For-work side projects?

Is anyone working on any side projects for work (not personal)?

I used to do a lot when in tech support, some projects even becoming full-fledged product features (mainly in Fireworks which, naturally, effectively died not long after :stuck_out_tongue: ).

Iā€™m kind of on a side project kick again now - inasmuch as there are things I want to work on. But truth is, I donā€™t have the time I used to, so Iā€™ve limited myself to just one. And this oneā€™s not all that amazing or fun, just an unsanctioned rewrite of one of our modules. The old code is nasty andā€¦ old. A rewrite would be welcome (especially for me living in the old code), so Iā€™m hoping I can move it along far enough to be considered as a replacement. But weā€™ll see.

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I mentioned having some exposure to a startup crypto mining farmā€¦ thereā€™s actually a bit of a connection to my job I didnā€™t elaborate on. So this is sort of appliesā€¦

There are many separate machines on the network there.

I wrote a little program to poll the network for all MAC, IP, ip type, is pingable?, link to each machines login pages, save text nicknames linked to MACā€¦ Stuff like that.

So i did this:
AIR app (of course :slight_smile: )
Run .bat file, output to a text file
Ping broadcast address
arp -a
arp -a | Find ā€œ5c-d9-98ā€ (reverse lookup if needed)

Import text file, parse the raw text in as3 in to a fancy chart, do pings from there etc.

It does work as I wrote it to, so thatā€™s goodā€¦but I happen to run a 3rd party IP scanner the day I started messing with arp commands. Because of this, I had a very full arp cache. Stupidly, I didnā€™t realize after the machine is rebooted, the arp cache is gone. This is where i tried adding pinging the broadcast address, from what I read its supposed to trickle down and get a response from all the devicesā€¦ It did not work for me though.

So I end up still needing to fill the arp cache somehow by either sending a ping to every possible IP (too many), or knowing the IP before hand (I do actually but it defeats my purpose as a blind ā€œscannerā€ like I wanted).

The admin ended up finding some really nice management software online, so I didnā€™t bother to develop it further, but it was nice for a day or so.

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Aw man I hate that! But it sounded great up until that point :smiley:

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I did a tech support job in the past, but when I started I didnā€™t know much coding, I agree it definitely inspires side projects/tool creation.

We actually had a guy who made some ā€œvirtualā€ programs in flash (fake software clones to walk the rep through a piece of software) It would load tons of full screen images on startup on old computers so it was crazy slow when you needed it. The funniest part was that while loading this super bloat swf, it would be looping fake code, like a black and green scrolling code video from the matrix so it would look like cutting edge hacker styleā€¦ while adding even more slowness to it. I thought it was hilarious

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Love it!

Yeah this was when I first got a job at Adobe. I was a lead developer at my previous job, so it kind of felt like a step down, but it was on the other side of the country, a hop and a skip outside of silicon valleyā€¦ and paid me more money :wink: So I was OK with it. Plus, this was just after Adobe snatched up Macromedia so it was my foot in the door to probably the place (effectively) I wanted to work at most.

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At the moment Iā€™m tending to do side aspects in the projects that Iā€™m working on. So when Iā€™m asked to create a new tool quickly, but I want to push us forward technology-wise, then I end up learning and doing the new-tech bit in my own time. So while I could make the new tool really quickly in our existing tech, I try doing it in new tech without it taking any more work time.

Sometimes it feels like too much work, but then lots of people study for qualifications at home so itā€™s not too different from that.

The current one is moving us to web fronted tools, including React, hence how I ended up on your site and ordering your new book! :slight_smile:

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While I donā€™t have any direct work-related side projects, almost everything I enjoy fiddling with (including my work) is intertwined. My day job is to work on PWAs on the Web Platform team at Microsoft, which basically means improving the low-level runtime support for HTML, CSS, and JS. The things I do here by writing about web-related topics keeps me closer to the ground on what the implementation challenges are, what people actually care about, and so on. You all could say that me posting here is directly related to my work :stuck_out_tongue:

It has been a while, so I figure it is time to bump this topic up!

I planted 33, 6ft tall trees and built an 8ft x 200ft fence to block myself off from society. Thatā€™s been my latest side project. Non work related, non coding. I think I broke the tread rules

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Iā€™ve been chopping down an equal number of trees of equal size (and larger), in an attempt to clear a path into the woods to help me get away from society. Same goal, separate tactics.

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Interesting, I believe your method is faster.

I have also been cutting down many trees lately, a ton actually, we had a tornado in May, no home damage but trees pulled out like toothpicks

Sounds like what I need: a tornado to come and take out some trees, but only certain trees, along a path of my choosing. :thinking:

Sounds like you need a reckless chainsaw weilding person. I could be that person, but Iā€™m 3000 miles away so Iā€™m just gonna wait out this tree compound Iā€™m growing over here.