Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#21

Post by computerjunkie » Fri, Dec 19, 2014, 11:41 PM UTC

- Completed university with a 1st class degree in Computer Science.

- Developed a prototype eCommerce website (not live yet) In PHP(CodeIgniter) for my final year project. (Which I am currently working on porting to Django)

- Deployed a website (Actually took a lot more time than I thought it would.)

- Finally took a break and went on vacation with 10-20% of good online availability for 2 months.

- Lost 11 kilograms (24.25 pounds), although I think it was mostly due to final year stress.

- Attended https://www.siliconmilkroundabout.com/, my first ever technology focused meetup/job fair.

- Started watching my first anime(Naruto) after overhearing conversations from my friends about how good it is.I finally understand why they enjoy it.

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#22

Post by api » Fri, Dec 19, 2014, 11:42 PM UTC

withinthreshold wrote: post #19

api wrote: post #4

Got to early revenue and some pretty encouraging sustained compounding growth in my side-project-turned-startup: https://www.zerotier.com/ This is a three year old project. 2014 saw the first auto-updating binary releases on three platforms, the first commercial users, and the first revenue. It also made HN's front page twice: once for the site itself, and once for a blog entry that I wrote on the mechanics of NAT tr…

Wow, congratulations on your success! Have you maybe thought about redesigning your homepage? I'm certainly not in your target audience, but it was a little bit hard to understand your value proposition - maybe think whom you are selling to (CTOs, CEOs etc.) and adjust your copy accordingly. Good luck and hope you succeed in fundraising!

I'm working on a home page redesign right now, so yeah I'll have that done fairly shortly... probably a few weeks. The new version is a bit more "pro" or "enterprisey" looking and tries to clarify things a bit while continuing to keep it simple.

Clarifying the message has been tough overall. In some ways it's so simple it's hard to convey. "Connect ALL THE THINGS!!#$!#$!#4!11" ?

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#23

Post by computerjunkie » Fri, Dec 19, 2014, 11:46 PM UTC

cblock811 wrote: post #3

I got my first job in the tech industry after leaving hospitality. It was the most difficult and most rewarding thing I've done in my career.

Congrats!I can imagine. I'm currently trying to get a job and its quite challenging

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#24

Post by dionyziz » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 1:09 AM UTC

- Finished a software engineer in product security internship at Twitter.

- Ran a security class [0] in Greece.

- Presented my master thesis on decentralized transaction identity and trust [1] for my Electrical and Computer Engineering degree, but didn't complete the degree yet.

- Talked about BREACH [2] at the SFHMMY [3] and FOSSCOMM [4] conferences.

- Did a talk about computer security at a local community high school.

- Attended FOSDEM [5]

- Invented an anonymous decentralized marketplace system [6] and joined the OpenBazaar [7] team as a core developer.

- Traveled to the Turkey (Istanbul), Greece (Alexandroupolis, Ioannina, Athens, Ikaria, Thessaloniki, Lamia, Corfu, Drama, Komotini), Austria (Salzburg, Vienna), UK (London), Belgium (Brussels).

- Hiked through the Vikos Gorge, the Astraka Refuge and Drakolimni in Greece. Sailed in Preveza and in the Saronic Gulf in Greece [8]. Snowboarded in Zell am See in Austria.

- Tried two different interesting mind-altering chemical substances.

- Spent quite a long and nice time with friends, family, and lovers often doing nothing at all with them.

- Bungee jumped for the second time in my life, this time in Corinth and double the height (78m) of my previous jump.

- Got hired as a full-time software engineer at Google.

- Moved from San Francisco, US to Zurich, Switzerland.

- Started my private pilot license.

- Taught math, physics, programming, algorithms, web development, and security to many students privately for free.

- Donated more money than any other year in my life to charity.

- Started learning guitar.

- Lived in a share-house for the first time.

- Learned many things about security and software engineering, realized I'm a noob in so many things and fields and I want to improve a lot!

[0] http://security-class.gr/

[1] https://gist.github.com/dionyziz/e3b296861175e0ebea4b

[2] http://breachattack.com/

[3] http://www.sfhmmy.gr/

[4] http://lamia.fosscomm.gr/

[5] https://fosdem.org/2014/

[6] https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2014-M...

[7] https://openbazaar.org/

[8] https://mapsengine.google.com/map/viewer?hl=en&authuser=0&mi...

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#25

Post by krapp » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 1:11 AM UTC

Regular employment.

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#26

Post by asalkey » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 2:30 AM UTC

- Finally got a junior dev position! Took 3 years, I already gave up when I got the email out of the blue.

- Made an android app

- Made a game

- Went back to school for Software Engineering

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#27

Post by sideproject » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 2:34 AM UTC

I've been meaning to launch a product per year. 2013 was SideProjectors (http://sideprojectors.com) - which is still going quite well, plenty of people posting their projects for sale.

2014 was Postatic (http://postatic.com) - allowing people to create their HN clone (or Reddit clone or online communities, however you call it) - it's been rewarding to get so much feedback from users and improving the product.

Let's see what I can build next year. :)

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#28

Post by baristaGeek » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 2:46 AM UTC

-Have teached and tutored people in programming, for free.

-Organized an event for +200 people with +10 sponsors for a non-profit.

-Read amazing books, most notably: Zero to One, The Innovator's Dilemma, Good to Great and A Brief History of Time; among others.

-Considerably improoved my competitive programming skills

-Made various sites, I'm rocking on front-end dev

-Went to India to teach various subjects to unprivileged kids

-Went to Dubai to share time with my dad after having him away for 19 years

-Traveled to the US 2 times (Florida and North Virginia)

-Have written essays which really smart people are debating around the internet

-Despite the heavy workload, I'm keeping up with college

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#29

Post by rubiquity » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 5:36 AM UTC

I spoke at a conference for the first time and spoke at a total of two conferences. Both conferences were for languages I really enjoy: Elixir and Ruby.

This is cliche, but I met a ton of really nice people that I enjoy being around, especially programmers!

I think I've expanded my mind drastically this year. I've learned to enjoy building again and not stressing over OOP pedantry. I also finally think I'm understanding the value of functional programming.

I learned to not be dogmatic about testing or project management. Everything is so fluid. I'm learning to be patient and thoughtful.

I'm most happy that my wife and I are finally living in the same country as one another.

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#30

Post by ftchirou » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 8:14 AM UTC

- Got my first job as a software developer.

- Finally met my father.

- Realized that I'm a much better programmer than I thought.

- Realized how quickly I can learn new things.

- Started knowing myself.