alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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In measuring how long can esp32 stream video over wifi using single 14500 battery (AA size but 3.7V lithium). So far it seems like 2h 8m is the limit. I'm using tps63020 buck-boost to 3.3V.
Trying to make a stab at improving RSS feed discoverability. There's a website portion and an app portion. Hope to have something to show off in a few weeks.
Working on a 2 circle Venn diagram creator (https://Venndiagrammer.com)
I've got a taskboard that auto-completes easy tasks, specs out and visualises hard ones.
Draws from a bunch of sources, MCP-connects to my agents, comes with a browser plugin to invite meeting bots to calls, lets me (and my testers) leave notes on websites which also gets added in.
The goal is to make work as simple as dragging tickets around, and load as many best practices + review clarity into it
I've set a deadline to finally launch tomorrow, but frankly - I don't know how it's gonna go. Feeling proud, yet a bit anxious about it.
https://kodan.dev, if anyone wants to take a peek
https://www.contextractor.com/ - Web content extraction tool to feed LLMs
Building storica.club, experimenting the adult way to learn a new language, through actual content that an adult can enjoy.
A JVM written exclusively in go. Now, 5000+ commits into the project.
Decided to cancel my personal Miro subscription, so vibe-coding* a diagram/vector graphics tool with UX I would enjoy rather than tolerate.
* assisted coding, not full code generation
I'm writing an M68K NeXTStep userland emulator and thunks to run NeXTStep apps under GNUStep. I'm starting today with hello world.
working on https://www.focuslive.app/realtime Its a virtual body doubling tool without camera that helps people focus together anonymously
A few days back, a book on FreeBSD Driver Development was posted here [0], and everyone assumed a) it's LLM slop and b) a terrible introduction to the topics covered.
I scanned a couple of chapters and realised it likely wasn't LLM generated, it just needed an edit. The intro to C is a hard and weird intro, but then driver development in FreeBSD is hard and weird and people who aren't prepared to get through such intros probably aren't going to get through the rest of it.
Being the contrarian, I've started going through it. I was involved on the periphery of the FreeBSD project ~25 years ago, went to conferences, ran a BSDUG in my hometown, and so on. And I realised I've missed systems programming and FreeBSD itself a little, and in recent years became a little sentimental.
What I've discovered so far in the first few chapters:
1. I miss FreeBSD. And it's weird my muscle memory kicks in and am surprised in a lovely way to find familiar things like /etc/rc.conf work the way I remember them.
2. This is not AI slop. There are issues that I can blame on him not using the same platforms I am (if you're on Apple Silicon, just use UTM and the aarch64 ISO - don't use the VirtualBox config he suggests, as an early example), but as somebody who sees a lot of AI generated content in my day job - this isn't it
3. I have got excited about coding again for the first time in a while.
So, this is my hobby for a while. Go back to where I started, get into low-level systems programming again, I have some ideas on some hardware I want to help out on... it's different to a lot of what I've been working on for the last decade or so, but that excites me.
Clodhost.com … Claude code with a web interface on your own (hetzner) VPS… and free!
pod2book.com It converts podcasts to e-books for the deaf, hard of hearing or neurodivergent because transcripts are clunky.
A Self hosted multi-player boggle game
Play a game here: https://bawgle.alifbae.dev
https://www.htmlwasher.com/ - online HTML cleaner
A browser for designers: https://www.matry.design
I can't really go into details of what I am working on. But I'd like to say that a lot of European corporations are running their stuff on Azure and are very much interested in having Data Lake(house) platforms tailor made to their business and IT requirements based on Databricks and their stack. I mention this because I find this mismatch of what I see being relevant in business and what is being upvoted on Hackernews quite interesting (for the lack of a better word).
Basecheck.ai - a database auditing tool, supports Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Supabase and SQLite. Happy to demo
i keep building more to https://service-zen.com instead of finding my first client. but this is what i’m working on
On my spare time, I am working on my game, a sci fi dungeon crawler – written in Haskell. Currently finishing up the graphics engine. OpenGL based. 2.5D but with a real 3D dynamic light system. In game objects and entities cast realistic soft shadows, and are lit up realistically. Took a lot of mathing and thinking to get working!
Next up is actually implementing game play!
There is a little video demo here (but bear in mind that everything is temp graphics) https://hakon.gylterud.net/diary/2026-05.html#2026-05-02
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Working on https://fastsleep.app
Using this app, you may fall asleep in 20 minutes (maybe within 8 to 15 minutes)
Simply start the session and imagine what you hear. Like if you hear "calm river", imagine that. If you hear "heavy rain over a tree" imagine that. And you may fall asleep soon.
Try this tonight!
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Currently building my own rss reader because I wanted one that runs in the terminal, but all the ones I could find were in Rust
https://easel,games
A reactive programming language for games! Properties signal when they change and you can register blocks that tell the engine how to use that property, not just once but every time it changes. It’s a more declarative way of making games which I think is lots more productive.
I’ve been working on this for four years, it’s been a big project!
Hackerman Text editor.
595 days and counting.
ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ
For the past 2.5~3 months I've been working on a 2D/3D VFX (visual effects) editor dedicated to mac and iPhone/iPad, it was on my never ending list of fun projects to build and a perfect excuse to learn agentic coding on a domain of expertise (written in Swift/SwiftUI and Metal).
I wrote a blog post about my process: https://sxp.studio/blog/subjective-building-a-native-vfx-edi...
...and you can download the app here if you're curious (the app is free!): https://subjectivedesigner.com
Next project is going to be a pivot of that project into something related to creative coding and agentic :-)
Bloom! Visual research tool.
LazyNote : Discord/Slack like personal note app https://about.lazynote.app/
This is a Flutter project.
cascade-editor.pages.dev - a free node-based image editor that works with image sequences and has an associated desktop app. It’s pretty incredible what you can do in browser these days with wgpu and wasm- everything is cross compiled from rust.
I've been vibecoding* a calendar-based personal note-taking thingy: https://github.com/cu/doneski
The idea is that each morning, you click the "New Day" button, and your Todo list along with other notes carry forward from the previous day to the new one. When you accomplish something, you add it to the Done section. Other sections can be added as needed. I have been using a text editor and/or shell script for this purpose for about a decade, but have been inspired to make it into an app now that I can delegate the boring bits of app development. It is not quite done yet, but it's getting close to being usable.
(* To the inevitable downvoters, this is in part an experiment to get familiar with what SOTA LLMs can handle. With the intent of comparing it to local LLMs once I get my Strix Halo set up as a coding assistant. I only code as a hobby currently, and have too many other hobbies, and this app wouldn't exist without something else doing the heavy lifting. That said, this is a pretty low-stakes application and I don't commit any code that I haven't reviewed and don't understand.)
A TypeScript in-browser game engine where everything is a mod.
i guess some kind of a mashup Airtable x Yahoo Pipes, but i've never used either of these
in each job i find myself trying to enhance information in order to visualize it, so this time i'm finally giving it a try
I’m developing a Gizmondo emulator. It’s an old gaming handheld.
A personal CRM system that lives locally in your device, no data shared anywhere
Writing detailed and a bit math heavy blog post about specular microfacet-based BRDFs.
I'm working on a system to create animations, and a new cicd system.
After some medical leave, writing the third post for my series about how Linux works: https://serversfor.dev/linux-inside-out/
vicode -- TUI coding agent written in Rust, with tabs/subagents running in worktrees on top of fuse-overlayfs: create/fork tabs to work on multiple features/implementations, while subagents work in parallel without conflicts; additional lowerdir with bindfs mounts lets agents share the compilation cache, so that `cargo check` doesn't take minutes
since it's all just mounts, vicode works as a worktree manager as well: select a vicode tab (which sets cwd to the corresponding worktree with OSC7), open a new terminal tab/window, and run claude/codex inside
disclaimer: unstable, linux-only (mac build WIP, no overlayfs), some modules were vibecoded (grep for `SLOP`)
Im building termyte, the runtime safety layer for ai agents.
I am working on an OpenType text shaper and renderer in Javascript and Rust with minimal memory requirements. Will allow complex scripts (Arabic, Devanagari, Thai, Khmer, etc.) rendering with standard TrueType fonts on embedded systems like a valilla esp32.
I am currently working on a server hardening and inbox cleaning services without a subscription
I’m making a top down RPG. 16x16 pixel art. Loving it. In Godot.
hosting comparison tool https://www.punycoder.com/hosting/
also https://www.gluee.com/ - Text Styling for Social Networks, Slack, Teams etc...
I have fully implemented mutable torrents (BEP 46) in Transmission. When a torrent is created, you can set it to be "mutable", and you (and you alone) can add files to the torrent, remove them, modify them, or change their filenames. Other members of the swarm will be notified of the new change, and begin downloading that as well (if they use a client with mutable torrent support). For leechers, they can choose whether to allow mutability on a per-torrent basis, and only in the fashion that they prefer. They can even store every change (and seed those) too.
I have the macOS, Windows, cli, and web app working with this feature. I had a bit of a mixup with Gtk, so I don't have a Debian package for it, but it's buildable from source.
https://github.com/NoMoreNicksLeft/transmission
I would appreciate it if anyone wanted to test it. I'd like to think that the feature would be a big deal, even if my implementation of it's kinda crappy.
Lately I’ve been working on https://oceanconnect.ca
The original developer has left our organization so I’ve been tasked with general assessment and winding it down to enter maintenance mode. It’s still alive and well, has a very passionate and appreciative user base, but we want to ensure it doesn’t demand too much attention moving forward while we focus on other things. It has pretty noisy error reporting.
Reliability and fault tolerance are some of my favourite things to work on in software so it has been a lot of fun so far. It has also been an incredible opportunity to practice using LLMs for specs, planning, verification, and research. I don’t actually need to output much code to get this thing into a stable state in which it can coast along; the bulk of the work is time spent understanding the app, the infrastructure, its existing faults, poring through traces and logs, going over query plans, and so on. LLMs are great assistants for this work and I’m having a ton of fun having so many opportunities to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
The outcome has been awesome. The performance is steadily climbing (especially in the database), and most common errors when I started are either gone or much better understood with plans to address them. I’ve almost got it set up so if someone needs to take it over in the future, it should be pretty easy to toss them the keys and trust that they can deploy and maintain it easily from the docs and systems I’ve created.
Despite spending a lot of my career on the front end, the hardest part of this project has been navigating that. Aiming to improve an application with minimal intervention is exceedingly difficult in the browser, or so I’ve been finding. I can get incredible performance gains out of Postgres without changing the interface between lambda and rds in the slightest, but meaningful improvements to the react application seem virtually impossible without substantial refactoring.
I understand the key factors in getting better performance out of react apps and I see plenty of opportunities, but they all involve large diffs that are risky and time-consuming, even with a model like Opus handy to churn through boring and large change sets. It’s such a fragile and flaky environment.
Even so, I’m loving it. Making software better is so gratifying. Doing it without reinventing the world is such a fun challenge, too. It really puts your brain to work. It would be so easy to go in and start flipping tables and throwing code in the garbage, but that’s too easy and too risky. Taking it slow, absorbing as much information as you can, truly understanding how features work, and planning surgical changes with significant pay off is safer and just feels awesome when it works.
I’ll be sad when this one is finished. It’s almost there. Next up is a remote temperature controller for 40 saltwater experiment tanks with a temperature profile planning interface and a monitoring interface for the lab. That will be awesome too. It has been a good couple of months for work.
working on a voice first, interaktive universal audio guide. https://artsplain.com
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I'm working on a device that acts as a bridge between a video game sim wheel controller and a radio control car. It uses ESP32s on both ends, communicating using the ESP-NOW protocol. My client and I have been working on this for about 2 years now, and the final PCBs have just arrived. I did the coding and the board design in its entirety, and another freelancer designed the enclosure.
Unfortunately the only marketing material so far are some TikTok posts, but it's a pretty cool demonstration.
I've been working on a set of custom PHPStan rules that started off as a replication / modernization of rules from PHPMD, but has evolved to include more than that.
https://github.com/Orrison/MeliorStan