I really loved HDEV, especially watching sunrises & sunsets.
I have ~40,000 screengrabs I took for my twitter bot @hdevcam between 2015 - 2017 availible at http://billeberly.com/hdev if you want to relive those days.
Sadly, they're not the best quality - despite being the High Definition Viewing Experiment they never seemed to actually transmit in high def. And the files are just timestamped - the tweets had the locations too, but they weren't stored with the files. Maybe I should go do that on a rainy day sometime...
I spent most of that time writing the software that downloaded images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, located the galaxies in them, cut them out, and placed them with the correct location & scale in the animation software. The best part for me has been getting to work on a project I really believed in, even though I had absolutely no experience with films or astronomical imaging. I just jumped into the deep end and had to learn as I went.
Writing code that puts things on a 6 story tall movie screen is such a different experience than pushing code to an app server to serve up banking apps. Hopefully the work I did here will go on to inspire someone else to have the same love for space that I do.
"Do you know what looks like confetti and candy to small children? Screws. Know what else they really love? Saw blades. There would be no way I could both build a feeder that deterred squirrels and keep my children out of the ER."
Have we become so overprotective of children that we can't even have sharp objects in the house with them?
Look for a local charity or nonprofit that might need some work done. Having real stakeholders, requirements, etc, is a great way to simulate what a real project will be like.
I attended a talk on UI design for devs a few months ago. The presenter asked us: "Do any of you run an S&M website? No? Then your buttons shouldn't say submit!"
I have ~40,000 screengrabs I took for my twitter bot @hdevcam between 2015 - 2017 availible at http://billeberly.com/hdev if you want to relive those days.
Sadly, they're not the best quality - despite being the High Definition Viewing Experiment they never seemed to actually transmit in high def. And the files are just timestamped - the tweets had the locations too, but they weren't stored with the files. Maybe I should go do that on a rainy day sometime...