kwellman

I made a game! I guess that’s not very exciting in itself, but it took me many months, from conception to publication, and it was a lot of hard work (way more than I expected). It was written in C++ using cocos2d-x.

Wordigami is a fun and original word game that challenges you to rearrange letter tiles into a grid that spells a common word along every row and column. Someone described it to me as being like a word game that you play like Game of Fifteen.

Any feedback appreciated. Thanks for checking it out!

Direct links:

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wordigami/id1082173497?mt=8

Android: http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yargies.wor...

SEEKING WORK

Remote or Montreal

I'm a full-stack developer. I specialize in Android, python, and AWS.

-- Built and designed The Unfollow App (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unfollowap...). Backend was done in python/flask.

-- Drag To Shirt (http://dragtoshirt.appspot.com/)

-- Face It Shirt (http://www.faceitshirt.com/) -- Twtspire (http://www.twtspire.com/)

Looking for short-term projects. Available immediately.

Technologies: Java, Android SDK, Python, MySQL, AWS, Ansible

http://www.interstellr.com/ | email address in profile

I did something very similar to this a while back[1]. I also wrote a blog post about it with code here http://blog.interstellr.com/post/22534653144/mining-twitter-...

[1] http://www.twtspire.com/

I did something similar to this when developing my backbone.js + phonegap + jquery android app (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.celebnoise).

Edit: I didn't post this to just promote my app. I noticed that there's no android market link on the blog post and thought some people might like to try out a backbone.js app without having to build it. I know it's not the same, but I do think it shows how responsive an html5 mobile app can be.

A good set of resources. Thanks.

Here's a few more that I've found useful:

http://iconfinder.com (or the similar http://findicons.com)

http://365psd.com (free photoshop file everyday)

http://www.colourlovers.com/ (great for picking a color scheme)

http://graphicriver.net (really cheap graphics)

http://themeforest.net (themes)

SEEKING WORK - Montreal, remote

HTML5 development including backbone.js and knockout.js. Back-end development with python, mongodb, mysql, google app engine, flask, and django.

I've built an HTML5 Android app available in the marketplace (http://celebnoise.com/).

Portfolio: http://kenjiwellman.appspot.com

Github: https://github.com/kwellman

See my profile for my email address.

I just watched this video (http://gigaom.com/2011/09/27/facebook-mobilize-2011/) where Facebook's head of mobile product talks (a tiny bit) about using HTML5 in their mobile products instead of all native development to keep pace with launches on the Facebook desktop site.

Check out the video at ~16 minute mark.

Can anybody clarify the last line of the blog article [1]? The author makes it sound like storing data using $.data() is an async operation. The API docs make no mention of this. In some quick tests using Chrome, I was always able to immediately retrieve the value that was stored.

I'm actually planning on using this method, so I'd really like to know.

[1] "Furthermore, storing data takes a certain amount of time, so you might get a null exception if you are planning on retrieving it right after storage. There are currently no plans to add a callback to the jQuery data that I’m aware of."

Edit: $.data() seems to be async, but $(el).data() is not. At least that's what I found. Maybe that explains the difference in speeds.

That page has the most elaborate and geeky captcha I've ever seen. It's also not very practical considering that something like 7 percent of men have some degree of color blindness. I can barely tell the difference between 3 and 5 on that scale.

Ok. I just implemented a quick and dirty voting mechanism that'll due for now.

It uses the reddit algorithm for calculating how "hot" a story is.

That was fun!

I wish I had the design chops to create a graphic of that quality...

I got it from http://iconfinder.com/. You can find lots of great graphics there for free (don't forget to check the licenses).

If you're a python or java programmer you could use Google App Engine. It seems ideal for small projects.

I know breakupnotifier.com was hosted on GAE.

Twtspire uses the twitter search api to find tweets with key phrases like "I wish there was a site that..."

Hopefully it'll help give an idea of some of the things that people actually want, and inspire a weekend project or two.

I would love to hear some feedback.

Hmmmm... the url seems to be working.

It's a shame. I've yet to see spam on HN, but this looks like spam. Wish I could downvote it.

For the bootstrapping budget startups:

bitbucket.org --> Free private repositories

amazon ec2 --> Free usage tier for a year

uservoice --> basic functionality is free

Have you looked at telehash (http://www.telehash.org), a much more recent project by the same guy?

I'm impressed by how elegant the protocol is. I hate XMPP, but telehash gives me faith.

I have a masters in computational biology. I did some work on flux balance analysis (FBA), which is a pretty interesting topic.

FBA simulates the metabolic system using linear programming, which is a technique used most extensively in economics, but applicable to biology. Basically, linear programming is a mathematical method of determining the maximization of some linear function given a set of linear contraints.

The assumption behind applying FBA to metabolic systems is that the cell acts to maximize its growth based on what is available in the environment and the stoichiometry of the metabolic reactions that can occur in the cell (ie the constraints of the system).

It is suprisingly accurate at predicting things like the consequences of metabolic gene knockouts, and has been applied to identify potential drug targets.

The most renowned researcher is this area is Bernhard. O. Palsson. His group[1] has created computational models of different organism that can be used to perform FBA and test things such as, for example, the outcome of gene knockouts. His models are available to download.

There are linear programming libraries available for linux. I used lpsolve, which has Python bindings. As a starter project you could do something like identify the essential genes in a organism like E. coli.

I'd be happy to help. My homepage (in my profile) has my email address.

[1] http://gcrg.ucsd.edu/

I recently converted the Python port to use lxml instead of BeautifulSoup.

If you need speed (BeautifulSoup is slow), and not portability (lxml won't work on google app engine), check out http://blog.interstellr.com/readability-in-python-using-lxml

Good stuff.

Anybody know any other tips/resources for meeting fellow hackers or potential co-founders in your area?

I'm currently in Toronto and hoping to meet people.

Edit: Added last sentence mentioning my location.

What resources for finding meetups, events and conferences do you recommend?

The current project I'm working on involves managing and launching a lot of http requests to different web service api's, and gevent really is the best thing since sliced bread.

Things like rate limiting (gevent can monkey patch time.sleep), error handling, and scaling to a large number of concurrent connections (see gevent.pool.Pool) have been added to my app with surprisingly little increase in code complexity. The fact that you write your code as if it was synchronous makes it so much easier to maintain. I don't have to find my way through callback spaghetti. I also find asynchronous much easier to grok than threading (and it's also more lightweight)

Here's a blog post from several months ago: http://nichol.as/benchmark-of-python-web-servers

Gevent uses the http server built into libevent, which is written in C, so it's no surprise that it is fast.

Would have been more informative if Javascript was separated into client-side and server-side. It's obvious that everyone uses it on the client-side.

Seems like the spreadsheet is no longer publicly shared.

Missed the party :(

PyPy is a very interesting project, but I suppose there's just no "killer feature" for me to start using it at the moment.

Has anyone done any recent memory benchmarks with PyPy?

I'd like to see magnitude of the memory trade-off for using a JIT compiler. As a web developer my programs are mostly IO-bound, not CPU-bound. I'm also bootstrapping and trying to squeeze as much as I can out of my 512MB linode.

I total agree about the meaningless titles. I ended up using http://www.pastacode.de/extending-gnu-screen-adding-a-taskba... to change the title to the current working directory and the program being executed.

Would be interested to hear your other tricks if you ever remember them ;)

Tornado MongoDB Vim Fabric

To be honest, it seems like you just wrote a script that scrapes all your comments from hacker news and then posts them to your blog.

Unless you add something to your posts like images, and some context, I'm not going to be revisiting your blog. I'd just stay at the source (Hacker News) where I can find lots of great comments that are all presented in their context. The voting system does a great job of picking out the best.

I think you do have interesting things to write about, I just think you need to do more than copying and pasting your comments.

When the social web came out, I wasn't completely enamored with it as well. It was only later, when I started getting into "network science"[1], and began to view social systems and the internet as large complex systems, that the social web really clicked as something fascinating to get involved with from an engineering perspective.

Since, as you say, you're not a "particularly social person", maybe if you step back from many of the inanities of the social web and take a big picture view of the system, including the similarities between social systems, biological systems, and other systems, you may gain a new perspective on it.

[1] See http://www.amazon.com/Networks-Introduction-Mark-Newman/dp/0... for a good introduction.