Build it. There are a lot of tutorials out there to quickly build stuff in any technology you choose. Reaching out through this question - "What do I do?" Is what you should advice suicidal people to do. There is always help if you ask for it.
Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
31–40 of 161 posts
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#32liyanchang's suggestion is bang on. Even if you never touch on it again, if you actually force yourself (by working on an interesting project) to touch on the full stack of an app you will benefit from it for years.
So many of the little hobby projects I've worked on over the years (long since abandoned) have provided a fantastic base for something else. A website I managed when I was a teenager taught me all sorts of server admin skills that still pay off 5 years later. When you're 15 you have absolutely oodles of free time (it might not seem that way now, but it will when you're working full time!). Make use of it!
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#33Congrats man, well done!
This list of cognitive distortions and how to fix them might be relevant: http://www.apsu.edu/sites/apsu.edu/files/counseling/COGNITIV...
This was created by Dr. David Burns and is supported by research in cognitive therapy. The full information is available in his book "Feeling Good". The interactive medium could afford some interesting possibilities.
Another thing that I remember reading is that tracking your happiness level and sharing that information with others seems to improve mood. Somebody was experimenting with this on the web. Seems like a perfect fit for a social app.
I second the opinion that you should make sure that you pay attention to research. Some common sense approaches might be counter-productive. For example, the cliché: "suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" can make suicide sound even better to the seriously depressed. Be suspicious of common sense here.
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#34I would encourage you to write the entire thing, frontend, backend, content, PR releases, etc. Two reasons: 1. You're young and still figuring out what you love doing; no better time to experiment and learn. I still have fond memories over the php site I wrote in high school. You could visible tell which functions were written at the beginning of the project versus the end because you'll improve drastically. [1] 2. T…
I generally agree with all of this. Backend is not as scary as you might assume, and it's not hard to ship something that works.
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#35What is a "front-end developer"? I can do the literal translation, and I can surmise that it means a person who builds and designs UIs, but I always thought that was a designer, not a developer. Javascript is the only thing on what you've just listed that's Turing complete, so look into Node.js, in addition to all the other Buzz Words you see in the rest of the comments. I also think you should come at this with a da…
A front end developer is someone that builds the interface. Designers are becoming programmers more and more nowadays, but it used to be that the designer drew out an interface and the developer built it.
Here's a good article about it, as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_and_back_ends
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#36You are working on something important, and I was glad to read (and upvote) a lot of the other comments you received, and especially the offers for pro-bono help. One comment below suggested that you read the literature (I presume that means the literature about suicide prevention) and I would second that advice. To expand that advice a bit, I'll note that Martin E. P. Seligman and some other psychologists who have studied depression and suicide think that the "self esteem" movement that took over United States schools after I graduated from high school may have actually INCREASED risk of suicide in the United States--certainly the rates of both attempted and completed suicide, and the rate of diagnosed youth depression, went up over the years when those school programs were put in place. In other words, don't just rely on intuition about what would be helpful, but look into actual research. Seligman's books Learned Optimism[1] and The Optimistic Child[2] are both helpful, although there should be some even newer research out by now. Reading those books may help you deal with the challenges of working on this interesting project while keeping up with your school work. Best wishes.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Learned-Optimism-Change-Your-Mind/dp/1...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Optimistic-Child-Depression-Resili...
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#37You should use http://ionicframework.com when it is ready, for storage use ngStorage https://github.com/gsklee/ngStorage, and a guide for starting with angular and phonegap/cordova is here http://devgirl.org/2013/06/10/quick-start-guide-phonegap-and...
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#38Suicide prevention /app/?
You don't stop suicide with an app. You're 15 and you have a grant for a gimmick. I'm 22 and I'm unemployed. I'm already depressed but this makes me angry, too, so I just made an account to let you know that this disgusts me.
Empty words. At least your resume looks better with this.
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#39Lots of people have given you very specific advice about what frameworks to use, how to approach the problem, etc...
Take it all with a grain of salt. What I'd suggest to get started is create a public github project for it, put together some wireframes and sequence diagrams (publish them in the github project) so that people can see what it's meant to look like and how it's mean to work. Then just start coding.
Post the github project here on HN and ask for contributors. Keep a curated list of features, tasks and bugs in the github project and let people pick them up and help you build it.
Rule #1 though, don't let people get you down. Everyone has an opinion and we software people can be pretty harsh, especially when, frankly, we're just arguing our opinion rather than fact.
Rule #2, done is better than perfect. What's your Minimum Viable Product? Build that, maintain tunnel vision on completing that, then worry about everything else it could do.
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#40I would encourage you to write the entire thing, frontend, backend, content, PR releases, etc. Two reasons: 1. You're young and still figuring out what you love doing; no better time to experiment and learn. I still have fond memories over the php site I wrote in high school. You could visible tell which functions were written at the beginning of the project versus the end because you'll improve drastically. [1] 2. T…
I generally agree with all of this. Backend is not as scary as you might assume, and it's not hard to ship something that works.
no kidding, I'm finding Angular / JS a pill compared to Laravel/Rails backends.