John Polacek shares ideas and examples of cool tech projects including 3D printing, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, robot soccer, synthetic biology, biohacking, hover bikes, jQuery, responsive design, APIs, and more. He encourages building prototypes to increase luck by doing and telling others. His focus is on fun and silly projects and he asks the reader to share what cool stuff they are working on.

1. by @johnpolacek

2. Hi
John Polacek
Senior Developer
Draftfcb Chicago

3. All the Things
johnpolacek.com/prototype

4. An Idea Alone
is not cool stuff

5. “Go to Subway with
an idea and see if they will
give you a sandwich.”
Jason Fried
Founder of 37signals

6. The magic is
not the idea.
It is what you
do with it.

7. Let’s Look At
Some Cool Stuff

9. $49.90
toys.brando.com

10. 3D Printing
Face scanned using a nextengine scanner – nextengine.com
printed on a z-corp Spectrum Z 510 3D printer – zcorp.com/en/home.aspx

11. 3D Printing

12. Makerbot Replicator Printrbot
$1749 $799

13. Raspberry Pi Arduino
$25 ~$50

14. Robot Soccer

15. Synthetic Biology Biohacking
700 TB of Data
700 x
1 Gram of DNA

16. Cool Kids Stuff

17. Cool Learning Stuff

18. Holy Shit
It’s a goddamn Hover Bike.

19. Cool Web Stuff
That’s more my thing.

21. jQuery, Websockets, geolocation, Responsive Web Design,
Mobile First, Content First, Style Tiles, Web Apps, Github,
Single Page Sites, APIs, REST, Touch, Canvas, WebGL, SVG,
Raphael, Infographics, JSON, mustache, CSS Transforms,
NoSQL, Cloud DB, webfonts, AMD, pub/sub, getUserMedia,
node.js, clojure, data visualization, localStorage, three.js, d3,
Meteor, Modernizr, Chrome Dev Tools, Angular, Twitter
Bootstrap, Video.js, impress.js, Heroku, AWS

22. + APIs
Google, Facebook, Twitter,
Yahoo, YouTube, Maps,
LinkedIn, Klout, Flickr, Yelp,
Foursquare, Dropbox, Stripe,
Vimeo, Yammer, ESPN,
Census Bureau, Bing, bit.ly,
Tumblr, duckduckgo

23. I’m not..

25. Grant Thomas Polacek
December 6, 2011

30. If you build it
(and talk about it)
They will come.

38. Building
Cool Stuff
Tactics For
Success

40. Challenge Domains

41. Really Big Ideas?
Break them down into smaller ideas

42. Follow Your Whims
Tired of it? Drop it.
Build the next cool thing.

43. ABP
Always Be Prototyping

44. “The key to being
a good developer is to be
really good at Google.”
- Abraham Lincoln

45. Read

46. Listen

47. L00k

48. Learn

49. Subscribe

50. Aggregate

51. Collect

52. Plan

53. Share

54. Chicago

55. Increase Your
Luck Surface Area
Do and Tell

56. Be Bolder Than
You Want To Be

57. Have A Focus
Figure out what stuff
really grabs your attention

58. My Focus
Fun and a little silly.

59. What’s Your
Cool Stuff?

60. Thanks!
johnpolacek.com/prototype
@johnpolacek
johnpolacek.github.com