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

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#181

Post by yjhoney » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 11:35 PM UTC

I'm writing a book that teaches people coding using JavaScript, the book that takes you from 0 (no coding background) to getting a job as a JS engineer.

2 years I ago, I had a hypothesis to see if anybody could learn coding if they tried. To test that, I reached out to random people with no coding background, most of them from underprivileged backgrounds. I figured they have fewer opportunities and are more likely to stay through the entire program. 17 of them stayed.

As of today, 14 of them have gotten full time jobs (which was a high win for them, going from minimum wage to 130k+ per year). The remaining 3 of them are starting interview prep right now. I'm going for a 100% success rate.

Everybody learns at a different pace. The slowest student took 2 years and the fastest around 6 months (I actively made them stay around to help out the slower students for as long as I could).

I'm putting together a curriculum of all the pain points people face when learning how to code and come up with a comprehensive book. It will be free to all. The current rough draft is here: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f...

To test the effectiveness of the book, I've just recruited a new student (my dad), who spent the last 30 years doing manual labor and barely knows any English. So far, so good.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#182

Post by kinow » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

samcrawford wrote: post #139

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 possibl…

Not much into running, more gym and judo. But have been traveling a lot recently, and running would be easier than finding a gym or dojo for me.

I had a look around in my last trip to the UK for short circuits with 5 to 10 KM, flat, not much obstacles, but couldn't find any.

Would be even better if I could also find some markers around the map indicating things like pull up bars or abs bench.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#183

Post by westoncb » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

dh-g wrote: post #180

westoncb wrote: post #172

Whenever I get free time I work on my 'abstract visual debugger' project. I've been doing that since late 2014 though, so recently I'm trying a new tack to free up some time for myself: I've been building a little desktop utility with three.js + Electron + Rust, that I'm going to sell in the Microsoft store (eventually elsewhere too): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-ANWHLvARM I'll start beta testing in about a week…

This looks nice, I use GrandPerspective for this task currently but your UI looks beautiful and useful.

Thanks! I came across this kind of app for the first time in January (GrandPerspective, WinDirStat, DiasyDisk, TreeSize, etc.), and I've spent a lot of time thinking about/working on making interactive/visual trees in the past, so I really wanted to take a crack at making the best one I could.

Here we are many months later and I'm finally starting to be pretty happy with the results. It's taken many iterations, but it is quite effective from a usability perspective now.

I'm starting to put a little thought into what other kinds of hierarchical data it might be useful for exploring...

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#184

Post by zzzmarcus » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

spxdcz wrote: post #176

Still a long way to go, but trying to make it easier (and cheaper!) to research public companies / stocks - with both quantitative and qualitative data. https://docoh.com/

This is seriously impressive!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#185

Post by mrieck » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 11:39 PM UTC

vinitagr wrote: post #142

mrieck wrote: post #46

Working on a desktop version of my webdev tool SnipCSS: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/snipcss/hbdnoadcma... The current version is a Chrome Extension that extracts every CSS rule needed to rebuild the DOM subtree of a selected element. Unlike other tools it never uses computed styles and uses the actual DevTools protocol to get the CSS. The current extension doesn't handle CSS specificity or inheritance c…

This looks like a really useful tool. I would use it. How are you planning to market it?

Thanks! I haven't thought much about marketing yet - when it's ready I'll try submitting it to ShowHN, ProductHunt and dev subreddits.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#186

Post by peteforde » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 11:40 PM UTC

I have two excellent passion projects right now.

The first is working with my friend on remote pair programming in service of levelling her up faster than would otherwise be possible for the average graduate of a coding bootcamp program. She got a job as a junior dev almost immediately out of the program, and I spend sometimes many hours a day screen sharing and talking through problems. It demands patience and good communication, but the results have been one of the most incredible investments I've ever made. It's also one of the most intimate connections I've ever experienced. We both have a ton of gratitude, and I've learned an amazing amount in the process.

I've also been working on my own Rails project, which I've been converting from ad hoc jQuery to Stimulus and Turbolinks. One of the things I've learned from working with my friend is that when it comes to the whole React/JS-for-everything ecosystem, the inmates are running the asylum. In this case, inmates are a critical mass of relatively new devs in an echo chamber that thinks React is the default choice for every project and have little practical experience to base this on. Sadly, Stimulus/Turbolinks is not the hipster choice and part of the problem is a lack of visible examples of how amazing these libraries actually are. I'm excited to publish a series of posts about how warm the water is on our side of the debate.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#187

Post by adamnemecek » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 11:41 PM UTC

I'm working on an IDE for music composition http://ngrid.io.

Ive mentioned this many time but I'm close to being done. Fall of this year.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#188

Post by ElFitz » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 11:41 PM UTC

Currently building some serverless automation platform, as a SaaS, with an associate.

Something similar to Zapier, but appropriate for heavy workloads, with separate dev & production environments, which handles throttling (you don't want to accidentally DDOS a third-party API) and doesn't structure an array of objects into arrays of their properties, etc

The goal is to be handle to handle all non-crud backend workflows.

It's quite challenging really.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#189

Post by tuckerpo » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 11:42 PM UTC

A bootloader that makes you win a game of pong before you get to your OS.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#190

Post by mysterydip » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

Game development, most recently getting a collection of 80s arcade-inspired games polished up and on steam. In the past several months also worked on a few boardgame ideas, and learned a ton about the industry and best practices, which I've carried with me back to videogame development as well.