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What Is The One Website / App You Would Build If You Had All The Necessary Skills to Do It Yourself?

Matthew Collison on August 05, 2019

We’re super curious on this one. Maybe you can follow it up with actually learning the skills necessary if it doesn’t seem too impractical?

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Joe Beretta

Assistant from "Iron Man" which could become your real assistant and help you everywhere & anywhere ))

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TheJason

I had a similar idea. Basically just tell my assistant to "code this" and then let me know when she's done. Yes, I'd give my assistant a female personna, because female developers rock.

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Joe Beretta

Haha, love it. Program is programming. I think every dev dream about it)

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Matthew Collison

Can you imagine a world where everyone and their Aunt's great app idea is just a "Code this, assistant" away from fruition...

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Matthew Collison

Surely we are headed in that direction in the future. We have them in our pockets but they're not very smart yet... ;)

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Joe Beretta

But what if they'll be not in pocket instead in our brain?) Terminator is coming soon... 😅))

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Matthew Collison

Have you seen Neuralink??? Elon Musk wants to hack our brains... 😅

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Joe Beretta

Hope it )))))

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TheJason

Neuralink scares the hell out of me. I watched his introduction to it.

"We built a robot that jabs your brain with microscopic needles, strategically avoiding blood vessels 😐, what if I sneeze?

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Matthew Collison

“We are going to strategically avoid a stroke” is a translation of that.

There’s really no perfect strategy so I am curious to see how they are going to address this... It seems insurmountable but Musk has a record of going at the insurmountable and he’s made some incredible progress!

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TheJason

I think chatbots are the path forward on this. I worked on a project where chatbots spoke to other chatbots, and it was pretty amazing. Most people are focused on building chatbots that can reply to humans. But the real power is when bots are used to communicate with other bots. That's your real SkyNet scenario - lol

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Garrett / G66

An easy and automated way for people to erase their digital footprint (or as much of it as possible).

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Desi

I just found this today! deseat.me/

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Garrett / G66

Desi thank you! That's super cool. It's interesting and probably very efficient that it scans your emails to find the accounts, but, it's only working with people who use(d) Google and/or Outlook/Hotmail. That's definitely going to cover most people, but not everyone. I'm going to use this as inspiration and try to build something that helps anyone regardless of chosen email provider. Thank you again for sharing this...it's super helpful!

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desi profile image
Desi

I wonder if you could somehow import inbox backups to scan for accounts that way... just a thought!

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Garrett / G66

Brilliant!!

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Matthew Collison

Top idea! Like a tiered type of system “We can integrate with these and here are 30 guides for the email providers on how to export / import manually”

We’re all helping Garrett plan his future SaaS extension to his business... I’m so proud haha

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Matthew Collison

That’s a really cool idea. In an age where you sign up for 100’s of websites and probably forget most of them, it would be amazing to have a central place to blitz all of that if you needed to.

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Garrett / G66

Exactly! I offer this as a service and although I do charge for the time it takes (and the tools I need), I'd give up the job to make it easier for people to do it on their own.

Walt Disney said something like, "we don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies."

I feel the same way about what I do. I don't help people erase their digital footprints to make money, I make money to help people erase their digital footprints.

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Matthew Collison

You’re clearly very passionate on this issue and it’s really great to see how principled you are in that you actually just want to help people out with this problem. Most people don’t even know how to do it on their own, so it’s great that there are people like you to do it for them!

Maybe you can make portions of the process automated. It’s easier with major services where there are APIs, but I suppose there are parts that must be manual when you get to obscure random websites that contain traces of someone’s email / name etc.

This is oddly fascinating!

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Matthew Collison

On which note, you could offer a tier 1 service which is “automate as much as you can” and a tier 2 where you upsell your services - which down the line could translate to employing more people to help you either develop better automated solutions or scale the manual side.

Mind going 1000mph here... Sorry :D

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garrett profile image
Garrett / G66

Don't be sorry; this is great! You've got some fantastic ideas and I'm soaking them up.

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matthew_collison profile image
Matthew Collison

Yours to keep! I hope you do that. Having a free tool like this is an incredible way to create traffic for your business. A lot of businesses build complementary free tools that actually provide value to people which converts into customers for them.

And your intent is very clear; you want to help people, and you’ll be able to achieve that goal on a far bigger scale if you managed to pull something like that off.

Anyway, thanks for the comment! Best of luck with all your digital footprint covering endeavours!!!

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AxelleDRouge

I dream of a software for managing farms, and any kind of food production spaces, so efficiently it would erase the needs for chemicals and land destruction.
A way to plan for the best crops for each part of a field, with GIS and data from captors. It would use data of the soil, the climate, the vegetation, to choose the most appropriate seeds. And would feed the software informations in real time of everything need to be done.
Maybe have a BIM model of the farm in real time, and robots and drones to manage it. That would allow for great quality of production, with great care of the land, without the ecological cost.

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Matthew Collison

The environmental impact of farming currently is enormous on so many levels - and your idea genuinely doesn’t seem very far fetched.

We’re always going to need to farm I think and this thing will only become a reality in the coming decades as big data and computing power becomes more accessible.

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AxelleDRouge • Edited

Thanks for your reply
One of the challenging part is the large amount of technical aspects that I need to learn. I am working on a small app to use as a prototype, some king of gardening app that would use the basic of a bigger software. I would need data analysis, GIS server-side and mathematics, to complete what I know about front and back programming (in javascript mostly) and environmental science. The goal of the whole project being to allow anyone using to obtain knowledge and precision, and harvest more with less impacts
And the energy required would be a big challenge too. Because, why create a software with ecology theory in mind without thinking about the energy cost of that same software? probably I would love that software to be installed in a farm, working on renewable energy coming from the farm (like sun, water, wind, and bioenergy from manure, wood or compost)

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Matthew Collison

I think your idea about starting small and scaling up is your best bet.

Maybe even listing the challenges out and building small modules that can eventually make up the larger one.

There are 100's of ways you an approach this and we'd always be happy to advise the best route if you list out in detail each challenge and what it involves. It seems everyone's starting businesses and personal ventures in the comment section of this post!

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AxelleDRouge

Thanks for the advice =)
And of course, you asked about the projects we would love to create. Wouldn't most people, in this forum particularly, want to build and help their own baby grow? especially if we are passionate about it?
In fact today's release of the latest IPCC report, on food security has just increased my motivation

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Ali Murteza Yesil

I want to build my own apps with no advertisement, no in-app-purchase, no talking to remote servers for hours or any other crap. These are lightweight apps to do offer basic functionality. Contacts, calendar, note, password manager, ebook manager/reader, sudoku etc.
I don't want a sudoku app that is ~50MB.

Only advanced feature I want is automated sync between paired phones and pcs when they are on the same network. So that my notes, calendar events, passwords and etc will be synced. No setting up third servers or deploying container and stuff. No need to bounce data off a server few hundres km away to sync 2 devices in the same room.

I am currently learning Java but I can't even get a simple text file reader to run on CLI.

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Matthew Collison

You could probably set up a network-based sync feature by making your application host miniature servers that are available on a particular port through the network. That way the different devices can talk to each-other through and endpoint.

You'll definitely get there with your learning - you probably need better resources to read / watch or some extra guidance from one of the DEV community members. You can always put up a #help post!

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Max Ong Zong Bao

1 stop article publishing with custom scheduler and social media sharing once it is published. Last but not least image resizer as well for each platform.

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Matthew Collison

Make it and we'll pay you! Jeez that would help us save a lot of time. We're going to do a behind the scenes of our process soon and we pray someone will tear it down and make it more efficient for us to reach everyone. :D

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Max Ong Zong Bao

Looking forward to your behind the scene of the publishing process.

I had previously gone through RealPython's publishing process, I hope it's not that extensive like them.

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Matthew Collison

A lot of the time it's designing from one place (in a Figma template) and repurposing as slides, pins, DEV.to copy, tweets etc. It's not very refined but we're getting better.

We've actually just switched it up and are hoping to go hard for the next 7 days and report about it at the end.

The RealPython publishing process sounds interesting - could you give us a link to it?

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Max Ong Zong Bao • Edited

Sadly I don't have the full overview of it but it's about 15 stages or more as I wasn't able to publish a article over there.

But it was a really great experience to go through a publishing pipeline

1) SEO Topic research
2) List of potential topic pool
3) Topic pitching
4) Article outline
5) 1st review
6) Actual Writing
7) 2nd review
8) Technical review
9) 3rd review
10) Sanity review
11) Final language review
12) Cover image creation
13) Cover image review
14) Publishing final review
15) Scheduling of article
16) Publishing of article

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Matthew Collison

That is extreme! We are so much shorter in our processes - like unbelievably.

I think we are going to make a mega post in 7 days on how we produce so much content - and I think our process helps us achieve this.

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Max Ong Zong Bao

That's really awesome looking forward to it. :)

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Len

I would love to build an AI trained on my messaging/texting data that can be conversed with on a human level to auto-respond to messages and emails for me sometimes? (so essentially I guess I want myself as an AI?)

I've actually trained a very basic neural net on my Facebook data but most of what it spots out is nonsensical (although occasionally unintentionally funny)

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Matthew Collison

I can’t tell you how many hours I spent on that online chat bot thing - I’ve completely forgot what it was called but I was utterly fascinated by the way it responded - and it was more a “return a message similar to what other people returned” conditional thing rather than an AI but it was still cool none-the-less

It’s different but I get what you’re saying - a dynamic auto-responder based on the texts you’ve received and what you’d send back - sounds like a general AI problem to me but I have 0 experience with any form of Machine Learning so educate me!

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Len

Ahh! Yes I remember those :) I think the one I used to use is Cleverbot.. Just went back and re-visited it and it was such a weird experience haha.

Unfortunately I have very little machine learning experience as well so there's not much I can teach - but when I get around to re-training my existing nonsensical bot using a better algorithm, I'll probably write a blog post about it!

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Matthew Collison

Cleverbot, yes!! I'm going to put something together for that on our IG as that's a throwback haha.

That would be really cool, look forward to that one when you get round it! :D

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ChrisMBytes

A way to automatically track everything one person is eating and what affects their diet is having to their body in correlation to their lifestyle

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Matthew Collison

That would change the world. I don't know one person that wouldn't use that and seeing how your diet affects your body without the friction of having to manually enter everything in could be life changing.

I suppose the real barrier here is modern day tech - although we might be missing a strong middle ground that no one has thought of yet!

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Garrett / G66

That's a great idea. Would be cool to have a way to track health issues like arthritis, or other issues that "flare up" and correlate them to foods that may be triggering them.

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Natesh M Bhat

I would make a contained general AI that would solve each and every problem of humanity from solving basic resource shortages to reaching galaxies and self realization to consciousness.

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Matthew Collison

Basically an epic general AI on a quest to solve thing that will benefit humanity... Awesome!

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ArcticSpaceFox

An easy to use Proxy p2p system ehrte all your Traffic gets encrypted and Transporter safely. So Journalist or people who live in countries that Block certain Things can build Up a Tor Like system.

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Matthew Collison

Censorship sucks - big time! Definitely need more technologies that bring us in the direction of freedom. There are particular countries that are worse than others, and there’s been articles on here recently highlighting that!

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ArcticSpaceFox

Totally agree in that one. Thanks for the nice reply :3

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Matthew Collison

Please keep sarcastically ripping apart our articles, we can’t get enough of this 😂