Sami Greenbury
Technology, Teaching & Travel

Ideas

These are things I’d like to exist. I don’t mind whether I make them, or someone else does it; I think the world would be a better place with them.

A Social Tool

A website where you can connect with your friend/colleges/travel buddies and keep track of notes, who owes who money, ticket confirmation emails and other things current social networks neglect in favour of (some very cool) ways to share photos. It’s for current events, not past events.

Coffee Shop with Sofas in Hendon

After much travelling and visiting some really relaxed places I’ve developed a deep love for coffee shops not aimed at super-fast-caffeine fixes. I’d like sofas, board games, puzzles and books. Barista’s with local area knowlege and patrons from all over the world, chatting and sharing stories and ideas.

There’s a full wish-list in my travel notebooks. If you own a coffee shop and would like someone to manage it, let me know 🙂

3D-Geek

A translation dictionary for programming languages. You can lookup a function in one language and see it in another. The target audience would be people who know one language and wish to learn another (or have to work temporally in another). For example you could look up some PHP:

strtolower($string)

and find the Perl equivelant:

lc($string)

Initially I’d like to aim at simple function translations, such as above, but if a function isn’t available in a particular language then a code-block should be able to be given. Each entry will need a few features, and then a database table linking them together. Ideally with a collection of “See Also” links.

Features:

  • The actual code
  • Dependencies List
  • Version Requirements
  • Tags/Keywords for search

The hardest bit will be the search. Partly because I know little about writing search engines. Ideally you can paste in some code and search by that – the engine extracting the functions used to being really smart. A listing of all functions (filterable and sortable by language) will also be available.

It may be that in order to achieve something in one language requires another language (e.g Database access in Javascript). That’d be interesting to be able to support.

Translations should be submit-able by anyone, and have a ranking system to bring the most liked translations to the top.

Some resources which already exist: