Ask HN: What are you working on?

[jacquesm]

In the thread about Oracle rdtsc observed that 'the crowd who picks and buys Oracle doens't hang out on HN'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9703603

That's most likely true, but I suspect that we do have some people from that crowd and from plenty of other interesting niches in IT as well as well as lots of non-IT people that somehow are attracted to HN.

So hence my question, What are you working on?

What field would you consider your niche and how is it working out for you?

[dalacv]

LIMS - Laboratory Information Management Systems.

Definitely Niche. I've been doing it for about 15 years and I keep seeing the same consultants over and over again.

Here's the deal. Most manufacturing companies (think Big Pharma, Petrochemical, Chemical, Widget manufacturing, anything really) measure quality. Those quality measurements are probably done in a laboratory. Every laboratory generates data. All that data needs to be managed well so that the laboratory can maintain its accredidation.

Basically, LIMS systems manage samples and lab result data. In addition, they probably integrate with Instruments and instrument software to automate some of that data entry.

Other industries besides manufacturing are Govt (waste and wastewater treatment labs), Third-party labs (labs that do testing for other companies), Healthcare (clinical labs), Forensic Labs, and more.

Bottom line, there are tons of laboratories and they all need to manage their data.

The players in this space are downright stuck in the last decade. There is so much opportunity here for a few new players to come in and make a step-change.

I'm currently working on creating a modern LIMS to manage Laboratory data.

[csirac2]

That's awesome. Would love to know more. I was (only tangentially, really it was my manager) involved with (one of many) LIMS evaluations at CSIRO. I'm under the impression that "Generic" LIMS have awful track records in Australia at universities and research orgs like CSIRO: despite custom software projects also having poor cost/performance outcomes generally, historically it seems there aren't any great examples of LIMS aimed at diverse multidisciplinary research environments which have delivered better outcomes at less cost than even the most horribly expensive over-budget bespoke systems places like this churn out. There is a trail of train wrecks that is failed LIMS projects in this sector, largely from manufacturing/forensics sector thinking their LIMS fits all...

The most inspiring thing I saw was work on automated high-throughput materials discovery (I believe the examples at the time were polymers). Instrument operation, experiment design and results capture was done with OWL/RDF... And off it goes: repeatable results where the software drives experiment parameters until a goal or properties are reached. Semantic web tech has a lot of failed promises to answer for but those guys really seemed to make this stuff sing. Seeing what they're modeling/capturing, graph data models might not be such a bad fit, after seeing the contortions we went through in genetic studies trying to capture every facet of every piece of data and its provenance and the provenance of its methods and materials and specimens and specimen preparation and specimen identification and splitting and cloning and so on ad nauseum

Better stop ranting. I do software defined radio at dayjob and some silly osint graph-db driven thing I'm playing with at home to help security audit all packages, binaries and hopefully one day in-memory processes in linux/containers :)

[aesthetics1]

A truly informative post. Thanks for telling us something about your niche.

[lambdaelite]

A medical device startup, based on a technology platform I invented in grad school. The startup part is what started me hanging out on HN, but I've found that there is very little overlap between what I'm trying to do and what startups on HN do. Still, things are interesting enough here that I keep checking in.

edit: I missed the "how's it working out?" part.

Not great. Cash starved from day 1. Funding for medical devices is quite, quite different than software (i.e., bad but getting better recently). We don't fit the model for many VCs, so that limits potential sources, and being in medical devices means that we need to deal with sophisticated investors that can run proper DD on us, further limiting potential sources. Funding has been (and still is) a struggle! It's also a little bit "lonely": we run into a lot of problems unique to this industry, but often we can't talk about it in detail, and even when we can, there aren't many people around to talk to.

Project management has been interesting. There's quite a number of consulting and industrial design groups out there, which helps to bring in expertise when needed and keep things lean overall. A big challenge has been in setting up the supply chain: it's not something I've done (or thought of) before, but consulting has helped out here as well. Basically, we'd be dead in the water without outside consultants.

Regulatory affairs is a pain, but I appreciate why it's there and it's not onerous per se, just slows everything down (not necessarily a bad thing). It more or less distills down to documenting "say what you're doing, and do what you're saying".

The technology side is a bit boring, honestly. We need to design things conservatively, unless we have a really, really good reason not to. We also need guaranteed years of availability for parts, which additionally tends to lead to conservative designs.

Surprising lessons learned: cable management (i.e., in the device) is a nightmare, and packaging is anything but a simple problem to solve. Also, may have learned more in 6 mos. tilting at these windmills than my entire undergrad + graduate career.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

What kind of consultants do you typically find yourself needing?

I've been in the Medical Device field as a software engineer for almost 20 years and I'm beginning to look for other ways to leverage that experience. Most of my background in the field is in software/firmware development but I've managed to learn bits and pieces of Supply Chain, Regulatory, Manufacturing, Field Service and related subjects to get my job done.

Cable management: yeah. Our previous instrument had over a mile of wire & cable in its first iteration.

[heywire]

I'm a software developer working on point-of-sale at one of the major companies in this field. I've worked at the same company for my entire career, and have no plans on leaving. I've found that the retail software industry seems to be very "sticky" -- lots of people with 20, 30+ year histories at the same company (or sets of companies). Even those who leave seem to stay in the general industry, sometimes even returning to the same company. The company I work for gives plenty of opportunities internally to transfer between projects and teams, and there are many different software stacks in use, so there is always something interesting to work on.

[tixocloud]

It sounds like a really great place to be and I am curious as to why it's as "sticky" as it is even for software developers. Would you mind sharing more details? I'd be happy to chat on HN or email.

[samteeeee]

I'm working on what I currently call "IMDb for Drones", although I really need a better way of describing it! Here it is: http://www.RCPartRatings.com

[iDemonix]

If you haven't heard of it, have a play with PC Part Picker. Making something like this for your site would be really interesting IMO.

[gee_totes]

This is really really cool. I've worked on similar systems of bundling together parts, and your site is well-executed. Maybe you could call it "Pricewatch for Drones"?

[gt565k]

This is great! I was thinking about building my own drone, but was having trouble finding a starting point.

[victorhn]

Do you mind to share what stack are you using to build it?

[benzesandbetter]

I'm working with two SaaS startups to build analytics-driven marketing platforms based on an open source CMS. Both clients create tools for technical teams, and both are solidly profitable. One of them is from the Bay Area and on Series D. The other if from Scandinavia and on series A. In both instances, the previous version of their web presence was developed by the same dev team as their core product, and their marketing/growth team was competing for development time from the same devs who were building their core product. The platform we've developed enables non-technical marketing teams to easily push out new initiatives and new content, rapidly measure their results and correcting course. At the same time, their team can be confident that their site will work smoothly across a broad range of devices and platforms. By combining software development skills with knowledge of marketing tools and best-practices, we've created a nice niche for ourselves.

I'm also working with a Fortune 100 client to develop an intranet platform for them. It's an awesome project, and I wish I could say more than that, but we're under a rather restrictive NDA. We're working on producing a case study, and getting it approved by their legal department. We've done some other large intranet projects before (federal agencies and global NGOs) so this is another strong niche for us.

I often encourage developers to combine their technical skills with another domain-specific specialty to create a compelling value proposition. It's great to be a "Javascript developer" or "Python developer" but with that positioning, you are easily commoditized. By combining technical skills with a non-technical specialty you are much more resistant to commoditization.

[brickcap]

I am working on wrinq[1] an application that helps people manage their rental property. Not a niche domain (or maybe it is since I don't see many applications for the real estate sector except for listings) but we are using niche technologies.

It is built with openresty and couchdb both of which I feel are terribly underrated technologies.

"How is it working out?"

On the technology side. Everything is going great. I read a thread on micro-services a while ago and with couchdb (if you take time to think through) it is really easy to have micro-services that can be distributed. We've got 5. While they are not independently deployed yet they can be at any time. It's only a mater of replicating the existing data(very easy) and changing the urls(easy but needs some thorough testing).

openresty makes it really easy to communicate to in house as well as some third party services we use. I smile every time I write:

`local res1,res2,res3 = ngx.location.capture_multi{{"url1"},{"url3"},{"url3"}}

It is very satisfying to see the results of different independent apis coming together in a single call.

Both of these technologies are very resource efficient,openresty in particular. And we have tested high loads of traffic on cheap servers without making any effort to optimize.

On the business side. We are doing okay. Making sales is always a challenge but people are interested in talking to us which is a good sign, I feel. Only a matter of time before we perfect our product and pitch. We are in no hurry :)

[1]https://www.wrinq.com/

[iDemonix]

I would definitely invest in a better landing page, especially one with some screenshots of the software. I googled 'landlord software' and found a fair few - http://www.landlordvision.co.uk/ seems to be the most popular and their landing page looks pretty decent.

I am, admittedly, surprised by the lack of SaaS landlord sites. There are a fair few but most look very dated and uninviting.

[_dr62]

Think my niche is programming in news. Something between a programmer, an editor and a reporter. I don't work on the core CMS because we have dedicated teams for that. What I specialize in is all the things the CMS can't do, won't do, or isn't designed for, like interactives. Or this http://projects.voanews.com/ebola-tracker/ ; the tracker data is updated manually because it has to be reviewed (sudo vi ebola/data) but an automated watch script alerts me when the World Health Organization updates their ebola stats every few epidemiological weeks. I like using RaphaelJS for making graphics.

Currently, working on 3-4 editorial projects. First one is a bit dry, a metrics dashboard done in Node.js that gets top pageviews from our articles and then scrapes titles, number of article comments, facebook shares, tweets. Some real surprises there - an article can have 10x number of fb shares than pageviews. As in, the teaser photo + summary is enough for people to share and not read in entirety. I like node. Also (probably unsurprisingly) but facebook is faster than our own sites for scrapes, even though we use akamai / CDN.

Next up is a parallax-y report on fourth of July for our Learning English division. It's a longform writeup laced with some cinemagraph-style looping videos and embedded quizzes explaining the constitution and a bunch of Americana to our international audience. The internal tool we generate these projects with (tool separates content and programming/design) are a mix of PHP / Smarty templating that I want to convert to node with some realtime collaboration features, but once baked the final reader-facing stuff is HTML/JavaScript. Looks kind of like this http://projects.voanews.com/central-african-republic-diamond... project. Funny thing is the internal tool is called "timeline editor" and it does everything except timelines. It should be called interactive editor.

Also, oh boy, I made that map in the article and am so proud of it. It remixed a bunch of complicated and overwhelming data points and simplified it for the reader. Had to do some lat/lng to pixel conversions, some point-in-polygon checks, got the CAR shape polygon list from a UC Davis site and then used inkscape to simplify the shapes because it had millions of points. So guess this kind of programming is a niche specialization for news agencies, and it's worked well for me, going on 7-8 years now.

Damn, I'm a nerd.

[bemmu]

Very interesting tidbit about the 10x number of FB shares. I sometimes wondered why FB keeps showing me so many news on sites outside of FB, sending me away from their site. But I guess they don't send away quite as many people as I assumed.

[david927]

An new programming language paradigm: https://vimeo.com/107069470

Really tough going, but have a first customer in its initial incarnation: brodlist.com

[jdc0589]

just finished working on my first real fully automated + autoscaling + distributed application environment a few weeks ago. The the definition/spec for all of it is on source control; nothing is done manually at go-time.

It gives you the same type of confidence about your application environment that you experienced for the first time when you switched to automated application deployments.

the various "click the build button" workflows that are implemented so far:

1. base images for all the different server types get built/updated. any future environment updates will upgrade machines to the new images.

2. an entire new named application environment (minimum ~15 VMs) gets created (webservers, background services, cache servers, database servers, etc..), configured, and applications deployed to. creating a new environment for, e.g, performance testing is as simple saying "build: performance-test-env"

3. an entire app environment (any of them) gets updated based on any configuration changes made since the last update/create.

4. various normal application deployment automation

[notduncansmith]

Yo Davis! Shoot me an email about that sometime, I'm actually setting up something similar-sounding at my current company (though not at scale yet).

[andersthue]

A new methodology, agile/scrum but more humane.

Been an IT developer for most of my life but always found humans and how they work more interesting than computers and finally I figured out how to do something good with that interest.

http://timeblock.com

[duartetb]

http://Gamedevr.com - Links and resources for game developers.

Im trying to get into game development, and decided to create a website listing alot of tools and resources that i think are usefull.

The main objective is to be community curated, by adding your own links via Github. The problem is that im also a newbie webdeveloper and havent spent alot of time learning about source control and Github especificaly.

Im learning as I go, thats why i havent realy posted it anywhere.

Im planning on adding alot of resources, fix alot of stuff and then realy tell people about it.

Ill just leave it here, for some feedback from you guys.

Ps: Sorry for my terrible english.

[MarkCole]

At the moment my niche is 'game development'. Specifically the development of a web based game at a medium sized (400-500 employees I believe) game company. So nothing really out of the ordinary there.

Our tech stack is also pretty standard for a game of this era PHP and MySQL backend, frontend is HTML, CSS and JS. Version control with SVN.

It's definitely been eye opening for me, debugging old code that hasn't been touched since the mid-noughties can be a real challenge. However this has taught me to be more thoughtful about how I code, and to plan out how I'm going to build something efficient and maintainable.

[tixocloud]

Market Intelligence as a Service - Insightico (http://getinsightico.com)

Exploring if we have a viable business after several people have told us that it's useful. We're still trying to land our first customer though the challenge is focusing on the right customer segment since it spans multiple industries.

Funny enough, I did have a job choosing and picking technologies such as Oracle/Microsoft/etc. I worked at a high growth startup at the beginning and then went to work at large corporations to get a balance of both worlds.

[totmore1254]

site not working when entering email, getting error about CSRF?

[fananta]

Chirp - A new smart notification center.

It's still being developed but here's the landing page to give an idea: http://welcomechirp.com

[sganesh]

SETaaS - Software Engineering Teams as a Service

Trying to find out if the bootstrapped productized service at http://www.thinkbridge.us/setaas.html is viable.

Targets are businesses with software systems and applications that are to be developed and maintained at a smaller scale but need continued access to technical talent.

After being a Software Developer for 15+ yrs, learning marketing & sales :)

[tmaly]

https://askpatron.com fast single screen customer feedback with rewards for small local businesses. It's a work in progress and I am doing things that don't scale right now. I have four businesses that are helping me beta test. I am looking for more. The overall goal is to improve the customer experience using a system that is super fast and super simple to use.

[brudgers]

Refitting the architecture boat to sail seas of information instead of motoring commodified ponds of construction? So far, it's not appreciably less successful in real terms and even if my valuations and probabilities are each off by an order of magnitude or two in bad directions, the expected return is higher per time unit of effort simply because piece work cannot scale well.

And writing.

[atsaloli]

My niche is training sysadmins on CFEngine. Been doing it part-time for 5 years; just got a full-time gig as a CFEngine consultant for a year and wondering when I'm going to have time to continue developing/expanding the training but happy to be working on CFEngine full-time as it'll help raise my expertise.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Niche: embedded systems Working on - "at work:" a large medical instrument; "at home:" an industrial monitoring platform with a web interface.

I really like my niche. I've believed that merging embedded control systems and "the web" was long overdue, and finally industry is catching up with that belief.