I was catching up with a friend of mine recently and she was asking what I “wanted” to build. As we started talking about it, I realized I didn’t really have a “go to” list of what I’d love to try building. At this point, web apps have become a bit boring, I mean how many times can you really write:
Inspired by Y Combinator’s Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund and more recently Spotify’s Design Lead on Why Side Projects Should Be Stupid here’s a list of projects we’d love to build.
Bitcoin Hardware Integration
Inspired by Bitcoin: How would you build a parlor game?, I think it would be awesome to build some sort of hardware Bitcoin integration. Any interesting angle would be to take something familiar like a casino game, jukebox, or vending machine and then make it “Bitcoin powered”. Also, with the MIT Bitcoin airdrop in the Fall it seems like Central Square and Kendall Square are the perfect places to roll something like this out.
Real Time Stream Processing
From NodeJS to Websockets, “real time” seems to be all the rage but most applications aren’t really dealing with processing streaming data at scale. Processing data streams, even at moderate scale, seems like it would be a fun challenge and would open up the development of interesting solutions. In the last few years, projects like Apache Storm and Akka have significantly lowered the barriers to development so it seems like the perfect time to jump in. We’d love to leverage these tools to analyze click streams, sensor data, or financial “tick” data.
Badass Visualizations
As the price of storage has decreased, organizations are recording and retaining more data than ever before. Unfortunately, most companies are hesitant to experiment with different visualization options and end up with a handful of charts and tables. I’d love to have the opportunity to really take d3js out for a spin and build some awesome visualizations. From visualizing multi-modal data to helping uncover patterns, I’d love to help organizations get the most out of their data.
Anyway, if anyone wants to build any of these definitely get in touch! Would also love to hear everyone else’s ideas in the comments.