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Ask HN: What personal projects/goals are people working on for this summer?

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Ask HN: What personal projects/goals are people working on for this summer?

#1
Well, school's out for summer, but the learning doesn't stop. Jobs and internships aside, what personal projects/goals do you hope to accomplish during Summer 11'?

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I just had my wisdom teeth (all four) removed, and to help pass the time I've been working through Zed Shaw's 'Learn Python the Hard Way'. My end-goal is to have a few Python/Django projects in my portfolio come September.

Re: Ask HN: What personal projects/goals are people working on for this summer?

#2
I am currently working on (and will be all summer):

- MIDI Controller-related stuff (just finished a hardware project, moving on to some new and advanced firmware mods for the Midifighter).

- 2D SciFi viking game, using a custom C++/Lua engine, using OpenGL 3 for graphics, Intel Threading Building Blocks for multicore, SDL 1.3 for windowing and input, GLM for math, Bullet for physics. Component entity system based. No audio yet.

- Backend web development for money.

- Tinkering with various bits and pieces: a Qt-based mini-dwarf-fortress type thing; programming language concepts; bitcoin related stuff...

Amount of time spent on each is roughly in the above order, from most time to least time.

Re: Ask HN: What personal projects/goals are people working on for this summer?

#3
Learning Python, Django, and JavaScript for a project; goal is to have a prototype by the beginning of July.

Stuff to learn: numerical linear algebra, dictionary learning, Judea Pearl's Causality

Research: diffusion geometry for databases (?)

Re: Ask HN: What personal projects/goals are people working on for this summer?

#4
I started my summer a bit early: In Feb. I quit my job and moved to Guatemala. Here I'm spending the mornings learning Spanish, and the afternoons playing with Rails and Javascript. After I finish my current project, I'd like to look some into iOS development.

Re: Ask HN: What personal projects/goals are people working on for this summer?

#5
I'm trying to teach myself how to write games using common lisp, and will be documenting my experience in the form of a series of screencasts. Mostly because i want to learn lisp better, learn game programming, and learn how to produce good screencasts.

Re: Ask HN: What personal projects/goals are people working on for this summer?

#7
post #6

Building an app in Node.js, so will be learning that along with MongoDB. Have another project to start and need to decide if I use as a tool to learn Python by using django or if learning 2 new languages/frameworks at a time is a silly idea.

i'm working on building a node.js + socket.io realtime streaming web app. Also hoping to run through some of the new javascript frameworks such as Backbone.js for the frontend along with d3.js for visualization.

aiming to write some more http://www.privacypatterns.org so that I can talk about the project more widely.

Re: Ask HN: What personal projects/goals are people working on for this summer?

#8
Interesting question, techdemic. Just to mention for questions like this on HackerNews it's often common to prepend the post with 'Ask HN:' in the title.

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As for what I'm working on in the summer. If everything goes to plan.

- A directory of startup tools

- Brush up on my probability and statistics with the help of the Khan Academy and some text books.

- Then explore machine learning. Hope to go through the Stanford Machine learning video lectures. Then apply some of the modelling to the project above.

As for goals, I'd like to be ramen profitable with the tool/service directory.

Re: Ask HN: What personal projects/goals are people working on for this summer?

#9
I'm writing an app that helps you become a better programmer by recording statistics on your coding style and habits. It is built with node and CouchDB.

If you want to beta test, sign up at http://hackharder.com/ (really ugly, gonna fix it soon).

Alpha testing has not yet started, but soon :)

Re: Ask HN: What personal projects/goals are people working on for this summer?

#10

I started my summer a bit early: In Feb. I quit my job and moved to Guatemala. Here I'm spending the mornings learning Spanish, and the afternoons playing with Rails and Javascript. After I finish my current project, I'd like to look some into iOS development.

What brought you to Guatemala?
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