In other words, what are you working on for fun? And why do you find it fun?
Don't forget to upvote the poll so other people can see it and share their projects.
Ask HN: What is your current pet project?
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your current pet project?
#2Playing around with making projects with Arduino + sensors, it's fun because there is so much you can do with the Arduino platform these days. The hardware course in university was a rush through, and I never really had time to experiment on my own with it (the real learning). So now, I get to do it with the Arduino, which makes it SO much easier (and cheaper) than it use to be.
Re: Ask HN: What is your current pet project?
#3I've been having a lot of fun playing around with site scraping. Which probably sounds weird and lame but the challenge of building stuff from metadata has been interesting, and seeing how context behaves between linked sites. Here is an example, which builds a threaded feed from outbound links (still not quite ready for prime time): http://precis.gopagoda.com/url/https://news.ycombinator.com/...
Also i'm cloning HN in Laravel. Most of the basics work but i've got nothing online to show yet. I find it fun because I like imaging how the structure of the site might affect the way people communicate and use it.
Re: Ask HN: What is your current pet project?
#4Playing around with making projects with Arduino + sensors, it's fun because there is so much you can do with the Arduino platform these days. The hardware course in university was a rush through, and I never really had time to experiment on my own with it (the real learning). So now, I get to do it with the Arduino, which makes it SO much easier (and cheaper) than it use to be.
Hadn't really looked into Arduino until now. Thanks, this looks like it might turn into an interesting summer project for me and my son.
Re: Ask HN: What is your current pet project?
#5I've been working on implementing my first Lisp compiler and virtual machine. My last Lisp was a simple inefficient AST interpreter, so this seems like the next step up.
Re: Ask HN: What is your current pet project?
#6To teach myself Python "properly", I've been slowly writing a script that posts to Github's Gists - I'm finding it more and more useful as a note taking utility so I wrote something that lets me pipe input into it and get a URL out.
https://github.com/voltagex/python-gist
Python is just nice to code in, and I find it a lot easier to start a project in than C#, which is my day job.
The other thing I've been doing is getting into reverse engineering of embedded devices - http://blog.voltagex.org/bdplayer.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6997623
I also buy far, far too many tiny devices like Raspberry Pis and Cubieboards.
I think between experimenting with and reversing tiny linux-running devices (I'm looking at you, consumer router manufacturers) I'll find a new career direction, but at the moment it's a good challenge and a glorious time and money sink.
Re: Ask HN: What is your current pet project?
#7Building a citation manager (for like research papers and stuff) that maintains a central list of all sources, authors, and publications cited and also helps manage paper/project level stuff for the individual level. Hoping that the central list makes it easier to keep the db clean and also provides the user with some benefit by being able to just look stuff up instead of typing it in.
Re: Ask HN: What is your current pet project?
#8Mines a real "pet" project. I installed a bluetooth signal/sensor in my dogs harness, put an infrared sensor strip on backdoor and hacked together something like twillo for notifications. When I let him outside, I know when he is back at the door because his motion gets picked up by the sensor and a text message gets fired off to say "Woof. Let me in. Love Simon." This didn't take me long to build and it gets the job done. Still refining. It's all good fun... COST: under $19 for all electronics.
Re: Ask HN: What is your current pet project?
#9I'm currently building ghostream (https://github.com/ghostream/ghostream) - it is a data stream processing framework. Having used numerous commercial ones (most notably IBM's Streams), and building various other part-frameworks (i.e. for time and budget reasons focussed on one particular thing) I has an itch to build an open source one (while storm and samza are definitely related, I feel they fall into a slightly different category - I'm all about the streams :) )
It is still in very active development - but the base is solidifying and the new test framework is starting to shape up nicely.
I have already started dog-fooding it in my other personal projects - the most visual of which can be seen here: http://jamielewis.me.uk/posts/2013-11-03-Mapping-Earthquakes...
Re: Ask HN: What is your current pet project?
#10I teach an intro programming class in Python each fall, and this fall I started an open project to help my students learn Python: http://introtopython.org
It's progressing steadily, and people seem to be responding positively to the first project, a tutorial about plotting geospatial data using matplotlib and Basemap: http://introtopython.org/visualization_earthquakes.html
The whole project is on github: https://github.com/ehmatthes/intro_programming
PS I just accidentally ended a 132-day github streak, mostly focused on this project. I stared watching a movie with my wife last night, and at the end of the movie I looked at the clock and realized I forgot to make a commit before 11pm. No matter, it was never about the streak anyway. :)