Ask HN: Interesting ideas for a weekend project?

7 points by uams 12 years ago | 9 comments

Looking for interesting things to do over the Labor Day weekend.

CS Student. Done a mix of web, Python & Java.

I have a couple ideas, but would love to hear your thoughts.

- HN seems to love their functional languages. Learn Lisp? - I'm a Emacs user. Write an emacs plugin? - Have a Leap Motion, Raspberry Pi, and Apple TV sitting around. But no idea what to do with them. - iPhone user. Learn Objective-C and write an app? - Oh-My-Zsh plugin with ExplainShell

Thoughts? Additions?

liyanchang 12 years ago |

If you're looking to learn iOS, I'd suggest contributing to an open source application.

An app requires a bit of setup so taking someones app means that most of the minutia is set up. Therefore you can take on manageable size chunks. Also, and maybe more importantly, you'll have an experienced iOS developer review your code.

https://github.com/nothingmagical/cheddar-ios is a good one. Shameless plug: https://github.com/Ink/ThatInbox, ThatPDF, ThatPhoto, ThatCloud are ones that my company open sourced.

Related: https://learn.thoughtbot.com/ios is a good listing of iOS resources to get started.

lscharen 12 years ago |

Emacs plugin you say? I would love to see someone create an emulator-dev minor mode that would take a code project like is defined in the emacs-project-mode and create a disk image that could be loaded by a target emulator.

Ideally it could be set up to configure and launch an emulator which would then build the code tree with the platform's native development tools (if needed).

Here's a concrete example:

  1. Use emacs to write an AppleSoft BASIC program, myfile.txt"
  2. C-x <run-on-emulator>
  3. Automatically create a *.dsk file image, with the following files
     a) PRODOS and BASIC.SYSTEM installed
     b) a STARTUP program that executes the file, i.e.
        10 PRINT $CHR(4);"-MYFILE.TXT"

  4. Create (for example) a linapple configuration file to load this DSK image
  5. Start the emulator

johnmurch 12 years ago |

A few thoughts:

1) Scrolling through http://firespotting.com/ I found this nice idea: http://firespotting.com/item?id=2353 - Common app for Jobs - Maybe linkedin integration or even just something simple you can open source for startups to use or do what http://www.crowdhoster.com/ did for kickstarter

2) Give this a read/inspiration: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/rainy_day...

good luck - be sure to post code on ShowHN

godbolev 12 years ago |

When I browse, I often have multiple windows with lots of tabs open at once. Chrome gives me an option to "Continue where I left off" but only does this for a single window at a time.

Create an extension that lets me press a single button to close all of Chrome. It should also automatically restore all these windows when I start Chrome. My current workaround is to kill the Chrome process and it'll attempt to restore when I restart Chrome.

I'm not familiar with Chrome extensions so I'm not sure how hard this would be. But if someone built this, I'd definitely use it!

evadne 12 years ago | |

OneTab. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

godbolev 12 years ago | | |

Thanks!

kcent 12 years ago |

I love re-interpreting existing tools or ideas as practice and fun, like how an artist does studies of master artists' work to improve their technical skills or just to gain some perspective.

So perhaps if you can't think of something new, try re-inventing something that exists, in a new language or one you already know and like?

Though I'm partial to people building doodads with things like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. :)

sideproject 12 years ago |

Some of the ideas & side projects you can take a look - http://sideprojectors.com (disclaimer, I run the website) :)

johnmurch 12 years ago |

Would love to hear what you built :)