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Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

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121–130 of 583 posts

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#122
- left my old job like every year or so

- commenced an MSc course focussing on AI and Machine Learning

- according to GitHub I've created 624 commits and 35 new repositories in 2017

- built Botlang (https://botlang.org/), a scripting language for conversational chatbots

- have begun blogging about this and that (https://www.matchilling.com/blog/)

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#125
I worked mainly on open source side projects such as:

Sandglass https://github.com/celrenheit/sandglass a distributed, horizontally scalable, persistent, time ordered message queue. It was developed to support asynchronous tasks and message scheduling which makes it suitable for usage as a task queue.

Sandflake https://github.com/celrenheit/sandflake decentralized, sequential, lexicographically sortable unique id.

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would pay for that pocket-to-kindle service

Have you tried https://p2k.co/ ?

Yes, I've used it for a few months. That's the reason I've started working on my thing. I felt that it didn't have the features that I needed the most (hyphenation, dropcaps, ad removal etc.) and I would have felt like a jerk to ask for these things from the developer. These are not common needs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#127

Hosted Comments https://www.hostedcomments.com/ , a Disqus alternative with a focus on privacy. The learning experience of building Hosted Comments was great : using iframes to embed comments in websites, building a commenting system with voting and some features which Disqus does not have : locking comments, hiding comments (not yet deployed https://imgur.com/a/R89Cw ). It started out as a sideproject, then decided…

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Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an opportunity to work for them but declined because I didn't want to look at the content. Tell me: how much of that do you have to actually go through? And to other devs: if you have thick skin and an iron stomach, go work for them.

It’s definitely a factor to be aware of. We are legally not allowed to be exposed to image content, as developers, but personally I do have some exposure to text content as part of my role. Thorn has an excellent support / wellness system, with professional counselors, in place though for proactively staying healthy and processing what exposure we do experience.

I’m very glad they have such a good support network. A close friend of mine got a job out of law school prosecuting child sex crimes, and there was absolutely no support. After a year, he couldn’t take it any more and left public service altogether. Even a decade later, you can tell he’s still bothered by it. I have an incredible amount of respect for people who can do that work; I’m absolutely certain that I don’t have what it takes.

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#130
post #106

I spent most of the year working my ass off consulting for one of America's most hated companies building an utterly pointless system. My only consolation is knowing that I wasted a ton of their money since there's no chance it will pay any returns.

Lol. I had a good laugh.

How do you manage to continue working on something you know is a dead end though? Is the money that good? Would the money go away if you worked on another project at the same firm?

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