What have been those small, satisfying projects you started on a Friday evening, and by Sunday, you had something cool or useful (or both!) to show for your efforts?
Was it a simple app that solved a daily annoyance, some fun IoT experiment, or some non-tech hack that made your life easier?
They didn't provide that data, but it turns out with a little bit of grokking and staring at that 10gb text file, you could reverse engineer it so you could extract all the kids of a given school, and aggregate all of their answers. I produced a nice little report for our admins, with the questions of the text next to how we had performed in the aggregate and state averages, as well as averages of our "competitor schools."
The best part, though, is how I remember it being a bit "bullshit" that we, a private school, could afford to do this, but since the data was actually valuable to inform practice, surely the department of education should do that for every school! Whelp, over the weekend, I computed that info for every school in the dataset, and just stored a CSV for every school in an S3 instance (this was my ridiculous caching strategy lol). Spun up a frontend where you could select your school, and nicely visually go through every question, as well as print a pdf summary of the whole thing. On Monday morning tweeted at an ed journalist, and in a few days had a spread of me in the country's top newspaper, and people emailing about jobs "at my company."
This was the most rewarding project I've ever done, and I'm sad to say nothing has come close since. It cost me $0, produced a public good that I could see was being accessed from every state in the whole country, was technically interesting, and I saw it through from start to finish over the weekend!
Is your site still up?
On Thursday evening we rendezvoused at an equidistant AirBnB to sketch out our second album. It's now Sunday morning, Aelyth's just caught the train home because she's working today, but we have a concept, a title and ten songs for the new album!
There are admittedly another seven song ideas we've not had time to explore, but we've accomplished much more, much more quickly, than either of us thought possible. We've also committed to an overall musical style, plus boundaries on arrangements and instruments with the intention of keeping the production phase as concise as possible.
The whole user interface is a single physical button on her desk :
- ON : indefinitely play all MP3 files randomly
- OFF : stop playing
The longest task was to find her favourite pieces of music from my aunts and uncles.
https://github.com/remipch/radio_colette
I had fun making this little toy project, I felt like a software artisan assembling some simple existing pieces of hardware and software.
It's a refreshing change from complex professional projects that take months to complete.
And Mamie Colette loves it too !
EDIT: wait, after take a look at the repo you do remake iPod Shuffle
In 2013 this became important: in Western Australia, we had a very close senate election. There was one critical exclusion in the count where just 14 votes determined the outcome between two candidates. Obviously the accuracy of the counting software was key; it actually crashed when they were doing the count. They restarted it, but that shook the confidence of a couple of people I knew, and so I decided to write my own software to verify the count. I knocked it up in two all-nighters: https://github.com/grahame/dividebatur
Of course, I/we were fortunate that the electoral commission was forward-thinking enough to have published the data required to fully reproduce the count.
Some open government folks later on used the existence of my software to try and get the electoral commission to release their software system under Freedom of Information laws, so that it could be verified. I was quite amused when the commission alleged there was no way I'd done it in two nights. I had; but of course, what I had was a Python implementation of the count, not a fully-fledged electoral management system like they had.
Later on in 2017-18 we had a constitutional crisis[0], as various senators were found to hold foreign citizenship and thus be ineligible to hold office. Those ineligible senators were replaced by running a count-back of the vote, with them excluded. I happened to be the only person who had a system that could work out the results ahead of the electoral commission, so I had quite an exciting few weeks providing the media with predictions on who would take over the various seats that were lost.
Now there are better and more robust systems that have followed mine, but I must say I was quite happy with this two-day hack!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%9318_Australian_par...
Have you done anything like this professionally?
I think it’s rather hard to finish a project in under one weekend. And we tend to easily say “I did it over the weekend” but mean “I had something working after one weekend”. Especially if the weekend is not one where you spend 48 hours in front of the computer (counting Friday evening in). So, I was quite proud to get it finished in one weekend under normal conditions.
[1] https://reach-100.com
It started as me joking about how something like this would make a cool nerdy valentine gift, which then got both of us excited to work on it together. We posted on reddit during V day, and so far 170k+ stories generated! We haven't monetized it - so far it has been supported by small donation from a few users who use it regularly.
This test data formed the backbone of that company for the better part of a decade as it clearly showed when our product was running the temperature at the ceiling (across the whole room) reduced by 2degC and at the mid point of the room (head when sat in a sofa height) it rose by 2degC.
Our product acted as a destratifier and the test rig to prove it took me from Friday evening to Sunday night to make as I was working elsewhere at the time.
I'm curious if a very low resolution thermal imager such as Grideye could act in a similar fashion if you scanned the room using servos (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3538 is an example of a breakout board). Not sure of the accuracy though of such sensors for measuring temperature.
Edit: Just noticed they have "an accuracy of +- 2.5°C" so not good enough I guess, whereas ds18b20 claims 0.5C.
Yes that's the one. I couldn't remember/be bothered to check
Thermal camera would only work if there was a surface to get the temperature of, we needed to know the temperature of the air in the middle of the room rather than the walls etc.
We did think about hanging ping pong balls on string like the sensors I hung but then yes, accuracy becomes an issue compared to the ds18b20.
Also this was in 2011 so I don't think we had the same variety of embedded device compatible stuff available and a proper thermal camera was out of our budget.
Fun side note, I brought the test rig back to life a few months ago for fun, found the OneWire lib code I wrote, copied into the Arduino project (mBed was long gone) and it worked with about 2 minutes of tweaking. That's 13 year old code up and running like no time had passed ... I can't even imagine the pain of bringing back a 13 year old web project!
So, if you were in NYC in January and wanted to find out the closest location that was at least 72 degrees, it would spit out locations that met that criteria.
(There was also a companion app, "Take Me Cooler," that did the reverse.)
Required a one-time download of ZIP/coordinate data and daily downloads from a weather API. Figured out how to calculate the distances, and most of the rest was just stitching it all together.