Ideas

Here's some ideas for projects that I'd like to one day work on:

Tip Transparency

A community-maintained database of restaurants displayed on a map with a grading system based on their tipping practices. To get a perfect score a restaurant must not ask for tips and include taxes in the price. A $20 burger can be paid for with a $20 dollar bill. Restaurants then lose points for several things:

• Including a tip line on the receipt
• Having a tip jar
• Adding tax to a bill
• Adding other "taxes" and "state mandates"
• Adding automatic tips for audience of a certain size

There would be some algorithm that would likely change over time to calculate the score. Likely it would start with 100, subtract points for each violations, and convert it into an A - F score. The community submits scores and there would be some sort of weighting / averaging to come up with composite scores.

Community Curated Maps

I build an app called Map Buddy. I ran it for about a year, started a company, had a couple customers, then wound the company down. I'll eventually shut the product down entirely.

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript and is an O'Reilly published author.