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

by endriju on 8/28/14, 2:29 PM with 36 comments

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?

  • by fundamental on 8/28/14, 4:23 PM

    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.

  • by sethish on 8/28/14, 4:49 PM

    I forked Project Gutenberg to github[0]. I've been doing some some work on newsdiffs[1]. I'm working on a python library for dealing with Library of Congress Subject Headings[2]. And I'm trying to get access to and release hundreds of syllabi collected via universities via FOIA request[3].

    [0]: gitenberg.github.io [1]: newsdiffs.org [2]: https://github.com/sethwoodworth/LCC [3]: http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/u-of-wisconsin-will-turn-o...

  • by jtfairbank on 8/28/14, 8:45 PM

    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.

  • by michaelbuckbee on 8/28/14, 3:02 PM

    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.

  • by OGiR on 8/28/14, 8:05 PM

    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).

  • by pkinsky on 8/28/14, 8:36 PM

    I wrote a Dvorak practice program in Haskell that uses QuickCheck to generate random pseudo-scala practice sets. https://github.com/pkinsky/dvorak.
  • by ac360 on 8/29/14, 12:26 AM

    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 :)

  • by recalibrator on 8/28/14, 3:53 PM

    A psychological fitness regime for dying. That's all I can say for now: http://eepurl.com/XXOnD
  • by abstrct on 8/28/14, 4:30 PM

    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

  • by tekknolagi on 8/28/14, 5:16 PM

    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

  • by yodaiken on 8/28/14, 4:48 PM

    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.
  • by nkoren on 8/28/14, 2:35 PM

    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!
  • by anderspetersson on 8/28/14, 9:53 PM

    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

  • by hashtag on 8/28/14, 7:34 PM

    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
  • by andrewflnr on 8/28/14, 5:30 PM

    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.
  • by motyar on 8/31/14, 10:21 AM

    I am a LAMP developer. I learned NodeJS, MongoDB, AngularJS, Bootstrap. Spoken english.

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

  • by mnort9 on 8/29/14, 1:03 PM

    Building http://treble.io, a community management tool for twitter. Finally taking beta testers!
  • by JoeAltmaier on 8/28/14, 4:25 PM

    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.
  • by lucasisola on 8/28/14, 3:25 PM

    Creating MVP for http://molo.io. Trying to launch in Fall/Winter.
  • by bsenftner on 8/28/14, 3:53 PM

    Adding automated lip sync and remote developer access to www.3d-avatar-store.com.
  • by zindlerb on 8/29/14, 4:31 AM

    A port of Bret Victors Drawing Dynamic Visualizations tool
  • by tindrlabs on 8/28/14, 4:53 PM

    An app to help people keep track of their raised bed gardens.