I am following two projects one extremely technical and another more sale oriented.
The technical one is rediSQL[1] I am embedding SQLite into a redis module. Until few days ago I had performance issues that I wasn't able to figure out and I tracked everything in an issues.
I finally figured out the problem, solve it, gain a lot of performance and I am about to write a blog post about. The next step is to get the exact same performance in the redis module compared with using SQLite embedded in a simple C program it is not going to be easy and I would probably defer this performance gain opportunity in favor of more features in the module.
The second project, the sale oriented one, is WalOfStickers.com[2] where I try to sell hexagonal stickers for laptop. I like to show the technology that I work with and make my laptop mine, but I don't like that the more sticker you put the messier everything became, so I made these hexagonal sticker that you can tile in your laptop and make neat, complex patterns.
It is actually a n area that I haven't completely understand.
Most trademarks are registered in order to avoid that an unrelated tech product "steal"/"take advantage" of another well know product name.
Other companies sell similar stickers so I didn't actually bothered too much asking, I will definitely make this straight if I will made something worthed out of this side business.
I completed my first app, a game, I can play it in the terminal. So its not totally complete, doesnt have a GUI, but until now I didnt call myself a programmer. But even now there are so many things I dont't know, Im not sure I can call myself a programmer. I dont dare to apply for jobs.
So I'll not do anything more about that game because I dont believe it could earn me anything but I do have so many other things I want to do.
Scraping Gwern's darknet market dataset (https://www.gwern.net/DNM%20archives) for my undergraduate thesis. Looking to see how police interventions affect costs of drugs on darknet markets and get a general sense of how the markets work (from an economic standpoint). I will publish a clean dataset along with my analysis once it is done.
Can you handle queries over a few months? It would be nice to handle the use case: I'm looking at planning a vacation to Place X in July, August, or September, and quickly discern whether the weather is better at any certain week in that period.
Yeah, something like being able to know when over the course of the summer, say perhaps 3 months, temperatures in Miami are warm but not excessively hot. I really like to travel at the tails of top season for this reason, but that's really just a proxy in place of knowing the above.
Lonely Planet offers something like this [1], but it would be nice if the data were more granular than one high/low for each month and data sources were more transparent.
Recently finished http://hackerpixels.com/ - a side project to extract all video links from HN comments (and play with Docker). It's a huge time waster - the videos are very much in sync with the community, which is a good thing.
I wanted to see what kind of videos would come out and they turned out to be of good quality so I released it. Right now it has rather low traffic so I am not thinking too much about monetization, I might open source it and write a blog post if I find some time.
For the past couple of years I’ve been researching ways to write software that make it easier for newcomers to understand rather than for insiders to maintain. (https://lobste.rs/c/rue8pf)
Currently as part of that larger project, I've been improving my zoomable UI for browsing program traces: https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/9be4a67f42/100trace_brow.... I plan to turn this into a self-contained tool. All it requires is for logging frameworks to start each log line with a number indicating depth. When you open it on such a log file it shows just the highest-level information, allowing you to drill down into details in specific parts of the log.
I think such a UI can be a strong alternative to a debugger. Instead of running the program at interaction time you first collect a trace of the program's execution. You get time-travel debugging for a fraction of the infrastructural cost if you require manual program changes to add logging.
Currently researching China's Quantum Key Distribution network and feasible attacks and solutions. Currently checking out the possibility of using a quantum simulator programming language to demonstrate a man-in-middle-attack that utilizes quantum non-demolition observations.
Rebuilding a site for a startup, thinking about a new product I want to start building soon, considering which JS framework to try next (likely VueJS), debating spending Saturday playing with TypeScript.
I am building a platform for people to share and discover the best attributes and abilities about the people they know with the help of stories (incidents) about them.