vunderba 33 minutes ago

Back around a decade ago I worked as a software engineer for a company that specialized in botique residential real estate with the gimmick of allowing buyers to use VR headsets to visualize/place high end furniture and "walk around" the space.

At one point during some of the development, I remember doing some testing in one of the VR environments and suddenly felt an urge to scratch my nose, so I quickly laid down the VR remote on a nearby table... and a second later heard a loud cracking sound as the VERY EXPENSIVE VR controller smashed into the floor. That was my first "woah" moment where the incredible potential for VR immersion really clicked for me.

I don't know how frothy the VR space is anymore so while I can't necessarily recommend it from a financial perspective it was certainly a lot of fun.

solardev 2 hours ago

Have you ever considered GIS (mapping, geo datasets, cartography, drones, photogrammetry, etc.?)

I thought it was an interesting niche that on the user side (governments, researchers, environmental consultancies, etc.) tend to focus around one big company (ESRI), but on the web side, you have things like Felt.com, Mapbox, etc., and on the app side, Gaia, Handlebars, Trailforks, Alltrails, RidewithGPS, Strava, etc.

Personally I'm drawn to it because of the intersection of software and real-world data, but I've never worked in it full time – just studied it a bit in college and did some side projects.

Fun stuff though.

yen223 2 hours ago

I'm currently building a SQL editor for the phone. This project has me going deep into the weird intersection between mobile UX, database implementations, and parsers + ASTs.

The world of software development on the phone is, in my opinion, very underexplored.