Ask HN: What are you working on?

just finished working on my first real fully automated + autoscaling + distributed application environment a few weeks ago. The the definition/spec for all of it is on source control; nothing is done manually at go-time.

It gives you the same type of confidence about your application environment that you experienced for the first time when you switched to automated application deployments.

the various "click the build button" workflows that are implemented so far:

1. base images for all the different server types get built/updated. any future environment updates will upgrade machines to the new images.

2. an entire new named application environment (minimum ~15 VMs) gets created (webservers, background services, cache servers, database servers, etc..), configured, and applications deployed to. creating a new environment for, e.g, performance testing is as simple saying "build: performance-test-env"

3. an entire app environment (any of them) gets updated based on any configuration changes made since the last update/create.

4. various normal application deployment automation

SETaaS - Software Engineering Teams as a Service

Trying to find out if the bootstrapped productized service at http://www.thinkbridge.us/setaas.html is viable.

Targets are businesses with software systems and applications that are to be developed and maintained at a smaller scale but need continued access to technical talent.

After being a Software Developer for 15+ yrs, learning marketing & sales :)

Think my niche is programming in news. Something between a programmer, an editor and a reporter. I don't work on the core CMS because we have dedicated teams for that. What I specialize in is all the things the CMS can't do, won't do, or isn't designed for, like interactives. Or this http://projects.voanews.com/ebola-tracker/ ; the tracker data is updated manually because it has to be reviewed (sudo vi ebola/data) but an automated watch script alerts me when the World Health Organization updates their ebola stats every few epidemiological weeks. I like using RaphaelJS for making graphics.

Currently, working on 3-4 editorial projects. First one is a bit dry, a metrics dashboard done in Node.js that gets top pageviews from our articles and then scrapes titles, number of article comments, facebook shares, tweets. Some real surprises there - an article can have 10x number of fb shares than pageviews. As in, the teaser photo + summary is enough for people to share and not read in entirety. I like node. Also (probably unsurprisingly) but facebook is faster than our own sites for scrapes, even though we use akamai / CDN.

Next up is a parallax-y report on fourth of July for our Learning English division. It's a longform writeup laced with some cinemagraph-style looping videos and embedded quizzes explaining the constitution and a bunch of Americana to our international audience. The internal tool we generate these projects with (tool separates content and programming/design) are a mix of PHP / Smarty templating that I want to convert to node with some realtime collaboration features, but once baked the final reader-facing stuff is HTML/JavaScript. Looks kind of like this http://projects.voanews.com/central-african-republic-diamond... project. Funny thing is the internal tool is called "timeline editor" and it does everything except timelines. It should be called interactive editor.

Also, oh boy, I made that map in the article and am so proud of it. It remixed a bunch of complicated and overwhelming data points and simplified it for the reader. Had to do some lat/lng to pixel conversions, some point-in-polygon checks, got the CAR shape polygon list from a UC Davis site and then used inkscape to simplify the shapes because it had millions of points. So guess this kind of programming is a niche specialization for news agencies, and it's worked well for me, going on 7-8 years now.

Damn, I'm a nerd.

Chirp - A new smart notification center.

It's still being developed but here's the landing page to give an idea: http://welcomechirp.com

Market Intelligence as a Service - Insightico (http://getinsightico.com)

Exploring if we have a viable business after several people have told us that it's useful. We're still trying to land our first customer though the challenge is focusing on the right customer segment since it spans multiple industries.

Funny enough, I did have a job choosing and picking technologies such as Oracle/Microsoft/etc. I worked at a high growth startup at the beginning and then went to work at large corporations to get a balance of both worlds.