remember VS soundfingerprinting

Racket is my favorite language. It's fast, practical, has solid foundations and an extremely nice concurrency story (based on concepts borrowed and extended from Concurrent ML). It has an excellent documentation system, with an integrated package ecosystem, which means that most packages have high quality documentation with cross-references. It has a great backwards-compatibility story -- a lot better than Python's, for example, which I use in my current dayjob. So, my impression of the commenters saying it's too academic or not practical is that they probably never dove deeply enough, or they are students who were only exposed to the teaching languages in the past. It's definitely not perfect: the community is small, the runtime has a high memory baseline, parallelism requires spinning up a Racket VM per system thread, among others, but these are things that will improve over time.

In the past several years, I've:

* built & run an e-commerce site written in Racket[1]

* built a native macOS and iOS reminders app, available on the App Store [2, 3, 4]

* built a cross-platform desktop client for Apache Kafka [5, 6, 7]

* built a `#lang` for Lua [8]

Among[9] other[10] things[11]. I think that's all pretty practical stuff!

[1]: https://defn.io/2019/08/20/racket-ecommerce/

[2]: https://defn.io/2020/01/02/ann-remember/

[3]: https://defn.io/2024/04/09/ann-remember-for-ios/

[4]: https://github.com/bogdanp/remember

[5]: https://defn.io/2022/11/20/ann-franz/

[6]: https://defn.io/2023/10/15/ann-franz-for-windows/

[7]: https://defn.io/2023/08/10/ann-franz-source-available/

[8]: https://defn.io/2022/11/12/ann-racket-lua/

[9]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/http-easy/index.html

[10]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/deta/index.html

[11]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui-easy/index.html

A really simple keyboard driven reminder tool for macOS:

https://github.com/Bogdanp/remember

My goal for this year is to continue building (mainly Mac and iOS) apps (like Remember[1] and Franz[2]) using Racket and to help improve the language and ecosystem in any way I can.

[1]: https://remember.defn.io

PS this is a macOS app with the GUI made with swift https://github.com/Bogdanp/remember/tree/master/cocoa/remember/remember but the backend is Racket.

Started 10 years ago as an open-source project, building an algorithm for audio fingerprinting. Added a commercial offering, selling storage built specifically for audio fingerprints, targeting enterprise customers. Since the offering was too technical (it's hard to sell solutions to problems that are too narrow and domain-specific), pivoted to more "business-oriented problems". This last year's pivot is a chance to finally grow. Running a business in single-player mode is, at times, too stressful. Aside from the technical part, which I very much enjoy, I need to wear marketing, sales, and customer support hats.

[1] - https://emysound.com

The OP said elsewhere they are using this[1] library, which allows you to specify minimum seconds to match, so you'd presumably set it to match 20 seconds or whatever minimum length podcast commercials usually are.

Most other audio fingerprinting libraries I've seen allow you to specify min/max time, as well.

HTH.

1. https://github.com/AddictedCS/soundfingerprinting

My goal for the next year is just to work fewer hours. Covid pushed my work habit to the extreme, and I need to rebalance.

1. Read more books, less social media/news.

2. Spend more time with my friends. I haven't seen some of them IRL for more than a year.

3. Exercise more, play tennis with my daughter, spend quality time with my kids.

4. Spend more time with my parents. They've become visibly older in the last years, an observation that scares me.

5. Focus more on marketing for the businesses that I've bootstrapped. All the shiny new features that are developed are not as important as getting more people to use your product.

6. Promote open-source project to 1k GitHub stars[1]. I know it isn't very meaningful, but it's just nice to receive a bit of recognition from the community.

7. Enjoy life, don't stress about all the little things that happen along the way.

Happy new year!

[1]: https://github.com/AddictedCS/soundfingerprinting