Ask HN: What are you working on? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#131

Post by neilvictorgrey » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 10:42 PM UTC

Been spending 4+ hours per day studying languages for the last year and a half.

It started as a challenge to learn German, and now it's spiraled into going to polyglot conferences and doing "learning challenges".

Right now, my main focus is on Swedish, but I've joined a 3-month language challenge, where I'm trying to learn as much of Inuktitut as I can.

Since 2 weeks ago, I study most days on Twitch as personal motivation; I think most people would find this boring, but I've had a few people show up semi-regularly, so here's the link if that's something that floats your boat: https://www.twitch.tv/letsstudylanguages/

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#132

Post by opticfluorine » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 10:44 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #106

lacampbell wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like getting into embedded programming would be trading one dumpster fire for another. I try and limit my exposure to too much web dev crazy ness, usually by avoiding any 'framework' that requires its own command line tool.

Personally I find embedded (actual embedded as in having 20-100kb to work with, not 4gb Pi’s) far less dumpster fire than web dev; it is constrained and there are only so many options once you studied the specsheets and assembled your circuit. It is often like codegolf but for a lot of money and you cannot have bugs because you cannot (easily) send updates. At least I like that kind of thing. I hope to find time and…

Embedded development is fascinating. I work in embedded professionally and what I've always enjoyed about it is working closely with the hardware engineers (this for a project where the hardware is designed and built in-house). It's a different perspective and I've learned a lot from working with them.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#133

Post by dorchadas » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 10:44 PM UTC

neilvictorgrey wrote: post #131

Been spending 4+ hours per day studying languages for the last year and a half. It started as a challenge to learn German, and now it's spiraled into going to polyglot conferences and doing "learning challenges". Right now, my main focus is on Swedish, but I've joined a 3-month language challenge, where I'm trying to learn as much of Inuktitut as I can. Since 2 weeks ago, I study most days on Twitch as personal motiv…

Come join us on Reddit r/languagelearning and on 'A Language Learners' Forum' [1]

[1]https://forum.language-learners.org

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#134

Post by kingo55 » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 10:45 PM UTC

neckardt wrote: post #36

Nothing too crazy, just got done setting up OpenWRT this week, but am having a few issues getting ipv6 working properly. Also setting up a mediawiki server for the family, mainly so I can get all of my mom's great recipies and share them with the rest of the family :)

Perhaps this isn't what you're looking for to share with family, but there's an open source project I help with a little, called grocy.

It allows you to define recipes and track the stock you have in your fridge/pantry so you know what recipes you can cook at any point in time.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#135

Post by dmcswain » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 10:45 PM UTC

I'm working on Photo Recall an Amazon Alexa skill and Google Assistant app that let's you play photo slideshows by voice: https://bit.ly/photo-recall

I've also been working on Custom Voice Commands an Android app and web app that let's you load web content like YouTube video playlists, Google Drive or OneDrive documents, manage lists and reminders by voice plus ask Alexa questions: https://bit.ly/custom-voice-commands

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#136

Post by x1ph0z » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 10:46 PM UTC

Building a budgeting app for Android. Pretty basic in terms of functionality, but I'd like to at least bring a project to completion before moving on to something more complicated. Been at it for 6+ months, and the end isn't in sight yet...

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#137

Post by aldoushuxley001 » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

nsainsbury wrote: post #119

I'm working on a new chapter for my course Mastery with SQL ( https://www.masterywithsql.com ) covering query performance and indexing with PostgreSQL. I want to really allow everyone to see first-hand the impact of re-writing queries to be more performant and adding the right indexes so I've been spending a lot of time to create great exercises where you get to optimise poorly performing queries over some very large…

Sounds awesome, good work!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#138

Post by um304 » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

Reading these books:

- The Effective Engineer

- Crime & Punishment

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#139

Post by samcrawford » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 10:49 PM UTC

As a side project, I'm working on a route planning app for running. I'm a long distance runner and travel for work a lot, so I frequently find myself planning a run on one of the many existing apps at 5am in a new city whilst jetlagged.

My bugbear is that all the existing apps suck. I want a way to say "give me a running route that lasts approximately 10km and is as scenic (greenery, water, mountains, etc) as possible, with few road crossing and is as safe as possible". Maybe I can even pick from the top 3 options. Existing apps can't do any of this.

This data is readily available (or can be derived) for many countries using the wonderful openstreetmap and other public sources (e.g. national hiking trail routes).

I've adapted the brilliant Graphhopper routing engine to handle the routing algorithm and alternative routes selection. PostGIS (with OSM + other data loaded) is used under the hood to generate weights for each of the "ways" (edges in OSM-speak) for each of my variables (e.g. greenery). I'm using Leaflet and leaflet-routing-engine on the frontend currently, but would like to make it into a native Android/iOS app in the future.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#140

Post by treyfitty » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 10:49 PM UTC

Skincare line for men. I just turned 30 and I wanted an easier way to take care of my skin. One of the things I noticed was that there weren't a lot of skincare geared towards men that I "trusted." So, I threw myself all-in to see if I can bootstrap a brand focused on using natural ingredients myself. It was supposed to launch June 1, but early impressions suggested the "brand" sucked. Yes, I rebranded before I sold a single product, which was an expensive lesson, but it taught me a valuable lesson: Feature creep will always exist if you don't reign it in.

Anyway, I'm welcome to advice- if you want to check out the basic site, it's https://www.mendskin.co password: mendskin.

If you subscribe at the bottom (I'm a one man shop... I don't have the capacity to set up effective MailChimp campaigns, so you can trust me when I say I can't spam your inbox), I'll follow up with a personal hackernews offer once I launch.