Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

At my day job (dev consulting), I worked the entire year on a project that our client ultimately decided to shelve, which allowed me to level up my Ember.js, Rails, and Postgres.

On the volunteer front, I ran a computer club at my daughter's middle school for 20 sessions of 2 hours each, teaching kids some basic JavaScript, and taking them on a tour of things like turtle graphics, L-systems, rotoscoping, and a wrote them a simple "get the coins, don't touch the lava" game engine and a text-based level designer for it.

I also took a two week gig for Girls Who Code to run one of their campus summer programs at the University of Minnesota. We used Scratch to cover basic programming concepts, and in the second week they split into teams, each team working on a socially progressive game. One of the teams wrote a two player platformer that had a male and female character. The man had fewer hazards, and picked up money, and the woman had more hazards and picked up hearts. The levels were passed by the man and woman both flipping gender-specific switches. On the last level, the woman character doesn't appear, and the man can't complete all the tasks. Genius, and from a group of middle school kids.

Hah that happened at the startup I worked at. Between Sales and CEO they were promising the moon. At one point the CEO said our product used block chain in his slide deck. Not a single Dev has ever discussed block chain it was just out of nowhere.

I started a company, Argonomo (https://argonomo.com) and we founded and soft launched two ventures:

- SafeWhistle: An anonymous, encrypted, privacy-focused whistleblowing and incident management application companies and institutions can implement to help cut down on lack of reporting and increase transparency. (https://safewhistle.com)

- Sidepitch: A venture management system targeting private equity groups and venture capitalists. Streamlining the application process for startups and giving investors a central management solution for their investments, instead of a collection of emails, paper documents, and in-face communications. (https://sidepitch.com)

I launched a farm management software tool in Dec 2016 and spent 2017 iterating on it. Hired two developers in the last 5 months and made a big hire last week, myself. I'm going to transition out of my consulting business into this full time. Bootstrapped with $300k of revenue in '17. https://www.harvestprofit.com

Human computation! Not to be too #hailcorporate, but my job's pretty fun. It's using machine learning and humans together to solve problems. The fields pretty focused on labelling tasks, but there's much more to it. Having a large human workforce backed by a bunch of engineers and data scientists is like a fast-forward button on machine learning. You use humans and computers together to do things we really can't automate yet (or even ever, without general AI). ML meets cog-sci meets HCI meets crowdsourcing.