Many reddit communities have weekly threads that are great entry points into the community. In that vein, I thought I’d try one out here. I wasn’t sure about the meta tag, but I don’t know what else to use.
So the question is simple? What are you working on this week? If so, do you need any help from one of us? Need feedback on a prototype? Need a proof read of a post? We’re here to help.
I like weekly threads, they build a semblance of community.
I set up a Dokku / postgres box and migrated all my stuff over from supervisor / SQLite this past weekend. There’s a bunch of miscellaneous cleanup stuff left.
I want to get back to contributing to Rust once I finish up writing the tests for autojump.
Yes, please let’s make this a tradition, asking “what are you working on this week”. It’s like a coarse-grained twitter for programmers and open-source projects.
I’m on vacation, but contemplating moving a project from sockets to zeromq (https://github.com/vjoel/tupelo) and writing a talk proposal for MountainWest Ruby Conf (http://mtnwestrubyconf.org).
consider going straight to nanomsg, zeromq’s successor by the same author.
Thanks for the tip. A little put off by “WARNING: nanomsg is still in alpha stage!”. Nanomsg has been mentioned twice before on lobste.rs, but without discussion:
https://lobste.rs/s/buukh6/nanomsg_mit-licensed_zeromq_alternative https://lobste.rs/s/9lmnfh/gettings_started_with_nanomsg_examples_in_c
I will start a new thread asking for comments on nanomsg vs zeromq.
Great, if you have any ideas for other weekly threads, I’d love to get one a day for each day during the work week.
Thanks for maintaining autojump, it’s a great little tool.
I’m finally finishing up the book I’ve been writing since March; it’s looking like I might actually finish by the end of the month, or February at the latest.
How about you?
You should consider hosting on http://www.penflip.com if you are releasing them for free. It allows git-like version control for the writing process too. It’s seriously great. I found it a few months back on HN and have been using it for both of my free books myself.
I actually sell the ebooks versions (via Leanpub), but Leanpub lets me put up an HTML version for free. I do have a free book coming up (an introduction to the commonly-used cryptopackages in Go, like OTR, NaCl, tls, and one I wrote, CryptoBox), so I’ll definitely look into it. The only thing is I’d like to stray away from Markdown for writing technical books and use Asciidoc. Does Penflip support that?
Leanpub is awesome!!
It’s certainly made writing easier, except the Dropbox-based sync has made life difficult (mostly, I run OpenBSD, and there isn’t a good Dropbox client for OpenBSD).
Very interesting, also discovered your other book focused on Python. Kudos for putting them up free to read as well, definitely going be curling up with these this weekend!
The Python book is problematic for me, because I haven’t written much, if any, Python since starting Go. That means I have less experience with the elliptic curve stuff, because at my previous job we used RSA. I feel like it’s not as useful as it should be for Pythonistas.
I’m writing a dynamo-consistency based distributed counter database (in Go). I have worked with distributed systems for some time now, so I thought it would be good learning exercise to build one from scratch. Won’t be useful to anyone.
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Thanks! Not sure how relevant it will be to this project, as I’m building a dynamo-style distributed system, which isn’t related to dynamodb specifically.
see this paper: http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/cs239-w08/decandia07dynamo.pdf
I just released https://howsmyssl.com! It’s meant to help developers get a high level view the security of the TLS clients they use. I’ve had it in the backlog to go out for a while, so this is a good day.
It’s hack week at work, and I’m trying to finish a Go hpack draft 5 implementation for it, but I’m distracted by some promises of Real Work I made.
At work, pixel-perfecting and skinning up a big iPad app for demos soon. I both love and hate this phase of making consumer-facing apps; it’s tedious, frustrating, time-consuming, and sometimes feels wasteful but it’s also the part of the project that garners a lot of immediate positive feedback from stakeholders.
Outside of work, I’m working on a simple CAN-to-CAN middleman device to interface a post-2008 Lotus Elise instrument cluster with a pre-2008 car. The hardware prototype is a Teensy++ 2.0 attached to two off-the-shelf MCP2515-based SPI CAN modules but I’d like to eventually try to make my own boards with a Cortex M0 and MCP2515s together because I’m not a huge AVR fan (it was just handy). So far the hard part has been getting the hardware wired together and working at all; the connectors for the instrument clusters are “protected” so they’re hard to source and I’ve just been jamming connectors onto the pins. The protocol side is pretty easy as the old protocol is documented and, while the new bus runs at a different speed the new protocol seems to be remarkably similar with just a few extensions. Sadly a bench accident broke my donor instrument cluster so I’ll never actually be able to use it in the car :(
Cool, are you on Lotustalk?
I am, same username. Considering the fervor for the 2008 cluster over there I don’t want to make them aware of my pursuits until I have a release ready - seems like a distraction.
I am trying to reclaim the domain name (ctcten.org) of the foundation my family started in honor of my fiancee’s brother after he died in 2007. It expired due to out-of-date contact info, despite the fact that the foundation relies on that domain for email and web donations, and then was sold to someone in Japan in a private “auction” in which I was not allowed to participate. Name.com is the registrar but they aren’t being particularly helpful.
It’s not going well so far, since the foundation is small and doesn’t have formal trademarks. If anybody knows a trademark lawyer who has handled domain disputes before and doesn’t mind some pro bono work, I’d appreciate you getting in touch very very much.
For background, the foundation built a soccer field for elementary school kids in Khayelitsha Township outside of Capetown South Africa and sends an couple of interns over to run programs and leagues at the field every year. You can read more info on the temporary site we set up at http://ctcten.com.
This guy is supposed to be very good: http://johnberryhill.com/
This week I’ve been taking a week off from programming and getting scuba certified down in Honduras. It’s been a very rewarding experience and I recommend it to anyone at all interested. I’m learning a lot that feel is somehow relevant to software engineering, but I am having difficulty qualifying it at the moment. I may write a post about it later.
If you’re feeling good about your progress try a night dive. I did one off of Utila and it was a cool and memorable experience.
I’m mostly working on tools for political expression and participation this week.
“Call Congress Now”- a website that uses Twilio and Om to let you call congressmen from the safety of your browser. More proof of concept than anything else.
/u/CongressionalHound- a bot on reddit that hunts down mentions of members of Congress and provides relevant information. It’s all open source (pretty simple python stuff). Right now I’ve programmed all the main features I wanted, but I’m mostly negotiating with moderators of subreddits. They’ve been burned by some really dumb bots before and so they are understandably cautious about allowing an unknown nobody put a bot on their subreddit.
Going back to university after Christmas break. In addition to new and exciting classes, this semester I’m going to be a student assistant and help students one year below me with an Intro to OOP in Java class. I’m also going to be joining a student initative to teach coding (Scratch and Python) to younger students (Lower Secondary School in Norway, age 13-16). Any teachers/tutors want to share some tips?
I taught a course for 8th grade students using Scratch last semester. I just want to warn you that, for younger students (ours were 13-14 years old), it can be hard to get their attention. This is especially true in a computer lab where there’s a world wide web of distractions sitting in front of them. This was mainly because our students didn’t self-select, but were chosen by the assistant principal of the school we were working with. Also, we tried using Python in the course at first, but that wasn’t really working with the kids because they didn’t understand why they were doing anything. That’s why we moved to Scratch because you can get richer visual feedback.
So, to summarize, some key takeaways.
This Philip Guo article is great, thank you for sharing! Maybe we need a pedagogy/teaching tag (or regular thread?)
Yeah, he really has some great insights on teaching CS and programming. I just graduated and will be moving away to work, but my co-instructors are all continuing on to teach in the Spring semester. I sent them all this article after I read it because I think it is something very useful to keep in mind. Also, for anyone teaching Python to beginners, Philip Guo’s Ph.D. thesis was Python Tutor, a really neat tool for visualizing the execution of a Python program.
I’ve been teaching coding (w/ a sort of barfy Javascript curriculum) to middle & high school girls for a bit. Try to recognize when someone needs actual help and when they need attention. Find ways to divert the latter when it gets the point of being disruptive; a good technique is having the person sitting next to them help them finish the task. Allocate way more time than you think you need for setup/login/environment configuration. Seriously, practice beforehand giving the instructions and allocate twice as much time as you think you’ll need.
My senior year of high school I was a student assistant for a Scratch/Python intro course. The biggest issue I had (and still have while tutoring) is not just saying the answer. Coming up with different ways to phrase an assignment (or chunk of an assignment), and coming up with leading questions on how to get to the right result can be difficult. It’s also difficult for me to not introduce new ideas and concepts that are beyond the material being taught while helping people.
Lesson plans really help with this. Have some material to cover, problems they should be able to answer and a series of questions (Socratic method) that help the students complete the problems.
Plans would be nice, but I don’t really have the ability to do that. Right now I’m just one of my CS department’s tutors, and the way my school’s tutoring system works is by appointment, and most people are really bad about specifying what class their in and what assignment they’re working on (or they say something like “I’m working on assignment 3”, which means nothing to me).
I’ve been working on a game engine that runs over an HTTP API, so you can run whatever humans/machines you want behind the API call as long as it returns in 30 seconds. You can actually play connect four with it at the moment but it’s very much a work in progress at the moment.
https://github.com/battleofbits/arena
I’m also working on this!
Hey me too!
I assume its turn based as its a board game? That would be the only reason for HTTP to work as a networking solution.
Yes
Implementing left-right in scala. It’s pretty trivial to make one without explicit locks for reads, but trickier to make it lock-free for reads, and will require unpleasant things to make it wait-free for reads.
Also reading Distributed Systems, edited by Sape Mullender.
Working on getting Vagrant up so I can teach a coding class a lot easier. Also Vidpresso, my f/t gig.
How does using vagrant specifically make teaching the class easier? Or is it just sandboxing and using any virtual machine would give you the same benefits?
Do you have a bunch of custom stuff running on your machine, which would make teaching tricky?
As someone who has taught a few programming classes without Vagrant, it’s a nightmare. Many people are first time developers. They have no backups, so you don’t want to accidentally brick their computer. Using a VM allows you to configure everything ahead of time and be sure that things are going to work, regardless of the laptop your students bring in.
Windows is the actual answer.
Imagine you’ve never used computers before ever. And then you want to learn to code. And you want to learn with the newest tools. OK, get a bunch of unix knowledge before you get started!
Yeah, Vagrant really helps since I can set it all up beforehand, vagrant up, and you’re done.
Wouldn’t a full virtual machine, desktop and all, be better? It gives everyone the same desktop environment, same editors/IDEs, same everything, instead of just command line tools. It has a much higher cost in memory and processing power, but it makes everyone the same.
There’s a distinct line between “hard to install” and “not my environment” that I’m trying to walk. Sublime text is cross platform, so it’s fine imo for us to start there. Vagrant will handle the server stuff, our students will develop on their own machines, etc.
I’m not a teacher at a college, I’m just doing it at a local startup coworking space.
This week is focused on working on my startup and helping my dad with his fantasy football website. I’ve also committed to writing more blog posts this year, as I’ve been dormant since 2012.
What’s the fantasy football website?
I’m meeting with some other folks tonight to flesh out the requirements for a community activism DB project. Going to try to be mindful of balancing technology choices that I find exciting and choices that are going to make future maintenance by volunteers easy–would love to hear from others who’ve faced that tradeoff before.
I need to rewrite the intro to FP talk I’m giving at CUSEC. I suspect that Canadian college students won’t know who Pam Grier is but who says you can’t do a little cultural education along with the programming bit?
Stretch goal this week (yeah right, probably going to lay about with my new dog instead) would be finishing a little Scala macro toy project I started over Thanksgiving and writing a blog post about it. Nothing particularly groundbreaking but seems like consolidating good links to resources for writing macros in Scala is desperately needed, considering how hard it was for me to find anything useful.
I always have a few projects that I jump between. Currently the list is:
2d platforming game in Lua (using love2d) - https://bitbucket.org/sirpengi/lovestory/ My latest success is porting my lighting code into C. Luajit’s ffi makes that super easy to do, and it gained me back a lot of legroom to implement more game logic in Lua.
Recommendation engine as a service: http://savant-api.com/ SIte is just a placeholder. Still building out the backend.
A “2d world-building game for couples” sounds intriguing. Could you give a more detailed explanation of what you envision the game being?
if you’ve ever played Terraria (or the newer in beta StarBound), you’ll already know what I mean by 2d world builder. MineCraft is another (more famous) world builder, but 3d. I enjoy all of these games, and I always play with groups of friends, but one thing I feel lacking is any co-op dynamics. Nothing in their game designs reward team play over solo play. If you play together you just become effectively twice as powerful, with twice the inventory.
I don’t yet have a clear vision of what I want yet, but that’s the direction I’m leaning towards.
I’ve been hacking on my “great american programming language”, which so far has been entirely yak shaving on tools. My js/cs parsing library (packrattle) has gotten a lot of love, and is pretty good at generating debuggable parse trees now. My goal is a website that will evaluate expressions for you.
I’m fully aware that everything about that paragraph is ridiculous.
Wrapping up some work on Twitter’s ads API before I move to the social graph service team. Pretty stoked! Also getting ready for my Passion Projects talk on Thursday: https://github.com/blog/1728-passion-projects-with-dana-mccallum
I’m working on implementing structures from Okasaki’s Purely Functional Data Structures in scala as a learning exercise. I’m using two constraints: I’m making every structure invariant (in order to see what the consequences are) and I’m using nothing (or as little as possible) from the scala standard library (because I believe it is flawed)
Writing the software drivers for my FPGA MD5 cracker. This is part of a series of blog posts I’m doing on using the new Arrow SoCKit, an evaluation board for the Cyclone V FPGA/ARM HPS SoC.
Nice, I’ve got the Terasic Altera Cyclone IV starter board (DE0-Nano), but I haven’t gotten around to doing anything with it. I need to brush up on my Verilog, first. I’ve been following your series, interesting stuff.
I’m glad you’ve liked the series. Do you find the material covered generally helpful? Is there anything in particular you’d like to see discussed?
Here are some other resources you might find helpful. For learning Verilog, I recommend the tutorials on ASIC World. That’s what I read to learn Verilog after learning VHDL in school. Also, since the Cyclone IV has no hard processor, you’ll want to use a NIOS II soft processor. That’s what we used in my embedded systems class in school. The materials for the class are freely available online on the professor’s website. There’s a bunch of really helpful stuff there on designing for Altera FPGAs, especially in Labs I and III.
I haven’t gone too in-depth on it, mostly due to a lack of time (I’ve got a couple of projects that suck up what little spare time I have where I want to do computer stuff). I’ve got a crash course on Verilog that I’ve been following along with, and makes sense (but again with the time constraint). I’ll add the ASIC World link to my wiki page on the subject, a glance suggests it is a good resource.
Yeah, I can see how writing a crypto book would take up a lot of time. If you ever do get around to it, tell me how it goes. Altera’s tools can be puzzling and frustrating sometimes, so I’d like to know of any weird cases that I should document in my posts.
Awesome!
Have you seen Stanislaw Skowronek’s amusingly named “NSA@Home” from 2007 or so?
Different FPGA target but the lookup ideas and switch architecture might be interesting to you. His source is all up here: http://nsa.unaligned.org/rtl.php
meta-meta: Perhaps an
asktag does need to be added after all.metashould really just be for site-specific things, not asking the community at large (and also new users have it filtered by default, and many of them never turn it off).maybe there should be a heads up to new users that meta is filtered out?
I’m actually thinking it shouldn’t be filtered by default anymore. In the beginning it was done because so much of the discussion was about the site itself: people asking for features, questions about policy, etc. Now it seems like such a small percentage of traffic that users probably won’t be bothered enough to filter out the tag.
Edit: I’ve made a new
asktag and removed the meta filter from the default set of tags.Good call. I just registered and was wondering why meta was filtered away by default. This seems like the kind of site where the users are very interested in the meta things.
Code reviewing some new optimizations for https://github.com/Tokutek/ft-index, and converting scons to cmake for https://github.com/Tokutek/mongo (and getting it integrated with our CI system). In spare time, I’m thinking about special purpose memory allocators.
Finishing up an iBeacon related piece of demo-ware for some people, as well as finally reading “The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 1”.
Last week of the holiday, so I am not going to stress too much. I recently started a simple game-engine prototype in C++ that would feature a destructive environment and gameplay around that. A early prototype is already working.
Another project that have thought about continuing is my simple toy raytracer project.
I don’t normally write web client-side code, but I wrote StayDown (https://github.com/fritzy/staydown) to modularize a common problem: overflow scroll pinning w/ user intention, including dealing with image load and arbitrary dom changes. I’ll polish that up some more this week.
Otherwise, I’m doing client work, part of which involves making VeryModel (https://github.com/fritzy/verymodel) even better based on user feedback. It’s a Node.js model system that can be extended to be an ORM, that isn’t bound to any specific framework.
I’m adding correct SIGFPE handlers to http://opendylan.org/ in the C run-time. Our other run-time has supported them for ages, but since we use the C run-time on all x86-64 and ARM platforms as well as Mac OS X, having this fixed is important.
I also have a lot of pull requests to submit for emscripten to improve the libc support and fix some bugs with things like negative floating point zeros.
I’m thinking about starting a variant of Iron Blogger. In normal Iron Blogger, each week where you fail to blog you throw $5 in to the pot and every month or two there’s a big party paid for with the proceeds. In this variant (Coding Iron Blogger?) instead of paying $5 each week if you fail to blog, you’d have to open a pull request against a repo owned by another of the Iron Bloggers. :-)
I think it should work if there are enough bloggers to ensure a wide array of github repos owned by the bloggers, and if there’s some social pressure to have bugs tagged “easy” that can be accomplished by someone without previous exposure to the codebase. (And maybe some requested documentation; contributions don’t always have to be code.)
It might even help people to understand that programming in a language you don’t know yet isn’t always a scary thing to be avoided. What do you think – would you join, if invited?
Iron Coder sounds cool, but it seems a little limiting to require pull requests only on other members of the group.
Right now, I’m working on a free and open source book about the Meteor framework. I hope to finish it by the weeks end. It became much larger of a project than initially thought (it began as a blog post). http://www.penflip.com/rhgraysonii/a-fun-introduction-to-meteor I’d love some feedback!
That’s awesome; the book I’m writing also started out as a blog post (on using a particular Python crypto package) that evolved into an introduction to crypto with C, and then I discovered Go and it turned into a book.
I’m quite possibly the world’s worst web developer, but I’ll give it a look.
Home: working on YOURLS, a self hosted URL shortener, to get that 1.7 out soon
That’s fun, I wrote one as an exercise to learn basic web stuff with Go. I’d be moderately terrified to go back and look at the code for it now ;)
This is a lovely thread, I love seeing these on communities.
This week I started working on JVine a reliable web app for downloading and or converting Vines into animated gifs so you can share them on image sharing sites like Imgur. I feel gifs are outdated though so I’ve been working on a APNG library in the hopes more browsers will support it.
I’d love to get your feedback
I am working on a HAM radio project. All the components should show up this week, then I can start soldering!
Work: making a functional test suite written in Geb/Spock not suck. PhantomJS is not providing the speed boost I’d hoped for so far, but GroovyDoc is covering the documentation side pretty well.
Learn: Finishing up some overdue bits of a Coursera machine learning course.
Play: Replaying Twilight Princess, this time with my kid “helping.” 30 mins of dungeon crawling, then an hour or two of Zelda improv with action figures and blocks. At this rate we should be done by March.
Writing segmentation-based image filters. They take a database of textures, and given a source image segments the image and replaces each segment with the closest texture from the database. Use fabric swatches as your dataset and everything looks like it’s patchwork fabric.
I’m working on a json-to-json converter for work. I know, it sounds stupid initially, but the feeds we get from a given service are very genericized and can be deeply embedded. Things like promo.image can actually end up showing as something similar to item[0].images[0].imageAssetRef.url, making the client side templating bloated.
The idea is to make a general use describe your data, plug in a feed, and get your data back the way you want it.
At work, wrestling with odd NHibernate-related bugs in our application, trying to get something mostly bug-free for our guys to use, and practicing more advanced SQL to manage database issues.
At home, been working on a SaaS business idea for 4-5 months or so. It’s a RoR app for managing subscriptions for and controlling access to reports and tracking usage. Nothing too complex from a software point of view, but I have a couple of potential clients who are very interested in the idea. I’d have been done a lot sooner if I knew more about web development starting up, but I’m learning JS, AJAX, Ruby, Rails, ActiveRecord, databases, and a bunch of other technology as I go.
This week I completed the MVP for a site that facilitates feedback and dialogue within a company. It’s primarily for companies that are experiencing rapid expansion and growing pains as a result.
Here’s a prototype logged in view. I also made a placeholder landing page.
At work: Integrating an OCR package into a scanner application.
At home: Learning Haskell, WebGL
Just for fun: Starting to play with my freenas to setup git-annex. Really want to try having everything I use (including books/movies/etc) to be on git.
Writing: Have a goal to finish a long-in-draft-form blogpost guide about remote working near a ski resort.
Side Project: Playing with SVGKit (MTS’s osx fork) for my will-it-ever-ship side project Thimble, previously had hardcoded views and wasn’t happy with it, and not happy with using raster images either due.
Nice! I’ve had git-annex on my radar for some time now. Have you looked into the git-annex assistant at all?
Started going through the installation of the assistant (on osx) the other night, haven’t completely tried it yet. Eventually, I’ll install assistant on the android phone. The real goal of this is to have auto-backup of phone-taken photos straight to the server, feel comfortable occasionally wiping photos off the phone to free up space, and avoid dealing with google+’s interruptive/slower interface.
Starting a bit late, but I’m doing Julython this month; I will be working on the design and code for an idea I’ve had for a (possibly) different take on a static site generator. Hoping to learn a lot by doing it, and that it will provide a good place to start getting feedback from my tech mentor on where I need to improve.
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I’m working on querying for semantic data: http://www.brodlist.com
Please take a look if you have time. I’m open to any feedback. I’ll update the video on the site later this month to make it longer and clearer, with better examples.
At work: I’m researching hardware options for a major networking and storage refresh on one of our HPC clusters. So lots of time spent talking to vendors, digging through poorly-formatted powerpoint decks… :P Less than my favorite week.
On my own time: I’m working on a few toy projects in Go to help get more familiar with the language, and also building up my library of Ansible playbooks for deploying HPC and scientific computing projects on AWS. So nothing terribly well-focused, but a lot more fun than fighting with hardware vendors.
I’m working on ReactiveUI 6.0, which is a Functional Reactive UI framework for native apps in C# (iOS / Android / Windows). Getting a lot of PRs to review!
I’m also hacking on GitHub for Windows, adding Identicons support.
Working on modernizing Zipkin (https://github.com/twitter/zipkin). Previous owners never really had the chance to pull out the yak clippers. It’s been an interesting API design challenge.
I started poking at implementing a data flow library in Rust. It looks almost exactly like Twitter’s Scala Promise/Future. Mostly I wanted to learn something about Rust.
I’d love to see that library. I’ve found that continuations are tricky/impossible to use in Rust without turning them into externs because the lifetime parameterization still needs work.
Personal work: I’m working on creating the backend API for a Poll app. I like to describe it as an “imgur for polls with a bit of twitter mixed in”. Building it in Python with the Flask framework. Backend API is purely JSON, and I’ll decide on the frontend when I cross that bridge.
I’d love to get some feedback eventually. Perhaps in a week or two?
Back to university to continue my PhD and moving my blog from Wordpress to Octopress. PhD work is on optimising MRI gradient coils in terms of power/thermal efficiency. Other than that just trying to establish a weekly schedule now that the holidays are over.
As well as client work, I’m spending some time polishing up BitFriends which we quietly launched before Christmas.
Working on a small side-project that I started over the holidays in a bid to learn Clojure. Hopefully I’ll have the most basic version of it working by the weekend. A long transatlantic flight on Thursday should hopefully provide the time
Two things. I want to set up a share button on Which HTML Color Are You so that you can send somebody their “swatch”. That’s the super-small one I’d like to get done this week.
Second thing, I want to finally get the iOS 7 update into the approval process on my app Typey Typey. I got most of the glaring things fixed and out of the way, and was able to maintain compatibility back to iOS 5; the nature of the app is such that I can see parents giving possibly very old iPads / iPods / iPhones to their kids with this app loaded, so I want at least one last version that supports 5 / 6 before going 7 only.
I should be able to do both this week.
Rails API back end, AngularJS front end. Going all right.