

Show HN: Coding noob - first weekend project - augustflanagan
http://aflanagan.com/weekend-project/

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d0m
I think every programmer made their own task manager at least once in their
life.. welcome aboard :)

Also, don't be to hard on yourself, creating a real project from scratch takes
time and passion. I understood in half a second what your app was about and
why I should use it.. What many apps/site cannot even do in weeks :)

Finally, I like the idea about adding/removing stuff by replying by email.. so
intuitive but I never thought of it. Maybe a kind of "delayer" might be
useful:

\- Do that tomorrow night

\- Do this next week

So at least, if your 'digest' is empty, you don't get an email but you're sure
that you will receive it when it matters.

~~~
augustflanagan
Thanks a lot for the feedback. I like the idea of having some sort of
scheduling/reminder feature. I was wondering if I could set up a simple way to
do SMS reminders. There could be a special code to set an SMS reminder (like *
SMS 7pm) to get a reminder at 7pm.

That was a friend's idea though so I can't take credit for it ;)

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stanleydrew
Twilio SMS is super easy. Documentation is here:
<http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/sending-sms>. And there's a python
library to help you get started. (Full disclosure: I work at Twilio)

~~~
ulf
Do you guys have any timetable when to better support the german market? I
really would like to use your products, but since most german carriers do not
accept SMS from your system right now, it is not feasible.

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endlessvoid94
Great job! I also used GAE to build ThatHigh.com and it's working pretty well.

But like you're probably aware, GAE has a learning curve in addition to
python/django/whatever. The datastore, mainly. This is a shameless plug, but
I'm the co-founder of Djangy.com and we're in private beta. We're doing Heroku
except for python/django. we'll support other wsgi frameworks in the future,
but for now we make deploying almost any django app instant and painless.

in private beta now, but email me and we can set something up if you're
interested.

~~~
bmelton
Regarding Djangy (and all apologies for how offtopic this is), you REALLY need
to give some idea of what pricing is going to be.

The "only pay for what you use" statement only works when I have a relative
idea of how much a given computational unit costs, or how much the average
customer is paying.

EC2 could make the same statement, but there's a huge difference between a
small and medium instance, cost-wise.

~~~
endlessvoid94
Yeah, we're rolling out a ton of changes in the next week, so expect that. RE:
pricing, it'll be comparable to heroku. I JUST finished building the billing
system two days ago :-)

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dangrossman
You should make something happen when the Konami code is entered on your
website.

~~~
augustflanagan
Yes, I completely agree! I had that planned, and just decided to launch this
before completing that. It will happen soon.

~~~
DTrejo
Like make your page break ;)
<http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/gravity/>

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prawn
Reminds me - one of the things on my list is to build (yet another) chore
tracker with that gaming incentive everyone's done (earn points of some sort)
but avoiding the fault those all have: too easy to cheat yourself.

I envisaged multiplayer action, even just with a wife, for example, where each
person would allocate 'points' to be earned and traded for chores. She might
be more likely to avoid creating a floordrobe if she could trade the resulting
points for dinner out, making me watch rom-coms with her, etc. It's a little
juvenile, but I would get a lot of house cleaning done were there sexual
favours up for grabs.

What do people think?

Also been thinking that there seem to be few/no decent to-do apps out there
with 'dependency trees'. We've just built a house and have progressed to the
landscaping - every thing seems to hinge on something else. As an example, we
can't put in plants until the driveway is done and can't do that until the
water meter has been relocated. Or can't clear out weeds until I've bought
fuel for the lawnmower, etc.

~~~
nanexcool
Sounds good. Have you seen Epic Win or Chore Hero? Both are iPhone apps that
seem to do most of what you say here (haven't used them myself).

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prawn
Chore Hero talks about reward points, but doesn't mention what's done with
them. Epic Win seems to be the one that made me think "XP, for what?".

I've seen a few of these sorts of sites around, but they seemed to lack
incentive or real motivation. How many people have tried a bunch of To Do apps
and never stuck with any of them? I just keep going back to scraps of paper.

Of course, to-do apps and choretrackers are like black holes for developers
but I can't help but wonder if there's a tack yet to be tried with both.

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Sephr
The email address validation is incorrect. Neither test+foo@gmail.com,
test+foo@gmail.com., test@io, test@io., test@::123, test@[::123], or
test@[::123]:456 are accepted, and likely other cases. I suggest you take the
easy route and just only check `emailAddress.indexOf("@") !== -1`.

~~~
giu
Or have a look at the full RFC 2822 regular expression for matching email
addresses: <http://code.iamcal.com/php/rfc822/full_regexp.txt>

I'd personally stick with Sephr's advice, though ;-)

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robobenjie
I've jsut started using it. It would be nice if it were easy for my wife could
email things to be added to my queue. (Then again, maybe that wouldn't be so
nice...)

~~~
augustflanagan
Thanks for the suggestion. I hadn't thought about letting other people add
stuff to your list, but it's a great idea.

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Yzupnick
Just make sure it is not anyone who can add something to your list. Great job
on the app.

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bluespace
Great Job! I also wanted to let you know that your website, seems slightly
broken in chrome: <http://imgur.com/liF73.png>

I am not sure if it is due to being in chrome-dev, but it took me a second to
understand that the actual content was down the page. After widening up the
browser the main content div popped into the right place.

~~~
augustflanagan
Thanks, I had never noticed that before.

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hristov
I have question about the Google App engine. How does pricing work? Their
webpage says that you pay $8 per user per month, which seems pretty high for
any webapp.

And how do they decide how many users you have? I am sure here you are not
counting each person that submits their email for chore reminders as a user or
this would bankrupt you pretty quickly. So how does it work?

~~~
elxrr
That's App Engine for Business which is determined by "intranet users in your
Google Apps domain." The service is free for a fixed quota set by App Engine,
you pay extra for a billable quota, for resources used above the fixed quota.

App Engine for Business: <http://code.google.com/appengine/business/>

Terms:<http://code.google.com/appengine/terms.html>

Quotas:<http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html>

Billing FAQ:<http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/billing.html>

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ojbyrne
One thing noobs don't realize is that every project takes vastly more time
than you think it will. Seems like you've learned that lesson.

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Nemisis7654
Good job. Even if you ended up not finding the application as useful as you
had imagined it, the fact that you built it has to be satisfying enough. Plus,
you gained valuable experience. It's stuff like this that make me wish I was
not so busy with classes and work so that I could work on projects like this.
Hopefully soon I will be able to. And again, nicely done.

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timepilot
Great job! Can't wait to see what your next project is. I'm also learning
python and your post has inspired me to take a look at GAE.

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BornInTheUSSR
Awesome work making it happen, I know many people who have been professional
programmers for years who never created anything outside of their jobs. Love
the design too, how did you go about coming up with it?

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johnnytee
Nice job! I just tested it out and it works great. I see you're using google
app engine, I'm building a couple of apps on it and love working with. My
platform of choice for sure.

~~~
augustflanagan
Thanks! GAE is definitely a great way to get something up and running fast.

After spending a few months with RoR though I definitely am enjoying writing
in Ruby more so than Python. I might try JRuby next time I do something on app
engine - <http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/>

~~~
keefe
congrats on the launch, it's really great for a first effort!

I also hear app engine can tolerate a fairly large amount of traffic before
you have to pay, so it seems like a solid choice to start on.

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twymer
Do all of these "daily" chores extend on the weekend? I feel that would be a
good distinction between chores, as I don't do most of my weekday "chores" on
the weekend.

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jasonz
Great job on your first project! I think a cool next step would be to use
twilio so that users could add lifechores through text message.

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nopal
The site doesn't seem to accept myname+lifechore@gmail.com as a valid address.
Could you update your validation logic?

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djhworld
+1 for being honest about the pitfalls about your application and your ideas
to improve it.

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dchs
Kudos for launching - nice one!

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sahillavingia
Reminds me of my first coding project, Wipee List. Congrats, it's a great
feeling!

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achompas
Congrats man! I'll try to use this as motivation to code something myself.

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jmonegro
Looks like a simpler version of streak.ly

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blanketman
I like this project with the email replies, I use gmail so labelling and
filters etc don't make it spammy

I put "buy my girlfriend a new ring" hopefully that will annoy that crap out
of me until I do it lol

adding and optimizing the email replies would be great, its a great idea

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bobabooey
How do we know this guy's not a spammer collecting email addresses?

~~~
rradu
How do we know anyone's not a spammer collecting addresses?

