Live data from Hacker News

Rivers Cuomo is an active developer on GitHub

github.com

21–30 of 137 posts

Re: Rivers Cuomo is an active developer on GitHub

#27
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> formerly with Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force Which made me remember that Cuomo is also a pretty good guitar shredder, not long ago there was an interview with him shredding along his favorite lines from Malmsteen

Cuomo can play

I say this as a guy who’s been playing electric guitar for over 25 years - Rivers is certainly competent on guitar. He’s not some virtuoso and he’s definitely no Yngwie. His real superpower, however, is songwriting. He’s one the best who has ever lived.

Re: Rivers Cuomo is an active developer on GitHub

#29

According to his `new-albums` repo [1]: > I've been learning programming since 2015 So something he’s picked up fairly recently. [1] https://github.com/riverscuomo/new-albums

I know time is relative but I realized 2015 is 9 years ago ? Made me feel old.

Re: Rivers Cuomo is an active developer on GitHub

#30
Interesting, he seems to primarily work on a Discord Bot.

This is at heavy risk for confirmation bias, but I believe that writing chat bots is one of the best ways for people to get into and enjoy coding, because it's fun and rewarding, and simple enough (with an existing framework to use) that just uses strings. For a large generation it was MySpace and the ability to customize your page heavily with HTML. I know a number of people who learned HTML for that reason.

Chat bots seem like the closest modern day equivalent (despite the main platforms making it harder with stuff like difficult to connect to the real time websocket and force use of webhooks). 10 years ago or so when Slack was new and had a gloriously simple API, I even wrote a framework that made it as easy as implementing one function, and you could receive messages (among other metadata like the username of the sender) as strings and send replies easily as strings. It served as an entry point for a few friends who had some fun with it and learned some ruby in the process.

Anyway, if you're looking to get into coding but want to do a "real" project (or something very rewarding), start by writing simple chat bots! If you need some ideas, these are simple:

1. Start with writing a simple echo bot that just replies to every message with the same message that it received.

1. Write a bot that responds to every message with a random number between 1 and 100. For a slight increased challenge, have it do fizzbuzz where the nth message received is the counter.

2. Write a bot that that will reverse the message of whatever it receives, so it echoes replies but backwards.

3. Write a bot that will lookup a word when the message sent is "define " and reply with the definition from one of the many dictionary APIs out there.

Go from there!

Post reply on HN