
The importance of silly projects - twapi
http://engineering.slideshare.net/2011/08/the-importance-of-silly-projects/
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pavel_lishin
> Last week, Sylvain noticed that there was no way to know whether code was
> currently being deployed to the server. So he hooked up some (huge) speakers
> to a spare desktop and wrote a script that plays a bell sound every time the
> deploy script is run.

I wrote a quick five-liner that'll prevent people from deploying over each
other - until you've successfully deployed, nobody else gets to. (Yes, there's
ways to unlock it.)

As far as sounds go, I'm tempted to use some of the ones from here:
<http://theportalwiki.com/wiki/Turret_voice_lines>

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fishtoaster
Almost every place I've worked has had some version of a lunch decider or
another. At one place, it was a rails app I wrote in 5 minutes, just to prove
to my coworker that it was faster to make than pulling names out of a hat. At
another, it was a yelp scraper someone had written to find places near us.

It happens everywhere. I think it's the natural result of any problem that
takes a long time but seems pretty easy: a programmer will naturally try to
automate it.

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rgc1
I like this. It reminds me of this:

Michael Gilfix and Alva L. Couch, "Peep (the Network Auralizer): Monitoring
Your Network With Sound" Proceedings of the 2000 Large Installation System
Administration Conference (LISA00), New Orleans, LA, USENIX Association, Dec
6-8, 2000. Voted best student paper of LISA 2000.
[http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/lisa2...](http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/lisa2000/gilfix.html)

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m1
The 'Lunchbot' sounds something like what I wrote a few years back, me and my
girlfriend always had trouble finding films to rent and watch, so what started
out as a simply imdb scraping bot turned into a web app where it would select
a random film to watch, with trailers, ratings and also a database behind that
of what films we had watched.

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joelhaasnoot
Like the Middle Men reference, awful movie, but great ideas. Need to hook some
Arduino up at the office for that.

