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Ask HN: What's an interesting software development niche?

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Re: Ask HN: What's an interesting software development niche?

#21

Post by dev_0 »

cancan wrote: post #9
solardev wrote: post #2

Have you ever considered GIS (mapping, geo datasets, cartography, drones, photogrammetry, etc.?) I thought it was an interesting niche that on the user side (governments, researchers, environmental consultancies, etc.) tend to focus around one big company (ESRI), but on the web side, you have things like Felt.com, Mapbox, etc., and on the app side, Gaia, Handlebars, Trailforks, Alltrails, RidewithGPS, Strava, etc. Pe…

Hi there! I’m the founder of felt.com. Obviously, I am biased but I do work in this industry for the reasons you mentioned. It’s a great intersection of challenging technology, real-world impact and pure fun. Also, I’d say the GIS world is changing so fast right now; the modern GIS stack will look a whole lot different in a few years than it did.

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: What's an interesting software development niche?

#23

Post by Pinkthinker »

I don’t see any end to gaming. It meets deep human needs to master things, achieve things along the way and participate in a way that you don’t do with spectator sports, movies, or tv. I’m a jaded corporate type and it seems like playtime to me! Plus, I’ve watched mythic quest!

Re: Ask HN: What's an interesting software development niche?

#24

Post by boricj »

It's not my day job and I would not recommend it, but it's interesting to me: delinking, or the art of taking a program and turning it back into object files. That niche is so small, there's no literature on it and it might as well be straight out of some post-apocalyptic cyberpunk universe.

Simply put, when you have the ability to dismantle an executable for parts like a Lego set, you can reuse them in ways conventional software development methods can't, some of which I've demonstrated on my blog. It completely upended the way I think about the process of software development, because the toolchain is no longer a directed acyclic graph.

It is complete heresy according to established computer sciences, but it's devilishly fun. Developing the tooling for it and especially automating this process has been by far the most challenging yet rewarding project I've ever tackled. It's unusually exacting and it's very punishing if you get it wrong, but when it works it's truly magical.

Re: Ask HN: What's an interesting software development niche?

#26

Post by comprev »

petabyt wrote: post #20
bosch_mind wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To do what? Also how did you get started in that?

see magiclantern.fm and fujihack.org. it's mostly a hobby project.

Thank you for your work. I used to have an old Canon which I flashed with Magic Lantern :-)

Re: Ask HN: What's an interesting software development niche?

#27

Post by supergoogler »

solardev wrote: post #2

Have you ever considered GIS (mapping, geo datasets, cartography, drones, photogrammetry, etc.?) I thought it was an interesting niche that on the user side (governments, researchers, environmental consultancies, etc.) tend to focus around one big company (ESRI), but on the web side, you have things like Felt.com, Mapbox, etc., and on the app side, Gaia, Handlebars, Trailforks, Alltrails, RidewithGPS, Strava, etc. Pe…

I would like add my experience to this, a month ago I pick metabase as the default data visualization tool for the company I work for, we have to do pin map for some data to visualize but we are behind firewall, internet access is not allowed and is not on the options. we come up with offline map, we downloaded osm mbtiles files and we use tile server to serve the tiles. like others mentioned the whole process was really fun and rewarding. I have touched many stacks and used many software to do the work. Motivated by that I am also implementing a complete offline map of large selected area with satellite images and 3d view. If anyone interested happy to help.

Re: Ask HN: What's an interesting software development niche?

#28

Post by babyent »

cancan wrote: post #9
solardev wrote: post #2

Have you ever considered GIS (mapping, geo datasets, cartography, drones, photogrammetry, etc.?) I thought it was an interesting niche that on the user side (governments, researchers, environmental consultancies, etc.) tend to focus around one big company (ESRI), but on the web side, you have things like Felt.com, Mapbox, etc., and on the app side, Gaia, Handlebars, Trailforks, Alltrails, RidewithGPS, Strava, etc. Pe…

Hi there! I’m the founder of felt.com. Obviously, I am biased but I do work in this industry for the reasons you mentioned. It’s a great intersection of challenging technology, real-world impact and pure fun. Also, I’d say the GIS world is changing so fast right now; the modern GIS stack will look a whole lot different in a few years than it did.

Can you please explain the last part of your comment? I’m curious I have zero insight into gis
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