago|reply
Specifically, I've been trying to do things to Arc that will make News shorter. I'm running out of room, though: News is 1886 LOC, and it's rare now when I can find something that will cut as many as 5. So I'm going to try writing some other types of applications to make short.
[+] [-] akkartik|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|16 years ago|reply
Fatherhood, Arc and YC are three things, though:-) Don't know if it's your intention to share anything about the first one, but I'd be curious if you did, and very understanding if you didn't.
[+] [-] defen|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackattack|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zak|16 years ago|reply
I'm using Haskell and functional reactive programming. I intend to expose some sort of programming language (probably graphical) to the user so they can extend the effects engine[0] in ways I probably haven't thought of. Internally, I'm going for a very abstract design so I can build several types of control interface on top of one core.
[0] To oversimplify a bit, effects engines in lighting controllers allow the application of functions of time to any of several attributes of an automated light. A simple example would be a sine wave applied to tilt to make it swing back and forth.
[+] [-] spitfire|16 years ago|reply
Owners of night clubs don't get into the business for profit, but rather for lifestyle. Your fancy code will just be seen as "huh it lights some shit up".
If you can put yourself above dealing with individual owners, more power to you.
[+] [-] abecedarius|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petermarks|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahmud|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] listic|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vitaminj|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fakeempire|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Anon84|16 years ago|reply
I've been working on a global model of epidemic spreading for about a year now (the project was actually started about 3 years ago). The idea is to be able to forecast the progression of the disease across the globe as in where it will hit next, how many cases, there will be, the efficacy of possible governmental interventions, etc... (think weather forecast for disease spreading)
Swine flu came around just when we had finished testing a more detailed traveling model. It's been holding up pretty well so far!
[+] [-] mrduncan|16 years ago|reply
As an Indy resident, cool to see this is happening at IU.
[+] [-] yan|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahmud|16 years ago|reply
Cheers!
[+] [-] Ixiaus|16 years ago|reply
I will also be working on a few of my startup ideas; I am also going to pursue my self-education full time (as in 2 days per week). I have a rigorous self-made curriculum worked out.
My strongest startup idea is to create a pornography web application that uses an in-house ontology to describe the media in-depth. User interaction will be a simple "I like this" or "I don't like this" system to refine individual user's results. The ontology is the key though, most of the creative and foot work will be in that.
I'm also going to be building an RDF Triple Store using Clozure CL; complete with graph inference, a RESTful API, and built to operate as a distributed system.
My self-education entails all of the classic subjects: Mathematics, Rhetoric, Writing, Greek as a foreign language, Logic, and the Sciences. Some of the more specific subjects include: Knowledge Engineering, comp-sci, &c...
[+] [-] flooha|16 years ago|reply
Open this file. Find this code. Paste this code before it. Paste this code after it. Save the file. Rinse and repeat for 10 more files. Upload and pray. Error Troubleshoot Insert the missing semi-colon Upload and pray. Rinse and repeat.
On top of that, you have thousands of people all over the internet doing exactly the same thing. again. and again. and again. What a waste of human effort!
My answer: http://flooha.com
Choose your app, choose your add-ons, build it, install it, done. So easy anyone can do it. No downloading, unzipping, reading instructions, opening files, copying, pasting, comparing, merging, uploading, etc... Just clicking. Uploading addons is as easy as filling out some form info and uploading a zip file.
The site is live, but I have not yet "launched", meaning that I haven't done an ounce of marketing. I had actually planned a "Please review my app" post on HN on Tuesday, but I couldn't resist this tread.
[+] [-] patio11|16 years ago|reply
Next (workable) weekend: finish QA on Windows version 3.0 of the desktop app, and get it in the hands of Mac testers.
[+] [-] sdesol|16 years ago|reply
I've been working on this fulltime for over a year now and it seems like I can't make a dent in it. Don't get me wrong, I have a very solid foundation so far that includes an indexer and a very flexible server/client framework that should work for any organization. However, even with this I still have a boat load of work to do.
There are definitely days where I think I've gotten way over my head, but I figure I've invested too much to walk away now.
[+] [-] mrduncan|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|16 years ago|reply
Our Chicago intern, who we found on Hacker News, is going to be helping me with this project this week. He doesn't know it yet, though.
I'm also finishing our "official" poster for Black Hat, which is a hex/ASCII chart with "interesting" characters highlighted (like a calendar with holidays).
Starting sometime in the next couple weeks, I'm coming off a solid 18+ months of back-to-back consulting projects and moving back to product work for Playbook (http://runplaybook.com), Matasano's product. I have a lot of customer calls to make. Another thing that entails: recruiting a jQ/frontend Ruby developer in Chicago. Leads welcome!
[+] [-] dgallagher|16 years ago|reply
Last November I was laid off from my job. Haven't been able to find a new one, so I've been teaching myself to code in the meantime. It's a completely different field but I'm in love with it. :) I come from a mixed business/finance/IT (Win sys admin) background. I've run several self-employed small businesses which weren't scalable.
Amazoned about $400 in coding books and am chewing through them nicely. Struggled for months but eventually built a partial working prototype for my startup, and know that I can finish and launch it. If it fails miserably, well damn, I'm going to walk away smarter than I've ever been before, and am going to be well positioned to go on and do it all over again.
Definitely looking for a partner or two in the Boston, MA area. Ideally someone with experience in, or willingness to learn:
- Python w/Django 1.x
- Windows App development (C# I think???)
- Linux/Apache/PostgreSQL Stack
- Objective-C w/Cocoa (App Kit) | PyObjC
But I'm not set in-stone on the technologies. Whatever is easiest and most time/cost-effective. Ping me if you're interested and we can discuss further. I don't bite, except for apple's. Contact info here: dave-gallagher.net
"Find out what you can not do, and then go, and do it!"
[+] [-] inklesspen|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thunk|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lzell|16 years ago|reply
I'm in nyc and I would love to hear any feedback! Thanks.
[+] [-] ctingom|16 years ago|reply
http://www.minuteglass.com/
[+] [-] DarkShikari|16 years ago|reply
Some current commercial activities:
Working on optimizing CoreAVC video decoder for CoreCodec.
Working (9-5) at Facebook, primarily on video and photo-related stuff.
Working on the encoding backend for ShowReelPlayer.
[+] [-] chedigitz|16 years ago|reply
project 2 - a music aggregator that delivers new hip-hop tracks being discussed on twitter, the goal is to rank based on conversational patterns. m.grownmantv.com
for fun, I help students make sense of financial aid through video, twitter, and the good ol telephone. stuffa.org
[+] [-] emmett|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prakash|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woid|16 years ago|reply
In my spare time I'm making tools for web developers at http://www.binaryage.com.
Also look at http://hashpage.com (mashup builder on top bespin, github and google app engine) code: "michael" -> click to generate homepage -> woid -> "edit"
Anyone uses XRefresh, FirePython, FireQuery, FireRainbow, Visor? Gimme feedback! :-)
[+] [-] Pistos2|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fcoury|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emilis_info|16 years ago|reply