

Ask HN: Looking for ideas for my portfolio - pedalpete

I&#x27;ve been a developer for about 10 years now, and have built some apps that have had moderate success, but they&#x27;ve all been either rather large systems which have been shut-down or internal business tools (for other businesses).<p>I&#x27;ve got a few apps I&#x27;m working on, but they are still rather large projects, nothing that I can just bang out quickly.<p>I&#x27;m looking for suggestions on some simple example apps I can build for a portfolio.<p>Any suggestions?<p>Not that it matters, but I&#x27;ve got experience with PHP, Ruby&#x2F;Rails and am learning Python and Node, I&#x27;ve also got lots of javascript experience and am learning angular.
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swanson
Simple Ruby gem I was surprised didn't exist (that I could find):
`validates_twitter_username`

Given user input for username, ensure it is valid. Two levels of verification
- one would be probably regex based that the username matches twitter
restrictions (valid characters, length less than 15), one that pings twitter
to confirm the account is registered. Appropriate ActiveRecord errors etc

Good experience if you aren't familiar with packaging a gem and publishing to
rubygems as well.

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pedalpete
Thanks Swanson, I haven't made a Gem before, and for an interview I was
actually asked to make an app which used the twitter api and let you search
for a user, so I implemented some of this already in Javascript.

That's an interesting idea. I'll give it a go when I have more time (swamped
by school work this week).

