I get complicated work done by writing software and thanks to that work I've managed to generate $200k of savings using "spare time" to write an application to automate analysis work at one of the research facilities. Considering the value I provide them, it's cheap for them to spend $3000/month to fly me out of Tokyo 3-4 times a month to get things done during the week and I fly back to life in the big city on the weekends in Tokyo. That's how I roll.
The other great thing is that I have managed to get myself a lot of free time from the software I've written. All of this time gets plowed back into reading and studying more about code to help me speed up the software development process further. There are even times where it is possible for me to get away with out having to do any "real" work since I've got a lot of things automated and it's just a matter of waiting for the data to become available after long data crunching runs. It basically means that I've got lots of time to pour back into study and become even better at coding.
The fun thing about having a server at home: downloading cooking videos
Over the last year, I put a lot of thought debating between getting a computer in the cloud or something at home. I opted to shell out about $600 for a decent home server and I don't regret it. I don't need the reliability of a cloud computing setup and I've got plenty of computing power instead. To get something comparable on Amazon's AWS, I'd have to pay $2800 for a similar dedicated system. Since I have no need for a cluster just yet, I'm more than content to have a home server. The skills I pick up now could possibly be transferred over to a cloud computing platform later on. But the basics of say, knowing how to control computers remotely through a terminal remains the same.
One thing I've been having issues with recently is that I have a terrible internet connection at the hotel I stay at. I even have to set youtube to play videos at the lowest quality to just barely not get the videos to skip. So after getting quite fed up about the terrible speeds, I've opted to spend the evenings hacking on code through a terminal and telling my server at home to download packages to add functionality to the server.
I started on an automated youtube video downloading program just yesterday. Me, being a fan of such cooking shows as Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" and a variety of Jamie Oliver's shows, I've found a few users with a huge repository of uploaded videos. All I needed was something to query youtube to get back a list of videos and a module to download the video files. I started hacking the 2 together last night and finished it this afternoon. I have 800 files queued up for download and the process will keep running even after logging off. I can only imagine what other content I would be interested in getting access to offline.
What other interesting projects I could do with a server at home? I am not sure yet but another idea would be to scrape for good books to read. I'm starting to enjoy reading books far more than reading on the internet.
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