

Ask HN: Weekend update -- What weekend projects are you up to? - sunir

Many of us draw on Hacker News for inspiration on our ongoing evening and weekend projects. I'd bet most of us are soloing on our projects too.<p>Since weekends are a bit slow around here, I thought it would be fun and useful to have a weekly or biweekly open thread to talk about how your project is doing this week. I'd be interested to know what people are spending their time on and I'm sure it'd be nice to have a place to talk about our projects.<p>I'll start with mine in the comments. If it goes well, we can do this again next week.
======
sunir
I'm working feverishly over the holidays to get my project, Bibdex, running on
production legs. It's an online bibliography service meant for collecting and
sharing references and notes.

<http://www.bibdex.com>

One of my personal goals for the project is to spend absolutely no money on it
except for servers, domains, lawyers, and accountants. While seemingly insane,
I wanted to do this project to learn the full 360 degrees of how to create and
launch a web product so it could help me in my day career. No better way to
learn than to just dive right in and do it yourself, eh? It's a slower
process, but rewarding. (Also, I'm cheap.)

Here's an example of why it's valuable. Over the last year, I got pretty far
except for the logo, which used to look like I drew it in MS Paint. In fact,
the old one is still here: <http://bibdex.com/images/logo.png> . I was hunting
around on BrandStack (<http://www.brandstack.com>) and LogoPond
(<http://www.logopond.com>) and contemplating spending up to $1000 on a logo
designer when I realized a common theme to all the logos I liked.

    
    
      1. They all looked good in black and white because they were simple geometric forms.
      2. They only had two elements that played off each other.
    

If you go through those two logo sites, you'll see what I mean. Complicated
logos are worse. Logos by their nature are small, short attention span, high
impact communication forms. Keep it simple and deliver the message through
some tension.

I decided I'd try my hand at it, so after a few hours of sketches, I loaded up
Paint Shop Pro (yes, PSP. I mentioned I'm cheap, right?) and drew the new logo
myself. The constraints of simple geometric forms and limiting it to two
concepts led to something I'm happy with: a book that is also a rocketship to
demonstrate 'bibliographies in action'. Even if I ultimately find it an
unsatisfying implementation, I like the core idea and can later hire a
designer to redraw it.

So, what did you do this weekend?

~~~
vorador
By the way, I found a typo in your terms of service : _1\. You must
intentionally and maliciously disrupt the reasonable enjoyment of others using
the Service._

This is probably not what you wanted.

~~~
sunir
Hah. Well, that would help me go after the 4chan market. Thanks! Fixed.

------
savant
I'm working on a few things, both spanning at least two weekends.

The first is my baby, a project management tool built in PHP. Tired of messing
with slow trac installs on PHP or fugly-looking/complicated PHP tools (I'm
watching you, bugzilla!). It is mainly targeted towards the types of projects
I've seen were useful for development with the clients and staff I work with
as a student working in a university and freelancing on the side. It will
definitely allow me to sleep a little better on the weekends and keep everyone
on my team up to date as to what they need to get done and where projects
stand.

The second is a generic file upload system that will likely be used within the
android hacking community to track resources etc. This one is actually very
far along it's development after only two days of real development, and I am
quite happy with it. Hopefully it will be of use to people in other
communities/companies looking for a collaborative alternative to dropbox. I'm
a fan of minimalism, so while the app will have many features, you wouldn't
notice them all immediately. Hope to launch this within a week if everything
goes well with development.

------
thibaut_barrere
I've been working on <http://www.learnivore.com> (my ruby/rails/iphone
screencasts aggregator) - more specifically:

\- an iphone specific version (using jQtouch)

\- better ways to share the site (using topsy + facebook widgets, instead of
addthis and sharethis that proved uneffective here after a few weeks of
testing)

\- a more responsive site (using google cdn for jquery for instance + other
tweaks)

\- some bits of SEO

Btw, I'm now tracking my time for this kind of side-projects using Freckle.
Good to know how much time you spent at the end of the month!

------
stevejohnson
Regular expression parser and compiler for a VM regex implementation similar
to the one described in [1]. Part of a larger project, and the VM doesn't
actually operate on a normal string data structure.

[1] <http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html>

~~~
stevejohnson
Update: The parser is generating a correct AST. I mean, not that anyone really
cares, but I am getting some work done, which is nice.

~~~
sunir
Hey, sweet. High five!

Now I'm very curious. What kind of underlying string representation does your
VM have that you require your own regexp engine? Actually, more importantly,
what is the VM for?

~~~
stevejohnson
Thanks! But you misunderstand me. The VM is the thing that is executing the
DFA which represents the regular expression. That's what the paper I linked to
explains. The DFA is represented by simple instructions like char, split, and
jump (see the paper). Actually, I originally found that paper via - you
guessed it - HN! It applies directly to the problem I am trying to solve.

The VM was already implemented. I had to compile a canonical regular
expression into the instructions I listed.

Why? Well, let me see if my partner will let me talk about it. For now, I'll
just say that we are using a completely un-string-like data structure, and we
might use this engine for things which actually aren't strings. But it works
on strings for now.

Our demo code will currently take a regular expression (supported operators
are (), ?, *, +, and |) and a list of strings, and return the strings which
match the expression. I had never written a compiler before, but the code is
very clean, well-documented, and doesn't have any grammar issues. So I
consider this a productive week already!

Next up: character classes, and maybe some character class shortcuts (\d,
etc).

------
technomancy
Integrating package.el into the main Emacs codebase.

------
mquander
I'm working on a piece in Inform 7 for this interactive fiction design comp:

[http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/11/game_design_competiti...](http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/11/game_design_competition_7.php)

~~~
sunir
So, what's the story about?

~~~
mquander
Since the theme is "escape" and the target is a short, casual game, I'm trying
to stick to something puzzle- and event-oriented, and drive the game with the
player's curiosity rather than with a strong plot. The theme of the puzzles is
frame of reference; you have the ability to manipulate alternate copies of the
small, cozy environment in which you find yourself, and move things (and
yourself) between those copies in useful ways. I'm still experimenting with
different objects and mechanics on top of that.

The narrative and setting alludes strongly to William Blake's poem, "The
Tyger," but one wouldn't need to know it to enjoy the game, I hope.

------
leftnode
Working on my new shopping cart software. I've grown pretty disgusted with
most shopping cart options out there, so its time to finally buckle down and
finish mine.

IONCart

On Github: <http://github.com/leftnode/ION-Cart>

My blog: [http://leftnode.com/progress-on-ioncart-basic-mockups-
starte...](http://leftnode.com/progress-on-ioncart-basic-mockups-started/)

------
csytan
I worked on <http://www.webnodes.org/> \- it's a proggit visualization.

~~~
sunir
I love the tree builder. How does it decide there is enough space to expand to
two (or more) columns and conversely when to collapse columns?

~~~
csytan
Thanks!

Columns are filled top to bottom with nodes. Adjacent columns which are empty
can be filled by their neighbors.

If you'd like to know more, the code can be found at:

[http://github.com/csytan/webnodes/blob/master/static/topic.j...](http://github.com/csytan/webnodes/blob/master/static/topic.js)

------
kd5bjo
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027418>

------
thaumaturgy
So far this weekend I've lapped in most of the valves for the new engine for
my truck, worked on some parts for my model T speedster, done a little work in
the garden, and worked on some advanced features for the $5/month unlimited
domain mail hosting service that's getting turned on in a couple of days.

------
tobtoh
I've been working on my own personal expense tracking software. Not just
because it will have _exactly_ the features I'm after, but also as an exercise
to re-aquaint myself with php/mysql, then moving to make it iphone friendly
(as a web app) and finally to produce a iphone app version.

------
sammcd
I'm working on a Mac GUI to control Django and Rails local development
servers. Hoping to really take log viewing to the next level.

If you are interested: <http://141312.com>

I hope to launch in March.

------
jberryman
working on a befunge-93 interpreter in haskell... that sounds epically useful,
no?

------
Klondike
Finishing up an Android app for Campfire, a web-based chat service. I did the
app before they released an official API, and then rewrote it all. I think
it'll end up on the Market this week. It's been a lot of fun.

------
dangrossman
I'm working on a fraud management tool for ecommerce sites that integrates the
Twilio API to automatically call customers' phones to verify orders and record
voice authorizations.

~~~
sunir
When you get it working, we should talk. My day job is being the head of
integrations at FreshBooks. I'm also one of the leaders of the Small Business
Web (<http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com>) and know about a trillion
e-commerce ISVs.

Email me at FreshBooks: sunir splat freshbooks dot com

------
dangrover
Building the online store component to my sheet music reader for the iPhone:
<http://www.wonderwarp.com/opus>

~~~
guiseppecalzone
Wow. Really cool app. I could see musicians loving this.

------
jacquesm
Busy trying to implement an automated image tagger.

It's probably going to last me a bit longer than the weekend though :)

Most fun I've had coding in a while.

~~~
sunir
Tagging based on context, or from the image itself? Semantically, or on
graphical metrics?

~~~
jacquesm
From the image itself.

A combination between the two.

If I get it to work I'll do a write-up on it. It's not going to be an elegant
solution, I can already tell you that, more of a brute force approach.

------
cosmok
I had just finished on this: <http://www.goopendb.org> \- Elastic Lists for
movies. Back to work from today ;(

~~~
cosmok
I submitted the site earlier here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028410>, I have some background info
there.

------
cmars232
Ported Mafia Wars autoplayer to Google Chrome. Doing Little Schemer in
Clojure, converting to use tail-call recur. Mowing the laundry.

------
warfangle
My toy twitter app. Trying to teach myself Scala/Lift and collaborative
filtering techniques at the same time. Good times :)

------
pclark
Writing an e-book on managing your social identity.

Creating a twitter "I just had sex" bot.

~~~
sunir
Are you serious about the Twitter bot? That reminds me of the story of the
best man who rigged the newly weds' bed to Tweet whenever they had sex.

<http://mashable.com/2009/12/12/twitter-bed-sex/>

~~~
pclark
Am serious. Hadn't seen that article, thanks for sharing. Heh.

------
nostrademons
Playing around with Haskell LLVM bindings for a compiler of a small
experimental language.

------
rodyancy
I'm building a photo subject generating/photo sharing app for the iPhone.

------
thomasswift
A small web scraper to get my gears of war 2 multiplayer stats.

------
woid
currently: <http://totalfinder.binaryage.com>

more info on blog

------
steveklabnik
I put in some documentation for Hackety Hack, and started a new Secret
Project.

Should be fun.

