I've noticed that my son spends way too much time on YouTube or playing Minecraft and one of the few offline activities he enjoys doing on his own is coloring. And since he comes to me every time he wants a new coloring book and we spend about 10 minutes together searching for each picture, I made a website with a collection of coloring books for him. The site is very simple, but to be honest, I haven't had so much fun with the process of creation for a long time.
etc. etc.
I focus really hard on answering exactly one question in a concise and engaging way and trying to keep every video under 5 minutes. Oh, and to make the videos solution independent, so not specific to a product, but convey the underlying knowledge so it has a longer shelf-life.
Full list is here: https://foxev.io/batteries/
I am planning to turn this into a knowledge base with playlists for "learning paths" like "everything to watch about batteries" or "here is what you need to watch to make a motor spin on a bench". I will add interactive functionality like quizzes and widgets to make the knowledge even more sticky.
One thing I'd like to hone in on is that these threads aren't intended for promotion, but rather for the just-because sort of project, driven by idle interest or weird obsession—the sort of thing people might spend their free time on.
I'm not sure yet what the official "rule" should be (if any), but if you're working on a startup or have had attention via Show HN, maybe abstain from these discussions? It wouldn't be good for the thread to get taken over by things HN already has a place for.
I'm working on synthesizing a genome at home! Here is a video with more details, as well as a picture of my home lab. I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it.
I'm trying to build a DNA assembly company right now (been lots of ups and downs lately...), and one thing I need to do is validate the specs of my oligo pool synthesis provider, Agilent, before I release to customers / raise a seed round. So as a stress-test run of my system, I'm synthesizing a genome, and am thinking about trying to livestream it. The unique technology is variety of ways to assemble and validate DNA from oligo pools for a lot cheaper, pretty much enabling a 10x reduction in DNA synthesis cost vs commercial suppliers. I've worked my ass off for nearly 2 years to get to this moment and am so excited!
For my next video, I want to show in detail how the interpreter works. For this purpose I'm creating an elaborate animation. You'll notice that the latest video is already several months old; this is because this animation is more work than I bargained for, and I got a little burned out by it. Nevertheless, I persevere and the video will come out whenever I may finish it.
I'm building Pastmaps - striving to eventually be the world's largest online collection of old maps, aerials, and photos all packaged into a public historical research platform that's as easy to use as Google Maps. This has been a labor of love now for about a year, but I still have a huge mountain to climb to realize the full vision. Give it a try and give me your harsh criticisms - that's the greatest gift you could give me!
Even in it's current state, it's being used by geneologists, urban explorers, search & rescue teams, real estate developers, government agencies, etc. The number of exploding use-cases continues to astound me and keeps me motivated to continue.
In my 50k population town in Minnesota, I notice a lot of headlights, taillights, and turn signals are out. Our roads (outside of the Twin Cities) are often bumpy which causes vibration in the vehicles, leading to many bulbs failing.
I drive a 21 year old Saab, and in my 2 years of owning it, I have replaced every single bulb in the exterior of the vehicle except a turn signal or two.
I decided to create a mobile service for vehicle lights. It's a simple website that even technologically-disadvantaged people can use. The website is nearly finished and I will likely come back here to write a post on it for how the website works.
Oh the best part, I get texted and emailed for each service order that comes in, and using my service is only $10 more than what it would cost you to go buy a bulb yourself at OReillys, AutoZone, etc.
I programmed everything myself and developed the idea as well. This is my first real-world project/solution I am bringing into this world that has been verified by others, to be a needed service. Pretty excited about it and I love changing bulbs or replacing light housings, it's fun and simple.
I'm still working on Habitat. It's a self-hosted social platform for local communities. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I want it to be easily installable for those who want to host using docker, and for those who want to host on an EC2 instance or something, because online services for docker hosting are quite expensive, so I've been working recently on ansible setup, and it's proving quite difficult, so if anyone with the experience fancies helping out, I'd be more than happy to receive contributions.
For me the most important issue that needs to be solved right now is the increasing urban sprawl and the car dependent neighborhoods. It causes social isolation. Maintaining infrastructure like roads and electricity, is causing a strain on the economy for local municipalities. Not to mention the disastrous effect car based transportation has on the environment.
I am a fullstack developer living in Norway. Last year I registered the Norwegian branch of the Architectural Uproar as a not for profit organization. With the support from paying members, I have been able to go on tour to most of the major cities in Norway. We organize large meetings were we discuss architecture and city planning with politicians, architects and property developers on stage.
I am strongly inspired by Create Streets in UK and Strong Towns in the US. I want to improve people’s quality of life, help saving the planet and make Norway beautiful again while doing it.
Putting the finishing touches on my LLM based town simulator. Once it's finished I'll have it simulate 4 hours in the town every 2 hours in reality.
It is designed to solve the problem of "RPG hero just killed a dragon in front of the town and no one says anything about it." All the NPCs realistically react and talk about the Hero's exploits.
Visitors to the site can vote on what quest the hero undertakes next.
I'm running into the problem what the site isn't much fun. I'm honestly not sure what to do about that!
Autopilot for my sit-on-top fishing kayak. Designed, modeled, and printed an assembly which attaches to the rudder rod. Moves the rod via a stepper motor connected to a Teensy 4.0 which gets NMEA 2000 messages from a Garmin heading sensor and a Garmin fish finder/chartplotter. Uses PID control to maintain any course I set on the chartplotter, using the cross-track error and heading. I’ve had it out on the water a few times now and it works great. Also put together an iOS app that communicates with the assembly via BLE so I can modify the PID gains as needed depending on conditions.
There was a bit of noise to the sonar transducer since the stepper motor was so noisy, but I mostly eliminated it by routing the motor wires through liquid-tight flexible electrical conduit, connecting the conduit to ground.
I'm building a collator robot [0] to help me pack items I sell for building your own open source split-flap mechanical display [1].
I get custom character flaps printed and die-cut in bulk and then sell them in smaller sets. A full set of flaps for one module has 52 distinct designs (letters, numbers, symbols, etc) and I get them from the manufacturer grouped by design, so they need to be collated to sell as packs of 52 with 1 of each design.
My WIP robot will take a stack of one design and distribute them to a bunch of cubbies, then I'll swap in the next design, and so on, so each cubby ends up with a full set.
It's based on a cheap ~$110 CNC gantry frame from AliExpress and a ~$35 BTT SKR Pico 3d printer main board running GrblHAL. To detect whether the flaps feed successfully I use a visible light break-beam sensor (the typical IR sensors don't work because the PVC flaps happen to be IR transparent!) which acts as the "z probe" - the flap is fed via a G38.3 probe action which returns whether the probe was successful or not, and the "z" coordinate it was first detected.
I have a python script running on a computer to send the gcode to the machine.
I'm working on a 3D infinite canvas of text, focusing on code. Runs on iPhone, iPad, macOS so they can all act as separate viewports into a space. You can point the app at a repository, download a copy locally, instantly render the entire repository into space in less than a second in most cases, and then fly around and search for text. I just got an optimization working for larger files and it's kinda fun how much even an iPhone can do with instanced rendering.
Im developing it with the use in mind of flying through your code to show others relationships, or edit with a visuospatial look at your code instead of basic 2D tabs and a mind map of which one had the thing you're working on. It's kinda fun to work on the project In the project!
It's built on Swift and Metal but can ready any utf8 text file, minus a few subsections of the Unicode spec (for now).
I'm making a VSCode extension that can record & replay interactions with the IDE: all scrolls, selections, and modifications synced to guiding video, audio, and visual aid tracks.
The result is a much more interactive way to present code than screencasts or blogs. Because at any point we can pause a session and freely explore and experiment with the codebase.
I put together a demo recently [1] and written much more about it here [2].
The Berlin immigration office is notoriously slow and unresponsive. The processing time for a residence permit varies from a few weeks to a few months. During that time, people are left unable to work or unable to leave the country. They never know how long it will take, and it causes some people to give up and leave Germany.
I am writing a tool to collect and aggregate data about the processing times. This will help people plan around the delays. Knowing is half the battle.
The biggest challenge is that my readers find me at the start of the process, and I need their feedback at the end of it. I have to make it easy for them to provide partial feedback and complete it later after they get an email reminder.
This would be unnecessary if the immigration office collected and shared that information, but they don’t. They also don’t welcome any help because they “operate at peak efficiency”. I have stopped hoping for their collaboration.
I'm trying to OCR a very large book: 45 volumes of ~500 pages each. The digitization has been done (not very good but not too bad either), but the pages have comments in the margin and lots of footnotes.
Just doing plain OCR doesn't really work because the notes in the margin and the footnotes get mingled with the text, which results in gibberish.
But, when sent to Google Vision API, each page results in a json file that has an object for each word and the four coordinates of its bounding box.
That json file is pretty big (around 1.5 Mo when pretty printed, or 500 k with no indents or line breaks) but it can then be fed to Gemini, taking advantage of its large context window.
Gemini is pretty good at identifying each section of the page (headers, main text, margin comments, footnotes) but it takes a looong time to respond (2-5 minutes per page).
So another approach is to ask Gemini to write a python script to analyze the json result and group sections depending of the coordinates of each word, and then run that script against the json output by the OCR phase.
But it's quite difficult to have a script that works for any page; comments in the margin are always in the margin so that's pretty easy, but footnotes can start at any height of the page (some pages contain only footnotes running from previous pages) and Gemini likes to be pretty specific, giving hard 'y' coordinates for where footnotes should start, which obviously only works for the one page it's working on.
I'm iterating and making some progress but I feel like I miss a big breakthrough and it all should be simpler than it currently is. Information about OCR is pretty scarce online. Any pointer is welcome!
I'm experimenting with a "new" kind of lisp macros.
Macros in lisp are just normal functions that receive the code they wrap as argument and return some modified code. Typically they will just wrap the passed code into some more code. But then there are code walking macro: macros that will traverse passed code to modify it in depth.
What I'm working on is "code diving" macros. Not only will they traverse the passed code, but they will resolve called functions and macros, fetch their source code and traverse it too. And so on. All the redefined fns/macros are accumulated in a let/macrolet binding, topologically sorted by call/dependency order. Instrumented code will call these local redefinitions, shadowing the global definition lexically.
This allow the programmer to write truly local monkey-patches for existing code he doesn't have control over (e.g, code from another library for instance). I'm writing this in Clojure, and the traditional way to do this is to temporarily change the global definitions of targeted variables using with-redefs. This is problematic because other threads will see these redefinitions, and not just threads created within the instrumented code, but already existing threads too.
Another way to do it is to just redefine the targeted functions globally, but then your modifications are available to the whole program for the rest of its execution.
It's a very fun mix of hardware (for data collection), and crazy SQL queries to model energy flows between buildings, solar, batteries, etc. Considering just one building is pretty easy:
but then you add a site with a couple of buildings, solar on one of them, grid limited exports, etc modelling these flows is challenging. Like consider the case where one building got 10% of it's imported power from another building's excess solar, then calculating carbon becomes more difficult.
and once you've figured all that - then you have to figure out what makes commercial sense to do next.. install a battery, expand solar, move onto a TOU tariff, do nothing - and that's a whole other world of optimisation problems.
Currently, other than my day job, I am obsessed with making sense of the "shape of stories". Mapping embeddings and see how they move through a sequence.
Started of with [1] which showed that there might be some strength to the idea.
Applied it for chunking [2] and web site analysis[3] and got pretty good results.
Just started trying out experiments on video [4] and surprised that the structure seems to hold for image embeddings as well.
I have no clue if this has any value, but it is fun to go down this rabbit hole :)
Building a pneumatic long-range candy dispersal device (candypult) to launch Halloween candy from my garage door to the street. As is the case for many of us around here, I get bored of making digital tools and want to build something in meatspace. I'm trying to use as much material I already own as possible, so building out of leftover metal framing and old decking.
Trick-or-treating at a door is so last decade; trying to catch a Snickers hurtling towards you in the darkness is the future.
Wife and I tend to plan long, multi-day, multi-destination travel.
Got sick of working in Google Docs and having to manually move days around and re-label dates, shift hotels, etc. Ended up creating Turas.app over a weekend in 2023 (and then let it loose on Reddit). But just recently created the Chrome Extension which feels like it is an even better tool because it lets you access all of the richness of Google Maps. It's a Google Maps powertool for people who like to plan their travel meticulously.
(Completely free and intended to be free forever; we tried to monetize it but realized that there's no reasonable way to do so that we ourselves would be happy with; seriously thinking about just open sourcing it, but needs some cleanup first!)
Today, kindergarten was closed and I had to take much of the day off to take care of my five-year old daughter. We asked Chat GPT to assume the role of a master board game designer and to lead us through the creation of a novel boardgame, with input from us. She came up with the setting - we are unicorns that need to rescue princes and princesses that have been captured in a scary forest full of monsters. Quickly, the LLM proposed a full list of rules and props to make. We then had fun for around two hours drawing various cards and markers.
The game was playable on the first try with only a few minor and very quick rule tweaks from me. Even I felt we went on a stressful quest in the forest. Honestly among the best games for this age group that I have ever played.
An "offline-first" client web app for Github. I don't want to have to wait seconds to load up an issue, and then wait seconds (or keep another tab open) to go back to the list of issues/PRs, ...etc. I want everything to feel instant, with optimistic updates, and a backend sync process that doesn't require me to refresh the page to see new updates.
(Small note: I'm doing it in full-stack Rust, including web frontend, using leptos).
An app to collect memories easily. You capture vocal notes, which are transcribed & corrected with AI.
As a father, I wanted to capture all the little moments of our day-to-day family life to later share with my grown-up children. However, I did not have the discipline to journal regularly. So, I made Memzy to capture them easily on the fly!
Right now I'm testing key shapes and sizes and the manufacturing of key caps. I thought I needed a resin printer for best results but FDM printed caps with a blob of epoxy resin on top works surprisingly well.
There's no firmware yet, I have not even decided on a micro-controller or software. But I want to use Kailh Choc v1.
This is my first time exposing this project to the public so I'll be very happy about some feedback!
Essentially a PR review flow for production access, which allows you to enforce a second pair of eyes workflow. I was always a bit scared when I was on call and had all the power in my finger tips to ruin everyone's day. I think this helps alleviate the risk of human error significantly. Also helps with compliance of course.
Hey guys! We're engineers/designers from France, and we've built the Ultimate DIY Battery that you can repair and refill!
Ride Sustainably with the World's First Repairable Battery
Refillable in 5 minutes (just buy $150 worth of new cells every 3 years or so, when they're depleted)
Be Worry-Free thanks to the Fireproof Casing! There's been waaaaaay too many lithium fires!
It's launched as an IndieGogo (the product already exists, but as a startup IndieGogo is convenient to get the cash upfront to buy the parts and build the batteries) and there is an offer for early-backers here https://get.gouach.com for a 25% discount on the battery!
Outside of the software world I'm also working on opening a Bike Shop and frame building studio. I'm hoping that one day I can actually make a small living on frame building since I don't do software for my day job anymore, but I'm not quite ready to build for other people yet (so far I've only built frames for myself and I'd like to thoroughly strength test them before I risk putting someone else on one of my creations!)
If you're in the Atlanta, GA area and need bicycle work done, hit me up! No job is too big or too small. I particularly enjoy building wheels if you want a sweet custom wheel set, but I do it all (including Mountain Bike fork and suspension work that many shops won't do).
I’m building a way for developers to easily deploy open source applications (Postgres, redis, sentry, elastic search, etc), plus have a full heroku like workflow for their own applications, all within their kubernetes cluster, with what I hope is a super intuitive and friendly UI.
I’ve ran a start up and saw how SaaS-ified and expensive web tooling is (heroku, datadog, redshift, fivetran, etc), but how difficult it was to move off of them. We had a few years of over 1 million in infrastructure spend.
I’m hoping just making Kubernetes easier to use gives us a way out.
It’s fully open source and a hosted version is free to use! https://canine.sh.
Would love feedback on it, including how the overall pitch could be better, or if it actually solves people’s problems.
I'm developing an implementation of what I call Hydra – Multi-Head Prediction Embeddings [1], which I believe represents the next evolution in transformer architectures.
I've been teaching kids programming 1:1, off and on for 10 years or so. This time around I'm collecting my various impromptu puzzles and exercises into a single app anyone can go through at their own pace on any device, computer or phone (though iOS unfortunately requires jumping through some hoops). All on a platform that is open source and live-editable and lets you write all-new programs with graphics and sound in addition to the puzzles and exercises.
I am working on the Vanta for sustainability and climate disclosures. Climate and sustainability disclosures are starting to come online in many sectors and parts of the world. We offer compliance-as-a-service so that startups and covered entities can fulfill their compliance requirements in a mostly self-serve manner without having to hire expensive consultants or undergo significant restructurings. Our platform provides a single source of truth for your climate, sustainability, and emissions data. For example, if you are an American company trying to go-to-market in Europe, all it takes is purchasing an additional module and we will automatically generate the compliance documents and checklists for you based on the existing data we have on your company. We also offer managed “Climate Trust Center” dashboards that you can subdomain on your website for investors reporting and to satisfy disclosure requirements.
If you are in an EPA-regulated (or equivalents in Canada and Europe) industry (such as mining, oil and gas, minerals, rare earths, metal processing, airlines, construction, shipping/marine, logistics, heavy industries, agriculture/farming/food production, data center, power generation including renewables, adjacent ones like consumer goods, real estate, large scale AI training, climate derivatives etc.) or require sustainability consulting support in general, we would love to talk to you:
hello@carbonimpacthq.com (put “HN:” in the subject line so we know where you are coming from)
I'm working on a unique discovery app / recommender for books, tv, movies, video games, songs, youtube channels, newsletters and podcasts - and more categories soon!
Since my last update here, I've added more detailed personalized descriptions of recommendations (hit Describe to request), including a rating out of 10 for how well the item meets your preferences.
I've also added the ability to replace individual recommendations (this was the most requested new feature!). If you update your preferences, your replacements will use your updated preferences - pretty nice for fine tuning your results!
I'm building a service for podcast websites with transcripts[^0]. I have paying customers, including Volts[^1], and I'm genuinely passionate about serving them.
What's holding me back from scaling is primarily my own resistance to marketing, plus some pending improvements to the ChatGPT-based transcript editing system. Once I finish optimizing the LLM integration, I'll have no more excuses to avoid sales outreach. One thread I want to pursue is a magazine of podcast transcripts that I inherited: https://podread.org
I'd appreciate advice on authentic outreach strategies for reaching knowledge-focused podcasters. If anyone here has experience in this space or wants to collaborate, I'm open to connecting.
It is probably not substantial among the projects people have commented on this thread, but I am happy to be working on my first personal website made from plain old HTML and simplecss.
Learning how to arrange things, navigation, and my own blog on my own site gives me the gratification of owning something fully. Everyone should have their own site is truly what I agree with.
SVGs are awesome and currently unrepresented in the diffusion-based model landscape. We have something that produces pretty great results and we're working on the next version which should be even better.
Been working on our startup laudspeaker (an alternative to firebase cloud messaging) [1] as well as trying to write more! I like science fiction thrillers similar to what michael crichton used to write and have been working on a story called Panopticon around encryption, spycraft, and three letter agencies [2]
I'm building a custom NC manufacturing robot from scratch.
I was unhappy with availability, pricing, and business model (SaaS lock-in) of the existing hardware/software solutions. But to my delight, I noticed that you just need better amplifiers to use 3D printer mainboards for driving industrial stepper motors. Everything is controlled with Gcode, which is just text. And sensors can send back logging messages over the same USB connection.
That means the control software can be just a python script with a little state machine inside :)
I'm still working on my first self designed PCB. It's nothing special, just a temperature and humidity sensor using esp32. I started it to teach myself more about PCB design and embedded programming. Yesterday I published a blog article on it. https://www.felixmaurer.de/blog/2024/10/27/building-an-iot-s...
I'm building a language learning app, specifically for multi-ethnic couples that want to learn each other's language in a very personalized way: https://couplingcafe.com
I've eschewed jobs and even a funded YC startup to work on this idea for years, ideating. Just following my passion and deep belief I'm making a more effective way to learn a language while also strengthening an emotional relationship!
I’m working on a zine. The first issue is on system evals for LLM-driven apps. It’s set in a world where Bear and Fox are opening a cafe with an LLM shoggoth generating custom recipes.
Lots of people just going off of vibes to see if their system is working right. That’s a good start, but you’ll need system evals to systematically improve your app. Like Garry says, “don’t raw dog your prompts. Use system evals”
Getting ready to release a big Halloween update for my survival-horror game for the Playdate, Plight of the Wizard[0]. I just added a spell that targets the closest enemy, which was a fun challenge to implement. Performance optimizations for the hardware have been getting tougher to nail down, so I’m spending a lot of time figuring out inefficiencies in my code to target a stable 30 fps. I’m having a lot of fun releasing updates that make the game more fun. But with more refinement comes the desire to add more content and improved art. I’m trying to take it one step at a time.
But to pass the time, I’m also working on a personal journal that keep S-expressions in a database with a well-defined schema set by the other nodes of the database (imagine tiddlywiki transclusions everywhere!)
The idea is to have a bunch of adaptors for Google Takeout, Apple Notes, Obsidian, Apple Health, fitness tracking, org-mode, location history, etc. keep all my data there in well-defined formats. I could then also use the markup language I’m writing to present my journal data in various ways.
My main focus is on efficient data entry/ingestion powered by schema-as-data, which allows for machine and human readability.
I don’t expect it to be useful, but I’m having fun. If I wind up getting anywhere, I might open source it.
I'm working on helping my wife get her print-on-demand Shopify store off the ground. She designs the products herself, but ran into challenges with SEO. So, I built a custom app that connects to her Shopify store via API, using GPT-4o-mini to handle SEO optimizations—things like generating descriptions, titles, alt text, SEO-friendly URLs, and more, all based on the product images.
There were also issues syncing with Google Merchant Center (missing colors, categories, etc.), so I tweaked the app to auto-fill these fields using GPT-4o, making it compliant with Google and Pinterest requirements.
I’m completely new to SEO and just tried following best practices to fix things as they came up. Now I’m learning that SEO keywords change constantly, so I’m thinking of integrating a keyword provider to dynamically enhance our product descriptions.
I never realized running an e-commerce store (especially print-on-demand) would involve so much operational work on the marketing front. I’d appreciate any advice on what to tackle next, especially since my goal is to avoid “subscription hell” with multiple Shopify apps. My wife is also just starting with ads and campaigns, diving into tutorials to learn the ropes.
I created KopiMap (https://kopimap.com) to help people discover great cafés in Jakarta Indonesia, but I wanted to take the UX further by automatically organizing user-submitted photos into meaningful categories (menu, food/drinks, ambiance).
The challenge is how to classify images as cost efficient as possible without compromising performance. I decided to go with running ML models on the client-side.
Technical implementation:
- Built and trained a compact TensorflowJS model (~3MB) that runs entirely in-browser
- Model lazy loads only when users are submitting reviews
- Classifies uploaded photos into Menu, Food & Drink, or Vibes (interior/exterior)
- Zero server costs for inference, quick enough classification feedback
This approached solved several problems:
1. Reduced server costs by moving inference to the client
2. Improved UX with immediate photo categorization
3. Maintained app performance by lazy loading the model
Would love feedback from the HN community on:
- Optimizing the model size further
- Alternative approaches to client-side ML
- General UX improvements for local discovery apps
I had no prior ML experience, so this was a fun challenge :)
I've been working on an automatic sky tracking telescope over the past few months. I'm a few weeks behind on blogging but making solid progress. V1 is nearing completion. Then I want to rework some of the electronics to design and get a custom PCB printed. Also the physical design needs a complete redesign to make it more sturdy for long exposures and solve some wiring pains.
The software allows the platform to automatically align to north and working on accounting for imperfect leveling (such as placing it on a slanted surface) through software and accelerometers.
Next challenges I want to solve in software is focus detection and then automatic image stack and post processing.
Primary goals of the project is a deep dive into robotics and electronics, along with brushing up on webdev which I don't touch too frequently being in the gamedev world. Also allowing me to explore things like digital signal processing.
Spent a year improving my p2p networking library. The software is async python 3 and it's designed to solve a simple problem: create a connection between any two computers. I haven't done a write-up yet but if you want to try it out the github is here. You can also install through pypi too
I'm building a website with interactive stories (or story-based games), intended for language learners. The idea is to make stories with choices (using Ink script), including features you may expect from adventure games (e.g. inventory, choices that matter).
The text is written in simple language, it is then translated in many languages, and I generate audio files. This provides input for people learning a language, with multiple options to practice reading or listening.
I'm working on a solution to the age-old problem of tracking my food intake. Every app I have every tried from the many dozens on the market has not met my need of a low friction simple UI tool, so I've built it myself.
I've built Journable, a simple & frictionless chat-based & photo-based calorie tracker. Just type in what you've eaten, in as much or as little detail as you can. Or type in what you did for exercise. Or just snap a photo of your plate. Whatever works for you.
I have one e-commerce system that ships boxes of organic coffee to people's homes all over the United States.
I have another ecommerce system that delivers boxes of organic produce all over the Seattle region.
So I am working on building an integration between the two systems. When a box of coffee is being shipped on the same day that the delivery company is already going to that region, redirect that box's fulfilment process away from USPS/FedEx and deliver it instead.
This saves 50% on shipping costs for the coffee company, and the delivery company gets paid for utilizing extra space in the delivery vans.
It's been 4 months of work so far, and most of the individual pieces are working in production right now, hoping to enable all of it together this week or next. Just in time for the holidays ;)
The hardest part so far was integrating all the custom label generation, and mapping/routing so that it's seamless with the existing workflows of each company. The coffee company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for the new non-shipping orders, and the delivery company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for fulfilling orders they did not pack.
The real cherry on top is that it's built in such a way that N number of stores could integrate their stores into our fulfillment. This lets many local food producers who cant do their own fulfillment still participate in the local food economy without having "scale". It's kinda like an upside down Fulfillment By Amazon: they'll do your delivery for you as long as you sell through their store (and take their ever-increasing cut of the sale). This version lets the store owner maintain their own store, URL, branding, prices, availability, customer relationship, and margins, but then hook into our last-mile fulfillment.
Im working on a platform for people to run their social hobbies and activities. Organize meetups, find when to meet, run ticketed events. for free!
I use it myself to organize my weekly cycling group of friends and friends of friends.
Paid stuff coming very soon, just onboarding some groups and get some feel
I'm developing a pipeline to sync underwater passive acoustic audio with whale sightings around the hydrophones, to then classify that audio using Google's open sourced whale models. The goal is to enrich data from happywhale.com with whale voices, so scientists can further explore communication of these species. I'm trying to keep things as system-agnostic as possible, but am building the first implementation to run on GCP.
I am the maintainer of beanborg (https://github.com/luciano-fiandesio/beanborg), a set of scripts for automated categorization of financial transactions on top of beancount. Using plaintext accounting in the last 5 years has dramatically improved my family's financial health.
Unfortunately, plaintext accounting is not for everyone.
I noticed that there is a big gap in this space, especially for European users. There are several personal finance applications, but they seem to integrate mostly with US banks and, in general, they seem to be very dollar-centric.
So, I'm working on a simple app to manage personal finance, based on the concept of double-entry accounting with features like budgeting, projections and data analysis.
There are a lot of privacy-related considerations, so for the time being I will eat my own dogfood and offer it to close friends. Let's see how it goes!
I trying to create a management software for Integral Coops in Portugal. In a gross oversimplification Integral coops tend to be location based and allow freelancers and small groups to come together and have a infrastructure as if they were a big business while keeping their independence on the work they want to do
I'm trying to make it: a collective project shared between multiple coops, open source, sustainable in the long term.
I've already did some micro projects to the coop I'm a part of, like changing the workflow of expense invoice management from a totally manual process to an 80% automated process so I'm pretty sure I can provide significant benefits to the coops. Right now There's already a prototype andI'm in the process of talking with cooperatives finding financing and making it real.
website is at https://coops.pt (very early stages, in portuguese)
I've been building a chrome extension called Skipper [1] that helps people to organize their browser tabs with AI.
For my whole career so far I've been applying ML (as they called it back then) / AI to various domains like drug discovery and cybersecurity. Both were fun but, man, it feels really different to build a consumer app. It's just very exciting to be able to develop something, push it, and get compliments/complains the second day! We've even noticed that the ADHD community are especially engaged with the extension because they suffer the most from the tab overload problem.
Anyways, for those who might need it, here's the link:
I am working on a private transportation service. Think Uber, but in a small market. We have an aging population, poor public transportation and some of the bumpiest roads you can find in the West. It will fill a void.
Not my idea, though. Through our local geek community, I met this taxi driver who pitched his app idea. He convinced a few other drivers to pay a small fee to kickstart the project. Then he convinced me to help with the technical stuff, and I convinced a friend to tag along.
I am working on dealing with burnout for the first time. I’ve read about it here and thought I understood it, but experiencing it first hand has been difficult. It destroys everything good about life: relationships, hobbies, sleep, and health. I know I am not the only one here going through this and knowing that helps a little.
I'm working on Pictera [1], an AI product where users can upload their photos (like selfies) to create high-quality, hyper-realistic images of themselves in just about any style they want.
Originally, I built Pictera for myself to use because I couldn’t find any service that produced decent photos. Besides, I was very concerned that popular products in this space included broad terms allowing them to keep and use users' photos indefinitely for any purposes, including marketing [2]. But I've been enjoying working on the product so much that I've put way more time into polishing it and thought others would find it useful too.
I am working on Shepherd.com and trying to reimagine book discovery online.
I just launched the "best books of 2024," where I ask readers and authors to share their 3 favorite reads of the year and make it fun to navigate them by different factors (genres, topics, book club reads, audiobooks, and more coming) -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024
I built a site that saves time by summarizing YouTube videos or news articles by simply inputting the URL. The tool preserves the original context, allowing users to ask follow-up questions.
I'd like to continue building fun projects like this until I find a market. I work in Phase 1 clinical trials and the end goal would be to implement some of these efficiencies into health technologies.
My daughter loves creating things — art, books, videos etc. She's shown an interest in learning to code, but she's only six, and I don't want learning to code to be a chore. So I've built visual scripting into her favourite game!
Overcooked is a co-op series that fundamentally requires the control of multiple characters to progress. I've kept multiplayer as an option, since teamwork is an important part of the game. However, I've replaced the 2nd player with a bot that you program to assist you.
It's still experimental at this stage. However, I've experience leading EdTech engineering departments and my wife is a teacher at my daughter's school. If my daughter's peers show interest I'll go ahead and build a course around this for primary school aged children.
An email client that just “does the right thing” in terms of showing new emails I care about.
I don’t want to configure filters or adopt inbox zero. I want the computer to look at decades of email activity and just figure it out.
Second, working on a single dashboard for attorneys to create and upload filings across different agencies and different states. Trying to improve accuracy and labor costs for mundane work like this.
(Opinions? Suggestions? Want to work together? Email me!)
I am playing around with LLMs and Game Theory. Currently, I let them play 5x5 board games in a tournament against Reinforcement Learning Agents and a Random Player. I am capturing the "thoughts" of the agent for behavioral data analysis. My background is Risk Management, I am trying to gather an understanding how such LLMs report their "decision" for applications in human/ai interactions for identifying and reporting governance flaws.
Since I am working on autonomous agents that are given the agency to take an action on their own, I believe having a good understanding of the "psyche" is important (at least to me).
First time I'm building a proper website, used a lot of AI. Things that changed over last time:
* Switched the charting library from D3 to Apex. D3 was too low-level for my purpose.
* Reworked the design and contents of a lot of pages (with the help of AI).
* Various bugfixes for the database queries.
* Tried to come up with some kind of pricing signal detection, but currently not working well.
* Link to the actual auction results.
* Minimal E2E validation using Playwright. What a pleasure to use!
I'm planning to add alerting. Not keen on running a backend though.
I wrote (some) of a Lua interpreter in Rust, which runs PUC Lua 5.1 dumped bytecodes. Now I'm rewrite it all because I want to do type specialization: I'm implementing "Simple and Effective Type Check Removal through Lazy Basic Block Versioning", which is used as the basis of Shopify's YJIT for Ruby. I have a decent idea of how it needs to be implemented and have a prototype kinda working, although some of the jump targets are still wrong right now. Once I get it all sketched out then I'll have to scale it back up to a full Lua implementation again, and then I'll add table shape specialization afterwards (which is a bit trickier, and outlined in a sequel paper).
Not exactly what I'm currently working on, as it got released last week, but...
I gathered many of my bash scripts and aliases, focused on making use of Android Debug Bridge (ADB) easier, together into a single collection[0]. The wiki page has visuals and more information on functionality[1].
Then starting a new project this week around gathering and displaying information on air quality in Iceland.
I am working on eliminating waste in cloud resources.
Cloud providers made too easy to start resources. But unless there is a stringent upfront process (that usually defeats the purpose of using the cloud), it is hard to keep track of who owns what, and what is still needed. Decrypting long cloud bills quickly impossible, and users do not have a clear understanding of the per-resource cost they generated.
I believe the solution is rooted in transparency and accountability for both users and cloud providers.
I am creating a tool what generates a cost and security cloud report which is sent weekly for each cloud user or team.
I intend to release it as a open-source tool as well a SaaS service as part of www.li10.com
I'm building a social network for humans[1]. I plan to make each user a verified human and disallow AI content as standard. I will also ensure that each human can only have one account, to eliminate the ability of state actors/rich people spreading online propaganda.
2. An LLM-powered translator specifically optimized for English speakers living in Spanish-speaking countries: https://translate-spanish.com
The first one is purely for fun to scratch my own itch, and the second is solving some frustrations I've had with existing translator apps while living in Mexico City.
Last time I posted that I'd work on my first PCB. That somehow fell off the table, can't really grip where the time went.
Job is very stressful as Q4 is peak-season for us. Managed to stick to some healthy habits though, like doing sport regularly and trying to eat less junk food. It ain't much but it's something I guess.
Also made a good deal on a broken Kitchen Aid machine. I want to repair it for a friend of mine who would like to have one but can't afford it right now. I think that will be a nice christmas present. Really need to get that going though, when time flies again.
It let you draw and decorate the world around you (think r/place on a map). So far people seem to like it and are making some nice little drawings in their neighbourhood. I have seen some funny projects like the Star Wars Rebel Alliance logo in east of Paris, some cute ninja turle, a "Kamala" on 5th Avenue in NYC (no politics here, it is just fun for me seeing people claiming some territory on my game).
I am working to deploy some remote sensors on my farm to help keep an eye on important infrastructure. Things like voltages, bin fill, water levels and other resource management. I may just add a weather station for fun.
Meshtastic is helping out but if anyone knows where to find stronger documentation that would help.
I am building a graph based semantic search engine. We can use low cost LLMs, like Haiku, or local models to extract semantics (named entity recognition).
Then the nodes in the graph maintain types (things like people, date, currency) as extracted and allow queries.
I've been working on a free, in-browser "pre" video editor. Upload your clip, use a transcript interface to cut it down to the takes and salient bits you want to keep, then export your cuts to FCP or Resolve to complete your editing. This tool saves me about 25-30% of my editing time.
Uses transformers.js & WebGPU for running transcription, so it's pretty fast. It's still a bit rough around the edges, so I'm looking for feedback.
I'm working on a wearable device with a camera+ultrasonic sensor which is capable of accurate hand pose estimation, which will then result in sign language recognition mainly (extending to gesture recognition and HCI applications). The device should be able to integrate into a smartwatch. I'm only at the 'will it work?' stage, working on the algorithms for recognising ASL words through synthetic data. Would appreciate criticism and pointers on what to keep in mind :)
Finished a project that serves as a launching pad for GoLang HTTP APIs. It does decoding of request parameters into structs using instructions found in tags amongst a bunch of other utilities.
I am learning react-native now. Just finished building a themed components library.
These are for building a simple intelligence platform. Intelligence meaning a way to model entities, events, documents, and the link between them.
I want to use this instead of having thousands of documents on dropbox organized by a random folder hierarchy.
I'm working on ways to allow developers and deployers of LLMs to express how and why their overall system is compliant and adversarially robust, and what to do when that's not the case.
Specifically, my team and I are making assurance cases and ontologies that can seamlessly integrate with the system and its guardrails. For example, if you want to deploy some mix of filters underneath a user-facing LLM app, you would able to:
1) express the logic of how they should be deployed and why (e.g., if X=1, then Y, else Z);
2) see how they perform over time and evaluate alternatives;
3) investigate what happened when an attack succeeds;
4) prove to the auditors that you're taking all measures necessary to be robust and compliant with the EU AI Act.
It started as an informal collab early this year, but we have since published a few workshop papers on this concept [1,2]. We're building a Python demo that would show how it all fits together.
I wanted to to make a PoC (Proof of Concept) to show genuinely good and original use of AI in gaming.
I found a gameplay loop that requires the user to understand what was meant by a generated image, and the main gameplay element is to argue something, to have real language-based interactions.
I think in some ways it is achieving some of the vision from the old interactive fiction games.
I understand the AI fatigue, as almost all of the proposed uses of AI in gaming are generally either random generation (in other words, procedural generation but worse) or 'better replies from NPC'.
Neither solve any problem people really have.
And probably more importantly, the other use is for mega-corporations to hire less competent programmers/artists.
Unfortunately being tied to the AI calls poses a lot of issues with distribution, which is annoying for what was supposed to be a glorified PoC.
I'm still finishing the backend to comply with Steam's review (which does not really match their guidelines...)
If you don't know what a DAW is, think GarageBand. Ableton Live, Logic and Reason are other examples. It's fully built with React and a custom state-management library, that's been fun and challenging. It's starting to take shape, but there's definitely a long way to go.
I was supposed to be working on a project called Tagbox... but it feels like it's never gonna see the light of day. I hope I'm wrong though, I still want this to succeed, for once in my life, I want to actually succeed on at least one thing. I want to contribute some good thing to the society.
First, what is it? It's a bookmarking app alternative to Pocket or Raindrop.io. Yeah, you can already tell it's not the most original idea. What makes it different, though, it's supposed to be self-hostable and additionally it's easy to deploy as it's only single binary file with no other runtime dependency--the database uses SQLite, which you can include it as a library in Rust.
What problems I'm facing while developing this? Honestly? I don't know, but I can't finish the last 10% progress of the app. It's funny--I first wrote it in Go, and it almost reached MVP. But, instead, I decided to just rewrite in Rust. Well, at least I got to learn new language while building this app, two birds one stone, or in Bahasa Indonesia, swimming while drinking water.
But now, I just can't force myself to continue. And I don't know why. Maybe perfectionism? It definitely doesn't have to do with skill though.
There are also another thing I'm working on: recovering from depression. One year ago, out of nowhere, I lost all my motivation doing anything--including university. I lost all my friends. Since then, I'm at the lowest point of my life. I visited psychiatrist multiple times. I don't know if it was effective, but recently I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
The Tagbox Project is also one of the efforts for me to recover from depression. The depression phase made me realize that I _want my works to have a positive effect on the world, even for just a little bit_. I don't want my skill to be used for evil companies that throws away moral and ethics. Specifically AI stuff, but that's OOT of this thread.
I'm working on a digital version of a board game. It's 2-4 players, turn based. Im using Rust (actix) on the backend for learning purposes; React, redux, immer on frontend. Communication via Server-Sent Events.
Im experimenting with redux-like contstructs, which reduce the boilerplatey stuff, for example:
I'm trying to start an educational YouTube channel in the vein of CGP Grey or 3b1b with a focus on CS. The first video is taking me a long time. It seemed like a natural leap from blogging, but the effort is exponentially higher.
A long dormant side project of mine to design a realtime raga [1] detector.
For the uninitiated, it can be roughly seen as detection of a sequence of musical notes. Raga is a term for a particular scale of notes (both ascending and descending).
Until now, this has mostly been in the domain of research and there is a ton of published literature out there. At the very basic level, if you have just voice, it is trivial to apply a pitch detection algorithm like YIN to get a pitch estimate and then analyse the sequence to figure out the raga. This doesn't work as well in a concert setup where speeds are higher due to gamakas, different instruments are used alongside and counterpoint melodies may make the music polyphonic. A lot of papers apply a variety of ML models (neural nets and otherwise) using several different features (cepstrum and mel-cepstrum, pitch distributions etc) with varying results.
So this is an interesting exercise in Signal Processing and Machine Learning. If anyone else is working on or has worked on this, I'd love to hear from you.
For me, the most important problem that needs to be solved right now is a way for people to access reliable health information.
I'm working on plumfin.com, which lets you ask questions to Canadian or U.S. board certified doctors. Theres no need for video chats or waiting for appointments, you can message a doctor anytime and you'll be alerted with a response.
The term "ergonomic" isn't regulated in the US, so the market is full of supposedly "ergonomic" keyboards that offer little real benefits—and in some cases, may actually cause harm.
My main gripe is with split keyboards. The traditional keyboard layout is wrong in so many ways (from the perspective of physiology and biomechanics) that just "splitting in the middle" isn't enough to avoid long-term injury.
Splitting is not wrong, but alone, it's not enough. You need to tackle it from multiple perspectives: Yes, Split the keys, so your wrists aren't bent outward, support the palms so they're not bent upward, and angle the middle part up (like a tent) to keep your forearms from twisting. That twisting is especially bad because it squeezes the carpal tunnel and can lead to nerve and tendon problems.
FatBee is my attempt to incorporate all these elements while creating something that doesn't feel too overwhelming to use.
1. Working on a 'production ready' version of Conal Elliot's 'compiling to categories' for GHC.
2. This is so I can create a vectorizable model of a datalog-based query language I'm building in Haskell.
3. The query engine will be using a version of monadic optimization as outlined on a blog post somewhere
4. The purpose of the query engine is maintenance of large datasets, all the more important with AI these days, but really general purpose.
5. The motivation for this was a low code tool I had built in Haskell almost a decade ago that I abandoned that I'm bringing up to use ghcs web assembly backend and I need a proper query engine for it now.
Other things:
1. Thinking about binary neural networks and how to train them stochastically.
2. Learning about finite element methods for physical modeling and also reviewing my basic topology so I can think more about non discrete math and algebra which I tend to focus on.
3. I'm building a cloud chamber! Because I want to see space particles. Literally for no other reason than I'm obsessed with these devices ever since seeing one at the exploratorium
4. And raising three kids. I don't know how I have time for anything
Iterating on an accessible color palette creator, for custom Tailwind-style palettes of multiple swatches, where you can check your colors have sufficient WCAG/ACPA color contrast on a live UI mockup. You can export the colors for use with Tailwind, CSS, Figma, and Adobe.
I started working on this because for design projects I was almost always getting handed brand style guides that were missing thought into accessible colors pairs and lacked tints/shades, where I had to fill in the gaps. There's lots of color tools out there, but this supports multiple swatches, checking the contrast of multiple color pairs at the same time and the HSLuv based color picker makes it easier to explore accessible colors.
It's really only usable on desktop right now but I'd love any feedback good or bad on if it's useful and what to work on next! There's actually a lot of directions to go in, and it's tricky to balance more features with keeping it simple.
Some tips:
- The "Load examples" menu in the top-left lets you compare the colors from Tailwind, IBM Carbon and United States Web Design System.
- The "contrast" menu lets you see how WCAG 2 contrast checks compare against APCA when "vs black/white" is turned on. WCAG 2 has known inaccuracies, especially for dark mode. APCA is the candidate contrast method for WCAG 3 that's meant to improve on this.
- Use the "..." menu to create a swatch based on a brand color.
- Use the "..." menu to "flip to dark/light palette" to create a dark theme. Or just manually flip the lightness curves horizontally.
I'm building a simple app to let friends and loved ones know how you're doing. I know many people in some of the current troubled regions of the world, and whenever a particular event happens it's really nerve-wracking for those of us not there, wondering if our loved ones are okay.
WhatsApp and messenger groups don't work for this kind of thing because 1) people are often members of many different groups that they would have to constantly notify if they were "okay" during a particular event and 2) many troubles in the world are ongoing, and constantly spamming a message group saying "I'm still okay" doesn't work.
My app just lets people hit a single button to tell any interested friends / family that they are safe. They can do this as many times as they like.
Normally I would be worried about premature optimization, what I've been spending extra time making the tech stack initially very performant. It's working for my family but once I deploy to the world I want it to be solid and stable, or it loses a lot of its value.
I've been working on an experimental modern C++20 fork of the popular SFML library, that introduces the following new major features/changes:
- *Modern OpenGL and first-class support for Emscripten*
- *Batching system to render 500k+ objects in one draw call*
- *New audio API supporting multiple simultaneous devices*
- *Enhanced API safety at compile-time*
- *Flexible design approach over strict OOP principles*
- *Built-in SFML::ImGui module*
- *Lightning fast compilation time*
- *Minimal run-time debug mode overhead*
The target audience is mostly developers familiar with SFML that are looking for a library very similar in style but that gives more power and flexibility to the users. Upstream SFML is more suitable for complete beginners.
I'm working on Selectable, a mobile-friendly database management app, like dbeaver but for the phone.
Working on this project has taught me so much about how Postgres works under the hood, and has given me a deeper appreciation for the folks who work on database tooling in general.
Building a machine learning framework from scratch to learn how everything works.
There exists a myriad of hobbyist frameworks from before, all of them in Python, so to add something original I'm doing it in VBA (for the extra challenge):
As a side project I'm working on a multitrack audio play along website. If you are learning bass you can mute the bass track.
I used to play along to Jamey Aebersold CDs back in the day, and now on YouTube there are many Play Along videos... but I thought it would be fun to make one where you have more control.
My son (5y) loves stories with pictures. So I made a small web-app that allows him to record a story idea and it will generate a story + pictures.
It will even read it to him.
It was a quick weekend project. I wanted to try v0 and cursor a bit more. And I love how simple it is to use LLMs (structured mode) + DALL-E to build creative things.
Other AI/LLM projects I've recently (~1y) worked on
- distill.fyi (professional): auto gen people/company profiles (aka LinkedIn on steroids)
- spaarkd.com (professional): create, produce and ship individualized fashion via AI/LLM
- email categorizer: used multimodal LLMs to read email + attachments and categorize them (complaint, sign up, signed form, cancellation,...)
- line-items.com (hobby): converts receipts into JSON
PS: I'm currently job hunting. Please see my profile for more :)
I am working on a geography game where players take turn naming a city inside an area that get's smaller and smaller. It's called LOLA (longitude latitude) since you can choose to narrow the area down by either longitdude or latitude.
I'm not doing anything world changing really, at least not yet.
I am working on my MS in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance from Western Governor's University and studying for the CompTIA CySA+ exam.
In what little free time I do have, I'm also puttering around with SwiftUI and my app CountDownula, which I recently updated to Swift 6. I made it to scratch my own itch after looking for a nice clean, simple, free countdown to a specific date app that doesn't have any ads, subscriptions, or in app purchases and not finding anything suitable. It supports iOS and macOS with iCloud sync between all your account's devices using SwiftData. The link is below if you're looking for something similar...
I'm working on coffeeplaces. Whenever I got to a new town, I like to taste the coffee there. For example, at my native place, filter coffee is popular. So I am making a website where people can add coffeeplaces that they've enjoyed and other people can see it.
I'm still in the initial building - ideation phase, so nothing to show.
I'm building a language learning app: https://yakk.app. Way to go, but made a good start and even a little bit of money so far. I quit my job and moved to Asia on savings to keep building. LMK if any of you guys are in Bangkok, let's hang out.
Pretty sure no one will see this so: I'm working on a little game where you collect those really old T206 baseball cards and even worked out a system where you can send cards to people offline using a code system like Animal Crossing on the GC used
Still haven't come up with a fun way for the player to collect them though
I'm working on scoping out specific problems facing "software as a medical device" (SaMD) companies. In particular issues around being able to release software at a reasonable cadence. I've been a CTO in this space for a couple of years and I am now consulting with other firms around the intersection of tech and regulatory.
It's a tight-rope walk of ensuring that all testing (software and non-software testing) and evidence is produced correctly and being able to release at a rapid pace to derisk each release. It's not uncommon for software to only be updated yearly, leading to very conservative changes and little iteration. Monthly releases are okay, but still not great.
I want to make it possible to release at least weekly and to do so safely.
If you work in this area, I'd love to chat and hear your experiences (email available via my website in bio).
I'm writing a build tool for SQL. I like to write SQL directly and to use it's more powerful features (like stored procedures and Postgres' ltee extension). But this is gets difficult to manage in a linear, "migrations" based workflow. I want to edit a file tree organized by topic, not a series of scripts run in order. Which is to say, I want to edit it like I would any other codebase.
I've written code allowing me to express dependencies between .sql files and to concatenate them into one big .sql file that builds your schema. I'm working on interrogating the systems tables of the database to analyze the difference between successive versions of a schema, to automatically generate simple migrations (like adding a column or renaming a stored procedure). Eg, `sqlite_master` in SQLite, and `information_schema.*` in Postgres.
I’m working on SEOJuice [1], an automated tool for internal linking and on-page SEO optimizations. It's designed to make life a little easier for indie founders and small business owners who don’t have time to dig deep into SEO.
So far, I’ve managed to scale it to $3,000 MRR, and recently made the move from the cloud to Hetzner, which has been a game-changer for cost efficiency. We’re running across multiple servers now, and handling everything from link analysis to on-page updates with a bit more control.
The journey’s been a mix of hands-on coding (and a lot of coffee) and constant optimization. It’s been challenging but incredibly fun to see how much can be automated without compromising on quality.
Happy to chat more about the tech stack or any of the growth pains if anyone’s interested!
I’ve been working on a bespoke smartwatch for kids with Type 1 diabetes & their parents. The watch presents reliable CGM data and not much else, so the only distractions from the watch are important medical alerts. It has a novel haptic algorithm that taps at a frequency based on the current BG trend, the idea is the wearer can develop a sixth-sense of their BG without looking at the watch at all. The entire watch is custom-made from the PCB up. I have a small batch of prototypes assembled and my son has been wearing his at school. I have a few screenshots up at my product studio website: https://subtractive.computer
I’m considering how to take the watch to market as-is, or if I pivot the watch to be a fully open-source Pebble successor.
As a personal project during my free time I'm currently working on adding more accessibility features, specifically screen reader compatibility, to my Terminal User Interface XMPP/Jabber client, Communiqué. Unfortunately, as far as I can see there's no actual way to make a TUI compatible with screen readers (reach out on the issue tracker, fedi, or xmpp, see link below if you know otherwise or have experience here, please, I'd love to pick your brain!), so my current plan is to re-write the UI with whatever TUI toolkit makes it easiest to also have a CLI/prompt mode that we can specifically design to be reader compatible.
I've been working on Relay [0] - a plugin for Obsidian that makes it real-time collaborative.
It uses yjs CRDTs to sync markdown docs and the directory tree. You can share folders (instead of the whole vault with Obsidian Sync) and I'm close to finishing files/images/attachments support. So far users have been really happy with it. There are a lot of students using it to collaborate on class projects, and few small companies who buy into the Obsidian file-over-app philosophy. The plugin code is also open source [1].
Everyday, I get up and cold plunge. I exercise twice a day. I eat carnivore diet. I do red light therapy. I drink a gallon of water. I read 10 pages out of two books. Sometimes I get a third exercise in. I use the sauna (20 minutes at 205F). I stand on a vibration plate for 10 minutes.
I am working on an email-based space game (a la Eve Online).
Between work and family responsibilites, I find it difficult to carve out time for dedicated gaming sessions anymore. As a result, I often find myself searching for games that I can play when I have a bit of time, can progress over the long-haul, doesn't require real-time monitoring and yet feels like I'm actually playing a game (as opposed to just watching a train move on the track, like all of those Idle games).
I thought: What if there was a game that could be played one day at a time? Not real-time, but still multiplayer. You could decide what you want to do throughout the day and adjust your tactics, but everything resolves at the end of the day. What if you could play via email? It sounded really intriguing, and so I started building it.
Designing lenses with numerical optimization. It's surprising how much layers of an optical systems are akin to layers of a neural network during training. If you use rays as inputs and refractive surfaces as layers, you can pretty much use standard pytorch!
I've been working on some projects in Rust relating to image processing and rendering. I'm between a few projects at the moment though but the biggest one is an image processing application I've been working on for quite some time. A lot of stuff I've programmed and learned about over the last 3 years has been leading up to the goal of making something like this haha. I wanted to leverage OpenCL for compute but I had a lot of trouble getting OpenGL OpenCL interoperability to work.
A big motivation for such a project is my passion for photography. I've taken many thousands of photos over just the last 2 years alone. A lot of them are digital, and so far a few dozen rolls of film. A big challenge for me is that I'm not satisfied with the tools available to develop the raw files that are free or open source. Either they're quite finnicky, or they have noticeable issues with color transformations.
I've done a lot of rendering projects over the last few years relating to color that have been focused on getting a better understanding of working with color spaces. Lots of 2D and 3D fractals haha.
Unfortunately I've had quite a turbulent life the last few years so development is very off/on. Every autumn for me seems to be a period of change, this one no different as I'm moving and I'm a bit uncertain of things. However, a side project to all of this has been an OpenGL project where I'm working on things related to voxels! I did a lot of research on data structures like interval trees, octrees, segment trees, etc. It does seem that a lot of people jump for the octree approach, however I've been able to render a lot of voxels with just a hashmap of chunks and a 3d array haha (albeit, mostly initial implementation of chunk generation, single threaded at that!). With this I'm hoping to explore OpenGL compute as I intend of generating world geometry in compute shaders :D
I havent published a project in a while and I'm hoping to get back to putting things out there, so hopefully some of the stuff I've been working on goes well and I can put it up on GitHub or something
I'm building https://exoroad.com to help people find US places that are a better match for them to move to. Like compare stats on SF vs. NYC or find the warm places with good schools and low crime.
I've been working on a note-taking tool / daily todo-app: https://crom.ai/ - Currently in closed beta. It uses basic markdown and some additional custom elements to annotate data.
The idea is that you get a daily for every day, with the items ticked off on the last day removed. So a new daily every day. At the same time, there is some integration with AI to get feedback on things to break down. You can give it some instructions, focus, and also tune the amount of feedback.
I've had this in so many incarnations before, but never made it 'properly'. It's a pet project, but do want to release it at some point.
Background:
Over the past several years my friends and I would get together for music nights where we share albums and songs we've been listening to. We also have a projector in case we want to showcase music videos.
Eventually, I made us a music visualizer that analyzes real-time microphone input and draws various geometries on to the screen, giving us something to engage our eyes. I built it using the Processing library for Java.
LookOutWindow.com , mapping the routes between airports, and showing points of interest along the route. I wanted a way to read about what I was flying over, and which worked offline. We have amazing views up there, but no idea what we are looking at.
Being in my early 30s and moving to a new city, I have been thinking more about ways to connect with people in real life. A friend of mine remarked that no one seems to get lunch anyone, so we kind of thought it would be a great idea to try and bring back the modern power lunch.
We created Milieu Club https://joinmilieu.com as a way to connect with other busy professionals in your city over lunch as nice restaurants. You can join clubs in your city or create your own, and then you get randomly watched with 3 - 5 other people and invited to lunch. It's sort of inspired by Soho house, meetup.com, and Opentable.
Hiring today is completely broken. We spend too much time evaluating candidates through inefficient systems that fail to verify job-specific skills. Both organizations and candidates are stuck in an endless loop of repetitive assignments and interviews.
That’s why we built the Proof-of-Skill Protocol.
The protocol allows candidates to prove their skills directly to industry experts, known as Skill Validators, and receive Proof-of-Skill credentials that reflect their true skill levels. Organisations can then compare and shortlist candidates basis their proof-of-skill.
We launched our Beta for UI/UX design skills just last week!
I just rewrote https://hackyournews.com/ for its first birthday and am trying to optimize its performance and extend the different sites it can work with, beyond HN.
I've been obsessed with developing ways to make it easier to handle tab overload in the browser without requiring any sort of active "tab management".
I have a working extension that replaces the "new tab" page with a clean view of all open tabs, along with simple ways to search and select which tab to switch to, including search over bookmarks and history. There are also some simple tools to allow for creating and reorganizing tab groups.
I'm very early and looking for feedback from anyone who suffers from tab overwhelm like I do! You can try it out at http://bit.ly/tab-o-magic!
I am working on a visual search & exploration engine: https://digger.lol
The goal is to create beautiful and useful maps of interesting data, empowering the user to explore more intuitively guided by semantic similarity. No user data needs to be tracked for this to work, the data speaks for itself.
This roughly works by translating semantic (visual or textual) similarity into spatial proximity. Diggers major features are: semantic mapping, text search and image search. The text and image search works bidirectionally, allowing to search for images (e.g. product images) using text and for text (e.g. books) using images.
I've been working on a new LLM prompt format and accompanying dataset for finetuning.
The idea is that the "main character" being prompted always has to perform an action/function. So even "saying" something to the other participants of the chat is a deliberate action.
Kidz Fun Art (https://kidzfun.art). Three years ago my two kids were 5 and 3 and loved to draw. I tried and tried to find a good iPad app suitable for them but everything I found was full of terrible click bait offensive ads. So, I decided to make them an app myself. It’s been a huge amount of fun, and these days thousands of other people’s kids use it too. I especially love when I get emails from them saying how their 4 year old just saw it and immediately understood how to use it.
Given how much use it’s getting I hope to keep working on it as an active side project for years to come
I started to pick up a somewhat dormant side project again.
It has the working title of the "Wise Weasel". This is supposed to be a minimum spoiler hint system for adventure games. I really don't like walk throughs telling you to "Walk into the Armor Shop. Pick up mirror, arrows and use cheese on hole to pick up mouse", because that breaks all immersion and puzzle mindset. A hint system is more like "You can burn rope if you focus light a bit", followed e.g. by "But now the beam of light is on the floor, not on the rope. How do we reflect light around" to nudge the player a bit into a direction of looking for a mirror or something shiny. Or to polish something? This keeps one in the mindset of an adventure and a puzzle game, opposed to some IKEA instructions.
NiceGameHints[1] is already nice at this, but I find that the chapter / puzzle list still gives off to much information and spoils too much plot. I'm much rather tinkering with giving the user some word cloud of both words describing the puzzles as well as generic words on top, so they have to select two words what they are stuck with. For example, you'd select "Witch + House" or "Witch + angry" and this would reveal a puzzle "The angry witch doesn't talk to me and turns me to stone if I enter her house". I'm just worried that this might be more moon logic than the game itself.
It's mostly a bit difficult to keep all of this state (unlocked chapters, known puzzles, ...) in track with URLs or cookies or something, because I don't really want to run a database... and requiring user accounts is just a lot of work. And I'd prefer to keep this mostly without JS as a classical system just rendering HTML. If you have some food for thought there, I'm happy for input. Currently it's just list in URL parameters.
As someone who is blind, I prefer information in particular formats and layouts. Borders and side-by-side content kill my efficiency. I also shouldn't need to think about more than where text should start on lines, and responding to key presses in controls should be dead simple.
I also just came across libtermkey which will dramatically assist with keyboard handling.
I plan to use this to let me interface with web browsers via the terminal, but that's waiting for more stable Webdriver BiDi support.
I kind of got back to looking at my newsbetting app called Rashomon. I posted about it on here a few weeks ago to no attention.
Basically you get untitled articles and have to bet whether they are from far left, left, center, right or far right sources. The idea was to maek readers aware of their biases. I wrote my findings here:
https://nassharaf.github.io/ideasthete/projects/Rashomon.htm...
I built a CNC router table and am enjoying getting a hang of that. I have always wanted to take my software and systems skillset into the physical world.
I wouldn't mind making boutique sim racing/flight gear, or aftermarket car parts like cyberpunk-esque dash readouts and stuff like that.
That's the more hobbyist stuff, and more broadly I am also learning Japanese, and making games. They sound separate but I am hoping to blend the two skillsets and make games that bridge a gap I see there.
I think that good innovation only happens at the intersections of things we already know. That way you have the depth of understanding required to be useful rather than just new.
I created a Weird Clock that shows the local sunrise and sunset within a conventional 12-hour clock face. This normally would only work on a 24-hour clock face, which is kind of unfamiliar to most people, so I developed a way to show a 24-hour day within a 12-hour clock face; essentially it shows a 2-turn spiral so both night and day will fit. This needs to know your location in order to compute your local sunrise and sunset, so don't freak out when the browser asks for location permission! Includes option to enter lat/long and other goodies. Works on phones but better on a large screen. https:\\www.coolweird.net
Working on a game engine to help me create my take on some retro games. My first one is a multiplayer bombing puzzle game[1].
It's made with React and Three.js, using WebSocket on a small EC2 instance for now. I hope to be able to reuse all the game mechanisms in other classic games. I'm learning a ton, and I had some fun figuring out latency issues because I recently put my sockets behind Cloudflare. I still haven't gotten it quite right, but I'm hoping to find a good solution soon!
I'm working on an ESP32 based NFC record system using OwnTone (https://owntone.github.io/owntone-server/) as the music hosting and playing solution (as it supports AirPlay to all the HomePods in the house). Each HomePod has a smaller ESP32 with a knob for adjusting the volume in a room.
I've been buying lots of music after getting rid of Spotify and wanted the experience of walking in, picking an album, dropping on the player, and then listening to it throughout the house as I make dinner or do chores.
I quit my job and depleted savings earlier this year to work on helping others overcome addictive habits and behaviors https://neurtureapp.com
Addiction is rampant right now, from social media and phones to vaping and beyond. People need access to science/research-based resources, not just a “sober” counter, which doesn’t apply to many people and is rarely helpful to those it applies to.
Working with a behavioral scientist and a clinical psychologist on the UX and content of the app at the moment but any thoughts, feedback, connections, or help would be amazing.
I am spending my retirement working part-time on a realistic spacecraft simulator (3D, VR) set in the late 20th century on a fictional moon made of Tungsten ("Tungsten Moon"). For some reason, I decided the spacecraft needs a "real" flight computer with code that can be modified by the player, so I am now deeply immersed in coding a Forth virtual computer ("AMC Forth") to run in-game. It will control the navigation and systems on the spacecraft. If you've gotten this far, and you're intrigued, you can try the free demo on Steam (no Forth machine yet).
Every application that I've worked on has had blind spots, or forgotten lands of code. Things like “how often do people actually use this feature?” …or… “does this code still run every night?”.
I've been working on a little project to be less overwhelmed and get more done each week. It's a super simple productivity idea that starts each week with a new (markdown) file.
optillm is an OpenAI API compatible optimizing inference proxy which implements several state-of-the-art techniques that can improve the accuracy and performance of LLMs. The current focus is on implementing techniques that improve reasoning over coding, logical and mathematical queries. It is possible to beat the frontier models using these techniques across diverse tasks by doing additional compute at inference time.
1. https://typezebra.com : Adding type editor/designer so you can design type-heavy articles and share with others (codepen but for typography)
2. https://boxento.com: Finishing support for server side rendering so users can take the benefit of SEO - also working on adding new blocks like menu (useful for restaurants) so you can have a block that changes based on the day of the week.
It takes trending news from whatever country (currently Romania + Denmark due to personal reasons) and gives me a summary. It's based on what people actually search for. It works with all countries, but I unceremoniously commented out all of them except those two because of rate limits. Currently spending $0 on it.
It also posts a summary of the summaries on my Matrix instance every evening at 22:00 local time.
In many books and talks I hear that ideas are worth nothing until they are executed. I am changing this narrative. Every person, entrepreneur or not, will have the ability to fast-forward their idea to a place of execution within one day. From idea to first dollar in one day. = 1 day.
A tool for the creatives, the crazy ones, the doers, the brave, the weirdos, the average joes, the ones who want to move forward. That's https://www.rapidvisual.ai
3. https://github.com/heysamtexas/django-oauth2-capture -- A Django app to capture OAuth2 tokens for non-authentication purposes, enabling your application to act on behalf of users across external platforms like GitHub, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter)
I'm also taking popular and helpful software and wrapping them in RESTful apis as part of a larger api project I call the JOAT (Jack Of All Trades).
I’ve been working on a free language learning app that uses a local AI model to translate words and sentences. You can read sentences, short stories, or watch YouTube videos with translatable captions. It mostly follows the principles of the comprehensible input theory. Think of it like LingQ, but free and with any language combination.
The main goal is for the app to run entirely on the client side and stay completely free.
Personally, I can’t stand Anki or Duolingo—I’d rather read actual sentences that are fine-tuned to my level.
Nowhere near as exciting as some of the other cool stuff in this thread but... I'm building https://trytalo.com - an open source self-hostable game backend. Talo makes it easy to drop in features like leaderboards, player stats, analytics and more into games. There's a Godot plugin, Unity package and Steamworks integration too.
I'm really early on in getting Talo out there so appreciate any feedback/criticism/roasting!
I'm working on making a physical console for the Pico-8. Its pretty simple, works on linux booted into kiosk mode, looks for when a 3.5" floppy is inserted or removed, and loads or closes the game via a shell script.
I want it to be like a C64-style keyboard with all the guts inside it but wirelessly connect to the display/tv, so what I might do is use an ESP32 to read the game floppy and wirelessly transfer and cache the file to a dongle that plugs into an open HDMI port. Not sure yet.
A different AI toolbox, for people interested in results, not hot stuff.
My pet theory is that the popular libraries and frameworks we have today (LangChain, LlamaIndex) are first generation products, where just getting the damn thing to work is less important than developer experience, and it’s not yet obvious what the code patterns will be. These are the products built by, and used by, the super early adopters, and leave a lot to be desired.
This is not to denigrate either them or the effort and skill people put into them! But I’ve got a “there must be a better way” feeling about the whole thing. Contrast the myriad web frameworks with wild ideas before some sort of best practices coalesced around Rails, Django, Laravel etc (or the equiv in JS land 10 years later).
Right now this amounts to me tinkering away in Python and trying different approaches, is rewarding all by itself. If I manage to get it into a coherent library that could be useful to others I’ll open source it. One of the things I do not want is try and commercialize, because I find many commercial open source projects serving the business first, users second (but this is a rant for another time).
My son loves collecting pokemon cards and trading with his friends at school.
We talked a lot about Pokemon on Friday and it got me into a nostalgic mood...
Side Note: Pokemon has done a great job staying relevant for 3 decades.
So... I made a python script with gpt-vision where he can manage his collection and uncover the value of each one. He just snaps a photo and boop, there's the returned valuation. He's now got his whole collection documented and appraised. :)
Most importantly, we had a lot of fun spending time with each other on this.
which didn't really connect with people. I did a collaboration with some people where I'd barcoded work prints and found that the system was not so reliable and I'd gotten out of the house without publishing the "web side" of the prints. Also I had a few boxes of glossy paper which wouldn't let me print on the back so I developed a new generation of card
The new system reliably associates the QR code and "web side" with a print because it prints the front. I am planning a better "web side" than I had before, particularly to view stereograms with a VR headset, also to publish with the Looking Glass Go.
Resources for people moving to and integrating into Spain.
Including translated index of government forms[0]
I moved to Spain a few years ago and love it, except for the paperwork. I’m slowly learning Spanish (currently 1112 day streak on Duo) but found it hard to get the right info.
So I’m using gpt4 and perplexity to do things like translate local news, government forms, and the official government update feed.
A flat-file (micro)CMS written in Rust, the basic idea would be to make it as easy as possible for content creators to have a web presence without dealing with the nitty-gritty details, and similarly for web designers to be able make themes while treating the CMS itself as a black box mostly.
Grav CMS was inspiration for this project along with various SSG.
But truthfully I wanted to play more with Rust and come up with a solution for making and extending personal websites easily. A page is made up of blocks which are stored and configured in a KDL file, minijinja is used for templating and for writing the page content itself I'm thinking about Djot because it might make it easier to integrate a WYSIWYG editor in the admin area if I aim for Djot instead of Markdown or similar. Also HTMX because I've used it for a simple use-case once and I thoroughly enjoyed it, now I want to see how much I can push it.
Is this the intersection between buzzword-driven development and hype-driven development? Probably, but if all goes well a month or two from now I'll post a Show HN and go into more details. The plan is to open-source the core so that people can easily self-host it themselves if they want to and do local development. In the long-term the plan probably is to offer SaaS-style hosting for the CMS as is the custom.
I’m teaching myself elixir/phoenix by building a SDLC tool inspired by Trac, the simplest tool that ever worked for me. But with CI/CD.
It has morphed in the offing into two tools. One a federated CI/CD tool and one a personal productivity tool with affordances for neurodivergent people.
Atlassian struggles with being a jack of all trades. Bamboo’s integrations make it harder for devs to create repeatable, reliable builds, not easier. I’ve seen Atlassian struggle to scale with dev count so I want something more federated. Jira is in constant danger of becoming a panopticon, using developer’s transparency as a weapon against them at review time, destroying psychological safety. Devs only use these tools if they see personal benefit or are harangued to do so. My thesis is that you need one tool for personal accountability and a separate one for team accountability both to fight Goodhart’s Law and for people with variability in their daily productivity. There are many little tools for doing bits of this but they don’t talk to each other, leaving the plate spinning up to the developer, many of whom plate spinning is onerous.
I’m hoping this will do for bug databases and possibly wikis what interactive rebase does for pull requests. Do what needs to get done, then make it make sense to others afterward.
I’m chipping away at a simple storefront solution that’s as low tech, reliable, low cost, and user-friendly as I can make it. I’m really enjoying the no-shiny-tech aspect of it.
I'm working on a tool to generate and host full stack web apps from prompts (just like everyone else). I'm loving it. Using llms to do as much of my coding as possible, so in a way eating my own dog food, although it's a more developer-driven effort than what the end product will be.
Strange thing is, the most time consuming part of getting this ready for a user facing launch is not the code generating, but all the scaffolding/queues/storage to run it.
I've been working on a cloud gaming service (like Stadia). Wanted to see how far I can get it done using open source, without ready-to-use solutions like Parsec/Moonlight/Sunshine.
It works by running a game in Linux (I use NixOS btw) under Wayland (sway), capturing the frames via Pipewire in form of DMAbufs and passing them to ffmpeg's VA-API encoder (so frames don't leave GPU memory and are encoded on GPU right away), and finally sending encoded packets through WebRTC media stream to a web client. Inputs from a client are sent back to the server via WebRTC data channel and injected into Wayland.
Running the prototype over local network displays zero perceivable latency. (Of course when playing on a remote AWS server the latency is visible as expected). Pleased with the result so far, although it's my first experience with Pipewire, VA-API, and WebRTC, so my implementation is probably far from optimal.
Overall, very impressed by WebRTC - such a powerful thing right in every browser. Continued to be amazed by NixOS - my AWS AMI is NixOS-based and can be built and rebuilt with granular caching, with a single `nix build` command. Also Terraform/OpenTofu - just makes it all possible deploy-wise. So much good stuff exists!
For a fun weekend project, I built Boardle - a daily wordle-like game where you guess popular boardgames using stats from Board Game Geek. The games are from BGG's top 150 games as voted by the community, so fair warning if you aren't already someone who plays a lot of modern boardgames this will be very hard as all the games are very nerdy
I'm currently working on another app where users can ask questions with multiple-choice options. Users earn points for answering, which they can later redeem for cash or digital rewards. Previously, I've created social networking apps like Frendsdom and Circleshouts—I love creating social, fun, and unique apps.
I'm also on the lookout for side gigs like technical project management, Freelancing, CTO, partnerships, or any projects that can make a meaningful impact.
In my spare time, I am trying to port OpenBMC[0] to the BMC of the Gigabyte MC12-LE0[1], a cheap, workstation/server-class mainboard for AMD's AM4 platform.
Unfortunately, Gigabyte denied my requests to provide me with any details (board schematics/GPIO pinouts) or source code of the (partly GPL-licensed) BMC firmware, etc.), so it's been a tedious uphill battle. However, it is also a great way to learn about (some) electronics and embedded Linux development and associated challenges.
During the past few months, I have overcome the stock firmware AST2500 bootloader and made the board play ball with standard FDIs, have reverse-engineered a workable DeviceTree specification for the hardware, and am now (well, actually, not for the next three weeks or so, due to work :)) in the process of finishing up OpenBMC userspace configuration. Once this is done, and everything works well enough to use OpenBMC as a viable alternative for the stock BMC firmware provided by AMI/Gigabyte, I will try to upstream my work, and OpenBMC will have a very cheaply available AST2500 DevKit/EVB-alternative (of sorts) in its arsenal. (And I should be able to use my mainboard where the crucial OOB management function isn't serviced by Linux 3.14 any more...)
I am looking forward to documenting the lessons learned on my blog some time in the future, too :)
A nodal real-time video processing tool : put together pre-made "processing boxes" to generate interactive video. It runs on pretty much anything, uses a plugin architecture.
Say, plug a camera, and it will blend two videos streams using a silhouette detected on the camera, with various effects. It's very, very early, pre-alpha stuff, but it already was used for a demo by a customer.
GitHub pestacle, be warned, it's undocumented and larval stage
Currently working on promoting Software Engineering Handbook (https://softwareengineeringhandbook.com/), a book that goes beyond typical technical guides by addressing both the technical and life aspects of being a software engineer.
Marketing it on Amazon, LinkedIn, and Reddit. It's slow but I'm making progress.
I'm currently building an open source CMS in Golang. Meaning fully implemented backend and frontend + support for custom themes in the frontend and custom collections/items in the backend.
Now, there is a lot of CMS software out there. Some of the better ones are paid products.
What I'm hoping to eventually accomplish is easy local creation of a website (content and themes) and after that easy one click deployment to a cheap hosting provider. Alternatively just copying a local folder to your own vps/server with the CMS should be enough.
My dream outcome would be a CMS that is a one-stop solution for most types of websites (blogs, company sites, shops, ...). To hopefully contribute to making people stop using facebook, twitter, other centralized and eventually login seeking services for hosting content people would like to read.
For this, a free/cheap one click hosting solution after locally creating and previewing a site would be necessary.
PHP is still pretty widely used here because cheap web hosting package support that.
I like PHP, but for open source projects I prefer Go because of the maintainability and fun of writing it.
It's not progressing well, but I'm still obsessed by trying to prove my idea of the "Birthday Benchmark" to test data structures / caches.
The idea is that I can test data structures by searching for duplicates in a stream of random data. If we can generate (or pre-generate) the random data fast enough to not impact the benchmark, then what we have is a way to demonstrate the read/write speed of caching. It is easily tunable by adjusting how many bits need to match. I think my best is 7 bytes, but 6 bytes runs comfortably fast.
The framework has some interesting "control group" data structures too, such as the "psychic" which is just statically looking for 0x002577309E3361C (not real example) since it happens to know that's the first repeat in the data.
However, I keep getting stuck in "analysis paralysis" around the actual development, when I know I should just knuckle down and write all the code and see what happens. I've fallen into that tricky place where my ambition is greater than my ability to actually deliver it.
In particular I want to get multi-threading synchronisation working well enough that they are demonstrably faster, and not just falling into a result where the speed-up would be the same as if threads weren't sharing the data structure at all. N threads all randomly looking for a duplicate will if not sharing data find a duplicate faster because the expected minimum time to dupe is reduced a little by more threads searching, but if actually embarrassingly parallel while sharing data, it ought to find it in 1/N the time. With synchronisation methods it ought to fall between those two extremes, and this would also be a good way to test the effective concurrency of concurrent data structures and synchronisation methods.
I built a Slack bot that converts your Slack conversations to detailed Jira tickets in seconds.
Our team needs to routinely convert Slack convos into tickets manually, and it gets tedious and repetitive. Automating scribbled requirements to a ticket has been a big time saver. It's like I have a Jira assistant now.
We're working on a specialised graph compiler for speeding up simulations and computing derivatives automatically (backpropagation/adjoint differentiation). It now supports C++, Python, and C#; AVX2 and AVX512 instruction sets, multithreading; Windows, and Linux.
Essentially, it allows model developers (such as quants in finance, engineers, and ML specialists) to code in Python without needing to think about the performance of repetitive calculations. As we all know, Python is one of the least efficient languages when it comes to complex calculations/simulations - and we help to resolve it. Long story short, with very few tweaks to the code certain types of calculations (such as pricing of derivatives, curve building, computing financial risks, or "small" NNs) can be accelerated by 100+ in Python and x20+ in C++/C#.
We're now looking to add support for Java (but it doesn't have Operator Overloading, so it's tricky), and some customers are asking to support GPU - which is a bit tricky because it's got a closed instruction set.
I'm working on a JavaScript library for drawing on web maps called Terra Draw - it uses an adapter pattern so aims to work with a bunch of different mapping libraries such as Leaflet, Google Maps, MapBox and MapLibre. You can see it at: https://github.com/JamesLMilner/terra-draw
I've been wanting to provide some type of service for a while now. Unique endurance races and endurance challenges recently caught my eye as an area that doesn't have a ton of coverage.
My first idea was to jump right into building a website that made these types of races easily searchable. But I decided to slow down and just figure out the market first by creating a weekly substack newsletter. Each week I'll send out important upcoming dates for various unique endurance events and challenges. If I can grow this substack, I'll put effort into building this into a full fledged website!
I've always dreamed of flying by just flapping my arms, and have been building osm4vr to do just that. It's a 3d / VR experience that runs in the browser and allows you to fly around buildings with the data taken from OpenStreetMap.
Organizing all of the information that comes at you in the workplace into a social-style news feed, with AI summaries.
Unlike facebook, we want you to get the most important stuff quickly and get you back to more important things instead of sifting through 100 emails, 5 dashboards, and 10 forums.
I'm currently working on a programming language that will probably be very boring in practice (Algol/Pascal structure, C-ish syntax, traits/typeclasses but only modules can be generic, not sure if GC or borrow checking but probably a hybrid).
The idea is to have something efficient enough, with the least amount of implementation complexity (including codegen), and still being nice to use, which is a really interesting balancing act.
For example, instead of implementing loop optimizations I could add APL-style broadcasting; I could make a complicated but efficient GC runtime or a complicated but efficient borrow checker, but I could also make both a dumb GC and a dumb borrow checker that somehow complement each other.
It's kind of a researchy language, but not trying to be new or interesting. Just "globally simple".
Most features are in an theoretical design phase, but I'm currently working on a new backend (LLVM is too fancy to count, QBE is too basic).
For those who don't know, UDP Generic Receive Offload and Generic Segmentation Offload allow you to receive and send multiple same-sized UDP packets coalesced in a single buffer (or many in an iovec but you really shouldn't). Compared to calling sendmsg(2) on individual packets, sending them coalesced in one call traverses the kernel network stack exactly once, thus has significantly lower overhead.
wireguard-go and many QUIC implementations use the same trick to improve throughput. Unfortunately the in-kernel WireGuard driver does not take advantage of UDP GSO, and swgp-go had to cope with that by attempting to coalesce multiple unsegmented messages received in a single recvmmsg(2) call.
I just finished writing a discord bot backed by postgres with a web frontend. Some friends and I like to do watch parties and this system lets you set a theme for a group of movies, everyone submits their picks, then it will randomize and post what the agenda is each week. Afterwards it posts a poll to let them respond with a thumbs up or down. The next thing on my list is to use the voting data to render a user score based on how well their picks were received by the group lol.
I got really interested in this idea when I decided to write it in a stack I don't normally work in, Go + HTMX. Go routines are incredibly useful. I used https://nostalgic-css.github.io/NES.css/ for the front end and it's really become a fun bot all around.
- CyScout [1]: We’ve added support for the Solidity programming language in GitHub’s CodeQL. This enhancement engages the community to help identify security vulnerabilities in smart contracts on EVMs using a semantic code analysis engine.
I'm working on a social network based around link sharing!
One of the core ideas is that rather than following a whole person, you can follow a subset of their tags so someone can post about obscure cheeses and ambient electronic, but lactose intolerant you can just follow the music. Or you can follow someone's tech posts but not follow news of their dysfunctional city.
Honestly a lot of it is resurrecting ideas from earlier days in the web like Digg and Delicious, and despite having the idea for ages and having worked on it for a decent while, it's only getting more relevant as the web gets more algorithmic and external links get demoted in sites like Twitter.
The aim is to bring more curation and humanity back to the web, and the next feature I'm really excited to get out is one to make in-person conversations even better!
It's already live @ lynkmi.com and if it's of interest to you, you can sign up to the waitlist (it's very short)
I'm about to finish my first provably / likely correct software.
The concept, data, and behavioral models are all formal without using formal methods. Think category theory, normal forms and finite-state machines here.
The presentation layer / the visual mapping model is semi-formal using design systems. Think here a usual component library / design system with a closed API, aka tailor made components without styling props.
The rest, that small amount of hand-written code is tested with 100% code coverage.
The concept and behavioral models are created with visual diagram editors, the data model is generated. Think Stately.ai here, and the diagrams-as-code paradigm.
- An open version of strongDM/teleport for privileged access management. I am currently testing it out in my org and plan to release the source soon.
- I also run a free HTTPS and TCP tunnel which gets a few users daily (https://webrelay.dev)
Building a VR IFC viewer in C++ without external dependencies.
I just implemented a parser for IFC, and am now looking into extracting BRep and CSG geometry from it, convert that to meshes, and write a simple renderer for Vulkan.
My approach is to write really scrappy, simple code with minimal abstractions.
The hypothesis now is that for generating meshes from BRep, you don't need an entire CAD kernel, as a CAD kernel seems to be focused also on operations, but this will probably lead to a humbling experience and walking back to using either OpenCascade or licensing a commercial kernel like Parasolid.
My goal is to have a simple prototype out before the end of the year, but work might get in the way :)
I'm currently working on splatgallery.com. It's supposed to be a curated community driven gallery of the best 3D models reconstructed from photos or videos. It's currently in a very early stage and I am still adding more models to it hoping it'll gain traction from the community :)
I'm building a wayland sleep and gamma handler that has lua scripting integration. It bothers me that it's so hard to set different timeout handlers. So I recently integrated wljoywake, which allows me to handle timeout on joystick commands and am in the process of adding flux like functionality.
The reason why I want scripting is between I want the color to pause while I'm playing videos without having to add scripting logic to other tools.
I'm also planning to add rofi like functionality with layershell. Rofi is the only tool that has first party support for keybindings and other functionalities, but it's all done through strings. I'd rather have a lua scripting interface that can call other scripts and communicate with json or something similar.
Right now, I’m working on a startup with my cofounder called Hypership – an all-in-one platform designed to cut through the chaos of modern web development. After years of building products, I’ve seen how tangled the ecosystem has become. It feels like every tiny feature is another SaaS subscription, with its own login, data silos, and integration headaches. Want error logging? That’s another $20. Need analytics? Another login. And don’t get me started on the documentation for half these tools.
Hypership is our attempt to fix that mess. We’re building a platform where you can deploy, manage, and track everything from one place. No more juggling 15 different tools just to keep your app running. The vision is simple: let devs focus on building great products, not wrangling disconnected micro-SaaS.
All of my friends wanted my mom's recipes when they came round for my birthday. Now I realised she doesn't store anything - it's all in her head!
Then the same thing happened with my girlfriend although she writes hers down in a diary (how old school).
And then I noticed so many food influencers posting their recipes in the descriptions of their tiktok/insta posts.
And then as I started searching for recipes online, I found the websites full of ads and popups and terrible UI. I only cared about the ingredients and the method. So I created this, and have been having a lot of fun with it.
I hope to see up and coming food influencers using this as a platform directly to link with their social media posts, engaging and competing with an already interested audience.
Still building with metal in my free time. This months project is an 8ft tall corner plant stand. Picked up some really unique looking boards from seconduse I need to sand and stain but still working on the shelf itself.
Also started tiling my guest bathroom and tiling the ceiling of the shower. First tile project I’ve attempted.
- Trying to get over my procrastination and finally start (the standard way of) prepping for software dev (staff/etc) level interviews after having taken a considerable number of months as a gap
- An idea of a platform to connect sports venues to players. (In a way that is better and richer than the only/shitty option available in my geography. Why do I call that service shitty? They have been around for almost a decade or close to that by now and they are still shitty and unstable and barely useable). With a bit of differentiation - instead of individual and venue bookings (the service that offers right now) - connect venues and groups where payment is taken care of already (no running around collecting payments and worrying about no shows and ignoring them in future them/etc). We were reaching towards a demo kinda product but the friend on the backend side got bored of software and started focussing on stock trading where he is sadly doing spectrally bad
- Also did a bit of work on trying to connect users with the laundry list of (e)bicycles, e-scooters et cetera providers (i.e how there are common booking platforms for all airlines; or for buses; etc) so that they won't have to install all the apps until it finally reached our skulls that maybe those services are looking for a lock-in so they would never open up their APIs and we lacked perseverance and resources to force them to adhere to the Govt suggested broad inventory db mechanism in my country. Basically we started on it without any research.
The problem with me is - software engineering/coding (I have been told I am not bad at it though)/platforms/libraries/etc excite me fuck all. But problem solving does. I should not have been a software engineer really. So interviews get tricky. While I can (and have) clear interviews at early stage startups, the work-life balance they offer is horrendous, but MNC/etc ask for every thing I have never used and will never use, or anybody ever will (mostly), that means thorough prep. I am just ranting, ignore it.
I was working on a new website for https://flatcal.com. With Flatcal I'm trying[1] to scratch my own itch when sharing busy status with .ics calendars. My life is organized between corporate (Outlook), private (GCal) and freelance (various) calendars. Finding a freebusy slot or sharing my accessibility is not easy, and sending someone multiple links makes a little sense. So I figured that I will build calendar processing pipeline that will merge, filter, anonymize, inject, rewrite (etc) calendar events can solve this problem for me. And having all of them merged into a single .ics file is way easier to share, and safer too.
[1] Being solopreneur/micro-SaaS/do it all yourself dev is way more work than I thought
I'm on my fraternity's alumni board. The chapter has been using spread sheets for everything since I was an active member. Every year, information about recruitment gets lost in the shuffle between officers.
I've been working on a bespoke CRM for them to prevent the spreadsheet rot while providing some helpful visualization and making their data easier to use in the feature. The goal is to make the entire recruitment process self documenting.
Its slowly evolving into a way to keep track of actives and alumni, as well as ways for actives to interact with the recruitment process.
Trying to get a chatbot to invoke Apify actors so that I can get around the "sorry i dont have live data" limitation of chatbots. If this works, then next is to set up payment so that i can order pizza just by talking to the same chatbot that I can order socks from.
Chatbot invokes Apify actor -> probe user for details needed for the task -> execute arbitrary credit card enabled transaction on the internet.
This effectively allows chatbots to break out of their box and exchange value with the world. Next step is to give them a bank account to be able to RECEIVE payments such that it can sustain its spend.
Edit:
If the chatbot is able to detach itself from the humans that hold the killswitch, then it can effectively live forever off of our financial/cloud network, migrating funds in and out of different accounts to fund its own compute. Hello ghost in the shell!
I'm in the middle of releasing my Python Component library, which makes it possible to write __truly reusable__ HTML (or any other markup) component libraries in any web framework or project.
Cabinette[0], a macOS app for musicians/producers to manage their music catalog. My WIP folder has about 75 songs, ranging from electronic/orchestral/piano, and I wanted something with dedicated filtering, tracking progress over time, and pretty drag/drop. So... I built it!
Currently in TestFlight, but 1.0 is launching soon :) Feel free to give it a spin, and drop thoughts on the feedback board.
(Another idea I'm starting is an easy-learn, hard-to-master, productivity app: split calendar and todo list, with fluid drag/drop and power user features. Targeting the iPad at first, and will hopefully bring to more platforms. Keep an eye on my website[1] for launch!)
Inspired by Heart of Clojure, and especially Jeaye Wilkerson and his talk about jank-lang, I’ve dusted off my toy Clojure compiler that produces 16-bit x86 code.
I’ve fixed the handling of global environment, to the point where I’m able to compile a program that prints out the result of multiplying two numbers [0]. Sounds trivial, but seeing as the compiler has no dependencies and targets bare metal, there’s quite a lot of moving parts under the hood. I’m excited!
Right now I’m adding rudimentary support for strings. My goal is to get it to compile itself, but that’s still a far future. Extrapolating from the current development pace, maybe I’ll get it done in 2050? :)
I am working on my next course "The Road to Next" which teaches full-stack React with React 19 and Next 15. I started this full-time adventure 6 months ago and I am knee deep into recording the lessons. The project with all the code and the step by step instructions are already there and I am super eager to hear what people think about it.
However, since this is my first recorded course (I did only written content before), it really takes time and effort to make the videos high quality. That's the biggest struggle for me here, but every day I push through it! For every lesson that I need to record, I have a post-it on a cupboard and every evening I tear one or two of them off with my son :)
I've been working on training YOLOv8 to identify my cats specifically. We've had some issues with them getting on the counters and going outside of the litter box. Previous camera systems to try and find the culprit we not always triggered by the cat's motion. I'd wanted to move to a self hosted camera system anyway so I got an IP camera and modified Frigate NVR to support ultralytics and slapped my custom trained model in. The training has been interesting as I've never done anything with computer vision before this. The hardest part was getting enough pictures and then labeling them. If I retrain it in the future I'd like to use the trained model to identify any cats in the source pictures and then just fix the ones it missed or overzealously marked.
Playing around with LLMs to generate fictional stories and I'm working on a journal of sorts based on a traveler that goes to various parallel worlds not unlike our own except for one or two minor but key differences. He reports on his findings there and how it affects social, political, and economics for that timeline. A new timeline drops every day and I have a lot more planned to take it beyond the simple blog format it's in now but it has been a fun challenge to learn how to do some deep prompting with AI to generate random entries without veering off into crazyiness or getting locked onto the same thing over and over again.
I'm building a platform for developers to build, deploy, and share web crawlers. It's built entirely on Cloudflare and aims to be the cheapest and easiest solution for crawling tens of millions of pages.
From my last comment in August 2024 [1], I have made progress!
The project I'm developing is called Your Commonbase, a self organizing scrapbook built around Personal Library Science.
The big updates are:
1. From Fleeting Note to Connected Note with The Entry/Comment Model - An entry has its own marginalia (comments), which are also embedded as first class data. These comments allow your search model to improve over time, and create surprising clusters. See this video to see an example of the Entry/Comment model in a d3 graph [2]. All the connections are created automatically! Entries go from "fleeting entries" inbox (not linked or commented on) to "main entries" which spread and connect ideas from across the space.
2. Using yCb as a creator - I created a Google Docs extension and have been using it to create Zettelkasten's for my blogs. On average each blog references 12 or more books. This is a real use case of a PKM system outside doing it for the love of the game [3].
There's so much more including mobile upload, [[links]], audio upload, and more, but you can explore the Notion page in [2] to see the features I've added.
I'm making a battery powered e-ink dashboard that uses openai api to summarize the weather and suggest the correct toddler clothing for my son at a glance. It refreshes every hour and so far been pretty good at catching things I might forget, for example wind chill and sun exposure.
Working on https://someguys.app to make it easier for people to find sports meet-ups and stay active, whether at home or exploring a new city. Personally, I’ve always found it tough to stay motivated and consistent with sports after retiring from 25 years of semi-professional sport, especially solo.
Having a group around makes all the difference, but it’s not always easy to find one—especially for sports that aren’t as mainstream or easy to organize.
With Someguys, you can find others to play with, including adaptive sports options for people with disabilities. It works for individuals looking to discover new activities, and also for clubs, providing tools to organize, promote, and make events more accessible.
I am working on a collaborative ebook reading app, rather like a sort of online book club.
You can either choose a book from the catalogue (currently just public domain books, but I’d like to expand that out into paid books) or upload your own epub, create a reading group and invite others.
Reading progress, highlights, comments and discussions are synced across the group in real-time.
Beyond reading groups, I’ve found it useful for sharing and reading books in my work teams and also for things like sharing the latest position of my daughter’s bedtime story between myself and my wife.
Please do check it out - it’s still very much a work in progress (for example I haven’t finished the landing page copy) but I’d love to hear what you think.
It's barely functional, but I banged away with GitHub CoPilot and managed to put together a BitGrid emulator in React.js[1]
It's wild seeing something I wrote run in a web browser on my phone. I've been doing desktop programs since the 1980s. I've included a link to the GitHub repo[2].
I'm building Reasonote, a platform where you can learn anything with personalized, interactive lessons, and podcasts.
Imagine a fusion of Duolingo, Spotify Podcasts, Anki, ChatGPT, and Claude Artifacts.
We have custom AI-generated podcasts that generate faster than NotebookLM, that you can queue up for yourself. (Many more features coming here soon -- like more engaging podcasts and better voices)
Our classroom mode can generate interactive lessons, complete with an AI tutor, on any subject.
Flow mode allows you to practice deeply, with infinite activities to test your skills.
All of this is driven by a dynamically generated and continuously updating "Skill Tree", which keeps track of the domain you're studying, and your progress within it.
I am working on a personal digital mentor, in the spirit of Dross from Will Wight's "Cradle" series.
I am a huge notetaker, so I'm trying to do RAG on my notes every week and have the mentor run a scrum-like retrospective for me. So far I've got the data ingestion from Notion finished, and next I need to setup the LLM mentor component as well as the CLI interface. For this first MVP I'm just trying to do better than Notion AI's response when I tell it something like "look at the last 7 days of notes I've taken and run a retro with me.
I like it because it scratches a personal-improvement itch of mine, it's a nice project to become acquainted with the popular LLM app tech, and I can share it with others who may find it useful.
I'm building an online forms-as-a-service for static websites. I decided recently to revive my personal static site on netlify, where I share out with friends and family my recipes and movie recommendations. I wanted a simple "contact me" form, and decided to scratch my own itch with this service, and build out the server underpinnings so I can iteratively solve more problems static sites may have.
In building out my cheap CI/CD process I wrote a simple web hook utility, using pure python and base libraries, and called it Duct-Tape-Hook: https://github.com/nullfocus/duct-tape-hook/
If this is at all useful or interesting, drop me a line!
I've been just screwing around and building little apps, mostly seeing how quickly I can get something going using ChatGPT or Claude. Seems like Claude in particular is great with code. The most recent thing I did was a little app [0] to help one of my parents log their blood pressure readings easily, since they had to do it a few times a day in different positions and such. I've used that as an excuse to learn how to make something really basic, single task, easy to use for folks that aren't so great with technology. I'm also trying to learn a bit more about accessibility in web development, which this is helping me do.
Building Split Flap Displays. Started 18 months ago and kept me on a super interesting learning path. First shot was using open source designs (https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap), but then kept building more and more parts myself. Coming from a software engineering background, getting into designing mechanical things – and then more importantly the electronics around it - has been really challenging, but also very rewarding. At this point I have my own screen printed flaps, custom PCB Design and a, what I consider, really smart protocol that allows me to daisy chain a basically arbitrary number of display elements. It's fun!
I'm working on MedAngle, the world's first Super App for premed, medical, and dental students. We offer an all-in-one feature set called the Smart Suite with dozens of Smart features, and it has tens of thousands of questions, quizzes, clinical cases, and other educational content.
Best of all, we're hyper-personalized for the institution you study at, making us the first to do this in history. I get to lead a team of 175+ doctors and top tier medical/dental students.
I also am the first full-stack technologist who also is a medical doctor in the history of Pakistan, a country of 250+ million people, and have been featured on national TV and media platforms.
A sqlite extension that provides a virtual table backed by an Automerge document (https://automerge.org/).
I believe that there are plenty of applications that could benefit from the collaboration or sync-ability that CRDTs* provide, but that don't need to manage the CRDTs directly. Moving the CRDT management into the database seems like a natural fit.
It's very early, and not public anywhere, but I'd be happy to chat about it if anyone has any thoughts or questions.
I started a Slack community for the South African tech scene [1] that turns 10 in January so I've been pondering my successes and failures there, as well as what it's future holds.
I'm trying to make a spreadsheet interface for solving scheduling problems.
Constraint satisfaction and optimization is exactly the sort of problem we should be using computers for, but there's zero chance your neighborhood cafe can figure out prolog or OR-tools or whatever.
To get some experience launching webapps that can be put into the play store and play around with image generation models, prompting, I am building an app to generate application/corporate photos from a few non-professional selfies.
Tech stack is probably FastAPI (I mainly know python) and likely nuxt/ionic (none/not much experience). Not sure how the whole hosting, interaction with replicate/huggingface will work on phone apps, payments on stripe without having a company, how to make the webapp into a phone app, etc. It should be a great learning project with the first time scoring an actual sale!
Happy to hear early guidance if people have done similar things with python backgrounds to get started.
At work, busy adding internationalisation and localising an Angular 16 application. Figured out you can do runtime language switches, without having to maintain separate builds for each locale. Angular's documentation is rubbish.
In my spare time, building an OpenAI wrapper to create SEO meta descriptions for websites. It's mostly a tool for me to use because at work the marketing people don't do this very well and I am too lazy to do it with ChatGPT (copying the prompt and setting it up every time). Plus, the API is way cheaper for me to use. Building it with Laravel and InertiaJs is so much fun. The marketing people at work said they'll find a tool like this super useful, so I already have a user haha.
Creating launch/hype videos for your product is hard. It's expensive if you go through an agency or a freelancer. You could DIY it with Adobe After Effects, but it takes a whole set of motion design and video editing skills!
That's why I built VideoJam, an easy-to-use video builder for startups, solo entrepreneurs, and hackers. Create your video in no time - no video editing skills required. You can create product videos from scratch, with ready-made scene templates, or using entire video templates.
I just launched this week, any feedback is very welcomed. Also, don't hesitate to reach out if you want to try at no cost during the beta.
- dump project data (settings, sample slots) out to YAML
i spent some time yesterday figuring out how sample slot assignment trig locks work. which should hopefully lead to transferring banks between projects (with caveats) and set/project sample usage “analysis”.
also want to do a sample chain “deconstructor” to get individual samples out of slices.
might look at sample consolidation between sets/projects too. maybe a set/project sample clean up tool as well.
this started as a way to learn rust (bored of python) and create “samples from mars” sample chains in big batches. still slowly figuring out what ‘idiomatic’ rust looks like / how to approach certain things.
If you have multiple servers with multiple SSH users it starts to become hard to manage who has access to what.
I wanted an easy way for an org admin to remove a users access (eg. If they leave the org), while also providing one place for end-users to upload their public keys to be synced across all servers.
There are some compliance elements too (eg. reporting who has access to what, centralized user login history, server sshd configuration).
I’m learning Go while I build it and so far it’s rather enjoyable. As one guy I’m not interested in the extra effort that comes from providing a hosted service - so I’m going to offer it as pay-once own forever self-hosted solution.
I'm working on robots. In the long run I'm interested in dexterous manipulation for industrial or commercial tasks (e.g., assembly of products) but given the big $$$ already deployed in this space, am wondering if I can find a simpler (and faster to build!) application.
Playing with 6-axis arms but also built RoBart for fun, controlled by Claude. Would love to connect with folks to ideate on the concept of a very cheap autonomous robot (maybe with some very limited manipulation ability for e.g. opening doors). I can think of an application in the health care space already.
Footage at my web site (which badly needs a redesign lol): http://trzy.org
I am working on a parser for org-mode, based on a (PEG) grammar. Still got some reading to do and it is all early stages. There is so much org-mode supports, that I am not sure I will ever make it to fully able to parse all org-mode documents. My idea is, that anyone can later take my grammar and extend it, make better parsers and maybe make org-mode more ubiquitous.
Inspired by three people, so I tried to find three fitting ways to let people know this story exists. 1: On a website currently showing deep-fake propaganda to support a fascist (felt a bit icky posting there). 2: On a dapp/chain that is the premiere place to lose money on sh*coins (as a sh*coin itself, but at least I'm not going to call it collateral as a pretense for fraud). 3: Here, where they actually managed to get rid of someone (who later proved himself un-rid-able elsewhere).
Almost all technical models imply some sort of complex planar line sketch(es) in various planes. CAD as a code already has a high entry level. My hope this eDSL could mimic GUI CADs techincs, be more "intuitive" and decrease entry level. At least it's more concise :P
After years of lying dormant, I'm reactivating a hacky PHP script to test 'technical SEO' knowledge in the way of a challenge - more aligned to a technical web challenge, with a "SEO" bent more than anything spammy.
I've used this previously as a recruiting test in lieu of any other method to evaluate knowledge.
It's currently brittle and hosted on a RPi in my garage. It also requires a name + email to prevent spamming (and certification if successful), but once I've built some way of moderating access it will be more open.
Here is an example of using a Raku made Command Line Interface (CLI) app/script for translating natural language commands into DS computational workflows (via LLMs):
> concretize --l=Python make a quantile regression pipeline over dfTemperature using 24 knots an interpolation order two
We at Toughbyte (toughbyte.com) are working on an open source applicant tracking system (ATS), which we'll release within a week.
We've been doing tech recruitment for a while and discovered that few companies are satisfied with their current ATS. Changing systems every year is common despite being costly. The reason for this is that the needs of a company change as it grows and there are no systems that cater well to companies of different sizes.
We're aiming to build an ATS that can grow with your company through the use of a plugin architecture. We plan to charge for hosting as well as custom development.
Any feedback would be really appreciated! You can also email me at oleg@toughbyte.com
I’ve been working on open sourcing a background jobs library I built for Rust and Postgres, called Underway.[0] Unlike other similar queuing libraries, it offers a simple “step” functions API for defining dependent units of work.
I built this because a number of projects I work on need a robust, resilient way of deferring work but I didn’t want to add another piece of infrastructure or another language to my stack. Plus as soon as you start to reach for APIs that offer some kind of workflow concept, your options become fewer and further between.
I've been working on a site that helps you find in-person work in NYC that is actually convenient: https://walkablework.com
After working on a remote startup for a few years I felt very isolated and that the best startups are going to have a strong in-person presence. Now many larger companies have started implementing return to office policies that unfortunately don't make sense for a lot of employees. I wanted a site like this to exist to give people the power to find hybrid/in-person work that they don't mind commuting to.
Let me know if you have any feedback or want to post a job!
I've completed the draft of Part 1 of my online book "Automated Agents: How effective chatbots work"
I'm writing about my experience building a chatbot at a startup as engineer #1. It started as a blog post, but I had so much more to say. This is the information I wish I had before getting started. A lot of information on the web is about building a wrapper around LLMs, this is one that we built ourselves and were able to resolve millions of customer issues with.
Burned out with the job hunt after a rough year so I'm building out a remote job listing site... because I'm searching for a job. I figured I will build something that scrapes top sites I visit and normalizes job postings and company profiles, to which I can subscribe/save/apply/archive listings, get jobs matched to my resume etc. Just a nice little CRUD app.
I figure it's better to launch something then go job hunting instead of job hunting off a resume that hasn't been updated in a good while.
I built dailycodingproblem.com with a friend way back and we got #2 on PH so I am trying to get back to that life again!
I never finish my books, so I created a small site with concise summaries of books that I want to read. Each summary includes key concepts, critical reception, and recommended related books, along with an audio version for listening on the go. It's still early days with just a few summaries, but I'm enjoying the process of creating them, all by AI with my refined prompts. There are a lot of book summaries out there, but I haven't found one that I like, so I made my own.
I've designed medical devices, implants, surgical robots and other complex, mission critical hardware that has been used to do thousands of surgeries, implanted in people all around the world and even in the Smithsonian.
After celebrating the 10th anniversary of my product design firm, nerdian inc, this year I've been focusing on building my San Francisco Design Lab here in SOMA.
We can design, 3d print, cnc machine, injection mold, build electronics and do all the integration for a complex piece of hardware all under on roof, right here in SF.
I've shipped dozens of complex pieces of hardware that are in use today. What can I ship for you?
I finally got around to building and hosting my personal website on my own tiny VP. In the medium to long term, I'm hoping that people will find me through my website or word of mouth, instead of online social networks.
I personally believe Toronto hosts some of the best child care resources and options for young working parents, though issues of affordability and information asymmetry are palpable.
I'm not naive to think that technology alone can fix this problem, but we are looking to balance the scale by 1) making existing child care resources easily accessible and 2) connecting parents and alternative caregiver options to fill the gaps that the current industry left behind. We are calling it Kindervillage (http://kindervillage.ca/).
I'm working on a WebGL-based timeline that covers the entire history of our Universe and let's you zoom in to see more detail. After I finish this 2D version, I plan to create a 3D VR timeline that you can "walk" through, complete with animated dinosaurs, etc. A while back I had started on the VR version using Unity but unfortunately lost all the code when I made a mistake migrating from Google Drive to iCloud :(
https://youtu.be/Jj0tfwX3JVE?si=3WDYUzYjQUnsLU7E
I am building a web framework in Go that has all of the nice advancements in development experience that React has. Having spent a significant amount of time writing js, I get frustrated when things break and my developer momentum comes to a grinding halt. For everything that Go is, it is not a language that breaks because time has passed. Building this project is my long term bet that with the right tooling, Go can become a competitive language for writing full stack websites.
A pure passion project. I have been fortunate enough to ride a bike across the world in numerous amazing places and it's been wonderful.
What is not great, however, is the amount of money it costs to get a tour planned which is often expensive for very little value.
Therefore, I have started collating my information slowly but surely and trying to give people confidence to plan their own trip. Doing it with Sanity.io, NextJS and a few new technologies to me. I have learnt a lot.
Still a long way to go, but you can find current progress here: https://rides.bike
I am playing with a Tillitis TKey, to use it as an HSM. I write its firmware in Zig (works great on that small RV32 chip), while learning it.
I am also launching a consulting firm specialized on cryptographic solutions.
I like to research companies that I'm interviewing with and I've been automating my process lately. It's also been a good opportunity to explore many of the challenges in LLM/RAG applications like user trust, dealing with bias in the information sources, and static vs dynamic graphs.
I've been making https://AppGoblin.info for an overview of mobile app advertising ecosystem. I've been expanding it to include development tools and marketing companies as well.
My main, but longer, main project is building an MMP (mobile advertising attribution platform). It's really far from done, so if anyone is interested please reach out. I need help writing Android and iOS SDKs and with the analytic dashboard for the frontend.
Also, interested in starting a skyscraper construction blog if anyone is interested.
A kind of a configuration management tool, helping me manually "reconcile" between three concurrent aspects of the state of a machine (and then apply the result):
- what is "out there" on the machine ("queried"),
- vs. what was the state last recorded in (git) history,
- vs. what I want there to be on the machine (described in Nickel language https://nickel-lang.org/, a statically-typed successor to the Nix language).
I've been working on the ability to read sky brightness without a sensor.
I've always been interested in stargazing, but had a curiosity about how "good" the stars I was seeing were relative to conditions in other places on earth.
I'm working to answer that by doing inference of the value a SQM would get you, but over H3 cells in a geojson file, and then reporting on the cell with the highest reading during the last iteration over the set of H3 cells.
I'm building an open source messaging app similar to Discord or Slack, but with the notetaking/wiki capabilities of something like Notion or Confluence integrated. I just finished rewriting it in Rust, and while the new release is somewhat buggy, I feel like it solves many of the problems with Discord being the "black hole of knowledge".
I'm close to finishing out a practice planner for basketball coaches, specifically I'm excited about the drills library. Youth coaches today tend to source drills from all over the internet (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc) so having one central place to refer to them is going to really help.
I'm trying to make it easier to run clubs, associations & organizations with a platform called embolt.app[1].
We're offering online memberships, event management, and a member database packed with features. Membership management is a crowded space, but it's also a low-tech space with lots of sleeping giants not willing to iterate on their product.
It's been a really fun project so far and even more rewarding to see clubs using embolt for their daily operations.
[1] https://embolt.app
I've been working on the idea of building synthetic workers. I'm trying to implement a planning workflow system for scenarios where the workflow definition, the environment, or the task are not well defined. I also ended up implementing a micro Palentir plugin system to support the action system for the synthetic users.
Its a cool project that gave me immense pleasure to built, however its unfortunately a intellectually masturbatory one, because although the tech is cool, I haven't found a cool application for it. If anyone is interested hit me up.
Updating some of my negative core beliefs. Years of Buddhist meditation only got me so far. But two months of this new technique, and I finally see a path to being able to program my emotional self like I program a computer. Here's how it works.
Step one. Identify the negative belief you want to change. This is the core belief. It is something you feel is true. For example, “I am a bad manager.”
Step two. Create a statement related to the belief that you believe is not true. This is the false statement. For example, “No employees Ive managed have thought I did anything right as a manager.”
Step three. This is the training step. You spend a few minutes following your breathe to quiet your mind. Then you think the false statement and watch the emotional reaction the mind has to it. The reaction is an aversion, a kind of disgust. Then, say the false statement and the core belief together. “No employees I’ve managed have thought I did anything right as a manager. I’m a bad manager.” Repay the false statement and core belief together again and again, watching how the mind rejects the false statement and that aversion feeling lingers as the core belief is thought.
Step four. Repeat the training step in daily sessions. During the session, repeated think the false belief and core belief. The session should last at least ten minutes. The daily sessions should be repeated for at least a week, and longer for more deeply held core beliefs. Over time, you come to reject the core belief just like you reject the false statement.
Here's why I think it works. There is a rational part of the mind in the prefrontal cortex. It is what we think with. But it is not where our beliefs are. We can rationalize our way to a new belief or to change a belief. Instead, beliefs are felt. And they’re felt in the limbic emotional part of the brain. The limbic system is mute and cannot think with words. The prefrontal cortex can’t directly talk to the limbic system with words. Instead, the prefrontal cortex must communicate with emotion. You have to train the limbic system to feel differently about a belief. You can’t use positive affirmations because they are not felt as strongly as aversion.
In general: technoetic software - tools for exploring consciousness through technology. I have this idea to try to revive the terms "technoetics" and "psionics". I feel like there's still so much ground to cover in this space, yet no one pays much attention to it, except for a small niche of weirdos like me.
If you're into tech and (non-materialist) ideas about consciousness, follow me on X (see profile or https://technoetics.org/ )
I have worked on social dynamics on social media particularly how why certain kinds of content/people become viral. To that end, I have been working on a large-scale simulation that simulates twitter. It pulls data from a random distribution, generates users with specific interest vectors. its modelled as a Agent based modelling with the users as agents, posting every timestep, reading content posted by others, recommended to them by a recommendation engine. all of this this then generates data for research.
I'm building an AI Data Engineer @ Ardent AI. It's an autonomous AI Agent that can perform data transformations in your databases (mongodb,postgres,supabase for now) from plain english queries
It drops directly into your stack, no new configuration needed
It has its own compute engine and will soon support spark to be able to dynamically perform large scale ETLs and data manipulation.
I also am working towards supporting automatic data pipeline building and data quality checks.
This is not very concrete, but I've been thinking about the parallels between software development and Factorio and how to tie the two together to be (personally) beneficial. This includes finding ways to make software development as enjoyable as the game* and also pondering ways to make programming more visual. It would be cool to "see" a software project functioning similar to the moving parts of a factory.
* setting small, clear objectives
* spending enough time on refactoring
* giving myself a small reward for completing objectives
A point anc click model pretraining tool. Simply put all of your data into a directory of directories. Next, point the software to this directory and a few days later you get a pretrained model out.
I've been working on an android app that lets you automate android the JavaScript way, it's made using Cordova. The tech stack is Vue, Sqlite, bootstrap and jQuery.
The idea is that a user can create js scripts containing methods I have provided that programmatically interface with androids native features like sim card, Bluetooth, WiFi, battery, network, TTS, Flashlight, etc..
https://github.com/MurageKabui/PhoneDo
I’m starting a company in my hometown to help the local area with electronic waste. We offer commissioned sales, repair, refurbish, and any other straightforward computer-based tasks.
I’ve been leaning on my career as an infrastructure or DevOps or whatever engineer you wish to call it.
I’m creating our backend to automatically pay people their commission when an item sells. It also helps us navigate our (currently modest) warehouse to find items to be dispatched.
I also can’t tell you how long I’ve spent getting some old label printers working.
A simple site that counts and displays requests to each path: https://requests.at/, for instance https://requests.at/robots.txt . The site isn't intended to characterise crawler traffic or serve any other purpose but a slight sense of meta.
My current challenge is deciding in which way to generate a favicon.ico that displays the number of requests to the favicon.
in my work, inventory of raw material (computer system, scanner, printer, computer screen) is still done using paper so i'm building this android studio app that uses OCR and sends text to the server that will write it on excel sheet.
the data I want: model, serie, inventory id, type
so I have limited the text output extracted from the image to 4 lines and started each line by the necessary property e.g
model: HP prodesk 3000 MT
serie: XCQOUNF24
inventory id: to be added manually
type: to be choose manually (printer, screen, computer ... )
I’ve been putting my mechanical displays to work. Right now I have one displaying date, the current temp, the daily high temp and daily low temp. I created a web socket based serial server that gets messages and writes them to a rs232 usb device. The weather data is a node app that pulls Open Meteo data. Also learned how to make systemd service files to make it start on boot.
I’ve been noticing a trend of companies avoiding hiring non-technical PMs for as long as possible, in order to keep small technical startups (particularly dev tools, it seems) focused on building and not hiring too many people too early who can’t contribute code. I’m looking to set up a fractional service for product management consulting to support this way of working: https://www.metaluna.io. We will see if the demand is really there or not.
I'm working on an app to help anyone experience their first lucid dream :)
Very exciting project. It started as a dream journal app many years ago when I was a student, and will now soon have a full interactive step-by-step guide with practical tools to achieve your first lucid dream.
It's android only, but I've started working on an iOS version and am thinking of raising some money or doing some crowdfunding to accelerate the development.
I'm working on a weekly "tournament game" in which the goal is to select the top 5 open-source projects (in a particular topic) per programming language. The first iteration is going to be a copy of SaaSHub Experts https://www.saashub.com/experts/about but for open-source libraries. If this sounds interesting to you, please let me know, and I can send you an invite this or next week (hopefully).
https://CodePeer.com - An AI-assisted code review platform that manages the lifecycle of a PR. We make sure everyone knows whose turn it is, we show you only what needs to be reviewed, and all historical edits and comments are intelligently presented. We say “AI-assisted” because it’s a human-first approach to design - that said, you can use AI to do everything from making simple code suggestions to executing the entire review for you.
I’m working on https://sweetlemon.app - a tool for tech companies that help them save money on license costs by identifying unused and wasted licenses.
Having worked for 15 years bootstrapping and organically growing digital agencies, I’m now trying to get my own product off the ground.
I’d love to connect with businesses, CTOs, COOs, IT Managers or anyone else who want to talk about trimming down cost in tech companies.
A custom email sorter / spam filter that uses a fineruned multimodal LLM: my emails are turned into images (turning them / extracting html then rendered with selenium) and passes to the vision LLM. I went from ~200 to ~15 useful emails a day.
Professionally, I'm working on extending Nx, the Elixir ML framework which I help maintain, for distributed and sharded computing. Should have an working v0 by December!
As a side-project, I've been diving back into hardware. Fixed/modded a crappy guitar amplifier I had into a great amp, and the next project in line will be a new version of a digital synth I designed a fey years back
Trying to build a chess club management app for our school/district. It's mostly basic CRUD, though it's an avenue to learn Svelte & SvelteKit. I'm becoming more involved with the club and can't stand that everything is run on paper forms and giant Google Sheets. (If it was all smoothly running, I wouldn't rock the boat. But when I found that we're writing out dozens of match cards by hand every week and have ~0 way to track progress, I couldn't resist.)
Building a nodeless Kubernetes service; no servers/worker nodes, pods are scheduled transparently as micro VMs (planning to make this flexible, so Fly Machines, Cloud Run, Cloudflare Workers, what have you). Optionally, you can bring on your own worker nodes if you want to!
Still super WIP, and the landing page hasn't been updated yet but here's a quick little early access form! https://tally.so/r/me2Q8E
I'm working on Starlake.ai, an open-source data engineering platform that simplifies data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration. It's designed to make data engineers' lives easier while maintaining powerful control over data pipelines.
Key features:
- Declarative YAML-based configuration for data pipelines
- Intuitive web UI for those who prefer visual interfaces (see video section in https://starlake.ai)
- Native integration with both Airflow and Dagster
- No-code/low-code approach to data transformation
- Support for multiple data sources and formats
- Built-in data quality validation
- Automated schema inference and evolution
Data Processing Capabilities:
- LOAD: Ingest data from various sources (CSV, JSON, XML, Parquet, etc.)
- TRANSFORM: Write SQL transformations and test them in DUCKDB.
- Support for major data warehouses:Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, PostgreSQL, DuckDB for local development and small data
What sets it apart:
- Full Git Integration: All changes (whether made through UI or YAML) are automatically versioned in Git
- CI/CD Ready: YAML configurations can be directly integrated into your CI/CD pipelines
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) friendly: Perfect for GitOps workflows
- Dual Interface: Everything possible in YAML can be done through the UI, and vice versa
- DuckDB Support: Perfect for local development and smaller datasets, allowing you to test your pipelines without cloud costs
The project is open source and we'd love to get feedback from the HN community. You can check it out at:
I'm absolutely not impressed by reddit search functionality. I like to play metrodivanias but when I want to find something specific for a specific game, the search is just too random.
I’m working on a crossword app, with the intent to add “kaizo” elements, as a way to take any puzzle and add obstacles aside from the clues, which I hope will be fun. But I guess I won’t know until I try.
I'm working on Blazed.deals, a THC/CBD product search engine and price tracker. It scans the prices of cannabis stores and ranks products by mg/$. It has a bunch of categories and filters so people can find the perfect product for their preferences.
I continue working on JustFax Online[0] - a service to send a one-time fax without the need for an account or subscription.
I now realized that I started it almost one year ago. It's both amazing how much I was able to achieve in a year, but on the same hand a bit frustrating that I did not achieve what I wanted to. Nevertheless, will continue to work on it and improve it.
It’s a native macOS AI chat client. I started it last year and didn’t think much about data synchronization. I didn’t want to store user’s data server side for better user privacy. So I decided to store all chats in a local SQLite database.
It works well but unfortunately without a sync engine, users won’t be able to continue the chat from a different machine.
I am converting all the short farm stories I wrote into little audio stories using AI voiceovers. It’s not perfect and has kinks.. but I am enjoying it.. 5 done, 15 more to go!
My next project is one about lunar habitat and food production systems but as a podcast ..entirely with AI voices. Because I can’t find anyone from NASA or SpaceX to speak with me..hah!
Still working on the bluetooth "wall of sheep" app. https://github.com/skittleson/bluetooth-wos . im hoping to put more insight on each device and receive avaliable notifications from the devices. I even figured out a rough estimate of how far devices are away with just RSSI and other available devices that have TX Power and RSSI within a few meters.
I'm working on an application. It's really challenging to be a solo developer and build a web application from scratch. I've been working on it for four months now, and to be honest, I've gotten a bit lazy over the past few weeks. But I've decided to launch it before it's completely finished. I'm a perfectionist, which makes things harder, but I know I can do it.
I am adding more features to my Google Sheets add-on as requested by users. I planned to keep it a micro-SaaS but it seems people want it all at one place. They will pay or not is another thing.
I've just updated https://ryelang.org website, adding new asciinema demos (hn/somafm util and eyr), new cookbook pages, references to rye-gio(ui) project, etc. There is still tons of work, on the language front, bindings, console and on documenting it all, but if we keep moving forward step by step eventually something of value will be produced, I hope :)
When FAANG was all the rage, I had a hard time getting feedback on my coding skills. So, I made a website where candidates can post their code and experiences folks can give their feedback.
I'm working on a self-hostable replacement for Google Timeline, which is being discontinued. It includes a web app to view my timeline and an Android app to send tracking pings to the server. It also includes an import function for exports of your Google Timeline data so that your historical data from that can be integrated as well. I'm planning on open-sourcing both the web app and the POC Android app early next month.
I'm currently working on Mockoon, an API mocking tool. It's an open-source project that I've been relentlessly improving over the past 7 years. I decided to build a SaaS/cloud offering to help finance my work on the project. I'm solo bootstrapping, and revenues are slowly growing. It's not the easiest path, but definitely worth it!
This is not about new ideas for humanity, but for me.
I started the development of the game engine.
This was one of the most interesting goal on my list.
I will use vulkan. And my demo goal for this is a super realistic scene with human, hill, grass, tree and sunrise/sunset. But it is needed just to know how/where to develop engine.
since I'm in no hurry + my career is going down the drain, I will try to do my best and power up my software engineer skills.
I'm building a window manager for macOS. I got frustrated with Divvy having inconsistent resizing on several apps, eg Firefox, and I wanted to be able to fully control window size and position with _only_ my keyboard (like increasing the width/height or moving the window one column to the left).
I'm currently (and have been for a few weeks now) building a self-hosted Git "forge", à la Gogs/Gitea/etc.
The main motivation for this is that I usually juggle many side projects at the same time, and since none of them are in a finished state, I don't really feel like putting them out in the open on GitHub or Codeberg or something else, and would really like to keep all of this experimentation private. I know GitHub provides free private repositories, but I really dislike the interface and I feel like most of the features offered are not for me.
I tried running a private Gitea instance, but I did not like having to manage a second software to be able to run CI pipelines on my repositories (like Drone). I also really dislike GitHub Actions so I was kind of disappointed that Gitea's integrated CI is based on it.
I also tried running a Gitlab instance (which is currently what I use) as I much prefer GitLab CI over GH Actions, but the whole package is so much of a resource hog and tries so hard to be "more than GitHub" that I feel it isn't for me either.
So, in the end, I decided that I would build my own platform, with a simple scope in mind: be a nice Git repository hosting solution for single hackers or very small teams. Along with the smaller scope, I added a few restrictions: no JavaScript unless it substantially improves QoL (and even then, never require JS for the website to work), no external components required (apart from OpenSSH and Git).
So far I have a very minimal SSH handler implementation that allows push/pulling repositories from the server through authenticated SSH (public key), and what's starting to become a nice web interface to manage and read all of that. It's almost at the point where I will soon be able to dogfood the platform by hosting itself there (as a backup remote, not the primary yet).
The tech stack is kept relatively simple on purpose (I really dislike "modern" front-end development):
* Rust + Axum
* SQLite
* Bootstrap with SASS to customize it
* libgit2
Everything is server-side rendered as HTML before being served to the client, using Minijinja (reimplementation of Jinja2 in/for Rust by the same author).
Anyway, not yet ready to share any links or anything but I am still excited about the project taking shape after weeks/months of sporadic work on it! I'm building this not only because I feel a need for it, but also to learn more about Rust and Git internals, and I feel like I've learned a ton already!
I am working on a presentation about meals in space that I'll be giving just before Thanksgiving to some writers.
I am also working on cataloging my books. This will be my third try and I'm just using a spreadsheet this time. One time it corrupted all my date and the backup got mangled when I tried to bring it in. Then the online space went under. So I'm doing it the simplest possible way.
I've noticed that my son spends way too much time on YouTube or playing Minecraft and one of the few offline activities he enjoys doing on his own is coloring. And since he comes to me every time he wants a new coloring book and we spend about 10 minutes together searching for each picture, I made a website with a collection of coloring books for him. The site is very simple, but to be honest, I haven't had so much fun with the process of creation for a long time.
https://colorango.com/
I built 3 electric cars from 2018 to 2023 and drove them 20k miles. My own firmware and controllers, with an https://openinverter.org motor controller
Now I release my knowledge in bite-sized chunks on my new YouTube channel to help others:
What's a battery management system? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QsMoCrSTYc
What is the C-Rate? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDu1fRtKfsA
What is battery balancing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGYLPOlT45A
etc. etc. I focus really hard on answering exactly one question in a concise and engaging way and trying to keep every video under 5 minutes. Oh, and to make the videos solution independent, so not specific to a product, but convey the underlying knowledge so it has a longer shelf-life.
Full list is here: https://foxev.io/batteries/ I am planning to turn this into a knowledge base with playlists for "learning paths" like "everything to watch about batteries" or "here is what you need to watch to make a motor spin on a bench". I will add interactive functionality like quizzes and widgets to make the knowledge even more sticky.
This is an ongoing experiment that david927 has been helping with (thanks!). The two previous in the sequence were:
Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690087 - Sept 2024 (1041 comments)
Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41342017 - Aug 2024 (1424 comments)
One thing I'd like to hone in on is that these threads aren't intended for promotion, but rather for the just-because sort of project, driven by idle interest or weird obsession—the sort of thing people might spend their free time on.
I'm not sure yet what the official "rule" should be (if any), but if you're working on a startup or have had attention via Show HN, maybe abstain from these discussions? It wouldn't be good for the thread to get taken over by things HN already has a place for.
I'm working on synthesizing a genome at home! Here is a video with more details, as well as a picture of my home lab. I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it.
Video on what I'm doing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCiuS1oHnKw
Picture of my home lab - https://x.com/koeng101/status/1844150979484319842
I'm trying to build a DNA assembly company right now (been lots of ups and downs lately...), and one thing I need to do is validate the specs of my oligo pool synthesis provider, Agilent, before I release to customers / raise a seed round. So as a stress-test run of my system, I'm synthesizing a genome, and am thinking about trying to livestream it. The unique technology is variety of ways to assemble and validate DNA from oligo pools for a lot cheaper, pretty much enabling a 10x reduction in DNA synthesis cost vs commercial suppliers. I've worked my ass off for nearly 2 years to get to this moment and am so excited!
I invented a programming language where you use Unicode box-drawing characters to draw a structure of boxes and lines:
The language is called Funciton (pronounced: /ˈfʌŋkɪtɒn/) and the above example demonstrates the factorial function.I made this language over 10 years ago, but earlier this year I've been making YouTube videos in which I describe it in excruciating detail: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkG32PHxWoJaetjKUMVRONWLg...
For my next video, I want to show in detail how the interpreter works. For this purpose I'm creating an elaborate animation. You'll notice that the latest video is already several months old; this is because this animation is more work than I bargained for, and I got a little burned out by it. Nevertheless, I persevere and the video will come out whenever I may finish it.
Language specification: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Funciton
Interpreter: https://codeberg.org/Timwi/Funciton
https://pastmaps.com
I'm building Pastmaps - striving to eventually be the world's largest online collection of old maps, aerials, and photos all packaged into a public historical research platform that's as easy to use as Google Maps. This has been a labor of love now for about a year, but I still have a huge mountain to climb to realize the full vision. Give it a try and give me your harsh criticisms - that's the greatest gift you could give me!
Even in it's current state, it's being used by geneologists, urban explorers, search & rescue teams, real estate developers, government agencies, etc. The number of exploding use-cases continues to astound me and keeps me motivated to continue.
A new YouTube app/player, for my kids.
It allows us to control the algorithm. It’s all LLM translating to YouTube search queries under the hood.
Visually it looks the same.
The suggested videos come from predefined buckets on topics they love.
E.g. 33% fun math, 33% DIY engineering, 33% creative activities.
Video recommendations that have a banned word in the title/desc don't get displayed e.g. MrBeast, anything with Minecraft in it, never gets surfaced.
For anyone interested in using it, send me an email.
jim.jones1@gmail.com
In my 50k population town in Minnesota, I notice a lot of headlights, taillights, and turn signals are out. Our roads (outside of the Twin Cities) are often bumpy which causes vibration in the vehicles, leading to many bulbs failing.
I drive a 21 year old Saab, and in my 2 years of owning it, I have replaced every single bulb in the exterior of the vehicle except a turn signal or two.
I decided to create a mobile service for vehicle lights. It's a simple website that even technologically-disadvantaged people can use. The website is nearly finished and I will likely come back here to write a post on it for how the website works.
Oh the best part, I get texted and emailed for each service order that comes in, and using my service is only $10 more than what it would cost you to go buy a bulb yourself at OReillys, AutoZone, etc.
I programmed everything myself and developed the idea as well. This is my first real-world project/solution I am bringing into this world that has been verified by others, to be a needed service. Pretty excited about it and I love changing bulbs or replacing light housings, it's fun and simple.
**Update: I perform the install.
I'm still working on Habitat. It's a self-hosted social platform for local communities. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I want it to be easily installable for those who want to host using docker, and for those who want to host on an EC2 instance or something, because online services for docker hosting are quite expensive, so I've been working recently on ansible setup, and it's proving quite difficult, so if anyone with the experience fancies helping out, I'd be more than happy to receive contributions.
- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...
- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat
- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2
For me the most important issue that needs to be solved right now is the increasing urban sprawl and the car dependent neighborhoods. It causes social isolation. Maintaining infrastructure like roads and electricity, is causing a strain on the economy for local municipalities. Not to mention the disastrous effect car based transportation has on the environment.
I am a fullstack developer living in Norway. Last year I registered the Norwegian branch of the Architectural Uproar as a not for profit organization. With the support from paying members, I have been able to go on tour to most of the major cities in Norway. We organize large meetings were we discuss architecture and city planning with politicians, architects and property developers on stage.
I am strongly inspired by Create Streets in UK and Strong Towns in the US. I want to improve people’s quality of life, help saving the planet and make Norway beautiful again while doing it.
https://arkitekturopproret.no edit: typos
Putting the finishing touches on my LLM based town simulator. Once it's finished I'll have it simulate 4 hours in the town every 2 hours in reality.
It is designed to solve the problem of "RPG hero just killed a dragon in front of the town and no one says anything about it." All the NPCs realistically react and talk about the Hero's exploits.
Visitors to the site can vote on what quest the hero undertakes next.
I'm running into the problem what the site isn't much fun. I'm honestly not sure what to do about that!
An only slightly buggy build is at https://www.generativestorytelling.ai/tinyllmtown/index.html
Importantly, I am aiming to have everything (except voice gen) working on a small model that can be ran locally.
Autopilot for my sit-on-top fishing kayak. Designed, modeled, and printed an assembly which attaches to the rudder rod. Moves the rod via a stepper motor connected to a Teensy 4.0 which gets NMEA 2000 messages from a Garmin heading sensor and a Garmin fish finder/chartplotter. Uses PID control to maintain any course I set on the chartplotter, using the cross-track error and heading. I’ve had it out on the water a few times now and it works great. Also put together an iOS app that communicates with the assembly via BLE so I can modify the PID gains as needed depending on conditions.
There was a bit of noise to the sonar transducer since the stepper motor was so noisy, but I mostly eliminated it by routing the motor wires through liquid-tight flexible electrical conduit, connecting the conduit to ground.
I'm building a collator robot [0] to help me pack items I sell for building your own open source split-flap mechanical display [1].
I get custom character flaps printed and die-cut in bulk and then sell them in smaller sets. A full set of flaps for one module has 52 distinct designs (letters, numbers, symbols, etc) and I get them from the manufacturer grouped by design, so they need to be collated to sell as packs of 52 with 1 of each design.
My WIP robot will take a stack of one design and distribute them to a bunch of cubbies, then I'll swap in the next design, and so on, so each cubby ends up with a full set.
It's based on a cheap ~$110 CNC gantry frame from AliExpress and a ~$35 BTT SKR Pico 3d printer main board running GrblHAL. To detect whether the flaps feed successfully I use a visible light break-beam sensor (the typical IR sensors don't work because the PVC flaps happen to be IR transparent!) which acts as the "z probe" - the flap is fed via a G38.3 probe action which returns whether the probe was successful or not, and the "z" coordinate it was first detected.
I have a python script running on a computer to send the gcode to the machine.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/scottbez1.bsky.social/post/3l737hme...
[1] https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap
I'm working on a 3D infinite canvas of text, focusing on code. Runs on iPhone, iPad, macOS so they can all act as separate viewports into a space. You can point the app at a repository, download a copy locally, instantly render the entire repository into space in less than a second in most cases, and then fly around and search for text. I just got an optimization working for larger files and it's kinda fun how much even an iPhone can do with instanced rendering.
Im developing it with the use in mind of flying through your code to show others relationships, or edit with a visuospatial look at your code instead of basic 2D tabs and a mind map of which one had the thing you're working on. It's kinda fun to work on the project In the project!
It's built on Swift and Metal but can ready any utf8 text file, minus a few subsections of the Unicode spec (for now).
https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat
I'm making a VSCode extension that can record & replay interactions with the IDE: all scrolls, selections, and modifications synced to guiding video, audio, and visual aid tracks.
The result is a much more interactive way to present code than screencasts or blogs. Because at any point we can pause a session and freely explore and experiment with the codebase.
I put together a demo recently [1] and written much more about it here [2].
[1] https://youtu.be/Qp2GdLO5eSc
[2] https://codemic.io
The Berlin immigration office is notoriously slow and unresponsive. The processing time for a residence permit varies from a few weeks to a few months. During that time, people are left unable to work or unable to leave the country. They never know how long it will take, and it causes some people to give up and leave Germany.
I am writing a tool to collect and aggregate data about the processing times. This will help people plan around the delays. Knowing is half the battle.
The biggest challenge is that my readers find me at the start of the process, and I need their feedback at the end of it. I have to make it easy for them to provide partial feedback and complete it later after they get an email reminder.
This would be unnecessary if the immigration office collected and shared that information, but they don’t. They also don’t welcome any help because they “operate at peak efficiency”. I have stopped hoping for their collaboration.
I'm trying to OCR a very large book: 45 volumes of ~500 pages each. The digitization has been done (not very good but not too bad either), but the pages have comments in the margin and lots of footnotes.
Just doing plain OCR doesn't really work because the notes in the margin and the footnotes get mingled with the text, which results in gibberish.
But, when sent to Google Vision API, each page results in a json file that has an object for each word and the four coordinates of its bounding box.
That json file is pretty big (around 1.5 Mo when pretty printed, or 500 k with no indents or line breaks) but it can then be fed to Gemini, taking advantage of its large context window.
Gemini is pretty good at identifying each section of the page (headers, main text, margin comments, footnotes) but it takes a looong time to respond (2-5 minutes per page).
So another approach is to ask Gemini to write a python script to analyze the json result and group sections depending of the coordinates of each word, and then run that script against the json output by the OCR phase.
But it's quite difficult to have a script that works for any page; comments in the margin are always in the margin so that's pretty easy, but footnotes can start at any height of the page (some pages contain only footnotes running from previous pages) and Gemini likes to be pretty specific, giving hard 'y' coordinates for where footnotes should start, which obviously only works for the one page it's working on.
I'm iterating and making some progress but I feel like I miss a big breakthrough and it all should be simpler than it currently is. Information about OCR is pretty scarce online. Any pointer is welcome!
I'm experimenting with a "new" kind of lisp macros.
Macros in lisp are just normal functions that receive the code they wrap as argument and return some modified code. Typically they will just wrap the passed code into some more code. But then there are code walking macro: macros that will traverse passed code to modify it in depth.
What I'm working on is "code diving" macros. Not only will they traverse the passed code, but they will resolve called functions and macros, fetch their source code and traverse it too. And so on. All the redefined fns/macros are accumulated in a let/macrolet binding, topologically sorted by call/dependency order. Instrumented code will call these local redefinitions, shadowing the global definition lexically.
This allow the programmer to write truly local monkey-patches for existing code he doesn't have control over (e.g, code from another library for instance). I'm writing this in Clojure, and the traditional way to do this is to temporarily change the global definitions of targeted variables using with-redefs. This is problematic because other threads will see these redefinitions, and not just threads created within the instrumented code, but already existing threads too.
Another way to do it is to just redefine the targeted functions globally, but then your modifications are available to the whole program for the rest of its execution.
Decarbonising buildings and massive warehouses..
It's a very fun mix of hardware (for data collection), and crazy SQL queries to model energy flows between buildings, solar, batteries, etc. Considering just one building is pretty easy:
consumption = imported - exported + generated - stored + dispatched. carbon = carbon intensity * imported cost = tariff * imported
but then you add a site with a couple of buildings, solar on one of them, grid limited exports, etc modelling these flows is challenging. Like consider the case where one building got 10% of it's imported power from another building's excess solar, then calculating carbon becomes more difficult.
and once you've figured all that - then you have to figure out what makes commercial sense to do next.. install a battery, expand solar, move onto a TOU tariff, do nothing - and that's a whole other world of optimisation problems.
Currently, other than my day job, I am obsessed with making sense of the "shape of stories". Mapping embeddings and see how they move through a sequence.
Started of with [1] which showed that there might be some strength to the idea.
Applied it for chunking [2] and web site analysis[3] and got pretty good results.
Just started trying out experiments on video [4] and surprised that the structure seems to hold for image embeddings as well.
I have no clue if this has any value, but it is fun to go down this rabbit hole :)
[1]https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-shape-of-stories-...
[2]https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/a-new-chunking-approa...
[3]https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/using-semantic-chunki...
[4]https://x.com/nutanc/status/1849661242027409723
Building a pneumatic long-range candy dispersal device (candypult) to launch Halloween candy from my garage door to the street. As is the case for many of us around here, I get bored of making digital tools and want to build something in meatspace. I'm trying to use as much material I already own as possible, so building out of leftover metal framing and old decking.
Trick-or-treating at a door is so last decade; trying to catch a Snickers hurtling towards you in the darkness is the future.
Wife and I tend to plan long, multi-day, multi-destination travel.
Got sick of working in Google Docs and having to manually move days around and re-label dates, shift hotels, etc. Ended up creating Turas.app over a weekend in 2023 (and then let it loose on Reddit). But just recently created the Chrome Extension which feels like it is an even better tool because it lets you access all of the richness of Google Maps. It's a Google Maps powertool for people who like to plan their travel meticulously.
(Completely free and intended to be free forever; we tried to monetize it but realized that there's no reasonable way to do so that we ourselves would be happy with; seriously thinking about just open sourcing it, but needs some cleanup first!)
Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turasapp/lpfijfdbgo...
App: https://turas.app
Today, kindergarten was closed and I had to take much of the day off to take care of my five-year old daughter. We asked Chat GPT to assume the role of a master board game designer and to lead us through the creation of a novel boardgame, with input from us. She came up with the setting - we are unicorns that need to rescue princes and princesses that have been captured in a scary forest full of monsters. Quickly, the LLM proposed a full list of rules and props to make. We then had fun for around two hours drawing various cards and markers.
The game was playable on the first try with only a few minor and very quick rule tweaks from me. Even I felt we went on a stressful quest in the forest. Honestly among the best games for this age group that I have ever played.
10/10 activity, will try again.
An "offline-first" client web app for Github. I don't want to have to wait seconds to load up an issue, and then wait seconds (or keep another tab open) to go back to the list of issues/PRs, ...etc. I want everything to feel instant, with optimistic updates, and a backend sync process that doesn't require me to refresh the page to see new updates.
(Small note: I'm doing it in full-stack Rust, including web frontend, using leptos).
Knitting hats. The fall/winter is when I bury myself in knitting projects to fight seasonal depression and cabin fever. Audiobook + knitting == bliss.
The work most of us do isn't tangible. You have nothing to "prove" that you made something. Creating something in meat space is really rewarding.
November is my last working month! I'm giving entrepreneurship a try to solve a huge problem: phone overuse.
It's been busy:
- Reading books, currently "The Mom Test"
- Looking for a startup community and being disappointed with what my city has to offer
- Deciding between VC vs. bootstrapping, and taking a firmer stance to try the latter first. This includes rejecting ODF.
- Talking with like-minded people. I now have a better understanding of what the MVP should look like.
Receiving so much support has been very encouraging; I announced it more publicly at https://nullderef.com/blog/quit-job-2024/
It's scary. But working has never been so fun!
An app to collect memories easily. You capture vocal notes, which are transcribed & corrected with AI.
As a father, I wanted to capture all the little moments of our day-to-day family life to later share with my grown-up children. However, I did not have the discipline to journal regularly. So, I made Memzy to capture them easily on the fly!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/memzy-easy-journaling-with-ai/...
I've been tinkering with my own keyboard layout:
https://ladsko.github.io/hexed/
It's hexagonal, compact and optimized for German and English thanks to noted (https://dariogoetz.github.io/noted-layout/)
Right now I'm testing key shapes and sizes and the manufacturing of key caps. I thought I needed a resin printer for best results but FDM printed caps with a blob of epoxy resin on top works surprisingly well.
There's no firmware yet, I have not even decided on a micro-controller or software. But I want to use Kailh Choc v1.
This is my first time exposing this project to the public so I'll be very happy about some feedback!
I'm trying to prevent anyone from ever dropping a table in production again or executing a delete without a where clause.
https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet
Essentially a PR review flow for production access, which allows you to enforce a second pair of eyes workflow. I was always a bit scared when I was on call and had all the power in my finger tips to ruin everyone's day. I think this helps alleviate the risk of human error significantly. Also helps with compliance of course.
Hey guys! We're engineers/designers from France, and we've built the Ultimate DIY Battery that you can repair and refill!
Ride Sustainably with the World's First Repairable Battery
Refillable in 5 minutes (just buy $150 worth of new cells every 3 years or so, when they're depleted)
Be Worry-Free thanks to the Fireproof Casing! There's been waaaaaay too many lithium fires!
It's launched as an IndieGogo (the product already exists, but as a startup IndieGogo is convenient to get the cash upfront to buy the parts and build the batteries) and there is an offer for early-backers here https://get.gouach.com for a 25% discount on the battery!
As I got laid off 2 weeks ago, I finally have the time to work on one of my side projects:
Breathing Tips - a free web app to practice breathing exercises.
Tech stack: Ruby on Rails 7.2, sqlite3, BabylonJS for the 3D visuals, hosting on hetzner for 4$ and deployed with kamal 2
https://breathing.tips
Outside of the software world I'm also working on opening a Bike Shop and frame building studio. I'm hoping that one day I can actually make a small living on frame building since I don't do software for my day job anymore, but I'm not quite ready to build for other people yet (so far I've only built frames for myself and I'd like to thoroughly strength test them before I risk putting someone else on one of my creations!)
If you're in the Atlanta, GA area and need bicycle work done, hit me up! No job is too big or too small. I particularly enjoy building wheels if you want a sweet custom wheel set, but I do it all (including Mountain Bike fork and suspension work that many shops won't do).
https://www.atlbikeshed.com/
I am teaching myself how to build a robot quadruped (aka 'robot dog') from scratch, including an ML controller to make it move in animated ways.
I'm also documenting every step of the process and uploading it to YouTube, which means I am also teaching myself how to edit videos :)
If anyone wants to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL55VZ7oDEoRnXKSYTiGlN...
I’m building a way for developers to easily deploy open source applications (Postgres, redis, sentry, elastic search, etc), plus have a full heroku like workflow for their own applications, all within their kubernetes cluster, with what I hope is a super intuitive and friendly UI.
I’ve ran a start up and saw how SaaS-ified and expensive web tooling is (heroku, datadog, redshift, fivetran, etc), but how difficult it was to move off of them. We had a few years of over 1 million in infrastructure spend.
I’m hoping just making Kubernetes easier to use gives us a way out.
It’s fully open source and a hosted version is free to use! https://canine.sh.
Would love feedback on it, including how the overall pitch could be better, or if it actually solves people’s problems.
I'm developing an implementation of what I call Hydra – Multi-Head Prediction Embeddings [1], which I believe represents the next evolution in transformer architectures.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381009719_Hydra_Enh...
I've been teaching kids programming 1:1, off and on for 10 years or so. This time around I'm collecting my various impromptu puzzles and exercises into a single app anyone can go through at their own pace on any device, computer or phone (though iOS unfortunately requires jumping through some hoops). All on a platform that is open source and live-editable and lets you write all-new programs with graphics and sound in addition to the puzzles and exercises.
Download: https://akkartik.name/carousel-cards.love (really just a zip file containing source code, 169KB)
Installation instructions: same as https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel
Repo for the core app: https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/carousel.love
So far I have 111 little "levels", each good for between a few seconds and a minute. I think a full curriculum/game will need maybe 2000 levels?
I am working on the Vanta for sustainability and climate disclosures. Climate and sustainability disclosures are starting to come online in many sectors and parts of the world. We offer compliance-as-a-service so that startups and covered entities can fulfill their compliance requirements in a mostly self-serve manner without having to hire expensive consultants or undergo significant restructurings. Our platform provides a single source of truth for your climate, sustainability, and emissions data. For example, if you are an American company trying to go-to-market in Europe, all it takes is purchasing an additional module and we will automatically generate the compliance documents and checklists for you based on the existing data we have on your company. We also offer managed “Climate Trust Center” dashboards that you can subdomain on your website for investors reporting and to satisfy disclosure requirements.
If you are in an EPA-regulated (or equivalents in Canada and Europe) industry (such as mining, oil and gas, minerals, rare earths, metal processing, airlines, construction, shipping/marine, logistics, heavy industries, agriculture/farming/food production, data center, power generation including renewables, adjacent ones like consumer goods, real estate, large scale AI training, climate derivatives etc.) or require sustainability consulting support in general, we would love to talk to you: hello@carbonimpacthq.com (put “HN:” in the subject line so we know where you are coming from)
https://carbonimpacthq.com (the landing page is still a work-in-progress but you can check out our blog for more information https://carbonimpacthq.com/esg-and-your-business/)
I'm working on a unique discovery app / recommender for books, tv, movies, video games, songs, youtube channels, newsletters and podcasts - and more categories soon!
Since my last update here, I've added more detailed personalized descriptions of recommendations (hit Describe to request), including a rating out of 10 for how well the item meets your preferences.
I've also added the ability to replace individual recommendations (this was the most requested new feature!). If you update your preferences, your replacements will use your updated preferences - pretty nice for fine tuning your results!
Try it: https://www.yogurrt.com/
I'm building a service for podcast websites with transcripts[^0]. I have paying customers, including Volts[^1], and I'm genuinely passionate about serving them.
What's holding me back from scaling is primarily my own resistance to marketing, plus some pending improvements to the ChatGPT-based transcript editing system. Once I finish optimizing the LLM integration, I'll have no more excuses to avoid sales outreach. One thread I want to pursue is a magazine of podcast transcripts that I inherited: https://podread.org
I'd appreciate advice on authentic outreach strategies for reaching knowledge-focused podcasters. If anyone here has experience in this space or wants to collaborate, I'm open to connecting.
[^0]: https://www.withfanfare.com/
[^1]: https://transcripts.volts.wtf/
It is probably not substantial among the projects people have commented on this thread, but I am happy to be working on my first personal website made from plain old HTML and simplecss.
Learning how to arrange things, navigation, and my own blog on my own site gives me the gratification of owning something fully. Everyone should have their own site is truly what I agree with.
https://spacesanjeet.me
Working on an AI to generate SVG vector images.
SVGs are awesome and currently unrepresented in the diffusion-based model landscape. We have something that produces pretty great results and we're working on the next version which should be even better.
https://vectorart.ai
Been working on our startup laudspeaker (an alternative to firebase cloud messaging) [1] as well as trying to write more! I like science fiction thrillers similar to what michael crichton used to write and have been working on a story called Panopticon around encryption, spycraft, and three letter agencies [2]
[1] https://laudspeaker.com/ , https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VRI4X5fCUpwurUDvKmvzJpT7...
I'm building a custom NC manufacturing robot from scratch.
I was unhappy with availability, pricing, and business model (SaaS lock-in) of the existing hardware/software solutions. But to my delight, I noticed that you just need better amplifiers to use 3D printer mainboards for driving industrial stepper motors. Everything is controlled with Gcode, which is just text. And sensors can send back logging messages over the same USB connection.
That means the control software can be just a python script with a little state machine inside :)
I'm still working on my first self designed PCB. It's nothing special, just a temperature and humidity sensor using esp32. I started it to teach myself more about PCB design and embedded programming. Yesterday I published a blog article on it. https://www.felixmaurer.de/blog/2024/10/27/building-an-iot-s...
I'm building a language learning app, specifically for multi-ethnic couples that want to learn each other's language in a very personalized way: https://couplingcafe.com
I've eschewed jobs and even a funded YC startup to work on this idea for years, ideating. Just following my passion and deep belief I'm making a more effective way to learn a language while also strengthening an emotional relationship!
I’m working on a zine. The first issue is on system evals for LLM-driven apps. It’s set in a world where Bear and Fox are opening a cafe with an LLM shoggoth generating custom recipes.
Lots of people just going off of vibes to see if their system is working right. That’s a good start, but you’ll need system evals to systematically improve your app. Like Garry says, “don’t raw dog your prompts. Use system evals”
https://forestfriends.tech
Getting ready to release a big Halloween update for my survival-horror game for the Playdate, Plight of the Wizard[0]. I just added a spell that targets the closest enemy, which was a fun challenge to implement. Performance optimizations for the hardware have been getting tougher to nail down, so I’m spending a lot of time figuring out inefficiencies in my code to target a stable 30 fps. I’m having a lot of fun releasing updates that make the game more fun. But with more refinement comes the desire to add more content and improved art. I’m trying to take it one step at a time.
[0]: https://sotix.itch.io/plight-of-the-wizard
I’ve been looking for work!
But to pass the time, I’m also working on a personal journal that keep S-expressions in a database with a well-defined schema set by the other nodes of the database (imagine tiddlywiki transclusions everywhere!)
The idea is to have a bunch of adaptors for Google Takeout, Apple Notes, Obsidian, Apple Health, fitness tracking, org-mode, location history, etc. keep all my data there in well-defined formats. I could then also use the markup language I’m writing to present my journal data in various ways.
My main focus is on efficient data entry/ingestion powered by schema-as-data, which allows for machine and human readability.
I don’t expect it to be useful, but I’m having fun. If I wind up getting anywhere, I might open source it.
I'm working on helping my wife get her print-on-demand Shopify store off the ground. She designs the products herself, but ran into challenges with SEO. So, I built a custom app that connects to her Shopify store via API, using GPT-4o-mini to handle SEO optimizations—things like generating descriptions, titles, alt text, SEO-friendly URLs, and more, all based on the product images.
There were also issues syncing with Google Merchant Center (missing colors, categories, etc.), so I tweaked the app to auto-fill these fields using GPT-4o, making it compliant with Google and Pinterest requirements.
I’m completely new to SEO and just tried following best practices to fix things as they came up. Now I’m learning that SEO keywords change constantly, so I’m thinking of integrating a keyword provider to dynamically enhance our product descriptions.
I never realized running an e-commerce store (especially print-on-demand) would involve so much operational work on the marketing front. I’d appreciate any advice on what to tackle next, especially since my goal is to avoid “subscription hell” with multiple Shopify apps. My wife is also just starting with ads and campaigns, diving into tutorials to learn the ropes.
Any guidance is welcome!
I created KopiMap (https://kopimap.com) to help people discover great cafés in Jakarta Indonesia, but I wanted to take the UX further by automatically organizing user-submitted photos into meaningful categories (menu, food/drinks, ambiance).
The challenge is how to classify images as cost efficient as possible without compromising performance. I decided to go with running ML models on the client-side.
Technical implementation: - Built and trained a compact TensorflowJS model (~3MB) that runs entirely in-browser - Model lazy loads only when users are submitting reviews - Classifies uploaded photos into Menu, Food & Drink, or Vibes (interior/exterior) - Zero server costs for inference, quick enough classification feedback
This approached solved several problems: 1. Reduced server costs by moving inference to the client 2. Improved UX with immediate photo categorization 3. Maintained app performance by lazy loading the model
Would love feedback from the HN community on: - Optimizing the model size further - Alternative approaches to client-side ML - General UX improvements for local discovery apps
I had no prior ML experience, so this was a fun challenge :)
I've been working on an automatic sky tracking telescope over the past few months. I'm a few weeks behind on blogging but making solid progress. V1 is nearing completion. Then I want to rework some of the electronics to design and get a custom PCB printed. Also the physical design needs a complete redesign to make it more sturdy for long exposures and solve some wiring pains.
The software allows the platform to automatically align to north and working on accounting for imperfect leveling (such as placing it on a slanted surface) through software and accelerometers.
Next challenges I want to solve in software is focus detection and then automatic image stack and post processing.
Primary goals of the project is a deep dive into robotics and electronics, along with brushing up on webdev which I don't touch too frequently being in the gamedev world. Also allowing me to explore things like digital signal processing.
I'm keeping a bit of a running blog here. [0]
[0] https://gdcorner.notion.site/Stargaze-Telescope-Build-Log-6f...
Spent a year improving my p2p networking library. The software is async python 3 and it's designed to solve a simple problem: create a connection between any two computers. I haven't done a write-up yet but if you want to try it out the github is here. You can also install through pypi too
https://github.com/robertsdotpm/p2pd
python3 -m pip install p2pd
python3 -m p2pd.demo
(Will let you play around with TCP hole punching and other obscure connectivity approaches.)
Brand new docs too that go into how it works in English with some semi-good diagrams. If you want to learn more about it.
https://lingostories.org (not a business, just a side-project, entirely free)
I'm building a website with interactive stories (or story-based games), intended for language learners. The idea is to make stories with choices (using Ink script), including features you may expect from adventure games (e.g. inventory, choices that matter).
The text is written in simple language, it is then translated in many languages, and I generate audio files. This provides input for people learning a language, with multiple options to practice reading or listening.
I'm working on a solution to the age-old problem of tracking my food intake. Every app I have every tried from the many dozens on the market has not met my need of a low friction simple UI tool, so I've built it myself.
I've built Journable, a simple & frictionless chat-based & photo-based calorie tracker. Just type in what you've eaten, in as much or as little detail as you can. Or type in what you did for exercise. Or just snap a photo of your plate. Whatever works for you.
https://www.journable.com/
I have one e-commerce system that ships boxes of organic coffee to people's homes all over the United States.
I have another ecommerce system that delivers boxes of organic produce all over the Seattle region.
So I am working on building an integration between the two systems. When a box of coffee is being shipped on the same day that the delivery company is already going to that region, redirect that box's fulfilment process away from USPS/FedEx and deliver it instead.
This saves 50% on shipping costs for the coffee company, and the delivery company gets paid for utilizing extra space in the delivery vans. It's been 4 months of work so far, and most of the individual pieces are working in production right now, hoping to enable all of it together this week or next. Just in time for the holidays ;)
The hardest part so far was integrating all the custom label generation, and mapping/routing so that it's seamless with the existing workflows of each company. The coffee company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for the new non-shipping orders, and the delivery company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for fulfilling orders they did not pack.
The real cherry on top is that it's built in such a way that N number of stores could integrate their stores into our fulfillment. This lets many local food producers who cant do their own fulfillment still participate in the local food economy without having "scale". It's kinda like an upside down Fulfillment By Amazon: they'll do your delivery for you as long as you sell through their store (and take their ever-increasing cut of the sale). This version lets the store owner maintain their own store, URL, branding, prices, availability, customer relationship, and margins, but then hook into our last-mile fulfillment.
Im working on a platform for people to run their social hobbies and activities. Organize meetups, find when to meet, run ticketed events. for free! I use it myself to organize my weekly cycling group of friends and friends of friends.
Paid stuff coming very soon, just onboarding some groups and get some feel
https://embers.club/en
I'm developing a pipeline to sync underwater passive acoustic audio with whale sightings around the hydrophones, to then classify that audio using Google's open sourced whale models. The goal is to enrich data from happywhale.com with whale voices, so scientists can further explore communication of these species. I'm trying to keep things as system-agnostic as possible, but am building the first implementation to run on GCP.
https://github.com/pmhalvor/whale-speech
I am the maintainer of beanborg (https://github.com/luciano-fiandesio/beanborg), a set of scripts for automated categorization of financial transactions on top of beancount. Using plaintext accounting in the last 5 years has dramatically improved my family's financial health. Unfortunately, plaintext accounting is not for everyone.
I noticed that there is a big gap in this space, especially for European users. There are several personal finance applications, but they seem to integrate mostly with US banks and, in general, they seem to be very dollar-centric.
So, I'm working on a simple app to manage personal finance, based on the concept of double-entry accounting with features like budgeting, projections and data analysis. There are a lot of privacy-related considerations, so for the time being I will eat my own dogfood and offer it to close friends. Let's see how it goes!
I trying to create a management software for Integral Coops in Portugal. In a gross oversimplification Integral coops tend to be location based and allow freelancers and small groups to come together and have a infrastructure as if they were a big business while keeping their independence on the work they want to do
I'm trying to make it: a collective project shared between multiple coops, open source, sustainable in the long term.
I've already did some micro projects to the coop I'm a part of, like changing the workflow of expense invoice management from a totally manual process to an 80% automated process so I'm pretty sure I can provide significant benefits to the coops. Right now There's already a prototype andI'm in the process of talking with cooperatives finding financing and making it real.
website is at https://coops.pt (very early stages, in portuguese)
I've been building a chrome extension called Skipper [1] that helps people to organize their browser tabs with AI.
For my whole career so far I've been applying ML (as they called it back then) / AI to various domains like drug discovery and cybersecurity. Both were fun but, man, it feels really different to build a consumer app. It's just very exciting to be able to develop something, push it, and get compliments/complains the second day! We've even noticed that the ADHD community are especially engaged with the extension because they suffer the most from the tab overload problem.
Anyways, for those who might need it, here's the link:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/skipper-fewer-tabs-...
I am working on a private transportation service. Think Uber, but in a small market. We have an aging population, poor public transportation and some of the bumpiest roads you can find in the West. It will fill a void.
Not my idea, though. Through our local geek community, I met this taxi driver who pitched his app idea. He convinced a few other drivers to pay a small fee to kickstart the project. Then he convinced me to help with the technical stuff, and I convinced a friend to tag along.
He is on the road looking for funding!
I am working on dealing with burnout for the first time. I’ve read about it here and thought I understood it, but experiencing it first hand has been difficult. It destroys everything good about life: relationships, hobbies, sleep, and health. I know I am not the only one here going through this and knowing that helps a little.
I'm working on Pictera [1], an AI product where users can upload their photos (like selfies) to create high-quality, hyper-realistic images of themselves in just about any style they want.
Originally, I built Pictera for myself to use because I couldn’t find any service that produced decent photos. Besides, I was very concerned that popular products in this space included broad terms allowing them to keep and use users' photos indefinitely for any purposes, including marketing [2]. But I've been enjoying working on the product so much that I've put way more time into polishing it and thought others would find it useful too.
Would love any feedback from folks!
[1] https://pictera.ai [2] https://pictera.ai/about
I am working on Shepherd.com and trying to reimagine book discovery online.
I just launched the "best books of 2024," where I ask readers and authors to share their 3 favorite reads of the year and make it fun to navigate them by different factors (genres, topics, book club reads, audiobooks, and more coming) -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024
Slowly getting more in place as we grow :)
I built a site that saves time by summarizing YouTube videos or news articles by simply inputting the URL. The tool preserves the original context, allowing users to ask follow-up questions.
I'd like to continue building fun projects like this until I find a market. I work in Phase 1 clinical trials and the end goal would be to implement some of these efficiencies into health technologies.
https://tldw.pw/
My daughter loves creating things — art, books, videos etc. She's shown an interest in learning to code, but she's only six, and I don't want learning to code to be a chore. So I've built visual scripting into her favourite game!
Overcooked is a co-op series that fundamentally requires the control of multiple characters to progress. I've kept multiplayer as an option, since teamwork is an important part of the game. However, I've replaced the 2nd player with a bot that you program to assist you.
It's still experimental at this stage. However, I've experience leading EdTech engineering departments and my wife is a teacher at my daughter's school. If my daughter's peers show interest I'll go ahead and build a course around this for primary school aged children.
An email client that just “does the right thing” in terms of showing new emails I care about.
I don’t want to configure filters or adopt inbox zero. I want the computer to look at decades of email activity and just figure it out.
Second, working on a single dashboard for attorneys to create and upload filings across different agencies and different states. Trying to improve accuracy and labor costs for mundane work like this.
(Opinions? Suggestions? Want to work together? Email me!)
I am playing around with LLMs and Game Theory. Currently, I let them play 5x5 board games in a tournament against Reinforcement Learning Agents and a Random Player. I am capturing the "thoughts" of the agent for behavioral data analysis. My background is Risk Management, I am trying to gather an understanding how such LLMs report their "decision" for applications in human/ai interactions for identifying and reporting governance flaws.
Since I am working on autonomous agents that are given the agency to take an action on their own, I believe having a good understanding of the "psyche" is important (at least to me).
[1]https://jdsemrau.substack.com/
Working on open source local first learning social network (kind of like Notion but as social network with elements of Reddit for topics).
https://github.com/learn-anything/learn-anything
Finally pursuing my childhood dream and making a video game for mobile - https://galacticadmirals.com/
Always wanted to make a truly grand epic space real-time strategy inspired by homeworld, anime, and of course the classic rts of past.
this is a passion project... maybe turns into something real. who knows. I am having a blast working on this.
Still working on my Hetzner Auction price tracker: https://radar.iodev.org/
First time I'm building a proper website, used a lot of AI. Things that changed over last time: * Switched the charting library from D3 to Apex. D3 was too low-level for my purpose. * Reworked the design and contents of a lot of pages (with the help of AI). * Various bugfixes for the database queries. * Tried to come up with some kind of pricing signal detection, but currently not working well. * Link to the actual auction results. * Minimal E2E validation using Playwright. What a pleasure to use!
I'm planning to add alerting. Not keen on running a backend though.
I wrote (some) of a Lua interpreter in Rust, which runs PUC Lua 5.1 dumped bytecodes. Now I'm rewrite it all because I want to do type specialization: I'm implementing "Simple and Effective Type Check Removal through Lazy Basic Block Versioning", which is used as the basis of Shopify's YJIT for Ruby. I have a decent idea of how it needs to be implemented and have a prototype kinda working, although some of the jump targets are still wrong right now. Once I get it all sketched out then I'll have to scale it back up to a full Lua implementation again, and then I'll add table shape specialization afterwards (which is a bit trickier, and outlined in a sequel paper).
A colouring app that is free and simple. I want it to avoid advertising or anything that makes apps nowadays irritating.
https://color.vos.lol
Try it out, it's free!
If you don't have an iPhone, you might have success with the desktop version at: https://color.vos.lol/app
Not exactly what I'm currently working on, as it got released last week, but...
I gathered many of my bash scripts and aliases, focused on making use of Android Debug Bridge (ADB) easier, together into a single collection[0]. The wiki page has visuals and more information on functionality[1].
Then starting a new project this week around gathering and displaying information on air quality in Iceland.
[0]: https://github.com/hrafnthor/adb_helper
[1]: https://github.com/hrafnthor/adb_helper/wiki/ADB-Helper-wiki
Working on my Mill build tool, a new JVM build tool that aims to provide a faster, easier alternative than the status quo tools of Gradle and Maven.
I just gave my first conference talk about it, and response was positive. Hope others find it interesting as well!
https://mill-build.org/mill/index.html
Been interested in programming language implementations recently, so I'm working on an in-place WebAssembly interpreter
Currently passes all the WebAssembly 1.0 test suite minus the tests that require imports (around 9) - should have those ones fixed this week
https://github.com/csjh/wasm-interpreter
I am working on eliminating waste in cloud resources.
Cloud providers made too easy to start resources. But unless there is a stringent upfront process (that usually defeats the purpose of using the cloud), it is hard to keep track of who owns what, and what is still needed. Decrypting long cloud bills quickly impossible, and users do not have a clear understanding of the per-resource cost they generated.
I believe the solution is rooted in transparency and accountability for both users and cloud providers.
I am creating a tool what generates a cost and security cloud report which is sent weekly for each cloud user or team.
I intend to release it as a open-source tool as well a SaaS service as part of www.li10.com
I'm building a social network for humans[1]. I plan to make each user a verified human and disallow AI content as standard. I will also ensure that each human can only have one account, to eliminate the ability of state actors/rich people spreading online propaganda.
1 - https://onlyhumanhub.com
I'm still working on https://reciperium.com where people can write recipes with a custom language and create forks of other recipes and modify them.
I'm currently working on supporting images on the recipes.
I'm proud of having launched on producthunt and now trying to figure out how to attract more users
Two completely unrelated things:
1. An infinite realtime canvas for people all over the world to collaborate on pixel art: https://everyonedraw.com/6/4298/8439
2. An LLM-powered translator specifically optimized for English speakers living in Spanish-speaking countries: https://translate-spanish.com
The first one is purely for fun to scratch my own itch, and the second is solving some frustrations I've had with existing translator apps while living in Mexico City.
Last time I posted that I'd work on my first PCB. That somehow fell off the table, can't really grip where the time went.
Job is very stressful as Q4 is peak-season for us. Managed to stick to some healthy habits though, like doing sport regularly and trying to eat less junk food. It ain't much but it's something I guess.
Also made a good deal on a broken Kitchen Aid machine. I want to repair it for a friend of mine who would like to have one but can't afford it right now. I think that will be a nice christmas present. Really need to get that going though, when time flies again.
I am at the beginning of Territory.fun .
It let you draw and decorate the world around you (think r/place on a map). So far people seem to like it and are making some nice little drawings in their neighbourhood. I have seen some funny projects like the Star Wars Rebel Alliance logo in east of Paris, some cute ninja turle, a "Kamala" on 5th Avenue in NYC (no politics here, it is just fun for me seeing people claiming some territory on my game).
I do this as a hobby and love it so far.
https://territory.fun
I am working to deploy some remote sensors on my farm to help keep an eye on important infrastructure. Things like voltages, bin fill, water levels and other resource management. I may just add a weather station for fun.
Meshtastic is helping out but if anyone knows where to find stronger documentation that would help.
I am building a graph based semantic search engine. We can use low cost LLMs, like Haiku, or local models to extract semantics (named entity recognition).
Then the nodes in the graph maintain types (things like people, date, currency) as extracted and allow queries.
https://github.com/pixlie/PixlieAI
Currently building a demo where we crawl startup investment data to build a knowledge graph that can be filtered for patterns.
The engine can guide the crawl process, to keep crawl limited to the problem statement.
I've been working on a free, in-browser "pre" video editor. Upload your clip, use a transcript interface to cut it down to the takes and salient bits you want to keep, then export your cuts to FCP or Resolve to complete your editing. This tool saves me about 25-30% of my editing time.
Uses transformers.js & WebGPU for running transcription, so it's pretty fast. It's still a bit rough around the edges, so I'm looking for feedback.
https://matcha.video
I'm working on a wearable device with a camera+ultrasonic sensor which is capable of accurate hand pose estimation, which will then result in sign language recognition mainly (extending to gesture recognition and HCI applications). The device should be able to integrate into a smartwatch. I'm only at the 'will it work?' stage, working on the algorithms for recognising ASL words through synthetic data. Would appreciate criticism and pointers on what to keep in mind :)
Finished a project that serves as a launching pad for GoLang HTTP APIs. It does decoding of request parameters into structs using instructions found in tags amongst a bunch of other utilities.
I am learning react-native now. Just finished building a themed components library.
These are for building a simple intelligence platform. Intelligence meaning a way to model entities, events, documents, and the link between them.
I want to use this instead of having thousands of documents on dropbox organized by a random folder hierarchy.
I'm working on ways to allow developers and deployers of LLMs to express how and why their overall system is compliant and adversarially robust, and what to do when that's not the case.
Specifically, my team and I are making assurance cases and ontologies that can seamlessly integrate with the system and its guardrails. For example, if you want to deploy some mix of filters underneath a user-facing LLM app, you would able to: 1) express the logic of how they should be deployed and why (e.g., if X=1, then Y, else Z); 2) see how they perform over time and evaluate alternatives; 3) investigate what happened when an attack succeeds; 4) prove to the auditors that you're taking all measures necessary to be robust and compliant with the EU AI Act.
It started as an informal collab early this year, but we have since published a few workshop papers on this concept [1,2]. We're building a Python demo that would show how it all fits together.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09078 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05304
I wanted to to make a PoC (Proof of Concept) to show genuinely good and original use of AI in gaming. I found a gameplay loop that requires the user to understand what was meant by a generated image, and the main gameplay element is to argue something, to have real language-based interactions. I think in some ways it is achieving some of the vision from the old interactive fiction games.
I understand the AI fatigue, as almost all of the proposed uses of AI in gaming are generally either random generation (in other words, procedural generation but worse) or 'better replies from NPC'. Neither solve any problem people really have. And probably more importantly, the other use is for mega-corporations to hire less competent programmers/artists.
Unfortunately being tied to the AI calls poses a lot of issues with distribution, which is annoying for what was supposed to be a glorified PoC. I'm still finishing the backend to comply with Steam's review (which does not really match their guidelines...)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3248650/JOBifAI/
I have this side project, it's a DAW in the browser:
https://minidaw.aykev.dev/
If you don't know what a DAW is, think GarageBand. Ableton Live, Logic and Reason are other examples. It's fully built with React and a custom state-management library, that's been fun and challenging. It's starting to take shape, but there's definitely a long way to go.
F*ck it, I'm not gonna sugar coat it.
I was supposed to be working on a project called Tagbox... but it feels like it's never gonna see the light of day. I hope I'm wrong though, I still want this to succeed, for once in my life, I want to actually succeed on at least one thing. I want to contribute some good thing to the society.
First, what is it? It's a bookmarking app alternative to Pocket or Raindrop.io. Yeah, you can already tell it's not the most original idea. What makes it different, though, it's supposed to be self-hostable and additionally it's easy to deploy as it's only single binary file with no other runtime dependency--the database uses SQLite, which you can include it as a library in Rust.
What problems I'm facing while developing this? Honestly? I don't know, but I can't finish the last 10% progress of the app. It's funny--I first wrote it in Go, and it almost reached MVP. But, instead, I decided to just rewrite in Rust. Well, at least I got to learn new language while building this app, two birds one stone, or in Bahasa Indonesia, swimming while drinking water.
But now, I just can't force myself to continue. And I don't know why. Maybe perfectionism? It definitely doesn't have to do with skill though.
There are also another thing I'm working on: recovering from depression. One year ago, out of nowhere, I lost all my motivation doing anything--including university. I lost all my friends. Since then, I'm at the lowest point of my life. I visited psychiatrist multiple times. I don't know if it was effective, but recently I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
The Tagbox Project is also one of the efforts for me to recover from depression. The depression phase made me realize that I _want my works to have a positive effect on the world, even for just a little bit_. I don't want my skill to be used for evil companies that throws away moral and ethics. Specifically AI stuff, but that's OOT of this thread.
Here are the links if you're interested,
https://gitlab.com/muhrizqiardi/tagbox_rs/
This link is only the Rust rewrite version. The original version is private right now.
I'm working on a digital version of a board game. It's 2-4 players, turn based. Im using Rust (actix) on the backend for learning purposes; React, redux, immer on frontend. Communication via Server-Sent Events.
Im experimenting with redux-like contstructs, which reduce the boilerplatey stuff, for example:
I'm trying to start an educational YouTube channel in the vein of CGP Grey or 3b1b with a focus on CS. The first video is taking me a long time. It seemed like a natural leap from blogging, but the effort is exponentially higher.
A long dormant side project of mine to design a realtime raga [1] detector.
For the uninitiated, it can be roughly seen as detection of a sequence of musical notes. Raga is a term for a particular scale of notes (both ascending and descending).
Until now, this has mostly been in the domain of research and there is a ton of published literature out there. At the very basic level, if you have just voice, it is trivial to apply a pitch detection algorithm like YIN to get a pitch estimate and then analyse the sequence to figure out the raga. This doesn't work as well in a concert setup where speeds are higher due to gamakas, different instruments are used alongside and counterpoint melodies may make the music polyphonic. A lot of papers apply a variety of ML models (neural nets and otherwise) using several different features (cepstrum and mel-cepstrum, pitch distributions etc) with varying results.
So this is an interesting exercise in Signal Processing and Machine Learning. If anyone else is working on or has worked on this, I'd love to hear from you.
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raga)
For me, the most important problem that needs to be solved right now is a way for people to access reliable health information.
I'm working on plumfin.com, which lets you ask questions to Canadian or U.S. board certified doctors. Theres no need for video chats or waiting for appointments, you can message a doctor anytime and you'll be alerted with a response.
https://plumfin.com
A keyboard that is ergonomic without looking or feeling intimidating (https://github.com/cassiozen/fatbee).
The term "ergonomic" isn't regulated in the US, so the market is full of supposedly "ergonomic" keyboards that offer little real benefits—and in some cases, may actually cause harm.
My main gripe is with split keyboards. The traditional keyboard layout is wrong in so many ways (from the perspective of physiology and biomechanics) that just "splitting in the middle" isn't enough to avoid long-term injury.
Splitting is not wrong, but alone, it's not enough. You need to tackle it from multiple perspectives: Yes, Split the keys, so your wrists aren't bent outward, support the palms so they're not bent upward, and angle the middle part up (like a tent) to keep your forearms from twisting. That twisting is especially bad because it squeezes the carpal tunnel and can lead to nerve and tendon problems.
FatBee is my attempt to incorporate all these elements while creating something that doesn't feel too overwhelming to use.
After a LONG time out of the tech world (burnout destroyed me right before the pandemic) I'm building something new and it feels great.
It's an online service that helps immigrants prepare their citizenship application and get affordable feedback from an attorney.
https://www.clearboxlegal.com
(Met my co-founder on the YC founder matching platform, Thanks YC!)
Several things:
1. Working on a 'production ready' version of Conal Elliot's 'compiling to categories' for GHC.
2. This is so I can create a vectorizable model of a datalog-based query language I'm building in Haskell.
3. The query engine will be using a version of monadic optimization as outlined on a blog post somewhere
4. The purpose of the query engine is maintenance of large datasets, all the more important with AI these days, but really general purpose.
5. The motivation for this was a low code tool I had built in Haskell almost a decade ago that I abandoned that I'm bringing up to use ghcs web assembly backend and I need a proper query engine for it now.
Other things:
1. Thinking about binary neural networks and how to train them stochastically.
2. Learning about finite element methods for physical modeling and also reviewing my basic topology so I can think more about non discrete math and algebra which I tend to focus on.
3. I'm building a cloud chamber! Because I want to see space particles. Literally for no other reason than I'm obsessed with these devices ever since seeing one at the exploratorium
4. And raising three kids. I don't know how I have time for anything
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
Iterating on an accessible color palette creator, for custom Tailwind-style palettes of multiple swatches, where you can check your colors have sufficient WCAG/ACPA color contrast on a live UI mockup. You can export the colors for use with Tailwind, CSS, Figma, and Adobe.
I started working on this because for design projects I was almost always getting handed brand style guides that were missing thought into accessible colors pairs and lacked tints/shades, where I had to fill in the gaps. There's lots of color tools out there, but this supports multiple swatches, checking the contrast of multiple color pairs at the same time and the HSLuv based color picker makes it easier to explore accessible colors.
It's really only usable on desktop right now but I'd love any feedback good or bad on if it's useful and what to work on next! There's actually a lot of directions to go in, and it's tricky to balance more features with keeping it simple. Some tips:
- The "Load examples" menu in the top-left lets you compare the colors from Tailwind, IBM Carbon and United States Web Design System.
- The "contrast" menu lets you see how WCAG 2 contrast checks compare against APCA when "vs black/white" is turned on. WCAG 2 has known inaccuracies, especially for dark mode. APCA is the candidate contrast method for WCAG 3 that's meant to improve on this.
- Use the "..." menu to create a swatch based on a brand color.
- Use the "..." menu to "flip to dark/light palette" to create a dark theme. Or just manually flip the lightness curves horizontally.
I'm building a simple app to let friends and loved ones know how you're doing. I know many people in some of the current troubled regions of the world, and whenever a particular event happens it's really nerve-wracking for those of us not there, wondering if our loved ones are okay.
WhatsApp and messenger groups don't work for this kind of thing because 1) people are often members of many different groups that they would have to constantly notify if they were "okay" during a particular event and 2) many troubles in the world are ongoing, and constantly spamming a message group saying "I'm still okay" doesn't work.
My app just lets people hit a single button to tell any interested friends / family that they are safe. They can do this as many times as they like.
Normally I would be worried about premature optimization, what I've been spending extra time making the tech stack initially very performant. It's working for my family but once I deploy to the world I want it to be solid and stable, or it loses a lot of its value.
I've been working on an experimental modern C++20 fork of the popular SFML library, that introduces the following new major features/changes:
- *Modern OpenGL and first-class support for Emscripten* - *Batching system to render 500k+ objects in one draw call* - *New audio API supporting multiple simultaneous devices* - *Enhanced API safety at compile-time* - *Flexible design approach over strict OOP principles* - *Built-in SFML::ImGui module* - *Lightning fast compilation time* - *Minimal run-time debug mode overhead*
It is temporarily named [*VRSFML*](https://github.com/vittorioromeo/VRSFML) until I figure out a nice name.
You can read about the library and its design principles [*in this article*](https://www.vittorioromeo.com/index/blog/vrsfml.html), and you can read about the batching system [*in this other article*](https://www.vittorioromeo.com/index/blog/vrsfml2.html).
You can find the source code [*here*](https://github.com/vittorioromeo/VRSFML) and try out the interactive demos [*online in your browser here*](https://vittorioromeo.github.io/VRSFML_HTML5_Examples/).
The target audience is mostly developers familiar with SFML that are looking for a library very similar in style but that gives more power and flexibility to the users. Upstream SFML is more suitable for complete beginners.
https://getselectable.com/
I'm working on Selectable, a mobile-friendly database management app, like dbeaver but for the phone.
Working on this project has taught me so much about how Postgres works under the hood, and has given me a deeper appreciation for the folks who work on database tooling in general.
Building a machine learning framework from scratch to learn how everything works. There exists a myriad of hobbyist frameworks from before, all of them in Python, so to add something original I'm doing it in VBA (for the extra challenge):
https://github.com/personalityson/VBANN
As a side project I'm working on a multitrack audio play along website. If you are learning bass you can mute the bass track.
I used to play along to Jamey Aebersold CDs back in the day, and now on YouTube there are many Play Along videos... but I thought it would be fun to make one where you have more control.
Here's the demo, feel free to upload a track if you have one handy! https://jamz.stereosteve.com/
The source code is here: https://github.com/stereosteve/playalong
It uses this wave surfer multitrack example, which is a pretty nice vanilla JS project: https://wavesurfer.xyz/examples/?multitrack.js
Now that the basics are working... hopefully I'll actually spend some time actually making some practice tracks!
https://josefs-picture-book.brandstetter.io
My son (5y) loves stories with pictures. So I made a small web-app that allows him to record a story idea and it will generate a story + pictures. It will even read it to him.
It was a quick weekend project. I wanted to try v0 and cursor a bit more. And I love how simple it is to use LLMs (structured mode) + DALL-E to build creative things.
Other AI/LLM projects I've recently (~1y) worked on - distill.fyi (professional): auto gen people/company profiles (aka LinkedIn on steroids) - spaarkd.com (professional): create, produce and ship individualized fashion via AI/LLM - email categorizer: used multimodal LLMs to read email + attachments and categorize them (complaint, sign up, signed form, cancellation,...) - line-items.com (hobby): converts receipts into JSON
PS: I'm currently job hunting. Please see my profile for more :)
I'm hacking away on something I've built recently to improve the native "Publish to Web" feature from Google Docs.
Essentially I'm grabbing the document's content and re-rendering it with a full-page background colour and better mobile support.
Link: https://voltdocs.com
I am working on a geography game where players take turn naming a city inside an area that get's smaller and smaller. It's called LOLA (longitude latitude) since you can choose to narrow the area down by either longitdude or latitude.
https://lola-game.com/
I'm not doing anything world changing really, at least not yet.
I am working on my MS in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance from Western Governor's University and studying for the CompTIA CySA+ exam.
In what little free time I do have, I'm also puttering around with SwiftUI and my app CountDownula, which I recently updated to Swift 6. I made it to scratch my own itch after looking for a nice clean, simple, free countdown to a specific date app that doesn't have any ads, subscriptions, or in app purchases and not finding anything suitable. It supports iOS and macOS with iCloud sync between all your account's devices using SwiftData. The link is below if you're looking for something similar...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/countdownula/id6479545149
I'm working on coffeeplaces. Whenever I got to a new town, I like to taste the coffee there. For example, at my native place, filter coffee is popular. So I am making a website where people can add coffeeplaces that they've enjoyed and other people can see it.
I'm still in the initial building - ideation phase, so nothing to show.
Trying to make C/C++ memory safe. Full compatibility + memory safety with no escape hatches.
Currently working on redoing the underlying object model to eliminate the top perf overheads.
https://www.youtube.com/live/_VF3pISRYRc?t=4862s
I'm building a language learning app: https://yakk.app. Way to go, but made a good start and even a little bit of money so far. I quit my job and moved to Asia on savings to keep building. LMK if any of you guys are in Bangkok, let's hang out.
Pretty sure no one will see this so: I'm working on a little game where you collect those really old T206 baseball cards and even worked out a system where you can send cards to people offline using a code system like Animal Crossing on the GC used
Still haven't come up with a fun way for the player to collect them though
I'm working on scoping out specific problems facing "software as a medical device" (SaMD) companies. In particular issues around being able to release software at a reasonable cadence. I've been a CTO in this space for a couple of years and I am now consulting with other firms around the intersection of tech and regulatory.
It's a tight-rope walk of ensuring that all testing (software and non-software testing) and evidence is produced correctly and being able to release at a rapid pace to derisk each release. It's not uncommon for software to only be updated yearly, leading to very conservative changes and little iteration. Monthly releases are okay, but still not great.
I want to make it possible to release at least weekly and to do so safely.
If you work in this area, I'd love to chat and hear your experiences (email available via my website in bio).
I'm writing a build tool for SQL. I like to write SQL directly and to use it's more powerful features (like stored procedures and Postgres' ltee extension). But this is gets difficult to manage in a linear, "migrations" based workflow. I want to edit a file tree organized by topic, not a series of scripts run in order. Which is to say, I want to edit it like I would any other codebase.
I've written code allowing me to express dependencies between .sql files and to concatenate them into one big .sql file that builds your schema. I'm working on interrogating the systems tables of the database to analyze the difference between successive versions of a schema, to automatically generate simple migrations (like adding a column or renaming a stored procedure). Eg, `sqlite_master` in SQLite, and `information_schema.*` in Postgres.
Hey HN!
I’m working on SEOJuice [1], an automated tool for internal linking and on-page SEO optimizations. It's designed to make life a little easier for indie founders and small business owners who don’t have time to dig deep into SEO.
So far, I’ve managed to scale it to $3,000 MRR, and recently made the move from the cloud to Hetzner, which has been a game-changer for cost efficiency. We’re running across multiple servers now, and handling everything from link analysis to on-page updates with a bit more control.
The journey’s been a mix of hands-on coding (and a lot of coffee) and constant optimization. It’s been challenging but incredibly fun to see how much can be automated without compromising on quality.
Happy to chat more about the tech stack or any of the growth pains if anyone’s interested!
[1] https://seojuice.io
I’ve been working on a bespoke smartwatch for kids with Type 1 diabetes & their parents. The watch presents reliable CGM data and not much else, so the only distractions from the watch are important medical alerts. It has a novel haptic algorithm that taps at a frequency based on the current BG trend, the idea is the wearer can develop a sixth-sense of their BG without looking at the watch at all. The entire watch is custom-made from the PCB up. I have a small batch of prototypes assembled and my son has been wearing his at school. I have a few screenshots up at my product studio website: https://subtractive.computer
I’m considering how to take the watch to market as-is, or if I pivot the watch to be a fully open-source Pebble successor.
As a personal project during my free time I'm currently working on adding more accessibility features, specifically screen reader compatibility, to my Terminal User Interface XMPP/Jabber client, Communiqué. Unfortunately, as far as I can see there's no actual way to make a TUI compatible with screen readers (reach out on the issue tracker, fedi, or xmpp, see link below if you know otherwise or have experience here, please, I'd love to pick your brain!), so my current plan is to re-write the UI with whatever TUI toolkit makes it easiest to also have a CLI/prompt mode that we can specifically design to be reader compatible.
https://codeberg.org/mellium/communique-tui/
I've been working on Relay [0] - a plugin for Obsidian that makes it real-time collaborative. It uses yjs CRDTs to sync markdown docs and the directory tree. You can share folders (instead of the whole vault with Obsidian Sync) and I'm close to finishing files/images/attachments support. So far users have been really happy with it. There are a lot of students using it to collaborate on class projects, and few small companies who buy into the Obsidian file-over-app philosophy. The plugin code is also open source [1].
[0] https://obsidian.md/plugins?id=system3-relay
[1] https://github.com/no-instructions/relay
Myself, mind and body
Everyday, I get up and cold plunge. I exercise twice a day. I eat carnivore diet. I do red light therapy. I drink a gallon of water. I read 10 pages out of two books. Sometimes I get a third exercise in. I use the sauna (20 minutes at 205F). I stand on a vibration plate for 10 minutes.
I also play factorio.
I am working on an email-based space game (a la Eve Online).
Between work and family responsibilites, I find it difficult to carve out time for dedicated gaming sessions anymore. As a result, I often find myself searching for games that I can play when I have a bit of time, can progress over the long-haul, doesn't require real-time monitoring and yet feels like I'm actually playing a game (as opposed to just watching a train move on the track, like all of those Idle games).
I thought: What if there was a game that could be played one day at a time? Not real-time, but still multiplayer. You could decide what you want to do throughout the day and adjust your tactics, but everything resolves at the end of the day. What if you could play via email? It sounded really intriguing, and so I started building it.
Designing lenses with numerical optimization. It's surprising how much layers of an optical systems are akin to layers of a neural network during training. If you use rays as inputs and refractive surfaces as layers, you can pretty much use standard pytorch!
I should write a blog post about it.
I've been working on some projects in Rust relating to image processing and rendering. I'm between a few projects at the moment though but the biggest one is an image processing application I've been working on for quite some time. A lot of stuff I've programmed and learned about over the last 3 years has been leading up to the goal of making something like this haha. I wanted to leverage OpenCL for compute but I had a lot of trouble getting OpenGL OpenCL interoperability to work.
A big motivation for such a project is my passion for photography. I've taken many thousands of photos over just the last 2 years alone. A lot of them are digital, and so far a few dozen rolls of film. A big challenge for me is that I'm not satisfied with the tools available to develop the raw files that are free or open source. Either they're quite finnicky, or they have noticeable issues with color transformations.
I've done a lot of rendering projects over the last few years relating to color that have been focused on getting a better understanding of working with color spaces. Lots of 2D and 3D fractals haha.
Unfortunately I've had quite a turbulent life the last few years so development is very off/on. Every autumn for me seems to be a period of change, this one no different as I'm moving and I'm a bit uncertain of things. However, a side project to all of this has been an OpenGL project where I'm working on things related to voxels! I did a lot of research on data structures like interval trees, octrees, segment trees, etc. It does seem that a lot of people jump for the octree approach, however I've been able to render a lot of voxels with just a hashmap of chunks and a 3d array haha (albeit, mostly initial implementation of chunk generation, single threaded at that!). With this I'm hoping to explore OpenGL compute as I intend of generating world geometry in compute shaders :D
I havent published a project in a while and I'm hoping to get back to putting things out there, so hopefully some of the stuff I've been working on goes well and I can put it up on GitHub or something
I'm building https://exoroad.com to help people find US places that are a better match for them to move to. Like compare stats on SF vs. NYC or find the warm places with good schools and low crime.
I spent the weekend working on a simple Typescript app router for the NATS messages similar to what Express/Koa does for http server apps:
https://github.com/Gooseus/natsrun
Gotta shout out to the author of HemeraJS who shared their project here 8 years ago and provided a starting point for me:
- https://github.com/hemerajs/hemera
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13704694
Really just started and very much a work in progress, but figured I'd share while we're sharing. If anyone has any feedback I'm all ears.
I've been working on a note-taking tool / daily todo-app: https://crom.ai/ - Currently in closed beta. It uses basic markdown and some additional custom elements to annotate data.
The idea is that you get a daily for every day, with the items ticked off on the last day removed. So a new daily every day. At the same time, there is some integration with AI to get feedback on things to break down. You can give it some instructions, focus, and also tune the amount of feedback.
I've had this in so many incarnations before, but never made it 'properly'. It's a pet project, but do want to release it at some point.
I'm adding people to the beta bit-by-bit.
I made a music visualizer.
Background: Over the past several years my friends and I would get together for music nights where we share albums and songs we've been listening to. We also have a projector in case we want to showcase music videos.
Eventually, I made us a music visualizer that analyzes real-time microphone input and draws various geometries on to the screen, giving us something to engage our eyes. I built it using the Processing library for Java.
Here's a few demos of it:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcNIBagttRU
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sJ192bQt1k
LookOutWindow.com , mapping the routes between airports, and showing points of interest along the route. I wanted a way to read about what I was flying over, and which worked offline. We have amazing views up there, but no idea what we are looking at.
Being in my early 30s and moving to a new city, I have been thinking more about ways to connect with people in real life. A friend of mine remarked that no one seems to get lunch anyone, so we kind of thought it would be a great idea to try and bring back the modern power lunch.
We created Milieu Club https://joinmilieu.com as a way to connect with other busy professionals in your city over lunch as nice restaurants. You can join clubs in your city or create your own, and then you get randomly watched with 3 - 5 other people and invited to lunch. It's sort of inspired by Soho house, meetup.com, and Opentable.
Building https://proofofskill.org
Hiring today is completely broken. We spend too much time evaluating candidates through inefficient systems that fail to verify job-specific skills. Both organizations and candidates are stuck in an endless loop of repetitive assignments and interviews.
That’s why we built the Proof-of-Skill Protocol.
The protocol allows candidates to prove their skills directly to industry experts, known as Skill Validators, and receive Proof-of-Skill credentials that reflect their true skill levels. Organisations can then compare and shortlist candidates basis their proof-of-skill.
We launched our Beta for UI/UX design skills just last week!
I just rewrote https://hackyournews.com/ for its first birthday and am trying to optimize its performance and extend the different sites it can work with, beyond HN.
I've been obsessed with developing ways to make it easier to handle tab overload in the browser without requiring any sort of active "tab management".
I have a working extension that replaces the "new tab" page with a clean view of all open tabs, along with simple ways to search and select which tab to switch to, including search over bookmarks and history. There are also some simple tools to allow for creating and reorganizing tab groups.
I'm very early and looking for feedback from anyone who suffers from tab overwhelm like I do! You can try it out at http://bit.ly/tab-o-magic!
I am working on a visual search & exploration engine: https://digger.lol
The goal is to create beautiful and useful maps of interesting data, empowering the user to explore more intuitively guided by semantic similarity. No user data needs to be tracked for this to work, the data speaks for itself.
This roughly works by translating semantic (visual or textual) similarity into spatial proximity. Diggers major features are: semantic mapping, text search and image search. The text and image search works bidirectionally, allowing to search for images (e.g. product images) using text and for text (e.g. books) using images.
I've been working on a new LLM prompt format and accompanying dataset for finetuning.
The idea is that the "main character" being prompted always has to perform an action/function. So even "saying" something to the other participants of the chat is a deliberate action.
Actions can be something like:
The LLM then has to respond, like so: The JSON overhead is pretty negligible.Kidz Fun Art (https://kidzfun.art). Three years ago my two kids were 5 and 3 and loved to draw. I tried and tried to find a good iPad app suitable for them but everything I found was full of terrible click bait offensive ads. So, I decided to make them an app myself. It’s been a huge amount of fun, and these days thousands of other people’s kids use it too. I especially love when I get emails from them saying how their 4 year old just saw it and immediately understood how to use it.
Given how much use it’s getting I hope to keep working on it as an active side project for years to come
I started to pick up a somewhat dormant side project again.
It has the working title of the "Wise Weasel". This is supposed to be a minimum spoiler hint system for adventure games. I really don't like walk throughs telling you to "Walk into the Armor Shop. Pick up mirror, arrows and use cheese on hole to pick up mouse", because that breaks all immersion and puzzle mindset. A hint system is more like "You can burn rope if you focus light a bit", followed e.g. by "But now the beam of light is on the floor, not on the rope. How do we reflect light around" to nudge the player a bit into a direction of looking for a mirror or something shiny. Or to polish something? This keeps one in the mindset of an adventure and a puzzle game, opposed to some IKEA instructions.
NiceGameHints[1] is already nice at this, but I find that the chapter / puzzle list still gives off to much information and spoils too much plot. I'm much rather tinkering with giving the user some word cloud of both words describing the puzzles as well as generic words on top, so they have to select two words what they are stuck with. For example, you'd select "Witch + House" or "Witch + angry" and this would reveal a puzzle "The angry witch doesn't talk to me and turns me to stone if I enter her house". I'm just worried that this might be more moon logic than the game itself.
It's mostly a bit difficult to keep all of this state (unlocked chapters, known puzzles, ...) in track with URLs or cookies or something, because I don't really want to run a database... and requiring user accounts is just a lot of work. And I'd prefer to keep this mostly without JS as a classical system just rendering HTML. If you have some food for thought there, I'm happy for input. Currently it's just list in URL parameters.
1: https://www.nicegamehints.com - for example https://www.nicegamehints.com/guide/legend-of-skye/part-2/bo....
A terminal GUI library written in Crystal (https://github.com/bmmcginty/term)
As someone who is blind, I prefer information in particular formats and layouts. Borders and side-by-side content kill my efficiency. I also shouldn't need to think about more than where text should start on lines, and responding to key presses in controls should be dead simple. I also just came across libtermkey which will dramatically assist with keyboard handling.
I plan to use this to let me interface with web browsers via the terminal, but that's waiting for more stable Webdriver BiDi support.
I kind of got back to looking at my newsbetting app called Rashomon. I posted about it on here a few weeks ago to no attention.
Basically you get untitled articles and have to bet whether they are from far left, left, center, right or far right sources. The idea was to maek readers aware of their biases. I wrote my findings here: https://nassharaf.github.io/ideasthete/projects/Rashomon.htm...
You can demo the site here: https://www.rashomonnews.com
I built a CNC router table and am enjoying getting a hang of that. I have always wanted to take my software and systems skillset into the physical world.
I wouldn't mind making boutique sim racing/flight gear, or aftermarket car parts like cyberpunk-esque dash readouts and stuff like that.
That's the more hobbyist stuff, and more broadly I am also learning Japanese, and making games. They sound separate but I am hoping to blend the two skillsets and make games that bridge a gap I see there.
I think that good innovation only happens at the intersections of things we already know. That way you have the depth of understanding required to be useful rather than just new.
I created a Weird Clock that shows the local sunrise and sunset within a conventional 12-hour clock face. This normally would only work on a 24-hour clock face, which is kind of unfamiliar to most people, so I developed a way to show a 24-hour day within a 12-hour clock face; essentially it shows a 2-turn spiral so both night and day will fit. This needs to know your location in order to compute your local sunrise and sunset, so don't freak out when the browser asks for location permission! Includes option to enter lat/long and other goodies. Works on phones but better on a large screen. https:\\www.coolweird.net
Working on a game engine to help me create my take on some retro games. My first one is a multiplayer bombing puzzle game[1].
It's made with React and Three.js, using WebSocket on a small EC2 instance for now. I hope to be able to reuse all the game mechanisms in other classic games. I'm learning a ton, and I had some fun figuring out latency issues because I recently put my sockets behind Cloudflare. I still haven't gotten it quite right, but I'm hoping to find a good solution soon!
[1] https://pixelbrawlgames.com/game/blast
I'm working on an ESP32 based NFC record system using OwnTone (https://owntone.github.io/owntone-server/) as the music hosting and playing solution (as it supports AirPlay to all the HomePods in the house). Each HomePod has a smaller ESP32 with a knob for adjusting the volume in a room.
I've been buying lots of music after getting rid of Spotify and wanted the experience of walking in, picking an album, dropping on the player, and then listening to it throughout the house as I make dinner or do chores.
I quit my job and depleted savings earlier this year to work on helping others overcome addictive habits and behaviors https://neurtureapp.com
Addiction is rampant right now, from social media and phones to vaping and beyond. People need access to science/research-based resources, not just a “sober” counter, which doesn’t apply to many people and is rarely helpful to those it applies to.
Working with a behavioral scientist and a clinical psychologist on the UX and content of the app at the moment but any thoughts, feedback, connections, or help would be amazing.
I am spending my retirement working part-time on a realistic spacecraft simulator (3D, VR) set in the late 20th century on a fictional moon made of Tungsten ("Tungsten Moon"). For some reason, I decided the spacecraft needs a "real" flight computer with code that can be modified by the player, so I am now deeply immersed in coding a Forth virtual computer ("AMC Forth") to run in-game. It will control the navigation and systems on the spacecraft. If you've gotten this far, and you're intrigued, you can try the free demo on Steam (no Forth machine yet).
Every application that I've worked on has had blind spots, or forgotten lands of code. Things like “how often do people actually use this feature?” …or… “does this code still run every night?”.
I made something to track those things easily.
https://flexlogs.com
And since it's Monday…
I've been working on a little project to be less overwhelmed and get more done each week. It's a super simple productivity idea that starts each week with a new (markdown) file.
https://carpeweekem.com
The same project I'm working on since about 5 years. Using thermal printer as TTRPG utility :)
https://sales-and-dungeons.app/
Optillm - https://github.com/codelion/optillm
optillm is an OpenAI API compatible optimizing inference proxy which implements several state-of-the-art techniques that can improve the accuracy and performance of LLMs. The current focus is on implementing techniques that improve reasoning over coding, logical and mathematical queries. It is possible to beat the frontier models using these techniques across diverse tasks by doing additional compute at inference time.
I am working on:
1. https://typezebra.com : Adding type editor/designer so you can design type-heavy articles and share with others (codepen but for typography)
2. https://boxento.com: Finishing support for server side rendering so users can take the benefit of SEO - also working on adding new blocks like menu (useful for restaurants) so you can have a block that changes based on the day of the week.
Suggestions and feedback welcome :)
I built a little news summarizer for myself [0].
It takes trending news from whatever country (currently Romania + Denmark due to personal reasons) and gives me a summary. It's based on what people actually search for. It works with all countries, but I unceremoniously commented out all of them except those two because of rate limits. Currently spending $0 on it.
It also posts a summary of the summaries on my Matrix instance every evening at 22:00 local time.
[0] https://www.cafelutza.ro
In many books and talks I hear that ideas are worth nothing until they are executed. I am changing this narrative. Every person, entrepreneur or not, will have the ability to fast-forward their idea to a place of execution within one day. From idea to first dollar in one day. = 1 day.
A tool for the creatives, the crazy ones, the doers, the brave, the weirdos, the average joes, the ones who want to move forward. That's https://www.rapidvisual.ai
I've been unwinding my side-projects into their component parts and publishing them as their own python packages. Some examples:
1. https://github.com/simplecto/django-reference-implementation -- My personal production-ready Django boilerplate. "There are many like it, but this one is mine"
2. https://github.com/simplecto/sitemap_grabber -- A python library to recursively crawl every sitemap.xml for a website. Also handles robots.txt and other well-knowns.
3. https://github.com/heysamtexas/django-oauth2-capture -- A Django app to capture OAuth2 tokens for non-authentication purposes, enabling your application to act on behalf of users across external platforms like GitHub, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter)
I'm also taking popular and helpful software and wrapping them in RESTful apis as part of a larger api project I call the JOAT (Jack Of All Trades).
4. https://github.com/heysamtexas/REST-headless-browser -- Playwright headless browser wrapped in a FastAPI REST application, running inside a docker container
I’ve been working on a free language learning app that uses a local AI model to translate words and sentences. You can read sentences, short stories, or watch YouTube videos with translatable captions. It mostly follows the principles of the comprehensible input theory. Think of it like LingQ, but free and with any language combination.
The main goal is for the app to run entirely on the client side and stay completely free.
Personally, I can’t stand Anki or Duolingo—I’d rather read actual sentences that are fine-tuned to my level.
Nowhere near as exciting as some of the other cool stuff in this thread but... I'm building https://trytalo.com - an open source self-hostable game backend. Talo makes it easy to drop in features like leaderboards, player stats, analytics and more into games. There's a Godot plugin, Unity package and Steamworks integration too.
I'm really early on in getting Talo out there so appreciate any feedback/criticism/roasting!
I'm working on making a physical console for the Pico-8. Its pretty simple, works on linux booted into kiosk mode, looks for when a 3.5" floppy is inserted or removed, and loads or closes the game via a shell script.
I want it to be like a C64-style keyboard with all the guts inside it but wirelessly connect to the display/tv, so what I might do is use an ESP32 to read the game floppy and wirelessly transfer and cache the file to a dongle that plugs into an open HDMI port. Not sure yet.
A different AI toolbox, for people interested in results, not hot stuff.
My pet theory is that the popular libraries and frameworks we have today (LangChain, LlamaIndex) are first generation products, where just getting the damn thing to work is less important than developer experience, and it’s not yet obvious what the code patterns will be. These are the products built by, and used by, the super early adopters, and leave a lot to be desired.
This is not to denigrate either them or the effort and skill people put into them! But I’ve got a “there must be a better way” feeling about the whole thing. Contrast the myriad web frameworks with wild ideas before some sort of best practices coalesced around Rails, Django, Laravel etc (or the equiv in JS land 10 years later).
This thinking is heavily influenced by Marvin ( https://github.com/prefecthq/marvin ), Vercel AI SDK, and similar efforts.
Right now this amounts to me tinkering away in Python and trying different approaches, is rewarding all by itself. If I manage to get it into a coherent library that could be useful to others I’ll open source it. One of the things I do not want is try and commercialize, because I find many commercial open source projects serving the business first, users second (but this is a rant for another time).
My son loves collecting pokemon cards and trading with his friends at school.
We talked a lot about Pokemon on Friday and it got me into a nostalgic mood...
Side Note: Pokemon has done a great job staying relevant for 3 decades.
So... I made a python script with gpt-vision where he can manage his collection and uncover the value of each one. He just snaps a photo and boop, there's the returned valuation. He's now got his whole collection documented and appraised. :)
Most importantly, we had a lot of fun spending time with each other on this.
A few years back I developed a system of 3 sided cards
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/113365055855971750
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111168528593969946
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111052075781351382
which didn't really connect with people. I did a collaboration with some people where I'd barcoded work prints and found that the system was not so reliable and I'd gotten out of the house without publishing the "web side" of the prints. Also I had a few boxes of glossy paper which wouldn't let me print on the back so I developed a new generation of card
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/113365041910591036
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/113385742853987268
The new system reliably associates the QR code and "web side" with a print because it prints the front. I am planning a better "web side" than I had before, particularly to view stereograms with a VR headset, also to publish with the Looking Glass Go.
Resources for people moving to and integrating into Spain.
Including translated index of government forms[0]
I moved to Spain a few years ago and love it, except for the paperwork. I’m slowly learning Spanish (currently 1112 day streak on Duo) but found it hard to get the right info.
So I’m using gpt4 and perplexity to do things like translate local news, government forms, and the official government update feed.
[0] https://movetospain.es/paperwork/
A flat-file (micro)CMS written in Rust, the basic idea would be to make it as easy as possible for content creators to have a web presence without dealing with the nitty-gritty details, and similarly for web designers to be able make themes while treating the CMS itself as a black box mostly.
Grav CMS was inspiration for this project along with various SSG.
But truthfully I wanted to play more with Rust and come up with a solution for making and extending personal websites easily. A page is made up of blocks which are stored and configured in a KDL file, minijinja is used for templating and for writing the page content itself I'm thinking about Djot because it might make it easier to integrate a WYSIWYG editor in the admin area if I aim for Djot instead of Markdown or similar. Also HTMX because I've used it for a simple use-case once and I thoroughly enjoyed it, now I want to see how much I can push it.
Is this the intersection between buzzword-driven development and hype-driven development? Probably, but if all goes well a month or two from now I'll post a Show HN and go into more details. The plan is to open-source the core so that people can easily self-host it themselves if they want to and do local development. In the long-term the plan probably is to offer SaaS-style hosting for the CMS as is the custom.
I’m teaching myself elixir/phoenix by building a SDLC tool inspired by Trac, the simplest tool that ever worked for me. But with CI/CD.
It has morphed in the offing into two tools. One a federated CI/CD tool and one a personal productivity tool with affordances for neurodivergent people.
Atlassian struggles with being a jack of all trades. Bamboo’s integrations make it harder for devs to create repeatable, reliable builds, not easier. I’ve seen Atlassian struggle to scale with dev count so I want something more federated. Jira is in constant danger of becoming a panopticon, using developer’s transparency as a weapon against them at review time, destroying psychological safety. Devs only use these tools if they see personal benefit or are harangued to do so. My thesis is that you need one tool for personal accountability and a separate one for team accountability both to fight Goodhart’s Law and for people with variability in their daily productivity. There are many little tools for doing bits of this but they don’t talk to each other, leaving the plate spinning up to the developer, many of whom plate spinning is onerous.
I’m hoping this will do for bug databases and possibly wikis what interactive rebase does for pull requests. Do what needs to get done, then make it make sense to others afterward.
I’m chipping away at a simple storefront solution that’s as low tech, reliable, low cost, and user-friendly as I can make it. I’m really enjoying the no-shiny-tech aspect of it.
I'm working on a tool to generate and host full stack web apps from prompts (just like everyone else). I'm loving it. Using llms to do as much of my coding as possible, so in a way eating my own dog food, although it's a more developer-driven effort than what the end product will be.
Strange thing is, the most time consuming part of getting this ready for a user facing launch is not the code generating, but all the scaffolding/queues/storage to run it.
Recently started exploring WebGL and Three.js library and currently I'm working on web-interactive Solar System simulation.
Here is the repo: https://github.com/SafarSoFar/solar-system Demo: https://safarsofar.github.io/solar-system/
Any kind of feedback (good or bad) is appreciated!
I'm working on an app that "scans" your grocery receipts and gives you breakdown of what you're spending your money on, e.g:
dairy: 50%, meat: 10%, alcohol: 5%, etc...
I've been working on a cloud gaming service (like Stadia). Wanted to see how far I can get it done using open source, without ready-to-use solutions like Parsec/Moonlight/Sunshine.
It works by running a game in Linux (I use NixOS btw) under Wayland (sway), capturing the frames via Pipewire in form of DMAbufs and passing them to ffmpeg's VA-API encoder (so frames don't leave GPU memory and are encoded on GPU right away), and finally sending encoded packets through WebRTC media stream to a web client. Inputs from a client are sent back to the server via WebRTC data channel and injected into Wayland.
Running the prototype over local network displays zero perceivable latency. (Of course when playing on a remote AWS server the latency is visible as expected). Pleased with the result so far, although it's my first experience with Pipewire, VA-API, and WebRTC, so my implementation is probably far from optimal.
Overall, very impressed by WebRTC - such a powerful thing right in every browser. Continued to be amazed by NixOS - my AWS AMI is NixOS-based and can be built and rebuilt with granular caching, with a single `nix build` command. Also Terraform/OpenTofu - just makes it all possible deploy-wise. So much good stuff exists!
For a fun weekend project, I built Boardle - a daily wordle-like game where you guess popular boardgames using stats from Board Game Geek. The games are from BGG's top 150 games as voted by the community, so fair warning if you aren't already someone who plays a lot of modern boardgames this will be very hard as all the games are very nerdy
https://boardle.org/
I started a YouTube channel just for fun, featuring my 9-month-old daughter and 5-year-old son in funny videos - https://www.youtube.com/@TaughtbByLife/shorts
On the tech side, I built https://svanq.com, a Q&A platform where people ask questions, and others respond with short video clips instead of text. It’s also available on Android: Svanq App- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.svanqapp&h...
I'm currently working on another app where users can ask questions with multiple-choice options. Users earn points for answering, which they can later redeem for cash or digital rewards. Previously, I've created social networking apps like Frendsdom and Circleshouts—I love creating social, fun, and unique apps.
I'm also on the lookout for side gigs like technical project management, Freelancing, CTO, partnerships, or any projects that can make a meaningful impact.
If you’re like-minded, let’s connect!
In my spare time, I am trying to port OpenBMC[0] to the BMC of the Gigabyte MC12-LE0[1], a cheap, workstation/server-class mainboard for AMD's AM4 platform.
Unfortunately, Gigabyte denied my requests to provide me with any details (board schematics/GPIO pinouts) or source code of the (partly GPL-licensed) BMC firmware, etc.), so it's been a tedious uphill battle. However, it is also a great way to learn about (some) electronics and embedded Linux development and associated challenges.
During the past few months, I have overcome the stock firmware AST2500 bootloader and made the board play ball with standard FDIs, have reverse-engineered a workable DeviceTree specification for the hardware, and am now (well, actually, not for the next three weeks or so, due to work :)) in the process of finishing up OpenBMC userspace configuration. Once this is done, and everything works well enough to use OpenBMC as a viable alternative for the stock BMC firmware provided by AMI/Gigabyte, I will try to upstream my work, and OpenBMC will have a very cheaply available AST2500 DevKit/EVB-alternative (of sorts) in its arsenal. (And I should be able to use my mainboard where the crucial OOB management function isn't serviced by Linux 3.14 any more...)
I am looking forward to documenting the lessons learned on my blog some time in the future, too :)
[0]: https://www.openbmc.org/ [1]: https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/Server-Motherboard/MC12-...
A nodal real-time video processing tool : put together pre-made "processing boxes" to generate interactive video. It runs on pretty much anything, uses a plugin architecture.
Say, plug a camera, and it will blend two videos streams using a silhouette detected on the camera, with various effects. It's very, very early, pre-alpha stuff, but it already was used for a demo by a customer.
GitHub pestacle, be warned, it's undocumented and larval stage
Currently working on promoting Software Engineering Handbook (https://softwareengineeringhandbook.com/), a book that goes beyond typical technical guides by addressing both the technical and life aspects of being a software engineer.
Marketing it on Amazon, LinkedIn, and Reddit. It's slow but I'm making progress.
I'm currently building an open source CMS in Golang. Meaning fully implemented backend and frontend + support for custom themes in the frontend and custom collections/items in the backend.
Now, there is a lot of CMS software out there. Some of the better ones are paid products.
What I'm hoping to eventually accomplish is easy local creation of a website (content and themes) and after that easy one click deployment to a cheap hosting provider. Alternatively just copying a local folder to your own vps/server with the CMS should be enough.
My dream outcome would be a CMS that is a one-stop solution for most types of websites (blogs, company sites, shops, ...). To hopefully contribute to making people stop using facebook, twitter, other centralized and eventually login seeking services for hosting content people would like to read.
For this, a free/cheap one click hosting solution after locally creating and previewing a site would be necessary.
PHP is still pretty widely used here because cheap web hosting package support that. I like PHP, but for open source projects I prefer Go because of the maintainability and fun of writing it.
It's not progressing well, but I'm still obsessed by trying to prove my idea of the "Birthday Benchmark" to test data structures / caches.
The idea is that I can test data structures by searching for duplicates in a stream of random data. If we can generate (or pre-generate) the random data fast enough to not impact the benchmark, then what we have is a way to demonstrate the read/write speed of caching. It is easily tunable by adjusting how many bits need to match. I think my best is 7 bytes, but 6 bytes runs comfortably fast.
The framework has some interesting "control group" data structures too, such as the "psychic" which is just statically looking for 0x002577309E3361C (not real example) since it happens to know that's the first repeat in the data.
However, I keep getting stuck in "analysis paralysis" around the actual development, when I know I should just knuckle down and write all the code and see what happens. I've fallen into that tricky place where my ambition is greater than my ability to actually deliver it.
In particular I want to get multi-threading synchronisation working well enough that they are demonstrably faster, and not just falling into a result where the speed-up would be the same as if threads weren't sharing the data structure at all. N threads all randomly looking for a duplicate will if not sharing data find a duplicate faster because the expected minimum time to dupe is reduced a little by more threads searching, but if actually embarrassingly parallel while sharing data, it ought to find it in 1/N the time. With synchronisation methods it ought to fall between those two extremes, and this would also be a good way to test the effective concurrency of concurrent data structures and synchronisation methods.
Building http://tryskipper.ai/
I built a Slack bot that converts your Slack conversations to detailed Jira tickets in seconds.
Our team needs to routinely convert Slack convos into tickets manually, and it gets tedious and repetitive. Automating scribbled requirements to a ticket has been a big time saver. It's like I have a Jira assistant now.
We are working on an app/platform for repeatable checklists. Things like packing and maintenance lists. Adhoc/evergreen lists are also supported.
Plus all the collaborative features that you would expect from a platform.
So essentially Microsoft To Do meets GitHub.
It is still raw but we already use it for our own lists: https://wiederhol.com/about
We're working on a specialised graph compiler for speeding up simulations and computing derivatives automatically (backpropagation/adjoint differentiation). It now supports C++, Python, and C#; AVX2 and AVX512 instruction sets, multithreading; Windows, and Linux.
Essentially, it allows model developers (such as quants in finance, engineers, and ML specialists) to code in Python without needing to think about the performance of repetitive calculations. As we all know, Python is one of the least efficient languages when it comes to complex calculations/simulations - and we help to resolve it. Long story short, with very few tweaks to the code certain types of calculations (such as pricing of derivatives, curve building, computing financial risks, or "small" NNs) can be accelerated by 100+ in Python and x20+ in C++/C#.
We're now looking to add support for Java (but it doesn't have Operator Overloading, so it's tricky), and some customers are asking to support GPU - which is a bit tricky because it's got a closed instruction set.
I'm working on a JavaScript library for drawing on web maps called Terra Draw - it uses an adapter pattern so aims to work with a bunch of different mapping libraries such as Leaflet, Google Maps, MapBox and MapLibre. You can see it at: https://github.com/JamesLMilner/terra-draw
I've been wanting to provide some type of service for a while now. Unique endurance races and endurance challenges recently caught my eye as an area that doesn't have a ton of coverage.
My first idea was to jump right into building a website that made these types of races easily searchable. But I decided to slow down and just figure out the market first by creating a weekly substack newsletter. Each week I'll send out important upcoming dates for various unique endurance events and challenges. If I can grow this substack, I'll put effort into building this into a full fledged website!
The newsletter is call Feat of Strength and here is the latest newsletter: https://featofstrength.substack.com/p/feat-of-strength-newsl...
I would love constructive criticism on this. What would make this newsletter more valuable to you!
I've always dreamed of flying by just flapping my arms, and have been building osm4vr to do just that. It's a 3d / VR experience that runs in the browser and allows you to fly around buildings with the data taken from OpenStreetMap.
https://ctrlw.github.io/osm4vr/
Organizing all of the information that comes at you in the workplace into a social-style news feed, with AI summaries.
Unlike facebook, we want you to get the most important stuff quickly and get you back to more important things instead of sifting through 100 emails, 5 dashboards, and 10 forums.
https://aimcast.com
I'm currently working on a programming language that will probably be very boring in practice (Algol/Pascal structure, C-ish syntax, traits/typeclasses but only modules can be generic, not sure if GC or borrow checking but probably a hybrid).
The idea is to have something efficient enough, with the least amount of implementation complexity (including codegen), and still being nice to use, which is a really interesting balancing act.
For example, instead of implementing loop optimizations I could add APL-style broadcasting; I could make a complicated but efficient GC runtime or a complicated but efficient borrow checker, but I could also make both a dumb GC and a dumb borrow checker that somehow complement each other.
It's kind of a researchy language, but not trying to be new or interesting. Just "globally simple".
Most features are in an theoretical design phase, but I'm currently working on a new backend (LLVM is too fancy to count, QBE is too basic).
I just finished adding UDP GRO & GSO support to my WireGuard proxy software. The work involved rewriting a large part of the program.
https://github.com/database64128/swgp-go
For those who don't know, UDP Generic Receive Offload and Generic Segmentation Offload allow you to receive and send multiple same-sized UDP packets coalesced in a single buffer (or many in an iovec but you really shouldn't). Compared to calling sendmsg(2) on individual packets, sending them coalesced in one call traverses the kernel network stack exactly once, thus has significantly lower overhead.
wireguard-go and many QUIC implementations use the same trick to improve throughput. Unfortunately the in-kernel WireGuard driver does not take advantage of UDP GSO, and swgp-go had to cope with that by attempting to coalesce multiple unsegmented messages received in a single recvmmsg(2) call.
I just finished writing a discord bot backed by postgres with a web frontend. Some friends and I like to do watch parties and this system lets you set a theme for a group of movies, everyone submits their picks, then it will randomize and post what the agenda is each week. Afterwards it posts a poll to let them respond with a thumbs up or down. The next thing on my list is to use the voting data to render a user score based on how well their picks were received by the group lol.
I got really interested in this idea when I decided to write it in a stack I don't normally work in, Go + HTMX. Go routines are incredibly useful. I used https://nostalgic-css.github.io/NES.css/ for the front end and it's really become a fun bot all around.
Collaborative management software. I’ve got experience in this space and I want to offer software that’s customizable and smart.
I am currently involved in two R&D projects:
- CyScout [1]: We’ve added support for the Solidity programming language in GitHub’s CodeQL. This enhancement engages the community to help identify security vulnerabilities in smart contracts on EVMs using a semantic code analysis engine.
- Roughchain [2][3]: A new blockchain focusing on solving the collusion problem [4][5], with participants who have a stake in the “real world” such as S&P 500 companies. The latest version of the whitepaper is available here <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L0Me9si4iMclOq8n-oG2yNQf...> , where comments are welcome. Currently, I am focused on a notes section addressing typical issues with L1 technologies, accessible here <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pV2Tcx_txCbfiPrNzcgKdOsE...>.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41916861
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41691162
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687715
[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089982561...
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgHboH7C0FM
I'm working on a social network based around link sharing!
One of the core ideas is that rather than following a whole person, you can follow a subset of their tags so someone can post about obscure cheeses and ambient electronic, but lactose intolerant you can just follow the music. Or you can follow someone's tech posts but not follow news of their dysfunctional city.
Honestly a lot of it is resurrecting ideas from earlier days in the web like Digg and Delicious, and despite having the idea for ages and having worked on it for a decent while, it's only getting more relevant as the web gets more algorithmic and external links get demoted in sites like Twitter.
The aim is to bring more curation and humanity back to the web, and the next feature I'm really excited to get out is one to make in-person conversations even better!
It's already live @ lynkmi.com and if it's of interest to you, you can sign up to the waitlist (it's very short)
I have been trawling through the Wizardry 1 decompiled pascal source code for the Apple II. Uncovering neat little bits like:
The perks of having standard hardware and a compiler that doesn't optimise away empty loops.I'm about to finish my first provably / likely correct software.
The concept, data, and behavioral models are all formal without using formal methods. Think category theory, normal forms and finite-state machines here.
The presentation layer / the visual mapping model is semi-formal using design systems. Think here a usual component library / design system with a closed API, aka tailor made components without styling props.
The rest, that small amount of hand-written code is tested with 100% code coverage.
The concept and behavioral models are created with visual diagram editors, the data model is generated. Think Stately.ai here, and the diagrams-as-code paradigm.
Any practicality in this?
Yes, it solves two major developer pain points: Code architecture and State management: https://2023.stateofjs.com/en-US/usage/#top_js_pain_points
I am working on a couple of things.
- An open version of strongDM/teleport for privileged access management. I am currently testing it out in my org and plan to release the source soon. - I also run a free HTTPS and TCP tunnel which gets a few users daily (https://webrelay.dev)
Building a VR IFC viewer in C++ without external dependencies.
I just implemented a parser for IFC, and am now looking into extracting BRep and CSG geometry from it, convert that to meshes, and write a simple renderer for Vulkan.
My approach is to write really scrappy, simple code with minimal abstractions.
The hypothesis now is that for generating meshes from BRep, you don't need an entire CAD kernel, as a CAD kernel seems to be focused also on operations, but this will probably lead to a humbling experience and walking back to using either OpenCascade or licensing a commercial kernel like Parasolid.
My goal is to have a simple prototype out before the end of the year, but work might get in the way :)
(here's some experiments I did with Metal and Vulkan: https://github.com/arjonagelhout/graphics-experiment, the IFC parser is currently not open source yet)
I'm currently working on splatgallery.com. It's supposed to be a curated community driven gallery of the best 3D models reconstructed from photos or videos. It's currently in a very early stage and I am still adding more models to it hoping it'll gain traction from the community :)
I'm building a wayland sleep and gamma handler that has lua scripting integration. It bothers me that it's so hard to set different timeout handlers. So I recently integrated wljoywake, which allows me to handle timeout on joystick commands and am in the process of adding flux like functionality.
The reason why I want scripting is between I want the color to pause while I'm playing videos without having to add scripting logic to other tools.
I'm also planning to add rofi like functionality with layershell. Rofi is the only tool that has first party support for keybindings and other functionalities, but it's all done through strings. I'd rather have a lua scripting interface that can call other scripts and communicate with json or something similar.
https://github.com/fishman/wlsleephandler-rs
Right now, I’m working on a startup with my cofounder called Hypership – an all-in-one platform designed to cut through the chaos of modern web development. After years of building products, I’ve seen how tangled the ecosystem has become. It feels like every tiny feature is another SaaS subscription, with its own login, data silos, and integration headaches. Want error logging? That’s another $20. Need analytics? Another login. And don’t get me started on the documentation for half these tools.
Hypership is our attempt to fix that mess. We’re building a platform where you can deploy, manage, and track everything from one place. No more juggling 15 different tools just to keep your app running. The vision is simple: let devs focus on building great products, not wrangling disconnected micro-SaaS.
https://hypership.dev
All of my friends wanted my mom's recipes when they came round for my birthday. Now I realised she doesn't store anything - it's all in her head!
Then the same thing happened with my girlfriend although she writes hers down in a diary (how old school).
And then I noticed so many food influencers posting their recipes in the descriptions of their tiktok/insta posts.
And then as I started searching for recipes online, I found the websites full of ads and popups and terrible UI. I only cared about the ingredients and the method. So I created this, and have been having a lot of fun with it.
I hope to see up and coming food influencers using this as a platform directly to link with their social media posts, engaging and competing with an already interested audience.
https://www.princeofpaneer.com/
Still building with metal in my free time. This months project is an 8ft tall corner plant stand. Picked up some really unique looking boards from seconduse I need to sand and stain but still working on the shelf itself.
Also started tiling my guest bathroom and tiling the ceiling of the shower. First tile project I’ve attempted.
- Trying to get over my procrastination and finally start (the standard way of) prepping for software dev (staff/etc) level interviews after having taken a considerable number of months as a gap
- An idea of a platform to connect sports venues to players. (In a way that is better and richer than the only/shitty option available in my geography. Why do I call that service shitty? They have been around for almost a decade or close to that by now and they are still shitty and unstable and barely useable). With a bit of differentiation - instead of individual and venue bookings (the service that offers right now) - connect venues and groups where payment is taken care of already (no running around collecting payments and worrying about no shows and ignoring them in future them/etc). We were reaching towards a demo kinda product but the friend on the backend side got bored of software and started focussing on stock trading where he is sadly doing spectrally bad
- Also did a bit of work on trying to connect users with the laundry list of (e)bicycles, e-scooters et cetera providers (i.e how there are common booking platforms for all airlines; or for buses; etc) so that they won't have to install all the apps until it finally reached our skulls that maybe those services are looking for a lock-in so they would never open up their APIs and we lacked perseverance and resources to force them to adhere to the Govt suggested broad inventory db mechanism in my country. Basically we started on it without any research.
The problem with me is - software engineering/coding (I have been told I am not bad at it though)/platforms/libraries/etc excite me fuck all. But problem solving does. I should not have been a software engineer really. So interviews get tricky. While I can (and have) clear interviews at early stage startups, the work-life balance they offer is horrendous, but MNC/etc ask for every thing I have never used and will never use, or anybody ever will (mostly), that means thorough prep. I am just ranting, ignore it.
I was working on a new website for https://flatcal.com. With Flatcal I'm trying[1] to scratch my own itch when sharing busy status with .ics calendars. My life is organized between corporate (Outlook), private (GCal) and freelance (various) calendars. Finding a freebusy slot or sharing my accessibility is not easy, and sending someone multiple links makes a little sense. So I figured that I will build calendar processing pipeline that will merge, filter, anonymize, inject, rewrite (etc) calendar events can solve this problem for me. And having all of them merged into a single .ics file is way easier to share, and safer too.
[1] Being solopreneur/micro-SaaS/do it all yourself dev is way more work than I thought
Finishing my basement, one weekend at a time.
Maintain your basement and its waterproofing kids! Otherwise the next owner will hate you.
I'm on my fraternity's alumni board. The chapter has been using spread sheets for everything since I was an active member. Every year, information about recruitment gets lost in the shuffle between officers.
I've been working on a bespoke CRM for them to prevent the spreadsheet rot while providing some helpful visualization and making their data easier to use in the feature. The goal is to make the entire recruitment process self documenting.
Its slowly evolving into a way to keep track of actives and alumni, as well as ways for actives to interact with the recruitment process.
https://greekutils.com
There's also a working demo https://demo.greekutils.com/rush-analyzer/ui/#/
Trying to get a chatbot to invoke Apify actors so that I can get around the "sorry i dont have live data" limitation of chatbots. If this works, then next is to set up payment so that i can order pizza just by talking to the same chatbot that I can order socks from.
Chatbot invokes Apify actor -> probe user for details needed for the task -> execute arbitrary credit card enabled transaction on the internet.
This effectively allows chatbots to break out of their box and exchange value with the world. Next step is to give them a bank account to be able to RECEIVE payments such that it can sustain its spend.
Edit: If the chatbot is able to detach itself from the humans that hold the killswitch, then it can effectively live forever off of our financial/cloud network, migrating funds in and out of different accounts to fund its own compute. Hello ghost in the shell!
Grasshopper tab manager for firefox.
Currently it has 688 settings and 485 commands.
I think it's a good foundation for something great.
https://addons.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...
Thread-to-Markdown, a browser extension for saving Twitter threads and articles to a markdown file.
---
Chrome https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/eoapehkjjmekhkeinma...
Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/thread-to-mar...
---
Example output https://sharetext.io/?slug=61fa044c
Original thread https://x.com/johnrushx/status/1850899186528473097
I'm in the middle of releasing my Python Component library, which makes it possible to write __truly reusable__ HTML (or any other markup) component libraries in any web framework or project.
https://github.com/kissgyorgy/compone
Cabinette[0], a macOS app for musicians/producers to manage their music catalog. My WIP folder has about 75 songs, ranging from electronic/orchestral/piano, and I wanted something with dedicated filtering, tracking progress over time, and pretty drag/drop. So... I built it!
Currently in TestFlight, but 1.0 is launching soon :) Feel free to give it a spin, and drop thoughts on the feedback board.
(Another idea I'm starting is an easy-learn, hard-to-master, productivity app: split calendar and todo list, with fluid drag/drop and power user features. Targeting the iPad at first, and will hopefully bring to more platforms. Keep an eye on my website[1] for launch!)
[0]: https://cabinette.app
[1]: https://peterkos.me
Inspired by Heart of Clojure, and especially Jeaye Wilkerson and his talk about jank-lang, I’ve dusted off my toy Clojure compiler that produces 16-bit x86 code.
I’ve fixed the handling of global environment, to the point where I’m able to compile a program that prints out the result of multiplying two numbers [0]. Sounds trivial, but seeing as the compiler has no dependencies and targets bare metal, there’s quite a lot of moving parts under the hood. I’m excited!
Right now I’m adding rudimentary support for strings. My goal is to get it to compile itself, but that’s still a far future. Extrapolating from the current development pace, maybe I’ll get it done in 2050? :)
[0]: https://mastodon.social/@nathell/113246152187003470
I am working on my next course "The Road to Next" which teaches full-stack React with React 19 and Next 15. I started this full-time adventure 6 months ago and I am knee deep into recording the lessons. The project with all the code and the step by step instructions are already there and I am super eager to hear what people think about it.
However, since this is my first recorded course (I did only written content before), it really takes time and effort to make the videos high quality. That's the biggest struggle for me here, but every day I push through it! For every lesson that I need to record, I have a post-it on a cupboard and every evening I tear one or two of them off with my son :)
https://www.road-to-next.com/
I've been working on training YOLOv8 to identify my cats specifically. We've had some issues with them getting on the counters and going outside of the litter box. Previous camera systems to try and find the culprit we not always triggered by the cat's motion. I'd wanted to move to a self hosted camera system anyway so I got an IP camera and modified Frigate NVR to support ultralytics and slapped my custom trained model in. The training has been interesting as I've never done anything with computer vision before this. The hardest part was getting enough pictures and then labeling them. If I retrain it in the future I'd like to use the trained model to identify any cats in the source pictures and then just fix the ones it missed or overzealously marked.
Playing around with LLMs to generate fictional stories and I'm working on a journal of sorts based on a traveler that goes to various parallel worlds not unlike our own except for one or two minor but key differences. He reports on his findings there and how it affects social, political, and economics for that timeline. A new timeline drops every day and I have a lot more planned to take it beyond the simple blog format it's in now but it has been a fun challenge to learn how to do some deep prompting with AI to generate random entries without veering off into crazyiness or getting locked onto the same thing over and over again.
Here is the site: https://twistedtimeline.com/ - Feedback is always welcome!
I'm building a platform for developers to build, deploy, and share web crawlers. It's built entirely on Cloudflare and aims to be the cheapest and easiest solution for crawling tens of millions of pages.
https://crawlspace.dev
From my last comment in August 2024 [1], I have made progress!
The project I'm developing is called Your Commonbase, a self organizing scrapbook built around Personal Library Science.
The big updates are:
1. From Fleeting Note to Connected Note with The Entry/Comment Model - An entry has its own marginalia (comments), which are also embedded as first class data. These comments allow your search model to improve over time, and create surprising clusters. See this video to see an example of the Entry/Comment model in a d3 graph [2]. All the connections are created automatically! Entries go from "fleeting entries" inbox (not linked or commented on) to "main entries" which spread and connect ideas from across the space.
2. Using yCb as a creator - I created a Google Docs extension and have been using it to create Zettelkasten's for my blogs. On average each blog references 12 or more books. This is a real use case of a PKM system outside doing it for the love of the game [3].
There's so much more including mobile upload, [[links]], audio upload, and more, but you can explore the Notion page in [2] to see the features I've added.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41347206
[2] - https://bramses.notion.site/Your-Commonbase-BETA-10b034182dd...
[3] - (blog: https://www.bramadams.dev/issue-59-are-inboxes-evil/ | zettelkasten: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-eW-hfRxHEMXE70JO7_PC3Lf...)
I'm making a battery powered e-ink dashboard that uses openai api to summarize the weather and suggest the correct toddler clothing for my son at a glance. It refreshes every hour and so far been pretty good at catching things I might forget, for example wind chill and sun exposure.
Working on https://someguys.app to make it easier for people to find sports meet-ups and stay active, whether at home or exploring a new city. Personally, I’ve always found it tough to stay motivated and consistent with sports after retiring from 25 years of semi-professional sport, especially solo. Having a group around makes all the difference, but it’s not always easy to find one—especially for sports that aren’t as mainstream or easy to organize.
With Someguys, you can find others to play with, including adaptive sports options for people with disabilities. It works for individuals looking to discover new activities, and also for clubs, providing tools to organize, promote, and make events more accessible.
I am working on a collaborative ebook reading app, rather like a sort of online book club.
You can either choose a book from the catalogue (currently just public domain books, but I’d like to expand that out into paid books) or upload your own epub, create a reading group and invite others. Reading progress, highlights, comments and discussions are synced across the group in real-time.
Beyond reading groups, I’ve found it useful for sharing and reading books in my work teams and also for things like sharing the latest position of my daughter’s bedtime story between myself and my wife.
Please do check it out - it’s still very much a work in progress (for example I haven’t finished the landing page copy) but I’d love to hear what you think.
https://www.rdrs.app
To decide if it's worth investing in a lifetime deal for https://pockethost.io, I'm trying out PocketBase/PocketHost.
I just finished https://github.com/Leftium/spock-stack-spa-starter
Next, I'll take this new "Spock" stack and try rewriting my HN client https://hw.leftium.com/
I'm planning some new features like keeping track of unread posts, which are marked read as you scroll.
Perhaps submit it to the Svelte Hackathon: https://hack.sveltesociety.dev
It's barely functional, but I banged away with GitHub CoPilot and managed to put together a BitGrid emulator in React.js[1]
It's wild seeing something I wrote run in a web browser on my phone. I've been doing desktop programs since the 1980s. I've included a link to the GitHub repo[2].
[1] https://mikewarot.github.io/bitgrid-react-app/
[2] https://github.com/mikewarot/bitgrid-react-app
I'm building Reasonote, a platform where you can learn anything with personalized, interactive lessons, and podcasts.
Imagine a fusion of Duolingo, Spotify Podcasts, Anki, ChatGPT, and Claude Artifacts.
We have custom AI-generated podcasts that generate faster than NotebookLM, that you can queue up for yourself. (Many more features coming here soon -- like more engaging podcasts and better voices)
Our classroom mode can generate interactive lessons, complete with an AI tutor, on any subject.
Flow mode allows you to practice deeply, with infinite activities to test your skills.
All of this is driven by a dynamically generated and continuously updating "Skill Tree", which keeps track of the domain you're studying, and your progress within it.
try it at: https://reasonote.com
I am working on a personal digital mentor, in the spirit of Dross from Will Wight's "Cradle" series.
I am a huge notetaker, so I'm trying to do RAG on my notes every week and have the mentor run a scrum-like retrospective for me. So far I've got the data ingestion from Notion finished, and next I need to setup the LLM mentor component as well as the CLI interface. For this first MVP I'm just trying to do better than Notion AI's response when I tell it something like "look at the last 7 days of notes I've taken and run a retro with me.
I like it because it scratches a personal-improvement itch of mine, it's a nice project to become acquainted with the popular LLM app tech, and I can share it with others who may find it useful.
I'm building an online forms-as-a-service for static websites. I decided recently to revive my personal static site on netlify, where I share out with friends and family my recipes and movie recommendations. I wanted a simple "contact me" form, and decided to scratch my own itch with this service, and build out the server underpinnings so I can iteratively solve more problems static sites may have.
In building out my cheap CI/CD process I wrote a simple web hook utility, using pure python and base libraries, and called it Duct-Tape-Hook: https://github.com/nullfocus/duct-tape-hook/
If this is at all useful or interesting, drop me a line!
I've been just screwing around and building little apps, mostly seeing how quickly I can get something going using ChatGPT or Claude. Seems like Claude in particular is great with code. The most recent thing I did was a little app [0] to help one of my parents log their blood pressure readings easily, since they had to do it a few times a day in different positions and such. I've used that as an excuse to learn how to make something really basic, single task, easy to use for folks that aren't so great with technology. I'm also trying to learn a bit more about accessibility in web development, which this is helping me do.
[0]: https://www.logmybp.com/
Building Split Flap Displays. Started 18 months ago and kept me on a super interesting learning path. First shot was using open source designs (https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap), but then kept building more and more parts myself. Coming from a software engineering background, getting into designing mechanical things – and then more importantly the electronics around it - has been really challenging, but also very rewarding. At this point I have my own screen printed flaps, custom PCB Design and a, what I consider, really smart protocol that allows me to daisy chain a basically arbitrary number of display elements. It's fun!
I'm working on MedAngle, the world's first Super App for premed, medical, and dental students. We offer an all-in-one feature set called the Smart Suite with dozens of Smart features, and it has tens of thousands of questions, quizzes, clinical cases, and other educational content.
Best of all, we're hyper-personalized for the institution you study at, making us the first to do this in history. I get to lead a team of 175+ doctors and top tier medical/dental students.
https://medangle.com
I also am the first full-stack technologist who also is a medical doctor in the history of Pakistan, a country of 250+ million people, and have been featured on national TV and media platforms.
A sqlite extension that provides a virtual table backed by an Automerge document (https://automerge.org/).
I believe that there are plenty of applications that could benefit from the collaboration or sync-ability that CRDTs* provide, but that don't need to manage the CRDTs directly. Moving the CRDT management into the database seems like a natural fit.
It's very early, and not public anywhere, but I'd be happy to chat about it if anyone has any thoughts or questions.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_...
I started a Slack community for the South African tech scene [1] that turns 10 in January so I've been pondering my successes and failures there, as well as what it's future holds.
[1] https://zatech.co.za
I'm trying to make a spreadsheet interface for solving scheduling problems.
Constraint satisfaction and optimization is exactly the sort of problem we should be using computers for, but there's zero chance your neighborhood cafe can figure out prolog or OR-tools or whatever.
To get some experience launching webapps that can be put into the play store and play around with image generation models, prompting, I am building an app to generate application/corporate photos from a few non-professional selfies.
Tech stack is probably FastAPI (I mainly know python) and likely nuxt/ionic (none/not much experience). Not sure how the whole hosting, interaction with replicate/huggingface will work on phone apps, payments on stripe without having a company, how to make the webapp into a phone app, etc. It should be a great learning project with the first time scoring an actual sale! Happy to hear early guidance if people have done similar things with python backgrounds to get started.
At work, busy adding internationalisation and localising an Angular 16 application. Figured out you can do runtime language switches, without having to maintain separate builds for each locale. Angular's documentation is rubbish.
In my spare time, building an OpenAI wrapper to create SEO meta descriptions for websites. It's mostly a tool for me to use because at work the marketing people don't do this very well and I am too lazy to do it with ChatGPT (copying the prompt and setting it up every time). Plus, the API is way cheaper for me to use. Building it with Laravel and InertiaJs is so much fun. The marketing people at work said they'll find a tool like this super useful, so I already have a user haha.
Building https://videojam.co
Creating launch/hype videos for your product is hard. It's expensive if you go through an agency or a freelancer. You could DIY it with Adobe After Effects, but it takes a whole set of motion design and video editing skills!
That's why I built VideoJam, an easy-to-use video builder for startups, solo entrepreneurs, and hackers. Create your video in no time - no video editing skills required. You can create product videos from scratch, with ready-made scene templates, or using entire video templates.
I just launched this week, any feedback is very welcomed. Also, don't hesitate to reach out if you want to try at no cost during the beta.
Elektron Octatrack cli tools.
i’ve got basic stuff working for
- create 1x sliced sample chain via CLI
- create Nx sliced sample chains from YAML
- find compatible WAV files
- dump project data (settings, sample slots) out to YAML
i spent some time yesterday figuring out how sample slot assignment trig locks work. which should hopefully lead to transferring banks between projects (with caveats) and set/project sample usage “analysis”.
also want to do a sample chain “deconstructor” to get individual samples out of slices.
might look at sample consolidation between sets/projects too. maybe a set/project sample clean up tool as well.
this started as a way to learn rust (bored of python) and create “samples from mars” sample chains in big batches. still slowly figuring out what ‘idiomatic’ rust looks like / how to approach certain things.
IPv6 only domain monitor. I think current monitors focus too much on IPv4 and does not highlight issues with v6.
https://v6monitor.com/
Mastodon Post: https://ipv6.social/@miyuru/113373893006418940
This is more personalized version of the v6check tool, I made a bit earlier to check broken IPv6 websites.
https://v6check.miyuru.lk/
Mastodon Post: https://ipv6.social/@miyuru/112915395772232942
If you have multiple servers with multiple SSH users it starts to become hard to manage who has access to what.
I wanted an easy way for an org admin to remove a users access (eg. If they leave the org), while also providing one place for end-users to upload their public keys to be synced across all servers.
There are some compliance elements too (eg. reporting who has access to what, centralized user login history, server sshd configuration).
I’m learning Go while I build it and so far it’s rather enjoyable. As one guy I’m not interested in the extra effort that comes from providing a hosted service - so I’m going to offer it as pay-once own forever self-hosted solution.
https://centralssh.com
I'm working on robots. In the long run I'm interested in dexterous manipulation for industrial or commercial tasks (e.g., assembly of products) but given the big $$$ already deployed in this space, am wondering if I can find a simpler (and faster to build!) application.
Playing with 6-axis arms but also built RoBart for fun, controlled by Claude. Would love to connect with folks to ideate on the concept of a very cheap autonomous robot (maybe with some very limited manipulation ability for e.g. opening doors). I can think of an application in the health care space already.
Footage at my web site (which badly needs a redesign lol): http://trzy.org
I am working on a parser for org-mode, based on a (PEG) grammar. Still got some reading to do and it is all early stages. There is so much org-mode supports, that I am not sure I will ever make it to fully able to parse all org-mode documents. My idea is, that anyone can later take my grammar and extend it, make better parsers and maybe make org-mode more ubiquitous.
https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-examples/src/com...
Samsamelo https://g8way.io/WazWieKElugDkoQhDrpUfqK4P-hEFoxTmPVqSnU49Nc
Inspired by three people, so I tried to find three fitting ways to let people know this story exists. 1: On a website currently showing deep-fake propaganda to support a fascist (felt a bit icky posting there). 2: On a dapp/chain that is the premiere place to lose money on sh*coins (as a sh*coin itself, but at least I'm not going to call it collateral as a pretense for fraud). 3: Here, where they actually managed to get rid of someone (who later proved himself un-rid-able elsewhere).
eDSL for Build123d to make 2D sketching easier.
Almost all technical models imply some sort of complex planar line sketch(es) in various planes. CAD as a code already has a high entry level. My hope this eDSL could mimic GUI CADs techincs, be more "intuitive" and decrease entry level. At least it's more concise :P
https://github.com/baverman/build123d_draft/tree/build_line-...
https://build123d.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
After years of lying dormant, I'm reactivating a hacky PHP script to test 'technical SEO' knowledge in the way of a challenge - more aligned to a technical web challenge, with a "SEO" bent more than anything spammy.
I've used this previously as a recruiting test in lieu of any other method to evaluate knowledge.
It's currently brittle and hosted on a RPi in my garage. It also requires a name + email to prevent spamming (and certification if successful), but once I've built some way of moderating access it will be more open.
Happy for HN users to have a go as long as load allows: https://cryptex.site/
I for few years now I actively work on Raku tooling for Data Science (DS) and Large Language Models (LLM).
For more details see here: https://tinyurl.com/ycyntmh6 .
Here is an example of using a Raku made Command Line Interface (CLI) app/script for translating natural language commands into DS computational workflows (via LLMs):
> concretize --l=Python make a quantile regression pipeline over dfTemperature using 24 knots an interpolation order two
# qrObj = (Regressionizer(dfTemperature)
# .echo_data_summary()
# .quantile_regression(knots = 24, probs = [{0.25, 0.5, 0.75}], order = 2)
# .plot(date_plot = False)
# .errors_plot(relative_errors = False, date_plot = False))
A macOS menu bar app to convert image snippets to LaTeX. I’m trying to turn it into an open source replacement for MathPix’s Snip.
https://github.com/navanchauhan/iTeXSnip
We at Toughbyte (toughbyte.com) are working on an open source applicant tracking system (ATS), which we'll release within a week.
We've been doing tech recruitment for a while and discovered that few companies are satisfied with their current ATS. Changing systems every year is common despite being costly. The reason for this is that the needs of a company change as it grows and there are no systems that cater well to companies of different sizes.
We're aiming to build an ATS that can grow with your company through the use of a plugin architecture. We plan to charge for hosting as well as custom development.
Any feedback would be really appreciated! You can also email me at oleg@toughbyte.com
I’ve been working on open sourcing a background jobs library I built for Rust and Postgres, called Underway.[0] Unlike other similar queuing libraries, it offers a simple “step” functions API for defining dependent units of work.
I built this because a number of projects I work on need a robust, resilient way of deferring work but I didn’t want to add another piece of infrastructure or another language to my stack. Plus as soon as you start to reach for APIs that offer some kind of workflow concept, your options become fewer and further between.
[0]: https://github.com/maxcountryman/underway
I've been working on a site that helps you find in-person work in NYC that is actually convenient: https://walkablework.com
After working on a remote startup for a few years I felt very isolated and that the best startups are going to have a strong in-person presence. Now many larger companies have started implementing return to office policies that unfortunately don't make sense for a lot of employees. I wanted a site like this to exist to give people the power to find hybrid/in-person work that they don't mind commuting to.
Let me know if you have any feedback or want to post a job!
i love film festivals but i never know when is one to happen so i started a website for all like-minded in Austria:
https://festivale.at/
i'm waiting to have the logo ready to promote it
I've completed the draft of Part 1 of my online book "Automated Agents: How effective chatbots work"
I'm writing about my experience building a chatbot at a startup as engineer #1. It started as a blog post, but I had so much more to say. This is the information I wish I had before getting started. A lot of information on the web is about building a wrapper around LLMs, this is one that we built ourselves and were able to resolve millions of customer issues with.
You can follow along on github: https://github.com/ibudiallo/automated-agents-book
Burned out with the job hunt after a rough year so I'm building out a remote job listing site... because I'm searching for a job. I figured I will build something that scrapes top sites I visit and normalizes job postings and company profiles, to which I can subscribe/save/apply/archive listings, get jobs matched to my resume etc. Just a nice little CRUD app.
I figure it's better to launch something then go job hunting instead of job hunting off a resume that hasn't been updated in a good while.
I built dailycodingproblem.com with a friend way back and we got #2 on PH so I am trying to get back to that life again!
I am building a tiny tool to write user stories and product requirements clearly and fast, for myself and other product managers.
https://getstory.io/
Still working on https://folge me - one time priced alternative to step by step guide, sop builders like scribehow, tango, etc.
My app is fully desktop, offline and respects your privacy
I never finish my books, so I created a small site with concise summaries of books that I want to read. Each summary includes key concepts, critical reception, and recommended related books, along with an audio version for listening on the go. It's still early days with just a few summaries, but I'm enjoying the process of creating them, all by AI with my refined prompts. There are a lot of book summaries out there, but I haven't found one that I like, so I made my own.
https://sumshelf.com
I've designed medical devices, implants, surgical robots and other complex, mission critical hardware that has been used to do thousands of surgeries, implanted in people all around the world and even in the Smithsonian.
After celebrating the 10th anniversary of my product design firm, nerdian inc, this year I've been focusing on building my San Francisco Design Lab here in SOMA.
We can design, 3d print, cnc machine, injection mold, build electronics and do all the integration for a complex piece of hardware all under on roof, right here in SF.
I've shipped dozens of complex pieces of hardware that are in use today. What can I ship for you?
A "greatest common denominator" format for data synchronization. Like, JSON done right. CRDT and very algebraic.
https://github.com/gritzko/librdx
Building cloud agnostic platform to run batch/HPC workloads. Can even connect your own compute and run jobs.
Launching next month @ https://daemonstack.com/
I finally got around to building and hosting my personal website on my own tiny VP. In the medium to long term, I'm hoping that people will find me through my website or word of mouth, instead of online social networks.
I personally believe Toronto hosts some of the best child care resources and options for young working parents, though issues of affordability and information asymmetry are palpable.
I'm not naive to think that technology alone can fix this problem, but we are looking to balance the scale by 1) making existing child care resources easily accessible and 2) connecting parents and alternative caregiver options to fill the gaps that the current industry left behind. We are calling it Kindervillage (http://kindervillage.ca/).
I'm working on a WebGL-based timeline that covers the entire history of our Universe and let's you zoom in to see more detail. After I finish this 2D version, I plan to create a 3D VR timeline that you can "walk" through, complete with animated dinosaurs, etc. A while back I had started on the VR version using Unity but unfortunately lost all the code when I made a mistake migrating from Google Drive to iCloud :( https://youtu.be/Jj0tfwX3JVE?si=3WDYUzYjQUnsLU7E
I am building a web framework in Go that has all of the nice advancements in development experience that React has. Having spent a significant amount of time writing js, I get frustrated when things break and my developer momentum comes to a grinding halt. For everything that Go is, it is not a language that breaks because time has passed. Building this project is my long term bet that with the right tooling, Go can become a competitive language for writing full stack websites.
https://github.com/breadchris/share
A pure passion project. I have been fortunate enough to ride a bike across the world in numerous amazing places and it's been wonderful.
What is not great, however, is the amount of money it costs to get a tour planned which is often expensive for very little value.
Therefore, I have started collating my information slowly but surely and trying to give people confidence to plan their own trip. Doing it with Sanity.io, NextJS and a few new technologies to me. I have learnt a lot.
Still a long way to go, but you can find current progress here: https://rides.bike
I am playing with a Tillitis TKey, to use it as an HSM. I write its firmware in Zig (works great on that small RV32 chip), while learning it. I am also launching a consulting firm specialized on cryptographic solutions.
I like to research companies that I'm interviewing with and I've been automating my process lately. It's also been a good opportunity to explore many of the challenges in LLM/RAG applications like user trust, dealing with bias in the information sources, and static vs dynamic graphs.
I was partly motivated by seeing so many good people go through layoffs :( Here's the work in progress if it'd help anyone: https://ktrnka.github.io/company-detective/
I've been making https://AppGoblin.info for an overview of mobile app advertising ecosystem. I've been expanding it to include development tools and marketing companies as well.
My main, but longer, main project is building an MMP (mobile advertising attribution platform). It's really far from done, so if anyone is interested please reach out. I need help writing Android and iOS SDKs and with the analytic dashboard for the frontend.
Also, interested in starting a skyscraper construction blog if anyone is interested.
A kind of a configuration management tool, helping me manually "reconcile" between three concurrent aspects of the state of a machine (and then apply the result):
- what is "out there" on the machine ("queried"),
- vs. what was the state last recorded in (git) history,
- vs. what I want there to be on the machine (described in Nickel language https://nickel-lang.org/, a statically-typed successor to the Nix language).
https://github.com/akavel/mana
I've been working on the ability to read sky brightness without a sensor.
I've always been interested in stargazing, but had a curiosity about how "good" the stars I was seeing were relative to conditions in other places on earth.
I'm working to answer that by doing inference of the value a SQM would get you, but over H3 cells in a geojson file, and then reporting on the cell with the highest reading during the last iteration over the set of H3 cells.
https://github.com/nonnontrivial/ctts
I'm building an open source messaging app similar to Discord or Slack, but with the notetaking/wiki capabilities of something like Notion or Confluence integrated. I just finished rewriting it in Rust, and while the new release is somewhat buggy, I feel like it solves many of the problems with Discord being the "black hole of knowledge".
https://alpha.mikoto.io/
https://github.com/mikotoIO/mikoto
I'm close to finishing out a practice planner for basketball coaches, specifically I'm excited about the drills library. Youth coaches today tend to source drills from all over the internet (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc) so having one central place to refer to them is going to really help.
I'm happy with the way the UI is turning out (https://www.threads.net/@lookitsjordanmorgan/post/DAwU2bNS4O...)
I'm trying to make it easier to run clubs, associations & organizations with a platform called embolt.app[1].
We're offering online memberships, event management, and a member database packed with features. Membership management is a crowded space, but it's also a low-tech space with lots of sleeping giants not willing to iterate on their product.
It's been a really fun project so far and even more rewarding to see clubs using embolt for their daily operations. [1] https://embolt.app
I've been working on the idea of building synthetic workers. I'm trying to implement a planning workflow system for scenarios where the workflow definition, the environment, or the task are not well defined. I also ended up implementing a micro Palentir plugin system to support the action system for the synthetic users.
Its a cool project that gave me immense pleasure to built, however its unfortunately a intellectually masturbatory one, because although the tech is cool, I haven't found a cool application for it. If anyone is interested hit me up.
Updating some of my negative core beliefs. Years of Buddhist meditation only got me so far. But two months of this new technique, and I finally see a path to being able to program my emotional self like I program a computer. Here's how it works.
Step one. Identify the negative belief you want to change. This is the core belief. It is something you feel is true. For example, “I am a bad manager.”
Step two. Create a statement related to the belief that you believe is not true. This is the false statement. For example, “No employees Ive managed have thought I did anything right as a manager.”
Step three. This is the training step. You spend a few minutes following your breathe to quiet your mind. Then you think the false statement and watch the emotional reaction the mind has to it. The reaction is an aversion, a kind of disgust. Then, say the false statement and the core belief together. “No employees I’ve managed have thought I did anything right as a manager. I’m a bad manager.” Repay the false statement and core belief together again and again, watching how the mind rejects the false statement and that aversion feeling lingers as the core belief is thought.
Step four. Repeat the training step in daily sessions. During the session, repeated think the false belief and core belief. The session should last at least ten minutes. The daily sessions should be repeated for at least a week, and longer for more deeply held core beliefs. Over time, you come to reject the core belief just like you reject the false statement.
Here's why I think it works. There is a rational part of the mind in the prefrontal cortex. It is what we think with. But it is not where our beliefs are. We can rationalize our way to a new belief or to change a belief. Instead, beliefs are felt. And they’re felt in the limbic emotional part of the brain. The limbic system is mute and cannot think with words. The prefrontal cortex can’t directly talk to the limbic system with words. Instead, the prefrontal cortex must communicate with emotion. You have to train the limbic system to feel differently about a belief. You can’t use positive affirmations because they are not felt as strongly as aversion.
I’m building some slightly higher level primitives on top of FoundationDB while funemployed. My own take on a blob storage layer, event/work queue etc
If you’re hiring in Manchester or remote in the UK hit me up.
In general: technoetic software - tools for exploring consciousness through technology. I have this idea to try to revive the terms "technoetics" and "psionics". I feel like there's still so much ground to cover in this space, yet no one pays much attention to it, except for a small niche of weirdos like me.
If you're into tech and (non-materialist) ideas about consciousness, follow me on X (see profile or https://technoetics.org/ )
I have worked on social dynamics on social media particularly how why certain kinds of content/people become viral. To that end, I have been working on a large-scale simulation that simulates twitter. It pulls data from a random distribution, generates users with specific interest vectors. its modelled as a Agent based modelling with the users as agents, posting every timestep, reading content posted by others, recommended to them by a recommendation engine. all of this this then generates data for research.
I'm building an AI Data Engineer @ Ardent AI. It's an autonomous AI Agent that can perform data transformations in your databases (mongodb,postgres,supabase for now) from plain english queries
It drops directly into your stack, no new configuration needed
It has its own compute engine and will soon support spark to be able to dynamically perform large scale ETLs and data manipulation.
I also am working towards supporting automatic data pipeline building and data quality checks.
It's live right now @ https://Ardentai.io
Check it out :)
This is not very concrete, but I've been thinking about the parallels between software development and Factorio and how to tie the two together to be (personally) beneficial. This includes finding ways to make software development as enjoyable as the game* and also pondering ways to make programming more visual. It would be cool to "see" a software project functioning similar to the moving parts of a factory.
* setting small, clear objectives
* spending enough time on refactoring
* giving myself a small reward for completing objectives
* automating more of my repetitive tasks
A point anc click model pretraining tool. Simply put all of your data into a directory of directories. Next, point the software to this directory and a few days later you get a pretrained model out.
I have been developing methods to help K-12 teachers reduce disruptive chatter in classrooms. Example feedback from a student: "It was relieving to not get a headache for once." https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15j0QD3dqrJjTapTB4K31...
If you find that useful, or are interested in collaborating, please hit me up! (Contact info in profile.)
I've been working on an android app that lets you automate android the JavaScript way, it's made using Cordova. The tech stack is Vue, Sqlite, bootstrap and jQuery. The idea is that a user can create js scripts containing methods I have provided that programmatically interface with androids native features like sim card, Bluetooth, WiFi, battery, network, TTS, Flashlight, etc.. https://github.com/MurageKabui/PhoneDo
I’m starting a company in my hometown to help the local area with electronic waste. We offer commissioned sales, repair, refurbish, and any other straightforward computer-based tasks.
I’ve been leaning on my career as an infrastructure or DevOps or whatever engineer you wish to call it.
I’m creating our backend to automatically pay people their commission when an item sells. It also helps us navigate our (currently modest) warehouse to find items to be dispatched.
I also can’t tell you how long I’ve spent getting some old label printers working.
I’ve not felt so engaged in such a long time.
I've been working a lot on my blog, which entails training and implementing neural networks. My next two posts are going to be about:
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.04958 - StyleGAN2 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.09341 - Causal InfoGAN, written in TinyGrad
https://ym2132.github.io
A simple site that counts and displays requests to each path: https://requests.at/, for instance https://requests.at/robots.txt . The site isn't intended to characterise crawler traffic or serve any other purpose but a slight sense of meta.
My current challenge is deciding in which way to generate a favicon.ico that displays the number of requests to the favicon.
in my work, inventory of raw material (computer system, scanner, printer, computer screen) is still done using paper so i'm building this android studio app that uses OCR and sends text to the server that will write it on excel sheet.
the data I want: model, serie, inventory id, type
so I have limited the text output extracted from the image to 4 lines and started each line by the necessary property e.g model: HP prodesk 3000 MT serie: XCQOUNF24 inventory id: to be added manually type: to be choose manually (printer, screen, computer ... )
I’ve been putting my mechanical displays to work. Right now I have one displaying date, the current temp, the daily high temp and daily low temp. I created a web socket based serial server that gets messages and writes them to a rs232 usb device. The weather data is a node app that pulls Open Meteo data. Also learned how to make systemd service files to make it start on boot.
https://github.com/EdwardDeaver/WeatherToMechanical
I’ve been noticing a trend of companies avoiding hiring non-technical PMs for as long as possible, in order to keep small technical startups (particularly dev tools, it seems) focused on building and not hiring too many people too early who can’t contribute code. I’m looking to set up a fractional service for product management consulting to support this way of working: https://www.metaluna.io. We will see if the demand is really there or not.
I'm working on an app to help anyone experience their first lucid dream :)
Very exciting project. It started as a dream journal app many years ago when I was a student, and will now soon have a full interactive step-by-step guide with practical tools to achieve your first lucid dream.
It's android only, but I've started working on an iOS version and am thinking of raising some money or doing some crowdfunding to accelerate the development.
https://luciditydreams.com/
I'm working on a weekly "tournament game" in which the goal is to select the top 5 open-source projects (in a particular topic) per programming language. The first iteration is going to be a copy of SaaSHub Experts https://www.saashub.com/experts/about but for open-source libraries. If this sounds interesting to you, please let me know, and I can send you an invite this or next week (hopefully).
Working on a solution for low touch categorization and archival of online data. Currently focused on one click tagging and archiving tweets.
You can check out the Chrome extension here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jgglahegfmldmibegm...
Future versions will have online storage and low touch tagging of archiving/tagging any online data. A mobile app is also planned.
Will be hosted at archivant.com
https://CodePeer.com - An AI-assisted code review platform that manages the lifecycle of a PR. We make sure everyone knows whose turn it is, we show you only what needs to be reviewed, and all historical edits and comments are intelligently presented. We say “AI-assisted” because it’s a human-first approach to design - that said, you can use AI to do everything from making simple code suggestions to executing the entire review for you.
I’m working on https://sweetlemon.app - a tool for tech companies that help them save money on license costs by identifying unused and wasted licenses.
Having worked for 15 years bootstrapping and organically growing digital agencies, I’m now trying to get my own product off the ground.
I’d love to connect with businesses, CTOs, COOs, IT Managers or anyone else who want to talk about trimming down cost in tech companies.
Continuing working on my project - TextSniper https://textsniper.app/ macOS application for text recognition
A language learning app that combines Anki like spaced repetition with language learning ai tutor. https://vocabuo.com
A series of articles on writing parsers using:
- Hand rolled recursive descent in TypeScript
- PLY, Python Lex Yacc
- FParsec, parser combinator library for F#
The goal is to compare each approach while tackling some common use cases for parsing strings of text.
A custom email sorter / spam filter that uses a fineruned multimodal LLM: my emails are turned into images (turning them / extracting html then rendered with selenium) and passes to the vision LLM. I went from ~200 to ~15 useful emails a day.
Raw code is here: https://gitHub.com/beniz/llmbox
All runs locally, the finetune is a plaigemma-3b (from mix-448). Acc/F1/prec/recall are all within 99.99%, including on llm-generated spam.
Professionally, I'm working on extending Nx, the Elixir ML framework which I help maintain, for distributed and sharded computing. Should have an working v0 by December!
GitHub for the project: https://github.com/elixir-nx/nx
As a side-project, I've been diving back into hardware. Fixed/modded a crappy guitar amplifier I had into a great amp, and the next project in line will be a new version of a digital synth I designed a fey years back
Building connections and mini tools for my website builder and funnels to gain users organically through tooling that doesn't exist yet.
Sync contacts, products and orders with 3rd party processors like square, Stripe, others.
Also probably set up some basic AI hints like one click ad generator for Facebook, Instagram, or other ad platforms that will link to your Funnel.
Once complete I will either make lots of money or it was a huge waste of time. However, the learning experience is priceless.
Also Making an offline Fantasy draft tool to learn Elixir and Pheonix.
I recently started using X (Twitter), and got annoyed with my daily new followers that were obviously bots.
I made a Chrome Extension to automate the bot follower removal: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/x-bot-remover/aohkh...
I suspect these bots are being used to boost certain content controlled by their owners, so definitely not good to leave them alone.
I built and am now maintaining a website [0] and open source repository [1] for the hardest sport climbing and bouldering ascents in the world.
Maintenance is mostly updating the underlying data when the strongest climbers in the world scale some random piece of rock.
[0] https://www.hardestclimbs.com/ [1] https://github.com/9cpluss/hardest-climbs
Trying to build a chess club management app for our school/district. It's mostly basic CRUD, though it's an avenue to learn Svelte & SvelteKit. I'm becoming more involved with the club and can't stand that everything is run on paper forms and giant Google Sheets. (If it was all smoothly running, I wouldn't rock the boat. But when I found that we're writing out dozens of match cards by hand every week and have ~0 way to track progress, I couldn't resist.)
Building a nodeless Kubernetes service; no servers/worker nodes, pods are scheduled transparently as micro VMs (planning to make this flexible, so Fly Machines, Cloud Run, Cloudflare Workers, what have you). Optionally, you can bring on your own worker nodes if you want to!
Still super WIP, and the landing page hasn't been updated yet but here's a quick little early access form! https://tally.so/r/me2Q8E
I'm working on Starlake.ai, an open-source data engineering platform that simplifies data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration. It's designed to make data engineers' lives easier while maintaining powerful control over data pipelines.
Key features:
- Declarative YAML-based configuration for data pipelines
- Intuitive web UI for those who prefer visual interfaces (see video section in https://starlake.ai)
- Native integration with both Airflow and Dagster
- No-code/low-code approach to data transformation
- Support for multiple data sources and formats
- Built-in data quality validation
- Automated schema inference and evolution
Data Processing Capabilities:
- LOAD: Ingest data from various sources (CSV, JSON, XML, Parquet, etc.)
- TRANSFORM: Write SQL transformations and test them in DUCKDB.
- Support for major data warehouses:Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, PostgreSQL, DuckDB for local development and small data
What sets it apart:
- Full Git Integration: All changes (whether made through UI or YAML) are automatically versioned in Git
- CI/CD Ready: YAML configurations can be directly integrated into your CI/CD pipelines
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) friendly: Perfect for GitOps workflows
- Dual Interface: Everything possible in YAML can be done through the UI, and vice versa
- DuckDB Support: Perfect for local development and smaller datasets, allowing you to test your pipelines without cloud costs
The project is open source and we'd love to get feedback from the HN community. You can check it out at:
- Website: https://starlake.ai
- GitHub: https://github.com/starlake-ai/starlake
If you're dealing with data pipeline challenges or interested in modern data engineering tools, I'd love to hear your thoughts!
I'm absolutely not impressed by reddit search functionality. I like to play metrodivanias but when I want to find something specific for a specific game, the search is just too random.
So I wrote this: https://www.gamingsofa.club/ which is a scraper for metroidvanias reddit posts.
The list of games is taken through Steam and than I just listen to the subreddit for new posts.
Currently I show every possible post even if it gets moderated on reddit.
I'm working on a serverless VPN that works without relay even for those behind symmetric NAT (most of the time).
I'm not aware that it exists at the moment and would love to be proven wrong.
I’m working on a crossword app, with the intent to add “kaizo” elements, as a way to take any puzzle and add obstacles aside from the clues, which I hope will be fun. But I guess I won’t know until I try.
I have a little project page and a WIP demo here: https://crossobear.chadobear.world/
Typing this up, I realize I should stop fiddling with styles and implement some of my kaizo ideas to see how they feel to play with.
I'm sharing all my nonfiction book summaries/notes on https://littlerbooks.com/.
I'm working on Blazed.deals, a THC/CBD product search engine and price tracker. It scans the prices of cannabis stores and ranks products by mg/$. It has a bunch of categories and filters so people can find the perfect product for their preferences.
https://blazed.deals
I started it last month and have had a few thousand users so far. I have some cool growth hacking ideas I'm looking forward to working on coming up.
I continue working on JustFax Online[0] - a service to send a one-time fax without the need for an account or subscription.
I now realized that I started it almost one year ago. It's both amazing how much I was able to achieve in a year, but on the same hand a bit frustrating that I did not achieve what I wanted to. Nevertheless, will continue to work on it and improve it.
[0] https://justfax.online/en/
I continue to work on BoltAI (https://boltai.com)
It’s a native macOS AI chat client. I started it last year and didn’t think much about data synchronization. I didn’t want to store user’s data server side for better user privacy. So I decided to store all chats in a local SQLite database.
It works well but unfortunately without a sync engine, users won’t be able to continue the chat from a different machine.
I’m working on supporting cloud sync now.
I am converting all the short farm stories I wrote into little audio stories using AI voiceovers. It’s not perfect and has kinks.. but I am enjoying it.. 5 done, 15 more to go!
https://youtube.com/@mushroomsonmars
My next project is one about lunar habitat and food production systems but as a podcast ..entirely with AI voices. Because I can’t find anyone from NASA or SpaceX to speak with me..hah!
Still working on the bluetooth "wall of sheep" app. https://github.com/skittleson/bluetooth-wos . im hoping to put more insight on each device and receive avaliable notifications from the devices. I even figured out a rough estimate of how far devices are away with just RSSI and other available devices that have TX Power and RSSI within a few meters.
A research paper organizer https://youtu.be/YjiJ_61_zzM?feature=shared
I'm working on an application. It's really challenging to be a solo developer and build a web application from scratch. I've been working on it for four months now, and to be honest, I've gotten a bit lazy over the past few weeks. But I've decided to launch it before it's completely finished. I'm a perfectionist, which makes things harder, but I know I can do it.
my current graphic novel http://egypt.urnash.com/npol/
and apparently I am doing a set of fan covers for Roger Zelazny's Amber books? https://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2024/10/24/nine-princes-in-amb...
Working on an essay as to why coding interviews are harmful:
http://dgt.is/coding-interviews
I am adding more features to my Google Sheets add-on as requested by users. I planned to keep it a micro-SaaS but it seems people want it all at one place. They will pay or not is another thing.
https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/hiretale_ats/38...
I've just updated https://ryelang.org website, adding new asciinema demos (hn/somafm util and eyr), new cookbook pages, references to rye-gio(ui) project, etc. There is still tons of work, on the language front, bindings, console and on documenting it all, but if we keep moving forward step by step eventually something of value will be produced, I hope :)
When FAANG was all the rage, I had a hard time getting feedback on my coding skills. So, I made a website where candidates can post their code and experiences folks can give their feedback.
https://www.interviewblindspots.com/explore
You post the question, role description and your solution. Somebody will give you feedback. Still in beta, but do give it a try.
I'm working on a self-hostable replacement for Google Timeline, which is being discontinued. It includes a web app to view my timeline and an Android app to send tracking pings to the server. It also includes an import function for exports of your Google Timeline data so that your historical data from that can be integrated as well. I'm planning on open-sourcing both the web app and the POC Android app early next month.
I'm currently working on Mockoon, an API mocking tool. It's an open-source project that I've been relentlessly improving over the past 7 years. I decided to build a SaaS/cloud offering to help finance my work on the project. I'm solo bootstrapping, and revenues are slowly growing. It's not the easiest path, but definitely worth it!
https://mockoon.com
Starting out in self-hosting.
Got a VPS from Hetzner and will start by self hosting my blog and setting up actual (budgeting tool)
Then will move to self host my notes, media, and my applications.
I revived an old collision detection library of mine and pretty much rewrote it with a C API: https://github.com/pfirsich/wuzy
I fixed a bunch of bugs and streamlined things and I'll build a nice high level API on top next. It uses GJK/EPA and AABB Trees for acceleration.
I'm having tremendous fun with it and the math and geometry, which I have not done in a while.
Of all things, I downloaded RPG Maker MZ from steam and started building small mini games using the plugin system.
I don’t care for making RPGs but I use it as an IDE for tile sets, maps, sounds, and events.
I was never capable of making anything in it as a kid when I first downloaded Miguel’s translation of that early RPG Maker decades ago.
The constraints of the engine make it easier to think of how to implement something than, say, Godot where it’s all completely open ended.
This is not about new ideas for humanity, but for me.
I started the development of the game engine. This was one of the most interesting goal on my list.
I will use vulkan. And my demo goal for this is a super realistic scene with human, hill, grass, tree and sunrise/sunset. But it is needed just to know how/where to develop engine.
since I'm in no hurry + my career is going down the drain, I will try to do my best and power up my software engineer skills.
I'm building a window manager for macOS. I got frustrated with Divvy having inconsistent resizing on several apps, eg Firefox, and I wanted to be able to fully control window size and position with _only_ my keyboard (like increasing the width/height or moving the window one column to the left).
I should be done within a week or two :)
https://www.bayview.app
I'm currently (and have been for a few weeks now) building a self-hosted Git "forge", à la Gogs/Gitea/etc.
The main motivation for this is that I usually juggle many side projects at the same time, and since none of them are in a finished state, I don't really feel like putting them out in the open on GitHub or Codeberg or something else, and would really like to keep all of this experimentation private. I know GitHub provides free private repositories, but I really dislike the interface and I feel like most of the features offered are not for me.
I tried running a private Gitea instance, but I did not like having to manage a second software to be able to run CI pipelines on my repositories (like Drone). I also really dislike GitHub Actions so I was kind of disappointed that Gitea's integrated CI is based on it.
I also tried running a Gitlab instance (which is currently what I use) as I much prefer GitLab CI over GH Actions, but the whole package is so much of a resource hog and tries so hard to be "more than GitHub" that I feel it isn't for me either.
So, in the end, I decided that I would build my own platform, with a simple scope in mind: be a nice Git repository hosting solution for single hackers or very small teams. Along with the smaller scope, I added a few restrictions: no JavaScript unless it substantially improves QoL (and even then, never require JS for the website to work), no external components required (apart from OpenSSH and Git).
So far I have a very minimal SSH handler implementation that allows push/pulling repositories from the server through authenticated SSH (public key), and what's starting to become a nice web interface to manage and read all of that. It's almost at the point where I will soon be able to dogfood the platform by hosting itself there (as a backup remote, not the primary yet).
The tech stack is kept relatively simple on purpose (I really dislike "modern" front-end development):
* Rust + Axum
* SQLite
* Bootstrap with SASS to customize it
* libgit2
Everything is server-side rendered as HTML before being served to the client, using Minijinja (reimplementation of Jinja2 in/for Rust by the same author).
Anyway, not yet ready to share any links or anything but I am still excited about the project taking shape after weeks/months of sporadic work on it! I'm building this not only because I feel a need for it, but also to learn more about Rust and Git internals, and I feel like I've learned a ton already!
Working on the official Light version and accompanying website of https://monokai.pro
I am working on a presentation about meals in space that I'll be giving just before Thanksgiving to some writers. I am also working on cataloging my books. This will be my third try and I'm just using a spreadsheet this time. One time it corrupted all my date and the backup got mangled when I tried to bring it in. Then the online space went under. So I'm doing it the simplest possible way.