alt Hacker NewsSo where’s all of this cutting edge amazing and flawless stuff you’ve built in a weekend that everybody else couldn’t because they were too dumb or slow or clueless?
Replies
I wouldn't call these flawless but here you go:
- https://github.com/simonw/denobox is a new Python library that gives you the ability to run arbitrary JavaScript and WASM in a sandbox provided by Deno, because it turns out a Python library can depend on deno these days. I built that on my phone in bed yesterday morning.
- https://github.com/simonw/pwasm is a WebAssembly runtime written in pure Python with no dependencies, built by feeding Claude Code the official WASM specification along with its conformance test suite and having it hack away at that (again via my phone) to get as many of the tests to pass as possible. It's pretty slow and not really useful yet but it's certainly interesting.
- https://github.com/datasette/datasette-transactions is a Datasette plugin which provides a JSON API for starting a SQLite transaction, running multiple queries within it and then executing or rolling back that transaction. I built that one on my phone on a BART (SF Bay Area metro) trip.
- https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript is a pure Python, no dependency JavaScript interpreter which started as a port of MicroQuickJS. Here's a demo of that one running in a browser https://simonw.github.io/micro-javascript/playground.html - that's my JavaScript interpreter running inside Python running in Pyodide in WebAssembly in your browser of choice, which I find inherently amusing.
All of those are from the past three weeks. Most of them were built on my phone while I was doing other things.
I find it increasingly confusing that some people seem to believe, that other people not subjecting themselves to this continued interrogation, gives any credence to their position.
People seem to believe that there is a burden of proof. There is not. What do I care if you are on board?
I don't know what could change your mind, but of course the answer is "nothing" as long as you aer not open to it. Just look around. There is so much stuff, from so many credible people in all domains. If you can't find anything that is convincing or at least interesting to you, you are simply not looking.
Over the last few days I made this ggplot2-looking plotting DSL as a CLI tool and a Rust library.
https://github.com/williamcotton/gramgraph
The motivation? I needed a declarative plotting language for another DSL I'm working on called Web Pipe:
GET /weather.svg
|> fetch: `https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=52.52&longitude=13.41&hourly=temperature_2m`
|> jq: `
.data.response.hourly as $h |
[$h.time, $h.temperature_2m] | transpose | map({time: .[0], temp: .[1]})
`
|> gg({ "type": "svg", "width": 800, "height": 400} ): `
aes(x: time, y: temp)
| line()
| point()
`
https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe
https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp
https://williamcotton.com/articles/basic-introduction-to-web...
I've been working at quite a clip for a solo developer who is building a new language with a full featured set of tooling.
I'd like to think that the approach to building the BDD-testing framework directly into the language itself and having the test runner using the production request handlers is at least somewhat novel!
GET /hello/:world
|> jq: `{ world: .params.world }`
|> handlebars: `<p>hello, {{world}}</p>`
describe "hello, world"
it "calls the route"
let world = "world"
when calling GET /hello/{{world}}
then status is 200
and selector `p` text equals "hello, {{world}}"
Where is all the amazing, much better stuff you implemented manually meanwhile?
He's built lots of cool stuff with AI. Here is four random ones pulled from https://tools.simonwillison.net
- https://tools.simonwillison.net/bullish-bearish
- https://tools.simonwillison.net/user-agent
This is such a tired response at this point.
People are under zero obligation to release their work to the public. Simon actually publishes and writes about a remarkable amount of the side projects he builds with AI.
The rest of us just build tons of cool stuff for personal use or for $JOB. Releasing stuff to the public is, in general, a massive amount of extra work for very little benefit. There are loads of FOSS maintainers trapped spending as much time managing their communities as they do their actual projects and many of us just don't have time for that.