
Ask HN: What are you working on? - jacquesm
In the thread about Oracle rdtsc observed that &#x27;the crowd who picks and buys Oracle doens&#x27;t hang out on HN&#x27;.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9703603<p>That&#x27;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.<p>So hence my question, What are you working on?<p>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 :)

~~~
dalacv
You are totally on point about the one-size-fits LIMS for QC Labs not working
in the research lab. It's my observation that research labs need a solution
that is much more dynamic than the traditional LIMS.

I like your comments regarding OWL/RDF. I will have to look into that. I know
of a few Chemical / Polymer mfg. companies who are still using their homegrown
LIMS-slash-PLM systems to manage new materials research.

The thing I love about this field the most is working along side very
intelligent chemists and engineers and helping them automate their labs. The
appreciation factor is through the roof when you can remove manual data entry
and help them advance their laboratory throughput.

------
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.

~~~
lambdaelite
Inexpensive ones.

Kidding aside, as a startup, our needs and capabilities are quite different
from a more established company. We can't afford to pay for consultants to fly
business class, nor expensive per diems. We can't afford to implement
heavyweight development processes, nor should we since being nimble is one of
the few advantages we have as a startup. Software licensing costs is a concern
at this stage, so we'd rather do a subscription for a (for example) CAD
package even if it's not the industry standard over buying a license for the
industry standard package. Also frustrating in general is that as a medical
device, our volumes are never "large" in the consumer sense and so many common
manufacturing processes (e.g., injection molding) are not practical, nor are
companies excited to supply parts in our expected volumes—our consultants need
to consider what are sometimes less common processes or smaller, "hungrier"
suppliers. For many things, the budget is driving the bus, and it's within
reason acceptable to need to spend more in the future if it means we can spend
less now.

It can be hard to find the a consultant at an experienced group (and domain
expertise is what we need) that is willing to work with us. Our future
business is not guaranteed (statistically we are likely to fail), the business
we will be bringing is small, and we're pinching pennies on what we bring.
What seems to have worked is to find a "hungry" associate-level consultant
(keeps costs lower) at a larger group who can tap into the experience of
senior/principal-level consultants on demand. We point out that, if
successful, we'll be able to bring more business to the associate-level
consultants, so we both will grow together.

I'll give a specific example, stream of consciousness style partly out of
laziness. We have a software component, and a portion will be safety-
critical... crap, things just got more expensive. We know we need to develop
the device under a risk-management plan (ISO 14971), so we don't need
consultants to tell us that, but we may need them do to a design review
because we don't have enough in-house experts (how many do we need?). We know
that the software component must be developed under a SDLC (ISO 62304). Should
we do it agile (as per AAMI TIR-45, not cowboy agile nonsense), or a more
traditional V-model? Does CMMI or PSP apply to us? Should I listen to the nice
people at IBM and use Harmony, or are they preying on a poor (emphasis on
poor) innocent startup? It'd be nice to have a consultant advise us, based on
their experience, that one or the other works better _for a startup_. Have we
properly identified the safety-critical portions of our design? What should
the development environment look like: is MISRA-C everywhere the right answer?
Probably not. So MISRA-C for the safety-critical portion, and regular C
everywhere else? Or should we do Java/RTSJ with a fancy JVM? Ada/SPARK? We
could justify any of these, and probably others. What are the costs of tooling
for each choice, licensing costs, how hard will it be to find
employees/contractors (should we use contractors? how many will I need to
hire?), and what will productivity look like? What about maintainability? Is
QNX better than VxWorks? Is model-based systems engineering worthwhile, or is
it an expensive buzzword? Those nice people at IBM said Rational is great, and
it'll tie into DOORS! And they said DOORS is great! Maybe I should use Excel
instead of DOORS, I heard from a guy on the internet that works just fine. And
so on...

So for much of this, we want an experienced consultant that can review case
histories and show us that in the past, comparable companies were successful
by doing X, and so it makes sense for us to go that route too. Many times we
know we need to do something, and frequently how to do something at a larger
company, but not the optimal way to do it _at a startup_. I can do a decision
matrix, but without the case histories, there's too many gaps in the matrix to
be useful. We also need to have external people for design reviews, and figure
out when we need to pull in those external people, when we don't, and when we
should. I need to be able to tell the regulators that our processes were based
on industry best practices. I need to be able to tell board members the same,
and be able to tell them that our processes and plans have a successful track
record at comparable companies to justify the time/cost/etc. I want to be able
to show shareholders that we're being good stewards with their investments,
and we're doing that by making careful, informed choices.

~~~
zeroc8
I was working for an avionics startup that was facing the same problems. The
necessairy ingredients to get a system certified were all just way out of
reach for us. For example, the asking price for the DO178 certified operating
system was around 200.000 Euros. Then another 200.000 for the safety critical
OpenGL drivers. And so on and so forth. In the end, we went with a Linux based
noncertified system which could be used in the aircraft via an expensive
"minor change". We sold exactly one device an went bancrupt. Killed by IPad &
Co.

------
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.

~~~
heywire
That's a good question, and probably one I don't truly know the answer to.
I've been here my whole career (~11 years), so I simply don't have any
experience outside my company or industry to compare against.

I imagine that some of it probably has to do with the large amount of domain-
specific knowledge you gain when you work in the retail software business,
although I'm sure that is true to some extent anywhere. That knowledge is very
valuable when looking to hire someone into the business, but may not translate
to anything tangible outside of it. It is actually something I worry about a
bit, so I try to keep my skills sharp in other areas as well, playing with
other software stacks and keeping up with the latest trends. I really enjoy
programming, and problem-solving in general, so luckily it doesn't feel like a
chore. I've always joked that if I won the lottery and could quit my job
programming, I probably wouldn't because I enjoy it so much.

Speaking specifically about my employer, there are quite a few reasons why I
have no intentions to leave even after more than a decade. Our cost of living
is pretty low here, so the salary for an experienced software developer is
sufficient to support a family of four comfortably, including owning a 2000+
sq. ft. home and putting away a good amount for retirement. That means that I
do not need to look for "outside promotions" to increase my salary. It also
gives me some hope that I won't run into some of the difficulties I hear about
older software developers getting hired later in their careers. I personally
work on a mature product, so there are rarely "crunch times". I generally work
40 hours a week +/-, some of them from home. Travel is minimal, and I do not
have to carry a company phone, so I feel that I have a very good work/life
balance. There are advancement opportunities available within the company,
both for the technical and management track. I've seen people hired in as call
center employees progress through to senior project management and technical
experts.

Sorry that I don't have a simple answer to your question, but maybe explaining
what keeps me here explains some of it.

~~~
tixocloud
Thanks - no apologies needed. It's good even if you do share your own personal
opinion. I'm just interested in how I can build an organizational like that
where software developers are happy. I've observed how project/tiger teams can
stimulate enthusiasm but eventually, it fizzles out, the product gets shoved
into the face of other developers who really don't want another new thing to
maintain and everyone's just unhappy. Anything you can share on the culture
side or what your company does to help keep software developers motivated?

------
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](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.

------
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/](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/](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.

~~~
brickcap
Thanks! and yes we could do with a better design. The challenge for us has
been to find a good arrangement of all the text that we have (may be we should
cut some of it out?). Landlord vision looks beautiful.

------
pp19dd
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/](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...](http://projects.voanews.com/central-african-
republic-diamonds/) 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.

~~~
pp19dd
Yeah, participation from any kind of passive teasers or pushed content is a
lot lower than you'd think. If we launch a new project and post a teaser about
it on our very homepage, it's a coup if we get a 10-15% click rate. Think that
low clickage number is pretty standard across news sites, and well, sites in
general.

Anyhow the part that's interesting with facebook is that there is no homepage
on facebook. Everything's fairly temporal, so you only have a brief period of
time to capture interest. On top of that, it's a hit/miss possibility that
you'll start a chain reaction of interest, so I'm amazed when there's a 5:1 or
10:1 or 20:1 ratio of shares to pageviews. It means that facebook as a content
platform is totally plausible, which I don't like.

------
david927
An new programming language paradigm:
[https://vimeo.com/107069470](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](http://timeblock.com)

------
duartetb
[http://Gamedevr.com](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](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](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](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](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.

------
memossy
Modelling religion and extremism using a combination of behavioural
economics/psychology, AI and a few other snazzy buzzwords.

We believe that if we build on this framework correctly it is possible (maybe
not probable) to eliminate major extremism and are about to kick off our seed
round to scale it..

Frighteningly ambitious, but fun

------
haidrali
Previously i had worked on a mobile app product Tweelerts (tweelerts.com) and
now i am working on a Parse like service which let you share you static data (
text, json, XML, files or any other data) over API. No coding required you
just need few click to set up and server data over API

------
moubarak
i'm working on automating texture compression for game authors. i'm imagining
a tool that automagically compresses assets for best quality and size, and
very quickly, in a way a game author wouldn't have to even know it's
happening. At this point i'd like to talk to game authors about their texture
compression pains.

------
anotheryou
I work on a lot of projects and love doing the concepts. in parts I consider
myself an Artist and Explorer. My qualities are a good sense for abstraction
and having a broad knowledge (as opposed to specific expertise) and knowing
how to communicate between people. The tech side is often too much work and to
complicated for me to go beyond a proofs of concept, but as I do most just to
satisfy my own curiosity I'm feeling great with this.

My Passions are structuring knowledge, perception, society, art, sound, music
and love.

I'm not so much career focused, but I'll see what opportunities I can find,
once I finished my Diploma:

.

1\. PostPriori - combining news aggregation with twitter like personal
subscriptions, exploring weighting of content beyond:

\- a suggestion engine (not yet good enough for the finesse of a personal
taste, scary because out of direct control, biased towards easily digestible
content)

\- democracy (simply does not scale. Might work for niches, but look at the
shift in reddits audience. It has to become mainstream. Subreddits are a fix,
but not a very elegant solution I think)

\- doing it chronologically (one needs to filter the mass of input, making
actuality so important is not the right way I think and a huge problem in the
media. I'm also incapable on using twitter as is because of this.)

I have a few things to try on how to keep all the ratings very human and hand-
choosen by those you personally trust. I also want to try to enhance viral
distribution and allow for semi-classical editorial institutions.

Further discussions about it are very welcome!

It will become my Diploma in Arts, so I'm free for now from commercializing
it. You can subscribe to a newsletter which I will send out once beta-testing
starts:

[http://signup.postpriori.com/](http://signup.postpriori.com/)

.

2\. All of It - A personal, local Wiki.

I recently started making a wiki out of my notes. I will yet have to see on
how to cramp the naturally ribosomal information there is in to some hierarchy
with cross links.

To stay true to the nature of information I'd need a more associative
indexing, but i won't build another google or some other brain. :)

I'm using markdown,
[http://wikitten.vizuina.com/](http://wikitten.vizuina.com/) and owncloud.

.

3\. musical experiments

\- I'm writing sort of a firmware for a midi keyboard to play quarter tones.
(using this
[http://www.keithmcmillen.com/products/qunexus/](http://www.keithmcmillen.com/products/qunexus/)
it has 2 pressure sensors per key, so I can split keys easily once I have the
raw data)

\- I'm planning a responsive, randomized effect array.

From my instrument (a trumpet for now), I try to extract how I play (pitch,
volume etc.) and randomly assign effects to certain locations in this matrix.
Once I like a certain location I will fix it and shuffle everything else. Over
time a a spectrum of curated effects will be fixed on the range of my playing.
I hope for something like bending down a loud C and having it distorted, than
when I go silent it suddenly becomes roomy with a reverb and things like that.

.

4\. I'll join another startup on monday. I want to build something to make
money, not just sell my time/workforce.

.

5\. I do some freelancing as a web developer, throwing together and
customizing CMS'.

.

6\. a relaxing students job at the state television

.

7\. Other small jobs: media installations for exhibitions and artists,
photography, proofreading (in german, spare me my mistakes here :)

.

edit: added projects and edited a bit

------
johnnyjuiceNYC
finance + user experience

