
Ask HN: What did you achieve in January 2016? - spIrr
A month into 2016, I think it&#x27;s a good think to reflect. I actually followed through and completed my first pet project, a Wordpress plugin. I have also lived together with my wife for a complete month now, and it&#x27;s going great so far (just married).
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jasondecastro
Congratulations!

I recently launched my first ever startup. It's a server hosting company much
like DigitalOcean but instead of paying $10 dollars for a 1GB server, you get
the ability to create multiple 1GB servers (2, 12, or 32) for less than half
the price you would pay if you bought them individually.

It's mostly targeted at businesses who need to spin up a lot of fast servers
for their employees and don't want to spend so much money -- but individuals
could also take advantage of this.

[0]: [https://ramgrid.com](https://ramgrid.com)

~~~
afarrell
Do you have an API or vagrant provider? Maybe I can add this to my tutorial
here [https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from-
scratch/step-10-digital...](https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from-
scratch/step-10-digital-ocean/)

~~~
jasondecastro
Yes! We currently have one in the works. I'll shoot you an e-mail when it's
ready.

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zoffix222
Quit drinking. After several years of battling alcoholism.

~~~
revorad
Awesome, much respect to you.

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afarrell
I just "finished" writing my interactive tutorial on server
configuration/deployment with Saltstack: [https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-
from-scratch/](https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from-scratch/)

As someone who struggled a lot with writing anxiety in school, I just feel
really good about having gotten this out the door. I also feel like I've
learned a bunch about how to push past writing anxiety.

I put "finished" in quotes because I still feel like I have a lot that I want
to add and improve:

\- I approached this project as a UI design and I feel like I want to do a lot
more user testing, especially for folks on Windows or who have poor
connections.

\- I wrote a line-by-line comments system so that folks could let me know
which parts didn't make sense. I want to improve that and turn it into a
plugin so that other projects could use it.

\- I have some integration tests for some of the parts that I feel like need
to be written.

\- There are a few trade-offs I made that I suspect I should go back and make
the other choice.

\- I currently have students only deploy to DigitalOcean. I want to have
instructions on how to deploy to AWS, Azure, and a bunch of other services.

But for now, I'm just really happy having gotten this up there. If you have
feedback, please let me know.

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freyfogle
Took our service, a geocoding API for the world based on various open
geocoders, out of beta:
[https://geocoder.opencagedata.com](https://geocoder.opencagedata.com) All
feedback, positive or negative, very welcome.

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rgbrgb
Congrats on getting married! Care to share the plugin?

From Jan 1 to today we tuned our site and put in a lot of grunt work to grow
daily organic traffic by 2x, daily uniques on the site by 3x, and average
session time by about 20%. Also launched a few really interesting feature
experiments that I can't share yet but we're hoping will end up making buying
a home significantly less expensive. This week I've been learning about
WKWebViews [0] and using them to retool our iOS app detail views to have
feature parity with our web app. Work is still fun!

[0]: [http://nshipster.com/wkwebkit/](http://nshipster.com/wkwebkit/)

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arien
Started dieting near the end of the month _and_ managed to stick to it (3kgs
down so far). Will take me about two months to reach my target, but I'm right
on track :)

Learnt to read/write around 250 Chinese characters. It was much easier than I
thought it would be and quite fun. Walking around Chinatown is a whole
different experience, even with the tiny fraction of characters that I know.

Not much on the techie side accomplished this month, but lots of little things
started. Looking forward to some results in February.

Congratulations on the marriage :D

------
DanBC
I started education for the first time in too long. This involves leaving the
house and talking to people, so it's challenging, but in a good way.

EDIT: Congrats on the marriage!

------
foxpc
I would not call it an achievement, per se, but my repository
Timelined([https://github.com/andriussev/timelined](https://github.com/andriussev/timelined))
gained over 400 stars. Haven't really had a repository that had stars before.

I have yet to determine how I become a multi-billionaire from this
_achievement_ :)

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abdelhadikhiati
Congratulation on getting married,

I have started a 3 days book challenge where i finish a book every 3 days,
it's going great so far, also I am refreshing my skills with online education
(although I am still following MS degree in Robotics and AI), but still the
world is broader than only this, and I programmed few robots and made few
contributions to the OSS (talking about ROS here).

------
mbrock
I made a combined CI and staging system for web app front ends based on Docker
Compose, Git, bash, Node, and React, over a weekend.

I came up with a way of writing front end browser tests that works very well
for us. It's based on React simulated events and a test runner that parses
English Markdown for general steps, aided by simple data attribute markup that
specifies semantic roles for elements. Plus a nice little React HUD for
running tests in your browser while developing.

I also joined some friends to play in a band, moved to Stockholm, scheduled a
date for this weekend, and mostly replaced coffee with tea.

Next up is an exercise habit...

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rfc
I built a really basic genome analysis pipeline. It's a super hacked together
tool with the hopes of helping doctors make more data driven decisions on
diagnosing patients based on empirical data: the individuals genome. I got a
very basic version working that allows a doctor to search for a specific term
(eg. ADHD) and see if the patient has any genetic mutations based on genes
typically associated with that disease.

Super straw man, not clinically proven, and hacked together - but fun and
learned a ton! Built on Redshift with a small R script and a ton of manual
data ETL.

------
revorad
1\. Started doing intermittent fasting. Of all the fat loss things I've tried,
this has been the easiest to stick to. Will post about my experience in a
couple of weeks.

2\. Started running regularly - 3 days per week. If anyone is looking to get
into running I can't recommend the NHS Couch to 5k plan enough.

3\. Launched the private beta for my new online learning marketplace -
[http://learnetto.com](http://learnetto.com) and got featured on Betalist.

Pretty excited about February!

------
wingerlang
After 1 year and 14 days I finally released my (Nth) product. Here's a
review/article/video about it
[http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/22/snapper-2-screenshot...](http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/22/snapper-2-screenshot/)

It's kind of 'niche' in who can use it, but I've got quite a lot of dedicated
users.

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seeminglyGrumpy
Rolled out a huge update to Snail Rush
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iitianspac...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iitianspace.snailracer))
a quiz game that we at Eduisfun made. It now has tons of different topics to
try out since not everyone is into Mathematics.

------
drakonka
I finally got over the hump with my BrainRunner and BrainHub apps (companion
apps for my SnailLife snail simulation). The BrainHub manages queueing brain
checks of living snails in the world and distributing them to free
BrainRunners. This way I can have an unlimited number of BrainRunners (well,
limited by my budget) running brain checks in parallel completely separately
from the user facing app.

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kele
I have read Cal's Newport new book about Deep Work
([http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/](http://calnewport.com/books/deep-
work/)) and have been trying to adapt some of the strategies from it. So far I
see positive results (less time spent working, but more done), even though I'm
not doing very well.

EDIT: Congrats ;-)

~~~
arnold_palmur
What are your thoughts on this book? I'm always intrigued by it but end up
passing each time I consider giving it a go.

~~~
mbrock
I thought it was a good inspiration with some practical and serious
suggestions. It gave me some good concepts (like just "deep work" itself) and
really hammered in the point that it's good to take serious time for real deep
work, that your life will be qualitatively different if you do.

------
yamalight
Congrats on the marriage!

During the first month we'd released a second alpha of our project that allows
to build real-time data processing/visualisation pipelines in the browser. And
now we're on track to allow building those pipelines using natural language
input (target is to create a pipeline from someone saying, e.g. "what people
on twitter think about brand X?")

------
Mankhool
I found a couple of great guys to build the Android version of my app and have
attracted interest from a VC in Silicon Valley.

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pedrodelfino
\- Lost 4 kilos;

\- Read 3 books;

\- Studied a lot of math (according to rescue time, something like 100 hours
in Khan Academy); and

\- Finished a 45 hours/class discipline in Collge (did an intense program for
that).

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ffumarola
\- Changed the company I work for

\- Also built some Wordpress and Magento plugins

\- Took on some freelance clients for advertising and have ramped up their
spend, and profits, incredibly

\- Joined Dataquest.io in a consultancy capacity

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Raed667
I gained 5 pounds.

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thorin
Started a new job for the first time in 14 years. I'm at a startup learning
about and doing asp.net web api and angularjs.

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swah
I wanted to read lots of books this year, but so far I just spent a lot of
time in my smartphone, just like last year!

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nassirkhan
signed up 3 major clients for my startup 5group.co . Its been a tough road but
some light is showing

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nyddle
Lost 6 pounds.

