alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
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Repo: https://github.com/mochilang/mochi
I'm building Mochi, a small programming language with a custom VM and a focus on querying structured data (CSV, JSON, and eventually graph) in a unified and lightweight way.
It started as an experiment in writing LINQ-style queries over real datasets and grew into a full language with:
- declarative queries built into the language
- a register-based VM designed for analysis and optimization
- an intermediate representation with liveness analysis, constant folding, and dead code elimination
- static type inference, inline tests, and golden snapshot support
Example:
type Person {
name: string
age: int
}
let people = load "people.yaml" as Person
let adults = from p in people
where p.age >= 18
select { name: p.name, age: p.age }
for a in adults {
print(a.name, "is", a.age)
}
save adults to "adults.json"
Happy to chat if you're into VMs, query engines, or DSLs.
Still working on: an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat. It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant.
- The encoder ring which works like an LED mouse, but in reverse: Fully reverse-engineered and on its own demo PCB
- The faceplate PCB, which does the actual control of the thermostat wires, has been laid out, but the first version missed a really-obvious problem involving the behavior on power-on with certain of the GPIO pins from the ESP32, so I've got rev 3 on order from the PCB manufacturer.
Nest Thermostats of the 1st and 2nd generation will no longer be supported by Google starting October 25, 2025. You will still be able to access temperature, mode, schedules, and settings directly on the thermostat – and existing schedules should continue to work uninterrupted. However, these thermostats will no longer receive software or security updates, will not have any Nest app or Home app controls, and Google will end support for other connected features like Home/Away Assist. It has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.
I'm cleaning up a 25-30 year old bicycle. First time I've stripped one almost right back to the frame.
Strongly recommend the rust remover described by Backyard Ballistics[0] on his second channel[1]; 1 liter water, 100g citric acid, 40g washing soda, generous squirt of dish soap. He claims the acid and alkali cancel out so there's nothing to attack the normal metal surface, but they leave citrate ions which dissolve rust by chelation, which makes it better than just citric acid, vinegar, or soda alone, which all pit and dissolve the clean metal surfaces, and easier/better than wire wool scratching. He also claims it's as effective as EvapoRust but much cheaper and can do more rust dissolving per litre than EvapoRust.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Backyard.Ballistics - restoration of old and very rusty guns
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVYZmeReKKY - "The Ultimate HOMEMADE Rust Remover (Better than EvapoRust)", Beyond Ballistics channel
https://sewerreport.com I am a dev/sewer inspector, done over 20k inspections for real estate alone. I built the ultimate, AI report generator based on my voice to text notes. Reports, email notifications, stripe integration. Payments and invoices. Unlock reports when paid. Square appointments integrations. Pulls all appointments and fills outs new report fields for me. No copy pasting anything ever again. Very niche but saves me 3 hours a day. Next js, it’s really been life changing for me.
I made a film called "Searching For Kurosawa". This short documentary chronicles the story of Kawamura, a man who worked with legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa on the set of his opus "Ran". Kawamura was working in the BTS crew, but his footage got confiscated. It took almost 40 years to recover the footage and present that as his feature film.
My film got screened at the Academy Award-qualifying Bali International Film Festival and the Marina Del Rey Film Festival in the past month. It will be screening next month in New York City at the Asian American International Film Festival.
After 10 years in defense tech, watching missile attacks in Ukraine and the Middle East made it clear how little most people really get about air defense. So I'm builiding this simulator which drops you into the operator’s seat. You can test out different scenarios and build an air defense network against various types of threats (stats from real world). Also have Ukraine, Israel-Iran scenarios.
I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy. https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai
I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.
I'm working on a new app for creating technical diagrams - https://vexlio.com. It's an area with some heavyweight incumbents (e.g. Visio, Lucid) but I think there's good opportunity here to differentiate in simplicity and overall experience. I'm still in the fairly early phase, and I suspect I haven't quite found the best match of features to customers yet.
From a dev perspective this area has a ton of super interesting algorithmic / math / data structure applications, and computational geometry has always been special to me. It's a lot of fun to work on.
If anyone here is interested in this as a user, I'd love for any feedback or comments, here or you can email me directly: [email protected].
Some pages the HN crowd might be interested in:
* https://vexlio.com/blog/making-diagrams-with-syntax-highligh... * https://vexlio.com/solutions/state-diagram-maker/ * https://vexlio.com/blog/speed-up-your-overleaf-workflow-fast...
This weekend, my modified Android/mobile Point of Sale (POS) app was used to celebrate the 100th anniversary of our village's volunteer firefighting organization.
The standard fiscal POS app was adapted to support a sort of low-trust swarm of waiters who used the app to collect orders. These orders were then transferred to a few high-trust cashiers by scanning QR codes generated on the waiters' apps.
After receiving payments, the cashiers' apps printed invoices and multiple "order tickets" categorized by "food," "drinks", "sweets"... This allowed waiters to retrieve items and deliver them to customers.
The system was used by around 40 users, with new waiters joining or leaving throughout the event. They used their own phones, and the app functioned without internet or Wi-Fi, gracefully downgraded (If a waiter didn't use the app due by choice or due to technical problems, they could manually relay orders to cashiers), Customers also had the option to approach cashiers directly, receive their order tickets, and pick up items themselves.
This is not that technically interesting, but I liked how the old manual system, the 70+ year village firefighting org. main cashier had, got digitalized in non-centralized way. (and I took this chance in trying to explain it, as I will have to, to maybe find more users for it)
After 2+ years of maintaining the FOSS lightweight Reddit frontend Redlib [0], I realized that my niche but extremely detailed knowledge and experience of using Reddit's endpoints might be useful. After reverse engineering the mobile app and writing code to emulate nearly every aspect of its behavior, plus writing a codegen framework that will auto-update my code from analyzing the behavior from an Android emulator, I can pretty easily replay common user flows from any IP around the world, collecting and extracting the data. Some use cases:
* OSINT (r00m101 just beat me to it by launching...)
* Research into recommendation algorithms, advertising placement algorithms, etc
* Marketing (ad libraries, detailed analysis of content given data not even exposed to the mobile app due to some interesting side channels, things like trend analysis, etc)
* Market research for products
* Sales teams can use it to find exact mentions of other products. Eg: selling crash reporting software? Look up your target accounts' brands and find examples of complaints.
Plus a few more with more imagination.
So I'm working on a site that allows user access to some of the read-only functions available here. Coming soon :tm:. Been really fun building it all in Rust, though :) If you're interested in anything here, email in profile.
Working on a physical and digital archive of all American vintage print advertising. I've built the archival and database software on Lucee & MySQL to store images and automate, and I use OpenAI to analyze images and extra meta data. All of the full page ads are pushed to https://adretro.com.
I've gotten the process to fully catalog all of the advertisements in a magazine (about 150 on average) down from over a week to a few hours. I should be able to get through the material within my lifetime now :)
https://spring-agriculture.com/
Autonomous robotics for sustainable agriculture. Based in the south of the UK. Prototypes of an autonomous mechanical farm-scale weeding robot currently beginning real-world testing. Still a huge amount of work to do though.
Hardware and software developed fairly much from scratch, not using ROS (for not entirely crazy reasons...); everything written in Rust which I find well suited to this application area.
The robot is built using off-the-shelf components and 3d-printed custom parts, so build cost is surprisingly low, and iterations are fast (well, for hardware dev).
On robot compute is a couple of Raspberry Pi 5s.
Currently using the RPi AI Kit for image recognition, ie Hailo 8[L] accelerators.
Not currently using any advanced robotics VLA-type AI models, but soon looking to experiment with some of it, initially in simulation.
Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to talk :) Contact details in my HN profile, and on our website.
Writing multisynq.io apps in newswpeaklanguage.org. Two game changing technologies now working together. My dream Frankenstein has finally come to life! I (re)implemented my toy application, The Chalculator, to yet another platform (the 7th or 8th maybe?) [1] I added comments to my blog _without any backend whatsoever_ [2] I built a counter app using Newspeak's Hopscotch GUI components to respond to Multisynq (javascipt) subscriptions (the final milestone) [3] 1) https://youtu.be/MPW5L1gj4Dw?si=Lms3odwQElZu_mLu 2) https://youtu.be/8gcCIaXmQjU?si=Qg2XSDu6mIhSAd9d 3) https://youtu.be/2-tZzB8MAX0?si=6nZ1nD6d4isdQd-5
Ideas are coming way too fast to work on them all at the moment.
* Expect/snapshot testing library for F# is now seeing prod use but could do with more features: https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Expect
* A deterministic .NET runtime (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.PawPrint); been steaming towards `Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!")` for months, but good lord is that method complicated
* My F# source generators (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Myriad) contain among other things a rather janky Swagger 2.0 REST client generator, but I'm currently writing a fully-compliant OpenAPI 3.0 version; it takes a .json file determining the spec, and outputs an `IMyApiClient` (or whatever) with one method per endpoint.
* Next-gen F# source generator framework (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Whippet) is currently on the back burner; Myriad has more warts than I would like, and I think it's possible to write something much more powerful.
Working on two projects right now:
- LegalJoe: AI-powered contract reviews for startups, at the "tech demo" phase right now: https://www.legaljoe.ai/
- ClipMommy: A macOS tool to help (professionals who record a lot of videos | influencers) organize their raw video clips. Simply drag a folder of "disorganized" videos onto ClipMommy, and ClipMommy organizes the videos into folders / subfolders, adding tags, based upon some special statements that you can make at either the start or the end of your video (think audio-based "clapboard"). I'm expecting to release this within a week or two on the Mac App Store (Apple allowing...).
As an aside, I've been very impressed with Claude Code, it's (for me at least!) leading the way for how the next generation of business software might leverage AI. I plan to iterate on LegalJoe to make more "agentic" as a result of what I've seen is possible in Claude Code.
I'm finally getting my online presence in order...
This week, I'll set up a Hugo blog with the Ed theme, love it, looks exactly what I'm looking for, and as a former LaTeX enthusiast, it's pretty close. It's readable, minimalist. I'll need to customize the theme, though. I plan to publish blog posts about anything I find interesting.
https://gohugo-theme-ed.netlify.app/
In parallel to this work, I'm setting up a simple system to keep my website + subdomains easy to build, rebuild, and deploy with Caddy on a cheap Scaleway compute server. In the past, I had some ideas I wanted to publish, but the system I went with made managing the sites dreadful.
Once that's ready, I'm back to learning Rust and crypto. It's fun, interesting, challenging, remote-friendly, and the salaries are usually 30-50% better. My current tech stack feels like a dead end: it has a low ceiling in terms of salary, the projects are generally not very interesting (I'm grateful for my current project, it's the best there is with this technology), and I believe the technology will see a slow and steady decline.
Apart from work, I'm building the playground for my 2 yo son, and planting blueberries, he loves them.
I'm still working on simple CRM system https://github.com/chauhankiran/rms CRM without complexity.
I am a PhD student and for a while now I'm designing and developing a distributed network protocol that enables dynamic resource allocation across heterogeneous nodes, to which I called Rank. It's designed to handle computational, network, and temporal resources in fully distributed environments without central controllers, but that could also handle a centralized environment. Rank implements four core functions: discovery (finding paths between nodes), estimation (evaluating resource availability), allocation (reserving resources), and sharing (allowing multiple services to use the same resources). What I think it makes it unique is its ability to operate in completely decentralized environments with heterogeneous nodes, making it particularly valuable for edge computing, cloud gaming, distributed content delivery, vehicular communications, and grid computing scenarios. The protocol uses a bidding system where nodes evaluate their capability to fulfill resource requests on a scale from 0-1, enabling dynamic path selection based on current resource availability. I've implemented it in C++ and then also created a testing framework to validate its performance across different network topologies. This is still a work-in-progress and I am eager to publish results someday!
A few months ago I launched SpiesInDC - https://spiesindc.com, a mail-based (as in the real mail) subscription service about Cold War history. Subscribers, ahem secret agents, receive packages every few weeks containing reproductions of famous documents, stanps from the USSR, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, coins, and other fun stuff. I keep refining the packages every week to make it better and it is so much fun.
https://inlovingmem.com/ - is a tribute to my recently deceased mom that I vibe coded over the last week. I felt her life deserved to be celebrated widely but wanted to be sensitive to her privacy. I've also built in a number of interactive features for participation in funeral services etc, before, during, and after.
Folks have reached out about having an 'In Loving Memory Of' site for their loved ones, so I'm turning this into a side business to help out more with my (now widowed) father's retirement and care.
I'm working on a new kind of encyclopedia and reference website that is way more engaging and rich than a single page of text on every subject like Wikipedia. Back in my childhoold we had Microsoft Encarta on CDROM and it was a very compelling multimedia experience and I want to emulate something like that on the modern web by combining video, sound, images and text in a more compelling user experience with great discoverability. I've been working on the first version for about eight months and I hope to launch it next week at https://reference.org
The last couple of weeks I've been building 'Recivo', a very simple way to receive emails programmatically. There are plenty of API-based services that can be used to send emails, but receiving them is harder. My service exposes a simple REST endpoint + event webhook that makes it a 5 min setup to start receiving. Attachments are included as well.
The main use-cases I'm thinking of right now is triggering agents using email or a very simple document upload flow to any SaaS (just forward an email to the SaaS).
I built a simple web app that helped make me more present during a family tragedy:
Brief backstory: While visiting us overseas, my in-laws were in a very bad car accident. Everyone involved is alive and going to be okay. But what followed was a series of emotional, physical and logistical challenges that pushed my wife and her parents to their limits.
During this time I found myself (shamefully) hiding on my phone. I was obsessively refreshing for updates from insurance/hospital teams, sending empty messages, and mindlessly scrolling feeds. My screen time was averaging 12 hours a day. Time I could have spent being fully present with my wife and her parents.
I finally accepted I have a serious phone addiction. I tried Apple Screen Time and a few popular screen time management apps, but found the blocks were too easy to bypass, and some apps were as useful as they were distracting depending on the context (e.g. YouTube). I didn’t necessarily want to use my phone less: it’s an incredibly useful tool, and the distractions were sometimes helpful.
What I really needed was intentional stretches of time spent away from my phone. I built touchgrass.fm as a simple way to record and incentivize those stretches of time. It’s not quite finished, but it’s been helping me stay present for hospital visits, meals and important conversations.
Memva, Claude Code for sales: https://memva.com/
Just built a last-mile logistics management solution to replace a SaaS solution for a delivery company I used to be involved with.
Handles everything from real-time driver tracking, public order tracking links, finding suitable drivers for orders, batch push notifications for automatic order assignment, etc.
Backend: Feathers.JS, Postgres + TimescaleDB & PostGIS, BullMQ, Valhalla (for multi-stop route optimization although most of our deliveries are on-demand)
Frontend: SvelteKit
Mobile App (Android only for now): React Native/Expo, Zustand, Expo push notifications, and two custom native modules for secure token storage and efficient real-time GPS tracking. The tracking was probably the toughest to get right to find the best balance between battery/data efficiency and more frequent updates.
Been testing it for a couple weeks and as of last week, that company moved their operations over to it with 50+ drivers and thousands of orders processed through it so far (in a country with pretty unreliable connectivity/infrastructure).
I built it initially as a favor but open to other applications for it.
A JS framework called Torpor: https://torpor.dev (https://github.com/andrewjk/torpor)
Been working on this for a while, with the aim of making something simple and immediately usable. Components are JS functions, containing UI that is (mostly) HTML, with reactivity only done through proxied objects.
To test it out I built a distributed social media/microblog site called Redraft: https://redraft.social (https://github.com/andrewjk/redraft)
Self-hostable or hosted for a fee, all your posts stored in an SQLite file, comment/like/react on other people's Redraft posts via a Web extension (pending approval, but you can use the unpacked version from source).
Both are in a pretty rough state, but usable for the intrepid.
Not as exciting or big as some of the projects on here, but just a small personal one I’ve been wanting to do for a while.
I recently impulse bought an Epson receipt printer, and I’ve started putting together a server in Go to print a morning update every day. Getting it to print the weather, my calendar and todos, news headlines, HN front page. Basically everything I pick up my phone for in the morning, to be on paper rather than looking at a screen first thing. Very early days but hacking away and learning escpos/go! (Vibecoding a lot of it)
Building https://www.typequicker.com
Long-term, passion project of mine - I'm hoping to make this the best typing platform. Just launched the MVP last month.
The core idea of the app is focusing on using natural text. I don't think typing random words (like what some other apps do) is the most effective way to improve typing.
We offer many text topics to type (trivia, literature, etc) where you type text snippets. We offer drills (to help you nail down certain key sequences). We also offer:
- Real-time visual hand/keyboard guides (helps you to not look down at keyboard) - Extremely detailed stats on bigrams, trigrams, per-finger performance, etc. - SmartPractice mode using LLMs to create personalized exercises - Topic-based practice (coding, literature, etc.)
I started this out of passion for typing. I went from 40wpm to ~120wpm (wrote about it here if you're interested: https://www.typequicker.com/blog/learn-touch-typing) and it completely changed my perspective and career trajectory. I became a better programmer and writer because I no longer had to think about the keyboard, nor look down at it.
Currently, we're doing a lot of analysis work on character frequencies and using that to constantly improve the SmartPractice feature. Also, exploring various LLM output testing/observability tools to improve the text generation features.
Approaching this project with a freemium model (have paid AI powered features; using AI to generate text that targets user weakpoints) while everything else in the app is completely free. No ads, no trackers, etc. (Hoping to have sufficient paid users so that we can run the site and never have to even think about running ads).
I've received a lot of feedback and am always looking for ways to improve the site.
I'm working on https://tickerfeed.net - a new kind of forum for stock market discussion.
After HashiCorp was acquired by IBM I decided to take time off from corporate life and build something for myself. For years I've also been a casual retail investor on the side.
Forums like /r/stocks and /r/wsb in the past have been useful resources for finding leads and interesting information. But meme-ification (among other factors) have substantially degraded sites like Reddit, to the point where interesting comments are much fewer and far in between. With TickerFeed I'm hoping to recapture what was lost - a platform where investors can discuss companies and all things stock market through meaningful long form content.
It's also a chance to build something with my dream stack - Go + HTMX + SQLite, and that's been fun :)
I'm building (and have been for the last few years) an open source high-performance Wordpress alternative on Elixir. It aims to achieve 1:1 feature parity. One thing that Wordpress has built up over the years that will take a little long for me is the plugins eco-system. But, other than that, I think everything else should be on par. IF you're an enterprise, you should easily see over 30-40% in server costs just by switching from Wordpress. This has been tested and proven with one of our enterprise clients who just recorded 500 million requests on a fork of the CMS.
But, I'm determined to see its completion even if there is just one user. I didn't take the Wordpress fiasco and how they handled it, lightly at all and it only fueled my motivation even more. ETA is by end of this year right on time for Christmas.
If you'd like to read more, here's an article about my CMS: https://medium.com/creativefoundry/what-i-learned-as-an-arti...
If you'd like to get Beta access, my email is listed in my profile.
Just published my Chrome extension that makes finding new content on YouTube easier!
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/relevant/fdhnccpldk...
Two months ago I posted an update that I had begun work on my Chrome extension [1] for Relevant. Relevant is a crowdsourcing website where users can categorize the channels they watch into a defined hierarchy of categories ranging from broad topics like "Science" and "Gaming" to more specific ones like "Phone Reviews" or "Speedrunning".
Although I had a little bit of engagement on the website, I found myself looking for something that could bring the experience onto YouTube, so I began work on a Chrome extension. It turns out there's a lot more complexity in building a Chrome extension than I realised. It's basically like building a website for the popup window, a javascript server for the background service workers and a message bus for the service worker.
After 2 months' of working weekends, I finally released a version of it that lets users see the categories of the content on the page, discover more channels matching those categories and contribute to the categorisation effort!
I just took a fortnight off work with the intent of getting away from my laptop, but accidentally ended up making a listings site for London's independent / arts cinemas. As far as I can tell no such thing currently exists, and I feel like it should.
Obviously the main thing is getting the listings data, which as far as I know (mostly) isn't readily available any other way that scraping the cinemas' websites, for which I set this up as a separate-ish project[1]
I am building a collection of Y Combinator video transcripts: https://videotobe.com/play/playlist/ycombinator.
The goal is to transcribe and provide summaries, topics, notable quotes, and companies and people discussed.
Feel free to send more ideas!
Been working on https://github.com/amterp/rad for almost a year now. It's a programming language designed for writing good CLI scripts, so it's aiming to replace Bash but is much more Python-like, and offers unique syntax and a bunch of in-built support for scripting.
Please check it out if it sounds at all interesting! Keen for feedback :) I've written some docs, including a "getting started" guide, linked in the GitHub page.
I've been working on Splice CAD – an in-browser cable-harness designer.
Building cables for multiple personal and professional projects, I was frustrated by having to cobble together harness diagrams in Illustrator or Visio, cut snippets from from PDFs for connector outlines, map pin-outs, wire specs, cable constructions, mating terminals, and manually updating an Excel BOM.
Splice gives you:
An SVG canvas to drag-and-drop any connector or cable from your library to quickly route and bundle wires. Assign signal names to wires or cable cores.
Complete part data Connector outlines, pin-outs, terminal selections (by connector family & AWG), cable core colors & strand counts, wire AWG/color.
Automated BOM & exports parts-ready diagrams, wiring drawings, and a clean BOM in SVG, PNG, or PDF.
Connector & Cable Creators. Connectors or cables not in the existing library can be added with an optional outline and full specs (manufacturer, MPN, series, pitch, positions, IP-rating, operating temp, etc.), then publish privately or share publicly.
Demos & tutorials: Harness Builder → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfQVB_iTD1I
Connector Creator → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqDsCROhpy8
Cable Creator → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFdQaXQxKzU
Full tutorials → https://splice-cad.com/#/tutorial/
No signup required to try—just jump in and start laying out your harness: https://splice-cad.com/#/harness. If you want to save, sign up with Google or email/password.
I'm building a platform to help people—especially students and young adults—design meaningful, intentional lives with balance, courage, and an entrepreneurial mindset.
In Singapore, the system is heavily academic. You're expected to follow a rigid path (PSLE → JC → Uni → job), but no one teaches you how to think about what kind of life you want to live—or how to create it. That leaves many people feeling lost, even if they’re “on track.”
This platform flips that. It starts with the big picture: *“When you’re 90, what do you want your life to have looked like?”*
From there, users create a personal timeline of milestones across life domains: health, relationships, learning, impact—and now, *financial freedom.*
The app helps users:
1. Set long-term visions, then break them into clear, visual milestones
2. Use an AI assistant to suggest weekly actions and recalibrate as life evolves
3. Voice journal instead of typing; the AI transcribes and flags patterns (“You mentioned burnout 5x this week. Want to add a rest week or revise your work goals?”)
4. Track basic finances and align spending/saving to long-term goals (“You want to take a year off at 30. At this pace, you’ll have the runway by 32. Want to adjust?”)
5. Get matched with mentors or peer circles for guidance and accountability
The goal is not to “optimize” life like a spreadsheet. It’s to help people reflect, take control, and become someone they’re proud of.
If you’ve worked on anything in this space—journaling, goal tracking, financial wellness, coaching—I’d love to learn:
A. What made your tool stick long-term?
B. How did you balance simplicity with depth?
C. Any design or product traps I should avoid?
Appreciate any thoughts, questions, or brutal feedback.
Numpad: https://numpad.io/
It's a web-based notepad calculator, which means it's a notes app but it can evaluate inline calculations like
``` £300 in USD + 20%
09:00 to 18:30 - 45 minutes ```
I wrote the core of the calculator a few years ago, and I've just launched a big rewrite that supports
* document syncing * offline editing * markdown formatting * PDF and HTML exports * autocomplete * vim mode
Happy to hear feedback :)
Still working on my books site https://thegreatestbooks.org that I started in 2008. It's been a 1 man team the entire time. I recently made some major algorithm changes that I think greatly improves the rankings. My algorithm code is open source https://github.com/ssherman/weighted_list_rank
I do plan on open sourcing more of the code over time. I also have started working on other sites using the same algorithm implementation (music, movies, video games)
This has just been a side project over the year generating passive income. I get around 250,000 page views a day, and with ads, memberships, and affiliate links I make around $2,500~ a month.
Tech stack is ruby on rails 8, postgresql 17, opensearch, redis, bootstrap 5.3 hosting on 3 servers on linode.
Still on my sabbatical and continuing to build on things I enjoy rather than things that pay (for now).
Main focus is https://wheretodrink.beer, collecting and cataloging craft beer venues from around the world. No ambition of being exhaustive, but aiming for a curated and substantial list. After the last thread, a bunch of people added their suggestions, thanks! It helped add interesting new venues from cities I hadn’t covered yet.
I’m very slowly layering on features, and have a few spin-off ideas I’ll keep brewing on for later. The hardest problem thus far has been attempting to automate popularity rankings and automatic removal of defunct venues without breaching a bunch of ToS.
Also made https://drnk.beer, a small side project offering beer-related linkpages and @handles for Bluesky (AT Protocol). It's been on the backburner, but still very much live.
Probably looking for another small project for the next few months to focus on something else for a while. Always curious to see what others are building and doing. Thanks for sharing!
I'm building an Electron app that integrates with Shopify and QuickBooks Online to streamline operations for artist-led product businesses. As a jewelry maker, I'm automating the spreadsheets and photo archives I rely on to run my studio. I want a single source of truth for all the data scattered locally and across platforms: tracking material prices, calculating costs and labor, analyzing marketing ROI, and accurately updating cost of goods sold when a piece sells.
A homegrown Plex.
After a lot of grief trying to make Plex and jellyfish to work with my collection, and then some more with the community [1] I decided to make my own.
There's no selling point and clear pathway to monetize, as other solutions are way more mature and feature complete, but this is my own and serves my needs the best.
I've been working on it on and off for last 8 years or so, and it's been my personal benchmark for js ecosystem. The way it works, every now and then I come back to the project, look at the latest trends in js world and ask myself a simple question - what should I change in the codebase to make it online with the latest trends. And everytime it leads to full rewrite. Kind of funny, kind of sad.
In a nutshell I have a huge movie collection - basically I'm preparing for armageddon where all online streaming services cease to exist and I need both backend to fetch me detailed information about movies in the collection as well as frontend to help to decide what to watch tonight.
My next major endeavor will be trying to integrate RAG to take a bite at my holy grail - being able to ask a question like "get me a good gangster flick" and get reasonable recommendations.
[1] I think it was jellyfish where I was asking on their forums for how to manually create a collection, stating I'm a software engineer with 20+ exp and they kept telling me that I shouldn't touch the code... While having an online campaign asking for volunteers to contribute to the codebase.
I moved my blog over to Jekyll hosted via Github: https://blog.andrewrondeau.com/
The site itself isn't anything "special." I've had a personal website for about 25 years; the past few years I finally moved from making HTML by hand to using various CMSes. I tried a "no database" CMS that my hosting page had, then I wrote my own CMS, https://github.com/GWBasic/z3, to learn node.js, but then I had to go back because Heroku dropped the free tier.
Jekyll is interesting. As a Mac user, I'm surprised there isn't a push-button app, like MAMP, to just run it. Instead, I got exposed to some weirdness with Ruby versioning that, because I don't have any Ruby experience, was frustrating.
The default Jekyll template has warnings, but when I tried to fix them, I ended up jumping into a rabbit hole of sass versioning.
I also ended up jumping into a rabbit hole with setting up redirects from old urls on my blog to their new locations. I don't touch Apache / cpanel that often, so there was a bit of a learning curve for me.
One funny thing was that I set up two redirects, in cpanel, from the same url to two different urls. (It was a mistake!) I couldn't delete them, so I had to submit a service request with my host.
Two interesting things that I do not have time to do:
- Set up Github actions to deploy on my original host (andrewrondeau.com) - Set up redirects from blog.andrewrondeau.com -> andrewrondeau.com
I went Yak shaving.
For my 3D audio project I need an affordable way to make plastic cases. I felt like injection molding services are way overpriced, so I decided to make the molds in-house. Turns out, CNC milling is overpriced, too. As are 5 axis CNC mills. So in the end, we built our own CNC machine.
And like these things always go, I found an EMI issue with my power supply and a USB compliance bug in the off-the-shelf stepper control board. But it all turned out OK in the end so we now have the first mold tool that was designed and machined fully in-house. And I learned so much about tool paths and drill bits. Plus it feels like now that everyone has experienced hands-on how stuff is milled, my team got a lot better at designing things for cheap manufacturing.
I made the same little Roguelike game with Raylib in Odin, C3, and FreeBASIC over the last few weeks. [0] [1] [2]
I started on a Zig one and nope'd right on out of that after a few hours of fighting the compiler.
I'm currently working on porting a bunch of my Rust mini-games to other languages. [3]
[0] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/odin-mini-games/tree/main/2d-gam...
[1] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/c3-mini-games/tree/main/2d-games...
[2] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/freebasic-mini-games/tree/main/2...
[3] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/rust-mini-games/tree/main/2d-gam...
Building TenantFit: https://tenantfit.mtxvp.com/, a lightweight tool to help small landlords pre-screen rental applicants.
When you post a listing (e.g., on Facebook, Kijiji), you get tons of “Is this still available?” messages — but no useful info. TenantFit lets landlords collect basic answers (income range, pets, lifestyle) via a public link, then ranks responses to highlight promising leads.
No accounts or sensitive info collected from tenants (landlord does not even see candidate email until they reply), just a quick pre-screen before deeper screening to save time.
I'm writing a decompiler for Turbo Pascal 3.0, to reverse engineer an educational game from the 80s.
Since TP 3.0 does no optimisations, and looking at the progress so far (~25% decompiled), it seems like matching decompilation should be achievable.
If/when I get to 100%, I hope to make the process of annotating the result (Func13_var_2_2 is hardly an informative variable name) into a community project.
The stuff I'm working on never feels worth sharing, but I am doing a lot of computer stuff lately. It's kind of the year of moving towards declarative setups for me.
- Migrating to Niri on my laptop and re-evaluating my literate config approach, switching from xkb configs to kanata and a few other QOL changes to make my tooling more composable and expressive
- Shoring up my blog / media sharing infrastructure (migrated to a landing page on an s3 bucket, with different prefixes for several different hugo deployments for different purposes, still need to get better about actually posting content)
- Preparing to migrate a bunch of my self-hosted services to a k8s cluster which can can be fully deployed locally for testing and defined in code. All this is managed through argo and testable with localstack and crossplane for some non-local resources
- Attempting (somewhat unsuccessfully) to setup a nixos config for a bunch of services that just don't feel right to run in containerized stack that I want to live in ec2 and have as close to 100% uptime as possible (uptime kuma, soju/weechat relay/bitlbee, conduit, radicale, agate, whatever else I think of that is small and has a built-in nixOS service module. Thinking about some kind of RSS aggregating solution here as well)
- Experimenting with vibecoding by trying to get an LLM to do the legwork to build a TUI interface to ynab using rust (which I don't know how to write)
I'm hoping that by the end of this summer most of the tooling I use for most things will be way more concrete and seamless. I also want to get my workflows down and get on top of converting at least a few the ~100 draft blog posts I have laying around into something I can actually post. Ditto for my photography albums, which are not yet organized into coherent groupings or exported for web.
An AI-native DocuSign
It's been around a month I've been working on it. Struggling with getting people to actually use it - this week I've set the ambitious goal of 10 new contracts sent *and completed* by people I don't know (last week's was 10...by people I do know).
It's hard because I feel I'm in a weird hole - in order to have a good product I need people to use it and give me feedback, but in order for people to use it and give me feedback I need a good product. It's like wth!
Another thing I'm struggling with - enjoying the process. I get daydreams like mad. I feel I'm always living in the future in some way, especially with this software, and it's taking away from being present in this work. Which sucks, because I want to be excited to *work* on this and NOT fake my own excitement towards this as a manifestation of my greed to get rich off it.
But MAN am I greedy. It's ugly sometimes, to myself.
But god how I love to work on software also. How I love making stupid bash commands on my terminal. How I love to feel like the old gods, who conquered the infant digital world.
I just quit my "day job" to work on a business I've built with some good friends! We make stingray-resistant booties -- ie, if you encounter stingrays in the shallows, these greatly reduce the chance you get stung (https://mydragonskin.com/). I'll be in charge of a couple marketing efforts, helping with Youtube, and other odd things that come up!
My day job required me to go into office frequently, and I'm really feeling the reduced social connection of being fully remote in a small company. Any suggestions how to deal with this? I'm planning to reconnect with old friends, surf a lot, go rock climbing, and maybe take dance / music / other classes. Would also love if anyone wants to work together in the same place (library, coffee shop, etc). I'm in Escondido California, but happy to drive ~30 min to meet folks.
Currently a one-man side project:
https://laboratory.love
Last year PlasticList discovered that 86% of food products they tested contain plastic chemicals—including 100% of baby food tested. The EU just lowered their "safe" BPA limit by 20,000x. Meanwhile, the FDA allows levels 100x higher than what Europe considers safe.
This seemed like a solvable problem.
Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent testing of specific products you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports meets Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid's snacks, whatever you're curious about.
Here's how it works: Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, get detailed lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn't reach its funding goal within 365 days, automatic refund. All results are published openly. Laboratory.love uses the same methodology as PlasticList.org, which found plastic chemicals in everything from prenatal vitamins to ice cream. But instead of researchers choosing what to test, you do.
The bigger picture: Companies respond to market pressure. Transparency creates that pressure. When consumers have data, supply chains get cleaner.
Technical details: Laboratory.love works with ISO 17025-accredited labs, test three samples from different production lots, detect chemicals down to parts per billion. The testing protocol is public.
You can browse products, add your own, or just follow specific items you're curious about: https://laboratory.love