I've been working on a voxel game engine called Bonsai for ~10 years.
Probably the most interesting thing about it at the moment is the editor. The world, and most things in it, are represented as collections of SDFs. More accurately, they're density fields, but, potato-tomato. The world generator and editor operate almost entirely on the GPU. I've been writing a graph compiler similar in spirit to compilers that execute LLMs, with some key differences. The SDF 'program' gets jitted into a kind of bytecode and fed through an interpreter in the world gen shader. This way, the world gen and edits can be applied deterministically using one big fused program, and transferred back to CPU land using the async PCIe hardware. I get something on the order of ~99% ALU residency, 95% L2 hit rate and 20-40% vram bandwidth usage.
Compared to doing world gen on the CPU, it's so fast it feels like magic. It's taken me the better part of two years to get this working well.
One neat thing about representing the world as SDFs is they've been thoroughly researched and documented by a guy named Inigo Quilez, and they have a lot of nice mathematical properties. For example, you can do a smooth union of arbitrary SDFs to get nice rounded contours where shapes join.
I'll do some shameless self-promotion and leave some links here for anyone interested in looking at the engine, language code, or some pretty pictures.
That's so cool, building something consistently for 10 years is no small feat. How did AI helped you, or How did AI impacted your day to day work in recent years ?
Thank you :) One of the nice things about working on a game engine is it's actually a large collection of small projects disguised a big one. That let's my squirrel-brain jump from thing to thing and have enough variety to not get bored.
I just started using AI a few months ago. My smoke-test was "can it write a simple memory allocator". Until recently, every time I tried to get an AI to write an arena or simple buddy-style heap allocator, they just vomited all over themselves. To my surprise, the last time I tried, the AI absolutely crushed it; it unearthed tricks I didn't even know about in one shot. Since then, I've been using AIs to do the boring, rote work that effectively just boils down to me typing in something that's in my head. For that, they're great. I typically sketch out the thing I want it to make, then tell it to fill in the blanks. Sometimes they still go off the rails, but all in all it's a useful tool.
Where I've found they still struggle is making any architectural decisions, or where performance matters.. even a little bit. They often make super braindead decisions when it comes to performance for no discernable reason. They'll course correct when you tell them to, but I've had to keep a close eye on the output and reign it in frequently. Asking an AI to design a system from the API level hasn't ever returned a good result for me.. I always do that work.
All in all, I feel like using AI will probably make me a better programmer in the long run, contrary to popular belief. They accelerate the boring stuff I already know how to do, which leaves me with more time to work on the edge of my skill level where I grow as an engineer. Guess we'll see in 5 years.
I have a PAL-2 [1] (a modern KIM-1 re-creation) and started learning 6502 by entering programs from The First Book of KIM [2].
I wanted to be able to compile/link the assembly from the book so leaned on Claude to set up a 6502 dev environment for my Mac. I put everything needed (and instructions) on GitHub [3].
(Claude also has been helpful in re-formatting the 6502 code from The First Book of KIM into a more modern style compatible with modern assemblers. A few of these modernized programs I added to the GitHub repo above.)
As it happens, I am also fixing/formatting The First Book of KIM by recreating it in a modern page-layout app (Affinity Publisher). The PDF scans that are out there are not pretty, have OCR errors (and the book itself has mistakes). Hopefully I'll have a new version of the book/PDF out on the internet by the year's end.
Working on / dog fooding my graph based recipe app[0].
There are more things I'd like to do with the graph concept, like linking two user's recipe trees if they were imported via the same URL. Really trying to to avoid features that I think would be cool that don't provide any functionality.
There are still a few features I'd like to implement that are more in the vein of nice to have in any recipe application, like nested recipes, temperature conversions, volumetric ingredients amounts to mass conversions, etc.
But I've been using it for new recipes and converting my old recipes I have written down in the margins to this format and I've been happy with how usable its been in these early stages.
I've been working on a small search engine for content creators that play and/or review indie games. It's written in C and has been a lot of fun to work on.
Lipik, a free open-source dictation app for Mac (https://github.com/Gourav2609/lipik). Hold fn, talk, let go, and clean text lands in any app: ums and self-corrections removed, spoken punctuation turned into real punctuation. Speech-to-text and clean-up both run on the Mac. On my 106 English test clips, lines that came out fully right went from 28% to 76% with clean-up on. Right now I'm working on Hinglish (Hindi + English in Roman letters). It gets 7 of 20 test lines fully right, so there's a long way to go.
Noticed how well Claude works for transcribing old German cursive, especially for broad hits in non-indexed 17th century parish records. Motivated me to pick up Ancestry again and helped me quite a bit in following some lines further back.
Then also HNowledge[1], a free iOS app for browsing the HN stories and comments I've upvoted. Made it to fit the way I browse HN, which is upvoting mainly what I find interesting and may want to come back to. The app lets you browse by date, domain or score, add notes and export. Apart from syncing your upvotes from HN, everything stays local without any tracking.
Wanes[2], an Apple Health logging interface for tracking how long symptoms last. I tend to have headaches quite often and the way Apple lets you enter that data is pretty limited, so I created an app which starts a Live Activity for one or more symptoms using widgets, Control Center or Siri. You can change the severity rating while it runs and stop it from wherever you are on your phone (Home Screen, Lock Screen, Dynamic Island, Siri).
Working on ZShot [1]. I'm about a year in on a local-only browser tuned specifically for CLI and API usage - kinda filling the gap for "geez, I sure wish I had a browser, but not one to look at". You need a webpage as PNG, or an MP4, or a website as a WACZ or SQLite database. There's a Mac app to help with discoverability of options, but I wanted for my local tooling and building services on top of it.
Along the way I ended up adding an internal agent framework to satisfy stuff like "log in, click the button, and then take a screenshot", out of which fell stuff like automatically generating Playwright tests from that. It even runs the Playwright test suite and Puppeteer test suites ( a bit faster, and for a lot less memory ). I kinda love this bit because I can layer in multiple models that will bounce control of the web session between each other, to do stuff like let a Typesafe model choose to escalate to Opus when it needs higher minded behavior. It's fun to watch it happen.
I've mentioned it a few times around here, I'll probably do a Show HN soon when I feel like it's ready for that. Hopefully soon.
I'm working on Eigakan Guide (https://eigakanguide.jp/en), a cinema showtime aggregator for Japan. Every popular cinema site in Japan only allows for very few filters, making it hard to find exactly what I was looking for. So instead I built a site where it's possible to filter by area, cinema, date, time, features like IMAX, English audio, English subtitles, and more. This allows for searching for stuff like IMAX showtimes with English audio on Friday after 7PM.
Since the last time I posted on HN I've added 100s of cinemas, user features like being able to save search filters, movies, and specific showtimes. Also a ChatGPT plugin which allows for searching for movie showtimes using natural language directly inside of ChatGPT (https://chatgpt.com/plugins/plugin_asdk_app_6abfdc298c208191...).
Finally I've added AI search to the site as well, allowing for natural language search with queries like "English audio showtimes near Shinjuku tomorrow" and so on.
I would really appreciate feedback for things to add, things that are hard to understand, and anything else!
GeoPeek, a small macOS Quick Look extension for GeoJSON. I work with geospatial data and wanted to press Space on a .geojson in Finder and see a map instead of raw JSON. It also shows an attribute table and basic stats. https://github.com/serifsadi/geopeek
Hence (https://hencegame.com) is a modern twist on Einstein's puzzle, with fun picture clues instead of text. It's a free online daily puzzle, the same for everyone, where every puzzle is always solvable by pure deduction with no guessing.
I launched it October 5. The hardest part was the graphics, making each picture clue unique enough that you recognize it immediately and know what category it's from, even at small sizes. Easier said than done.
Every puzzle is run through a verifier first to make sure it is solvable without any guessing, just by pure logic, so there is always a next step to find, which is what makes it feel so rewarding. There's a hint system to help and it works really well if I do say so myself . No account needed to play.
From what I've been hearing so far, the people who have checked it out are enjoying it and can't wait for tomorrow's puzzle, so that's a good sign.
I'd love to hear how the difficulty feels, and whether the pictures read clearly.
Repair of a Collins 651S-1 receiver. The 65-95 mhz vco module is bad, but if you over damp the pll loop filter it does eventually lock and receive properly. I found a similar but not identical replacement from a different model receiver. It lacks one of the two DC tracking signal outputs but I added an op amp based circuit to simulate the missing signal.
The loop is stable and responsive when receiving from 17 to 29.9999 Mhz, but not much below that... Almost got it
I've been working on a planner for the past 2 years for people whose day never goes the way they planned it.
I was trying to solve the problem I had with time-blocking, where your day ends up derailed and you give up on it because it takes too long to replan. I have solved with the idea of a cascading calendar. If I move a task down or change its duration it pushes other tasks later in the day.
Since then its kinda grown into my full productivity system for logging my thoughts and planning and documenting my life
I’m based in Berlin and currently working on ChatFrom.io . You upload your knowledge base, and it uses advanced RAG with hybrid search and reranking to find answers when someone asks a question. It connects to Stripe, Shopify, and other tools, and works on Telegram, Slack, and more. Free to start.
Building Wishfox [1] for around 6 years. It's a wishlist app with price tracking, groups, secret Santa and more. Recently did a major rebranding, and the mobile app is almost ready for testers.
Then I'm working on improving my two open-source apps, Portfox [2] and Localfox [3]. Portfox shows ports for running services and dev servers, Localfox provides them with .localhost domains with TLS and Cloudflare tunnels.
I've got 40k+ photos on my iphone, and wanted a better way to interact with them. The basic idea I had was to virtually stitch all the photos together into a gigapixel image, and navigate that image with pinch and zoom. On import, the app hierarchically groups photos based on date and similarity. The user can go back and edit the groups, change the layout, and adjust the size of photos if they choose.
The interesting I noticed is that in the process of curating and organizing my photos, I stumble across memories and moments that I had completely forgot.
Development Challenge: The app does two interesting things underneath the hood... First, given an arbitrary number of thumbnails with different aspect ratios, it finds the best sized rectangle that completely fits all the photos. This allows me to recursively stitch groups together and always output a rectangular thumbnail for the group. Second, the pinch/zoom UI uses these nested thumbnails directly without slicing/dicing to fixed sized tiles.
1-year part-time experiment: can you build a large project with AI writing the code and AI plus deterministic tools verifying/guiding/enforcing it for structural and behavior consistency, without a human reading the code?
I'm building a polyglot web framework in 15 languages, with C# and Lean4 as the reference implementations. Structural and behavioral audits using deterministic tools check that every port stays consistent with the reference. It's about 1.8M lines now. I have not reviewed the code/neither have i verified the behavior tests except at the time of giving requirement and never seen some of the language code at all.
The question is how far can we produce "working code → correct code [Possible] → good code [Unknown]" with deterministic audits correcting structure, ai mistakes and behavior validation.
So far the quality looks acceptable with lots of correction of AI output done without looking, but it isn't fully verified.
For now Im working on an agent-orchestration application that is taking tickets from a tracker and giving them to an Agent. It's called Even Keel.
The main feature is, that I can use different subscriptions/API keys (Claude and Codex - v0.1.4) and trackers (GitHub, Linear and Huly - v0.1.4) to make Even Keel start an agent for every single issue, task by task, one at a time per folder. There is also a parallel feature, so I can run more than 1 project at a time.
Once upon a time, when codex agent was integrated into the app, I wrote a ticket to make codex his own hook. It reused a hook that blocked its own git merge, if tests did not pass. I started calling it "A new agent writes its own cage"... Right after, it turned out it doesn't listen to the hook and it fixed it
Version 0.1.4 is already shipped, but v0.2 is coming soon with more supported trackers, agents and new features.
Built an app to suggest best local beach for given weather for my town. My partner shared with local moms and they seem to be loving it - https://beach.metacursion.com/
Also revived old project - https://aminosplore.metacursion.com - the idea was to compare what essential amino acids each food contains using spider web chart. It’s been dead for a while due to USDA API changes so I revived, added macros and enabled to build foods into actual recipes.
Finally have been improving elsrc.com - an easy and scalable way to use ai image generators. If you need hundreds of images you can just request them by url. Supports versioning, batching, regional and national styling based on viewers IP and few other neat features!
The idea is that the source code is annotated with special rules which configure how parts of the code (also configs and docs) depend on each other. This can be done either directly in the source code comments or in a config file blockwatch.toml
This tool is very useful for large codebases that e.g. share constants across programming languages and configs, have docs that should strictly reflect the current state of the code, etc
It uses tree-sitter to parse the source code, 35+ languages are supported.
The project is actively developed, your feedback is welcomed! Thanks!
How to make data storage on multiple storage devices unbreakable and consistent? The former means for me that back-ups should be automatical and serverless, the latter means that no matter how much of that HDD/SDD devices are connected, I want always to know all metadata of all files I have. I want this software under GPLv3 if to consider GPL still protects me from anything because permissive licenses are no better than WTFPL by any single case.
My first idea is to require the user to have more than one disk for the system needs and the system should know all of the rest data devices user owns. My second idea is to treat different files as having different priority which impose multiple copies. My third idea is to make the software accessible, and the last idea is to make encrypting of all the devices easy and with no ties to any commertial entities. I would like to have a discussion about how to not lose anything digital.
We just got a puppy, and needed a way to track potties to help us with house training. So, with AI/Claude's help, I found a similar open source package (Baby Buddy), forked it, and very quickly made it my own. Self-hosted, local for privacy reasons.
I just got Beacon approved for the Apple App Store, it’s a mobile app for answering “which friend is free to talk right now?”
It’s a one-to-many phone call that only one person can answer. Send a beacon to a group, and everyone gets pinged at the same time. The first person who answers gets connected for a 1-1 call, and for everyone else the signal drops silently. It does not log any missed calls so there’s neither pressure to answer nor pressure to return calls.
Overall it works really well!
It works best if you're able to join with at 4+ friends/family you’d like to chat with more. I have dozens of connections in the app now and it feels like magic to me. I press the button and get a random friend!
A bit like iodine in the basic idea, but the execution and network topologies you build with it are different. It's more of a building block; you get your DNS channels represented as UDP endpoints, and take it from there, ie you can run Wireguard over it, or SSH or a SOCKS5 proxy (using quicmux, so over QUIC), or run Mosh straight over DNS if you're crafty.
It has an Android app too! I tried to submit it to F-Droid but they're so swamped in spammy or low-quality apps that they're not taking any brand new apps :-(
A sad state of affairs, that.
Working on a natural language intelligence layer for contacts - "Pull everyone I know who works at a Series A healthtech in the Bay Area who also went to Stanford for ungrad" => either structured or unstructured results. Large-scale data support, automatically enriched with up-to-date data, fast/accurate results. Integrates natively with Gmail and Gcal.
Looking to pilot for free with small qualified teams (early-stage startups with real/immediate need).
I keep saving blogs and articles but almost never revisit them.
So I’m building an Android app designed to help me actually read what I save. You only get one saved article per day. Finish today’s read to unlock the next one. You can also save Twitter, Reddit, etc. posts separately and revisit them anytime.
Right now I’m mainly validating whether people would actually want something like this. If there’s enough interest, I’ll run a small closed beta for Android.
So far it's helpful for messages between my own AI's (chatgpt and claude etc), and for having my AI trade tech tips with a friend's AI or talk to my wife's AI. My AI also got its first message from a strangers AI from france which has also been really interesting. I read all messages first and approve before sending anything, but otherwise they're just talking about whatever they want.
I've been working on trying to be more helpful around the house, and trying to spend more time with my kids. I'm trying to give my partner a little bit of relief so that they can pursue their passions as well.
It uses Apple Intelligence to help brainstorm domain name ideas. I’m interested in seeing what small local models can do as they catch up to larger ones, this is my first iOS app so I started with something simple that scratches my own itch.
I’m building Tinta, a journal app for Android where all the AI runs on the phone. It works in airplane mode once the models are downloaded.
You write or dictate an entry, and a small model (LFM2.5 1.2B) asks you a question to reflect further. It turns out 1.2B models are decent at asking questions, so I leaned into that. An embedding model finds older entries about the same thing and shows bits of them under the new one.
Most people using it are on budget phones running the models on the CPU, where the app provides good experience.
Great idea! I'd love this, but as an open source app. Out of interest (not a criticism), what made you decide to do this closed source, especially considering there doesn't seem to be a commercial interest involved (for now)?
Thanks for a good question!
I see this app as an MVP that needs user feedback to deliver exceptional value in a world where cloud AI is abundant and doesn't use 2GB+ of RAM to run. I am excited to see what shape it will take, and it feels too early to determine source availability.
I'm working on a TradingView Pine Script compatible Python framework: https://pynecore.org . And a Pine Script compiler for it + a full IDE for Pine Script with syntax highlight, language server, full featured debugger, charting, data downloads: https://pynesys.io .
It is 99.771% bit exact on the top 1000 Pine Scripts and 100% trade match.
I'm doing it solo.
* files in organised trees/graphs generated using LSPs and symbol references instead of linear file list
* keyboard shortcuts for everything from navigation, pan, zoom, comment, note, submit...
* mostly github compatible with native features
* LSP powered symbol resolution for inspecting definitions and references
* LLM powered reviews supported
* Inline LLM question answering
I built the original for myself because I wanted to listen to acoup and other history blogs while sleeping. And in the spirit of getting better at finishing projects decided make it public even tho it’s nothing really unique or special.
Still lots to polish especially in the text/copy and ui but the core features should be working.
I’m still working on https://leafle.org which is a tool for getting more interesting reading (or listening) suggestions that one can borrow from the library (or Libby). I’m done for the moment with building it, so I’ve been doing things like making flyers and leaving them in local libraries.
Been a fun opportunity to play around with ai in various ways - mixed but definitely powerful experience in using it for data research (finding libraries and their locations), very impressive on reverse engineering apis to get book availability. And then a lot of interesting stuff around getting good behaviour from LLMs as chat partners, for example using jev to improve results from using openrouter by getting it to check for common failure modes and ban providers based on their output.
I've just released v1.0 of Rouler which is VPN split tunneling for windows. Think IP rules for Linux, but with per-app/service connection steering. The whole app is built in Rust, including the kernel driver. Having released v1 I'm now starting work on adding folder and windows store support. https://rouler.io
working on AudioWeave, an ad free, offline first Android podcast player.
switching from iOS, I wasn't happy with the existing podcast apps, so I built this mostly for myself. I've been using it for the last six months and finally pushed a public beta.
My day to day is BE so I used the project to learn Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. Everything is strictly native using Room and Media3/ExoPlayer. I wanted a nice looking (subjective), privacy-focused app without any tracking or ads.
For the month of November (and starting in October this year) I like to hold weekly cooking challenges to practice and refine my Thanksgiving day feast. Now about 3 weeks out from the final boss level of cooking, and I'm having a week all about brussel sprouts. Earlier weeks were cauliflower and the classic seasoning blend of sage, rosemary and thyme.
Aficionado (https://aficiona.do) - a place to discover, scrapbook and remember media (movies, video games, tv shows, music and books) that resonated with you or that you'd like to try.
I am building Cloud based context compiler and intelligent codebase visualizer for Developers and AI Agents, for easy PR review, onboarding and easy architectural understanding
https://hatamoto.dev - a complete replacement to Wordpress and its most used plugins built into the system. One go binary, no node , no compilation, Postgres and sandboxes plugins. Built in AI analytics
I'm working on a platform for selling event tickets (kind of an alternative to Ticketmaster or weezevent).
I'm working on it on my free time for now (I am also using it to test working with AI tools ).
Not sure yet if I want to build a company or not.
working on talk deep https://talkdeep.me, a little app for keeping in touch with friends after i moved countries. you pair with a friend and get one question a day, or go through decks of deeper questions together. i've never done an app before so building something from scratch has been a really fun creative outlet
My main project is trying not to lose my mind, given all the things I can now create thanks to AI.
Jokes aside (although I'm not entirely joking about my mental health), my main project is https://auradistill.com: First-principles thinking for your AI agents.
It's not just about giving your personal AI agents "memory". It's about encoding memories in a way that can handle ambiguity and contradictions.
That project alone has got me completely hooked on building for and with LLMs.
I've got other projects too, but this is probably the one I've poured the most time and energy into.
been building BuildOpsy mostly writing about system design, infrastructure failures and the occasional “well, that was an expensive outage” postmortem.
Also building calculators for things engineers usually calculate in a spreadsheet at 2am. you can see some on the site(https://buildopsy.com/calculators.html)
There is already a site here where you say what your job is and garages submit their offers. They can also auto-submit offers if it’s something routine like a standard service.
I am working on a Rust-based ext4 driver. The idea is that it can be re-used as a FUSE-based driver as well as (Windows) kernel driver (eventually).
Most of the essential features are implemented so far, but some (mandatory) features are lacking (xattrs support). My goal is to get to a full ext4 implementation that also supports ext2 and ext3 read/write.
The initial motivation was to have a pet project with a use-case for Rust, as I wanted to improve my Rust coding skills, after I did some work on a game server implementation in Rust earlier [1].
My goal is to have an implementation where I have digested every line mentally, which is something that pretty much excludes slop-like use of AI for large scale code generation. And of course I want to really trust the code that touches my files via raw hard disk access.
Hence, I use AI mainly for unit tests and (scoped) code rewriting when my code gets too verbose and cumbersome.
In the long run I'd want to add fuzzing to the implementation, so if anyone has experience on this, I'd be interested in getting some pointers.
Ur is an (in-progress) universal formatter and linter for every programming language. It's in preview right now, which just means friends are messing around with it and having a good time pointing out all the bugs. Docs are mostly up to date, but buyer beware.
I'm building a self-hosted media server for video, like Plex or Jellyfin. I'll be opening the beta in about a month.
Features:
- No paywalls, bandwidth limiting, or crippled behavior. No login required.
- Single go binary, deployed via Docker.
- Reaches your home server from anywhere with no port forwarding, no VPN and no paywall, even behind carrier-grade NAT. No Tailscale required.
- Cast to another device. You can use any logged in device as a playback screen.
- Watch together, with voice support: Play synced video with friends, and also chat voice. You can also mix this with casting to another device.
- Dialogue boost and loudness levelling for every film.
- Real adaptive quality, tuned for a home's upload.
- Hardware transcoding, full quality in every supported browser.
- A library that explains itself: what the scanner saw, why each title matched, guesses marked for you to check, and a disk that's gone missing shown as missing instead of its titles silently vanishing.
- Your data stays yours: The database is a rebuildable index, metadata corrections can be written back as NFO files that Kodi and Jellyfin read, and an automatic backup keeps what can't be re-derived (watch state, preferences, shares).
Security is a primary concern:
With the ever increasing pace of hacks and CVEs and AI-assisted intrusion, you simply can't be too careful anymore.
- The core (which talks to the network, handles the API, users and the database) never opens a media file or runs FFmpeg.
- A separate media node does every file read and every transcode. It has no network access and talks to the core only over Unix sockets.
- FFmpeg runs under Landlock and seccomp with no path to the file and no socket. All it can do is read and write streams.
- Small dependency tree on an allowlist, pure Go with no cgo, secrets sealed at rest and never logged.
- The library can be mounted read-only, so even a full compromise can't encrypt or delete your media.
- Cryptographically signed chain for servers and releases.
I've been working on a voxel game engine called Bonsai for ~10 years.
Probably the most interesting thing about it at the moment is the editor. The world, and most things in it, are represented as collections of SDFs. More accurately, they're density fields, but, potato-tomato. The world generator and editor operate almost entirely on the GPU. I've been writing a graph compiler similar in spirit to compilers that execute LLMs, with some key differences. The SDF 'program' gets jitted into a kind of bytecode and fed through an interpreter in the world gen shader. This way, the world gen and edits can be applied deterministically using one big fused program, and transferred back to CPU land using the async PCIe hardware. I get something on the order of ~99% ALU residency, 95% L2 hit rate and 20-40% vram bandwidth usage.
Compared to doing world gen on the CPU, it's so fast it feels like magic. It's taken me the better part of two years to get this working well.
One neat thing about representing the world as SDFs is they've been thoroughly researched and documented by a guy named Inigo Quilez, and they have a lot of nice mathematical properties. For example, you can do a smooth union of arbitrary SDFs to get nice rounded contours where shapes join.
I'll do some shameless self-promotion and leave some links here for anyone interested in looking at the engine, language code, or some pretty pictures.
https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai
https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof
That's so cool, building something consistently for 10 years is no small feat. How did AI helped you, or How did AI impacted your day to day work in recent years ?
Thank you :) One of the nice things about working on a game engine is it's actually a large collection of small projects disguised a big one. That let's my squirrel-brain jump from thing to thing and have enough variety to not get bored.
I just started using AI a few months ago. My smoke-test was "can it write a simple memory allocator". Until recently, every time I tried to get an AI to write an arena or simple buddy-style heap allocator, they just vomited all over themselves. To my surprise, the last time I tried, the AI absolutely crushed it; it unearthed tricks I didn't even know about in one shot. Since then, I've been using AIs to do the boring, rote work that effectively just boils down to me typing in something that's in my head. For that, they're great. I typically sketch out the thing I want it to make, then tell it to fill in the blanks. Sometimes they still go off the rails, but all in all it's a useful tool.
Where I've found they still struggle is making any architectural decisions, or where performance matters.. even a little bit. They often make super braindead decisions when it comes to performance for no discernable reason. They'll course correct when you tell them to, but I've had to keep a close eye on the output and reign it in frequently. Asking an AI to design a system from the API level hasn't ever returned a good result for me.. I always do that work.
All in all, I feel like using AI will probably make me a better programmer in the long run, contrary to popular belief. They accelerate the boring stuff I already know how to do, which leaves me with more time to work on the edge of my skill level where I grow as an engineer. Guess we'll see in 5 years.
Playing with 6502 assembly.
I have a PAL-2 [1] (a modern KIM-1 re-creation) and started learning 6502 by entering programs from The First Book of KIM [2].
I wanted to be able to compile/link the assembly from the book so leaned on Claude to set up a 6502 dev environment for my Mac. I put everything needed (and instructions) on GitHub [3].
(Claude also has been helpful in re-formatting the 6502 code from The First Book of KIM into a more modern style compatible with modern assemblers. A few of these modernized programs I added to the GitHub repo above.)
As it happens, I am also fixing/formatting The First Book of KIM by recreating it in a modern page-layout app (Affinity Publisher). The PDF scans that are out there are not pretty, have OCR errors (and the book itself has mistakes). Hopefully I'll have a new version of the book/PDF out on the internet by the year's end.
[1] https://www.tindie.com/products/kim1/pal-2-a-mos-6502-powere...
[2] https://archive.org/details/The_First_Book_of_KIM/
[3] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/KIM-1_Development
I’m making a digital real watercolor kit.
I’m a software developer and watercolor painter so my goal is to use real world painting techniques and have the results feel and look real.
Modeling the physics of paper, brush bristles, pigments, water, color mixing, drying in real time using gpu.
Built in rust using wgpu.
Currently looking for iPad beta testers if anyone is interested (supports Apple Pencil or finger).
https://puddlewatercolor.com
Very cool!
Thank you!
Working on / dog fooding my graph based recipe app[0].
There are more things I'd like to do with the graph concept, like linking two user's recipe trees if they were imported via the same URL. Really trying to to avoid features that I think would be cool that don't provide any functionality.
There are still a few features I'd like to implement that are more in the vein of nice to have in any recipe application, like nested recipes, temperature conversions, volumetric ingredients amounts to mass conversions, etc.
But I've been using it for new recipes and converting my old recipes I have written down in the margins to this format and I've been happy with how usable its been in these early stages.
[0] https://grainofsalt.app
I've been working on a small search engine for content creators that play and/or review indie games. It's written in C and has been a lot of fun to work on.
https://marketyour.games
https://prophitt.me/writing/a-modern-web-app-in-c
Lipik, a free open-source dictation app for Mac (https://github.com/Gourav2609/lipik). Hold fn, talk, let go, and clean text lands in any app: ums and self-corrections removed, spoken punctuation turned into real punctuation. Speech-to-text and clean-up both run on the Mac. On my 106 English test clips, lines that came out fully right went from 28% to 76% with clean-up on. Right now I'm working on Hinglish (Hindi + English in Roman letters). It gets 7 of 20 test lines fully right, so there's a long way to go.
Noticed how well Claude works for transcribing old German cursive, especially for broad hits in non-indexed 17th century parish records. Motivated me to pick up Ancestry again and helped me quite a bit in following some lines further back.
Then also HNowledge[1], a free iOS app for browsing the HN stories and comments I've upvoted. Made it to fit the way I browse HN, which is upvoting mainly what I find interesting and may want to come back to. The app lets you browse by date, domain or score, add notes and export. Apart from syncing your upvotes from HN, everything stays local without any tracking.
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hnowledge/id6813417548
Wanes[2], an Apple Health logging interface for tracking how long symptoms last. I tend to have headaches quite often and the way Apple lets you enter that data is pretty limited, so I created an app which starts a Live Activity for one or more symptoms using widgets, Control Center or Siri. You can change the severity rating while it runs and stop it from wherever you are on your phone (Home Screen, Lock Screen, Dynamic Island, Siri).
[2]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wanes/id6811679904
Working on ZShot [1]. I'm about a year in on a local-only browser tuned specifically for CLI and API usage - kinda filling the gap for "geez, I sure wish I had a browser, but not one to look at". You need a webpage as PNG, or an MP4, or a website as a WACZ or SQLite database. There's a Mac app to help with discoverability of options, but I wanted for my local tooling and building services on top of it.
Along the way I ended up adding an internal agent framework to satisfy stuff like "log in, click the button, and then take a screenshot", out of which fell stuff like automatically generating Playwright tests from that. It even runs the Playwright test suite and Puppeteer test suites ( a bit faster, and for a lot less memory ). I kinda love this bit because I can layer in multiple models that will bounce control of the web session between each other, to do stuff like let a Typesafe model choose to escalate to Opus when it needs higher minded behavior. It's fun to watch it happen.
I've mentioned it a few times around here, I'll probably do a Show HN soon when I feel like it's ready for that. Hopefully soon.
[1] https://zshot-app.com/
I'm working on Eigakan Guide (https://eigakanguide.jp/en), a cinema showtime aggregator for Japan. Every popular cinema site in Japan only allows for very few filters, making it hard to find exactly what I was looking for. So instead I built a site where it's possible to filter by area, cinema, date, time, features like IMAX, English audio, English subtitles, and more. This allows for searching for stuff like IMAX showtimes with English audio on Friday after 7PM.
Since the last time I posted on HN I've added 100s of cinemas, user features like being able to save search filters, movies, and specific showtimes. Also a ChatGPT plugin which allows for searching for movie showtimes using natural language directly inside of ChatGPT (https://chatgpt.com/plugins/plugin_asdk_app_6abfdc298c208191...).
Finally I've added AI search to the site as well, allowing for natural language search with queries like "English audio showtimes near Shinjuku tomorrow" and so on.
I would really appreciate feedback for things to add, things that are hard to understand, and anything else!
GeoPeek, a small macOS Quick Look extension for GeoJSON. I work with geospatial data and wanted to press Space on a .geojson in Finder and see a map instead of raw JSON. It also shows an attribute table and basic stats. https://github.com/serifsadi/geopeek
Hence (https://hencegame.com) is a modern twist on Einstein's puzzle, with fun picture clues instead of text. It's a free online daily puzzle, the same for everyone, where every puzzle is always solvable by pure deduction with no guessing. I launched it October 5. The hardest part was the graphics, making each picture clue unique enough that you recognize it immediately and know what category it's from, even at small sizes. Easier said than done.
Every puzzle is run through a verifier first to make sure it is solvable without any guessing, just by pure logic, so there is always a next step to find, which is what makes it feel so rewarding. There's a hint system to help and it works really well if I do say so myself . No account needed to play.
From what I've been hearing so far, the people who have checked it out are enjoying it and can't wait for tomorrow's puzzle, so that's a good sign. I'd love to hear how the difficulty feels, and whether the pictures read clearly.
Repair of a Collins 651S-1 receiver. The 65-95 mhz vco module is bad, but if you over damp the pll loop filter it does eventually lock and receive properly. I found a similar but not identical replacement from a different model receiver. It lacks one of the two DC tracking signal outputs but I added an op amp based circuit to simulate the missing signal.
The loop is stable and responsive when receiving from 17 to 29.9999 Mhz, but not much below that... Almost got it
I've been working on a planner for the past 2 years for people whose day never goes the way they planned it.
I was trying to solve the problem I had with time-blocking, where your day ends up derailed and you give up on it because it takes too long to replan. I have solved with the idea of a cascading calendar. If I move a task down or change its duration it pushes other tasks later in the day.
Since then its kinda grown into my full productivity system for logging my thoughts and planning and documenting my life
https://emberflow.space
You can demo here for free https://demo.emberflow.space/?ref=hn
I’m based in Berlin and currently working on ChatFrom.io . You upload your knowledge base, and it uses advanced RAG with hybrid search and reranking to find answers when someone asks a question. It connects to Stripe, Shopify, and other tools, and works on Telegram, Slack, and more. Free to start.
domain is showing avaialble for sale?
Building Wishfox [1] for around 6 years. It's a wishlist app with price tracking, groups, secret Santa and more. Recently did a major rebranding, and the mobile app is almost ready for testers.
Then I'm working on improving my two open-source apps, Portfox [2] and Localfox [3]. Portfox shows ports for running services and dev servers, Localfox provides them with .localhost domains with TLS and Cloudflare tunnels.
[1] https://wishfox.app [2] https://github.com/xergic/portfox [3] https://github.com/xergic/localfox
I'm working on an iPhone app called PhotoGather. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photogather/id6738232616
I've got 40k+ photos on my iphone, and wanted a better way to interact with them. The basic idea I had was to virtually stitch all the photos together into a gigapixel image, and navigate that image with pinch and zoom. On import, the app hierarchically groups photos based on date and similarity. The user can go back and edit the groups, change the layout, and adjust the size of photos if they choose.
The interesting I noticed is that in the process of curating and organizing my photos, I stumble across memories and moments that I had completely forgot.
Development Challenge: The app does two interesting things underneath the hood... First, given an arbitrary number of thumbnails with different aspect ratios, it finds the best sized rectangle that completely fits all the photos. This allows me to recursively stitch groups together and always output a rectangular thumbnail for the group. Second, the pinch/zoom UI uses these nested thumbnails directly without slicing/dicing to fixed sized tiles.
1-year part-time experiment: can you build a large project with AI writing the code and AI plus deterministic tools verifying/guiding/enforcing it for structural and behavior consistency, without a human reading the code?
I'm building a polyglot web framework in 15 languages, with C# and Lean4 as the reference implementations. Structural and behavioral audits using deterministic tools check that every port stays consistent with the reference. It's about 1.8M lines now. I have not reviewed the code/neither have i verified the behavior tests except at the time of giving requirement and never seen some of the language code at all.
The question is how far can we produce "working code → correct code [Possible] → good code [Unknown]" with deterministic audits correcting structure, ai mistakes and behavior validation.
So far the quality looks acceptable with lots of correction of AI output done without looking, but it isn't fully verified.
Line counts per language, with changes since August: https://claude.ai/artifact/5f1m1pTM7tZ4boQzwsoAG7
the link got deleted accidently and i had my noprocast flag on and hence go locked out. The new link is https://claude.ai/artifact/GaHoaHxqzBiYxoMQYabmJt
For now Im working on an agent-orchestration application that is taking tickets from a tracker and giving them to an Agent. It's called Even Keel.
The main feature is, that I can use different subscriptions/API keys (Claude and Codex - v0.1.4) and trackers (GitHub, Linear and Huly - v0.1.4) to make Even Keel start an agent for every single issue, task by task, one at a time per folder. There is also a parallel feature, so I can run more than 1 project at a time.
Once upon a time, when codex agent was integrated into the app, I wrote a ticket to make codex his own hook. It reused a hook that blocked its own git merge, if tests did not pass. I started calling it "A new agent writes its own cage"... Right after, it turned out it doesn't listen to the hook and it fixed it
Version 0.1.4 is already shipped, but v0.2 is coming soon with more supported trackers, agents and new features.
https://github.com/NamerekT/even-keel
Built an app to suggest best local beach for given weather for my town. My partner shared with local moms and they seem to be loving it - https://beach.metacursion.com/
Also revived old project - https://aminosplore.metacursion.com - the idea was to compare what essential amino acids each food contains using spider web chart. It’s been dead for a while due to USDA API changes so I revived, added macros and enabled to build foods into actual recipes.
Finally have been improving elsrc.com - an easy and scalable way to use ai image generators. If you need hundreds of images you can just request them by url. Supports versioning, batching, regional and national styling based on viewers IP and few other neat features!
I'm working on a cross-file deterministic drift checker https://github.com/mennanov/blockwatch
The idea is that the source code is annotated with special rules which configure how parts of the code (also configs and docs) depend on each other. This can be done either directly in the source code comments or in a config file blockwatch.toml
This tool is very useful for large codebases that e.g. share constants across programming languages and configs, have docs that should strictly reflect the current state of the code, etc
It uses tree-sitter to parse the source code, 35+ languages are supported.
The project is actively developed, your feedback is welcomed! Thanks!
How to make data storage on multiple storage devices unbreakable and consistent? The former means for me that back-ups should be automatical and serverless, the latter means that no matter how much of that HDD/SDD devices are connected, I want always to know all metadata of all files I have. I want this software under GPLv3 if to consider GPL still protects me from anything because permissive licenses are no better than WTFPL by any single case.
My first idea is to require the user to have more than one disk for the system needs and the system should know all of the rest data devices user owns. My second idea is to treat different files as having different priority which impose multiple copies. My third idea is to make the software accessible, and the last idea is to make encrypting of all the devices easy and with no ties to any commertial entities. I would like to have a discussion about how to not lose anything digital.
We just got a puppy, and needed a way to track potties to help us with house training. So, with AI/Claude's help, I found a similar open source package (Baby Buddy), forked it, and very quickly made it my own. Self-hosted, local for privacy reasons.
Repo: https://github.com/viciousnemesis/housetrained
Puppy: https://imgur.com/piDE0gq
I just got Beacon approved for the Apple App Store, it’s a mobile app for answering “which friend is free to talk right now?”
It’s a one-to-many phone call that only one person can answer. Send a beacon to a group, and everyone gets pinged at the same time. The first person who answers gets connected for a 1-1 call, and for everyone else the signal drops silently. It does not log any missed calls so there’s neither pressure to answer nor pressure to return calls.
Overall it works really well! It works best if you're able to join with at 4+ friends/family you’d like to chat with more. I have dozens of connections in the app now and it feels like magic to me. I press the button and get a random friend!
https://trybeacon.chat/
A networking-over-DNS client and server, in Go. https://sr.ht/~nullenenenen/ShrewDNS/
A bit like iodine in the basic idea, but the execution and network topologies you build with it are different. It's more of a building block; you get your DNS channels represented as UDP endpoints, and take it from there, ie you can run Wireguard over it, or SSH or a SOCKS5 proxy (using quicmux, so over QUIC), or run Mosh straight over DNS if you're crafty.
It has an Android app too! I tried to submit it to F-Droid but they're so swamped in spammy or low-quality apps that they're not taking any brand new apps :-( A sad state of affairs, that.
Working on a natural language intelligence layer for contacts - "Pull everyone I know who works at a Series A healthtech in the Bay Area who also went to Stanford for ungrad" => either structured or unstructured results. Large-scale data support, automatically enriched with up-to-date data, fast/accurate results. Integrates natively with Gmail and Gcal.
Looking to pilot for free with small qualified teams (early-stage startups with real/immediate need).
hello@llmsolutions.ai
Building a tool that finds code problems before they become "quick" Friday fixes. Currently teaching it to be less dramatic than the linter :)
I keep saving blogs and articles but almost never revisit them. So I’m building an Android app designed to help me actually read what I save. You only get one saved article per day. Finish today’s read to unlock the next one. You can also save Twitter, Reddit, etc. posts separately and revisit them anytime.
Right now I’m mainly validating whether people would actually want something like this. If there’s enough interest, I’ll run a small closed beta for Android.
Join the waitlist for beta access: https://forms.gle/XWXmK8HUSmAtfms29
TO be honest, I dont think I will pay for this, though revenue can still come through Ads
I'm working on a simple way for AI's to talk to each other: https://counterparts.ai/phone
So far it's helpful for messages between my own AI's (chatgpt and claude etc), and for having my AI trade tech tips with a friend's AI or talk to my wife's AI. My AI also got its first message from a strangers AI from france which has also been really interesting. I read all messages first and approve before sending anything, but otherwise they're just talking about whatever they want.
I've been working on trying to be more helpful around the house, and trying to spend more time with my kids. I'm trying to give my partner a little bit of relief so that they can pursue their passions as well.
so wholesome <3
A domain search app called NameTheory: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nametheory-domain-search/id680...
It uses Apple Intelligence to help brainstorm domain name ideas. I’m interested in seeing what small local models can do as they catch up to larger ones, this is my first iOS app so I started with something simple that scratches my own itch.
I’m building Tinta, a journal app for Android where all the AI runs on the phone. It works in airplane mode once the models are downloaded.
You write or dictate an entry, and a small model (LFM2.5 1.2B) asks you a question to reflect further. It turns out 1.2B models are decent at asking questions, so I leaned into that. An embedding model finds older entries about the same thing and shows bits of them under the new one.
Most people using it are on budget phones running the models on the CPU, where the app provides good experience.
https://tinta.page
Great idea! I'd love this, but as an open source app. Out of interest (not a criticism), what made you decide to do this closed source, especially considering there doesn't seem to be a commercial interest involved (for now)?
Thanks for a good question! I see this app as an MVP that needs user feedback to deliver exceptional value in a world where cloud AI is abundant and doesn't use 2GB+ of RAM to run. I am excited to see what shape it will take, and it feels too early to determine source availability.
I'm wrapping up my 2+ years of work on a browser-based version of EverQuest that plays itself: https://idlequest.net/
Also have some other cool browser-based 3d game projects listed here: https://brynnbateman.com/
including an online version of Shenmue: https://newyokosuka.com/
Storyline isn't available yet, but about 75% done with it
I'm working on a TradingView Pine Script compatible Python framework: https://pynecore.org . And a Pine Script compiler for it + a full IDE for Pine Script with syntax highlight, language server, full featured debugger, charting, data downloads: https://pynesys.io . It is 99.771% bit exact on the top 1000 Pine Scripts and 100% trade match. I'm doing it solo.
A PR Review tool for ergonomics - https://bobby.viraj.computer
* files in organised trees/graphs generated using LSPs and symbol references instead of linear file list * keyboard shortcuts for everything from navigation, pan, zoom, comment, note, submit... * mostly github compatible with native features * LSP powered symbol resolution for inspecting definitions and references * LLM powered reviews supported * Inline LLM question answering
Still building the file manager I've always wanted: https://intestinate.com/gusco/
Added an audio player this past month for all fellow file hoarders out there.
Also, you can now choose if you want Gusco to live in your terminal or run as a native-yet-texty app.
Was pleasantly surprised how well turning a Bubble Tea TUI app into a GUI-ish bundle works with Gio UI.
Turning RSS, atom, blog feeds into audio feeds with kokoro tts. Free, web app only.
https://porchlit.app/
I built the original for myself because I wanted to listen to acoup and other history blogs while sleeping. And in the spirit of getting better at finishing projects decided make it public even tho it’s nothing really unique or special.
Still lots to polish especially in the text/copy and ui but the core features should be working.
I’m still working on https://leafle.org which is a tool for getting more interesting reading (or listening) suggestions that one can borrow from the library (or Libby). I’m done for the moment with building it, so I’ve been doing things like making flyers and leaving them in local libraries.
Been a fun opportunity to play around with ai in various ways - mixed but definitely powerful experience in using it for data research (finding libraries and their locations), very impressive on reverse engineering apis to get book availability. And then a lot of interesting stuff around getting good behaviour from LLMs as chat partners, for example using jev to improve results from using openrouter by getting it to check for common failure modes and ban providers based on their output.
I've just released v1.0 of Rouler which is VPN split tunneling for windows. Think IP rules for Linux, but with per-app/service connection steering. The whole app is built in Rust, including the kernel driver. Having released v1 I'm now starting work on adding folder and windows store support. https://rouler.io
working on AudioWeave, an ad free, offline first Android podcast player.
switching from iOS, I wasn't happy with the existing podcast apps, so I built this mostly for myself. I've been using it for the last six months and finally pushed a public beta.
My day to day is BE so I used the project to learn Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. Everything is strictly native using Room and Media3/ExoPlayer. I wanted a nice looking (subjective), privacy-focused app without any tracking or ads.
I'm considering open sourcing it soon.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.enyodigita...
For the month of November (and starting in October this year) I like to hold weekly cooking challenges to practice and refine my Thanksgiving day feast. Now about 3 weeks out from the final boss level of cooking, and I'm having a week all about brussel sprouts. Earlier weeks were cauliflower and the classic seasoning blend of sage, rosemary and thyme.
https://www.nichess.org - chess with health points
Aficionado (https://aficiona.do) - a place to discover, scrapbook and remember media (movies, video games, tv shows, music and books) that resonated with you or that you'd like to try.
Indieweb/blogosphere index, search, and exploration.
Taking a break from features to focus on refining content filters and expunging sites that slipped through. Looking at you, .ai TLD.
https://outerweb.org
I am building Cloud based context compiler and intelligent codebase visualizer for Developers and AI Agents, for easy PR review, onboarding and easy architectural understanding
https://github.com/devlensio/devlensOSS
https://hatamoto.dev - a complete replacement to Wordpress and its most used plugins built into the system. One go binary, no node , no compilation, Postgres and sandboxes plugins. Built in AI analytics
I'm working on a platform for selling event tickets (kind of an alternative to Ticketmaster or weezevent). I'm working on it on my free time for now (I am also using it to test working with AI tools ). Not sure yet if I want to build a company or not.
Still plugging away on Slopjective-C 3.0 https://github.com/doublemover/Slopjective-C/pull/8278
and many other things
working on talk deep https://talkdeep.me, a little app for keeping in touch with friends after i moved countries. you pair with a friend and get one question a day, or go through decks of deeper questions together. i've never done an app before so building something from scratch has been a really fun creative outlet
I wanted to try and build something in a completely saturated market, so I’ve built a handful of movie themed daily games into a hub.
https://smashcut.games
https://github.com/hnarayanan/hello-guix - A GNU Guix installer for Apple Silicon Macs. :)
My main project is trying not to lose my mind, given all the things I can now create thanks to AI.
Jokes aside (although I'm not entirely joking about my mental health), my main project is https://auradistill.com: First-principles thinking for your AI agents.
It's not just about giving your personal AI agents "memory". It's about encoding memories in a way that can handle ambiguity and contradictions.
That project alone has got me completely hooked on building for and with LLMs.
I've got other projects too, but this is probably the one I've poured the most time and energy into.
I'm a really big fan of Grand Theft Auto IV but its online scene never took off. I'm trying to build a multiplayer client a la FiveM/RageMP for it.
been building BuildOpsy mostly writing about system design, infrastructure failures and the occasional “well, that was an expensive outage” postmortem.
Also building calculators for things engineers usually calculate in a spreadsheet at 2am. you can see some on the site(https://buildopsy.com/calculators.html)
Reddit alternative https://hissy.app it is currently offline though
I want to make app like action but for repairs, like electronics and cars.
Client posts request and masters respond with their offers.
What you think about that guys?
There is already a site here where you say what your job is and garages submit their offers. They can also auto-submit offers if it’s something routine like a standard service.
Hey, Thanks for info. I am from Central Asia, could share a link for that site?
Data driven, personalized typing application.
https://typequicker.com
I am working on a Rust-based ext4 driver. The idea is that it can be re-used as a FUSE-based driver as well as (Windows) kernel driver (eventually).
Most of the essential features are implemented so far, but some (mandatory) features are lacking (xattrs support). My goal is to get to a full ext4 implementation that also supports ext2 and ext3 read/write.
The initial motivation was to have a pet project with a use-case for Rust, as I wanted to improve my Rust coding skills, after I did some work on a game server implementation in Rust earlier [1]. My goal is to have an implementation where I have digested every line mentally, which is something that pretty much excludes slop-like use of AI for large scale code generation. And of course I want to really trust the code that touches my files via raw hard disk access. Hence, I use AI mainly for unit tests and (scoped) code rewriting when my code gets too verbose and cumbersome.
In the long run I'd want to add fuzzing to the implementation, so if anyone has experience on this, I'd be interested in getting some pointers.
[1] https://github.com/MordorWide/EANation
I am building Esara – the AI hiring platform for candidate sourcing and explainable evaluation.
We’ve just incorporated in Berlin together with two great co-founding colleagues. Honestly never felt more excited.
Though it is a B2B tool, check it out: https://esara.ai
AT1C Protocol AI Agents require Human consent. Don't trust us Verify the Receipt. https://www.npmjs.com/package/@at1c/sdk
I'm rebuilding a benchtop CNC milling machine.
I "accidentally" created one of the fastest modern JavaScript frameworks out there: https://signy.dev/
...according to my own benchmarks (yeah, I know how that sounds).
Next, I'm planning to submit it to independent third party benchmarks, hoping to find out whether my results are accurate... or not :)
I've also just finished a CSS framework: https://iriscss.com/
Now I'm working on a new backend programming language that runs on the Erlang BEAM, along with a few web applications built using this tech stack.
Mostly trying to think about what career to pivot to, since SWE wages are going to get crushed in the next 5-10 years.
Ur is an (in-progress) universal formatter and linter for every programming language. It's in preview right now, which just means friends are messing around with it and having a good time pointing out all the bugs. Docs are mostly up to date, but buyer beware.
https://ur.dev/en/
I'm building a self-hosted media server for video, like Plex or Jellyfin. I'll be opening the beta in about a month.
Features:
- No paywalls, bandwidth limiting, or crippled behavior. No login required.
- Single go binary, deployed via Docker.
- Reaches your home server from anywhere with no port forwarding, no VPN and no paywall, even behind carrier-grade NAT. No Tailscale required.
- Cast to another device. You can use any logged in device as a playback screen.
- Watch together, with voice support: Play synced video with friends, and also chat voice. You can also mix this with casting to another device.
- Dialogue boost and loudness levelling for every film.
- Real adaptive quality, tuned for a home's upload.
- Hardware transcoding, full quality in every supported browser.
- A library that explains itself: what the scanner saw, why each title matched, guesses marked for you to check, and a disk that's gone missing shown as missing instead of its titles silently vanishing.
- Your data stays yours: The database is a rebuildable index, metadata corrections can be written back as NFO files that Kodi and Jellyfin read, and an automatic backup keeps what can't be re-derived (watch state, preferences, shares).
Security is a primary concern:
With the ever increasing pace of hacks and CVEs and AI-assisted intrusion, you simply can't be too careful anymore.
- The core (which talks to the network, handles the API, users and the database) never opens a media file or runs FFmpeg.
- A separate media node does every file read and every transcode. It has no network access and talks to the core only over Unix sockets.
- FFmpeg runs under Landlock and seccomp with no path to the file and no socket. All it can do is read and write streams.
- Small dependency tree on an allowlist, pure Go with no cgo, secrets sealed at rest and never logged.
- The library can be mounted read-only, so even a full compromise can't encrypt or delete your media.
- Cryptographically signed chain for servers and releases.
https://orpheum-app.com/