alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Comments
I'm building DB Pro, a cross-platform database management app that lets you browse, query, and manage SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, and more from a single native interface. It's been growing steadily with a community of ~1,400 subscribers on YouTube and paying users.
What I'm most excited about right now is DB Pro Studio: a collaborative web-based version I'm building on top of it.
The idea is simple: databases are a team activity, but every DB tool treats them as a single-player experience. Studio adds either a self-hosted or managed hosted data browser, real-time collaboration, dashboards, visual workflow automation, and enterprise features like audit logging and role-based access. Think "database command center" where your whole team can inspect, query, and build on your data together.
The desktop app acts as the execution engine (your data never leaves your infrastructure), while Studio provides the shared dashboard layer.
I've also consistently posted devlogs on YT throughout the journey, which has helped build a community of ~1,400 subscribers who've shaped the product along the way.
Site: https://dbpro.app YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dbproapp
Would love feedback from anyone who's felt the pain of sharing database context across a team.
I’m working on an app builder that combines a Figma-like canvas for design with Apple Shortcuts-style logic for functionality. Instead of writing code or connecting node graphs, you define behavior by stacking instructions using a syntax based on Hyperscript.
You can try the editor here (no signup required): https://app.breadboards.io/playgrounds/weather
And here is a live app exported from it: https://late-cat-2043.breadboards.app
I'm a solo dev building a handful of apps across different niches..
- Kvile ( https://kvile.app ) — A lightweight desktop HTTP client built with Rust + Tauri. Native .http file support (JetBrains/VS Code/Kulala compatible), Monaco editor, JS pre/post scripts, SQLite-backed history. Sub-second startup. MIT licensed, no cloud, your requests stay on your machine. Think Postman without the bloat and login walls.
- Mockingjay ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mockingjay-secure-recorder/id6... ) — iOS app that records video and streams AES-256-GCM encrypted chunks to your Google Drive in real-time. By the time someone takes your phone, the footage is already safe in the cloud. Built for journalists, activists, and anyone who needs tamper-proof evidence. Features a duress PIN that wipes local keys while preserving cloud backups, and a fake sleep mode that makes the phone look powered off during recording.
- Stao ( https://stao.app ) — A simple sit/stand reminder for standing desk users. Runs in the system tray, tracks your streaks, zero setup. Available on macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.
- MyVisualRoutine ( https://myvisualroutine.com ) — This one is personal. I have three kids, two with severe disabilities. Visual schedules (laminated cards, velcro boards) are a lifeline for non-verbal children, but they're a nightmare to manage and they don't leave the house. So I built an app that lets you create a full visual routine in about 20 seconds and take it anywhere. Choice boards, First/Then boards, day plans, 50+ preloaded activities, works fully offline. Free tier is genuinely usable. Available on iOS and Android.
A podcast on the history of the “Majority World” - that is Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, Latin America and the indigenous people around the world - from a decolonisation point of view.
I just published the first episodes today and have zero listeners or subscribers, so it can only grow from here!
https://historyofthemajorityworld.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4qJh2jNwMvWcLP1J1EMXxr?si=dcc7...
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/rw/podcast/history-of-the-majorit...
I've been working with my wife on Uruky [1] for a couple of months, now. It's a EU-based Kagi [2] alternative (privacy-focused and ad-free search with domain boosting/exclusion rules).
We've been using it with friends and family semi-successfully (hashbangs work for edge cases we're still working on).
It's really difficult to get bigger indexes other than Mojeek and Marginalia to want to work with us and improve the results further, so that's something I've been researching more, lately. EUSP (the new Ecosia/Qwant-effort-related index) has finally replied to me last week, but I'm still waiting on an API key.
If you're interested in trying it for a few days and are a human, reach out with your account number and I'll give you a couple of weeks for free. We're pushing improvements daily.
[2] https://kagi.com
P. S. It's weird to see this duplicate (posted less than a week ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874385), but this post has a lot more comments!
EACL: Enterprise Access ControL is a situated ReBAC Authorization system based on SpiceDB, built in Clojure and backed by Datomic – https://github.com/theronic/eacl
'Situated' here means that your permission schema & permission data live with your data, which has a number of benefits:
- one less network hop, so can be faster than Spice for typical workloads,
- one less distributed consistency & syncing problem,
- one less component to run in prod with full consistency,
- potential to implement ZedToken / Zookies via Datomix txid, and
- easy to test new schemas with in-memory Datomic.
EACL is plenty fast without a cache since horizontally-scalable Datomic Peers already cache datoms aggressively, but there is another 10-100x improvement in the pipeline. EACL is especially suitable to real-time multiplayer apps built in frameworks like Electric Clojure.
IMHO, EACL is currently the best-in-class authorization library in the Clojure ecosystem and is improving every week. ReBAC subsumes both ABAC & RBAC. I recently applied for Clojurists Together funding to improve cursors for intermediate resource traversal, which is the primary perf. bottleneck.
EACL was not "vibecoded" as all tests were written by me and all code is human-reviewed, but EACL would not be possible for a single engineer to build mainly in his spare time without AI assistance.
Docs with rationale: https://eacl.dev/
https://sampler.meiji.industries/
I built a TUI sampler which cherry-picks my favourite features from modern & vintage hardware samplers, DAWs, plugins, outboard FX gear, and DJ equipment.
If you know what an AKAI MPC Live, MPC 3000, SP404, SP1200, BOSS RC-202, Alesis 3630, Serato Sample, S950 filters, and stem separation does, then you'll love seeing these "greatest hits" up in a terminal interface.
Last year while on vacation in Costa Rica, I started scratching my own itch for locating and organizing samples, which quickly evolved into adding more and more features while keeping it tactile and immediate. It was too fun to stop so I kept going. After a few days I was happily making beats in it, and since then it's only gotten better.
It's live and totally free to use, and works in macos & Linux (Windows soon). I'm about to launch v1.0 now, just working with folks in the community to round out the Factory Kits a little more for users new to beatmaking.
Turns out, making beats with no mouse and a terminal interface strikes the perfect balance of hardware feel and software power, and I'm loving the result. Been sharing it with folks in my beatmaking sphere and have plans to continue expanding its reach through more collaborations, contests, and in-person events.
Hope it brings you as much joy as it does to me :)
Hi HN, I am working on Circuitscript, a language based on python to describe electronic schematics: https://circuitscript.net/. A basic IDE (called the Bench) to try Circuitscript is available online: https://bench.circuitscript.net/
I have created a usb-uart converter board with the CH340 chip. The complete schematic was coded with Circuitscript and then imported as a netlist into kicad pcbnew to do the pcb layout. The design was produced with JLCPCB and after receiving the boards I tested them and they do work! The design files are here https://github.com/liu3hao/usb-uart-bridge. The circuitscript code file is here https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liu3hao/usb-uart-bridge/re... and the generated pdf from the circuitscript code is here: https://github.com/liu3hao/usb-uart-bridge/blob/main/usb_uar...
The motivation for creating Circuitscript is to describe schematics in terms of code rather than graphical UIs after using different CAD packages extensively (Allegro, Altium, KiCAD) for work in the past. I wanted to spend more time thinking about the schematic design itself rather than fiddling around with GUIs.
Please check it out and I look forward to your feedback, especially from electronics designers/hobbyists. Thanks!
I'm working on https://laboratory.love
Laboratory.love lets you fund independent plastic chemical lab testing of the specific foods you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports meets Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid’s snacks, or whatever you’re curious about.
Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, and get full lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn’t reach its goal within 365 days, you’re automatically refunded. All results are published publicly.
This project was inspired by Nat Friedman's PlasticList.org and we use the same ISO 17025-accredited methodology they did, testing three separate production lots per product (when possible) and detecting down to parts-per-billion. The entire protocol is open.
I just published new results today! Turns out Muir Glen's caned Fire Roasted Diced Tomatoes are incredibly low in plastic chemicals. Yay!
Browse funded tests, propose your own, or just follow along: https://laboratory.love
https://github.com/jsattler/BetterCapture
It's a lightweight screen recorder for macOS that lives in your menu bar. It's built with SwiftUI and ScreenCaptureKit, uses the native Content Picker to select what you record, and supports ProRes 422/4444, HEVC, and H.264 — including alpha channel and HDR. Frame rates from 24 to 120fps. System audio and mic simultaneously. You can also exclude specific things from recordings, like the menu bar, dock, or wallpaper.
No tracking, no analytics, no cloud uploads, no account. MIT licensed. Everything stays on your Mac.
A Jellyfin music client for Linux written in Rust and GTK:
https://github.com/Fingel/gelly
I thought it would be pretty simple, but here I am almost 6 months later still adding features. The positive feedback has been nice, though! People seem to appreciate (like I do) that its fast and doesn't use Electron or some other cross platform toolkit. Learning a lot.
It's not vibe coded. Sad that I have to make that qualification these days, but here we are.
I built a CLI tool in rust to find and remove duplicate files.
At work I sometimes download the same file multiple times to my machine and have to go through my downloads folder and manually remove the duplicates, so this is something I built to speed up the process of doing this.
https://github.com/jconvery1/hydra
I've found it quite useful.
I’ve been shipping AI-written code for 2 years now. I can build something amazing in 40 mins but then spend 4+ hours debugging because the agent has no idea how the libraries it’s calling actually work. Docs are stale, StackOverflow is dead, training data is outdated. Every engineer I talk to has the same problem.
So I built Instagit, an MCP server that lets your coding agent understand any GitHub repo in depth so it can get it right on the first try. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, etc.
No API key or account needed to try it out. Just need to share these instructions with your coding agent to get started:
curl -s https://instagit.com/install.md
I’m building datenba.ch, a hyper-local “digital village” for a few small communities in rural Germany (Neckartal/Odenwald-ish).
Instead of another social network, it’s a bundle of small, practical community tools under one umbrella, combining of the shelf-software with purpose-built projects of our own.
Our current areas of focus are
- help! a neighbor-to-neighbor help board (rides, errands, PC help, garden/handwork)
- hubs! for shared spaces / tool-sharing / events / social hubs
Right now I’m building the integration surface (claims, roles, provisioning), polishing onboarding, and trying to design help!/hubs! so they’re useful even with low activity.
If anyone’s done (hyper-)local community platforms: I’d love to hear what actually drove adoption and what did not work out for you.
I built a Pokédex for zoo trips for my girlfriend:
https://www.mikeayles.com/#zookeeper-wip
It lets you take photos of all the animals you see to collect them, when you 'capture' a new animal, it gives you fun facts about them.
I seeded it with UK zoos, but there's no reason it can't work elsewhere.
It was built because the signage at a zoo we went to was terrible and we had no idea what some animals were, so it matches your photo with the list of animals to the best of its ability.
https://concludia.org/ - I've mentioned it here before, it's a site to help people reason through and understand arguments together. No real business purpose for it yet, it's more an idea I've had for years and have been wanting to see it through to something actually usable. You can graphically explore arguments, track their logical sufficiency/necessity, and make counterpoints. It's different than other types of argument theory that just have points "in favor" and "against" because of how it tries to propagate logical truth and provability.
A tool for creating CSS color palettes for web UIs that pass WCAG accessibility standards for color contrast, where you can fine tweak all the tints/shades quickly using a hue/saturation/lightness curve editing interface:
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
Unlike most tools based around autogenerating colors, this is more of an editor that lets you fully customise all the tint/shades to your liking with a focus on accessibility. This is important when you've got existing brand colors to include and want to find accessible color combinations that work together.
Would love feedback in general and especially from designers/devs who have different needs in how they go about creating branded palettes!
I love making games, and I’ve been building a no-code game engine by extracting reusable components every time I ship a new game. It started as me scratching my own itch, and now it’s turning into a real platform.
Each game adds more building blocks to the editor: multiplayer, event systems, NPC behaviors, pathfinding, etc. I build a system once, and then anyone using the editor can use it in a click. For game logic, I recently added a visual event system I’m really excited about. It’s kind of like Unreal Blueprints, but focused on 2D. You pick a trigger, wire conditions, and chain actions in a node graph [1].
Big challenge right now: most people who want to make games needs assets, and don't know how to get/make them. So I’m building a marketplace where pixel artists can upload tilesets/characters, and unlike itch.io, assets are usable directly inside the engine. No ZIP downloads or import setup, just browse and drop into your game. A preview here[2].
Also, if you want to use the editor but ship elsewhere, you can export terrain, animations, and hitboxes to Godot 4. Nothing is locked in.
The engine/editor is at https://craftmygame.com if anyone wants to poke around! And you can test a games here[3][4], and 1 multiplayer game I've tested IRL in a bar [4]!
[1] https://youtu.be/8fRzC2czGJc
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hScOK_naYnk
[3] https://craftmygame.com/game/e310c6fcd8f4448f9dc67aac/r/play
I am currently building an alethiometer from the phillip pullman book series: his dark materials
Specifically its a remake knowing what we know now having finished the two trilogies.
Instead of the three hands and the moving needle, its just one moving needle. Its made from wood and aluminium. The reason for aluminium is that in the 1920s (roughly the age that these books are set) is a wonder material, a bit like carbon fibre/titanium is now.
I have the working mechanism (controlled by 8mm steppers) I need to finish the case and dial, and paint it. I also need to shrink the controlling mechanism and design the voice->text->inference->output to 36 symbols logic.
I've been working on the demo for Globs, a daily puzzle game about finding the hidden theme behind a jumble of tiles:
https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs
It was inspired by 2025 by thomaswc, a 45x45 connections-like puzzle. Globs jumped off from there and it's been very fun to make. I have AI generating the puzzle groups and it keeps surprising me everyday with what it comes up with. I've got demos up for over 20 different languages, and many different sizes of puzzle. Just recently, I got the puzzle to be generated daily for American English, British English, High German and European Spanish. It can also do custom theme puzzles like the following:
Big YC https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs/en-US/demo?size=big...
Jumbo HN https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs/en-US/demo?size=jum...
There is still some bugs I am tracking down (open the page in a private browser if you hit stale data) but the game has really come together lately and been a lot of fun, I hope you all like it!
I built https://measuretocut.com after too many DIY projects ended with another trip to the hardware store. It figures out how much material you actually need and how to cut it to minimize waste or costs. When I released it in December it just handled 1D cuts for things like boards, bars, and pipes. You enter what you need, and it lays everything out visually on stock lengths. This morning I released the 2D sheet cut calculator to do cut plans for plywood and similar sheet materials. Any feedback is welcomed from fellow engineers turned woodworkers!
Nonna Emilia, so I don't forget people's names and what they're up to anymore.
I did post about Emilia a few months ago... now I have a domain https://meetemilia.com/
The basic idea is that you give Emilia knowledge about your family and friends, and then you can ask her questions or (eventually) get reminders.
I was motivated during an extended family gathering where I completely blanked out on the names of the partners of some of my cousins. I felt awful... trying to hide the fact that I didn't remember their names.
Now the names and who they are etc is there in Nonna Emilia, and through natural text I can ask questions like "what's the name of all the partners of my cousins on the side of my dad's family?" or something like that.
I am looking for alpha users. The service has legit helped me a few times already remembering stuff, but the amount of work to input all this data still bothers me.
Anyway, it's free. If you want go ahead and try (bugs here and there I bet, and you need a Google Account) and shoot me an email at [email protected] if you have any comment.
It's an infinite canvas that runs SQL.
I've been working with data my entire career. I feel like we need to alt+tab so much. What if we just put it all on a canvas?
Currently very WIP, but there's a simple titanic demo available!
Built with tldraw and duckdb wasm, running on cloudflare durable objects
I'm an embedded software engineer by day and like it or not I have to acknowledge that AI tooling is coming to our work, so I'm currently working on learning to interact with AI coding tools like Claude Code more effectively and efficiently by "vibe-coding" a game for a family member on my personal time. Something inspired by a blend of 'Recettear' and 'Stardew Valley' with the touch that the player shopkeeper is an anthropomorphic cat.
Sorcery - open source app and protocol that, together, let you share source code links that open in each user's favorite editor, right on the linked line.
Supports VS Code, Neovim, IntelliJ/JetBrains Family, Zed, etc.
About to do the first beta release this later this week.
The protocol is "srcuri" (pronounced, "Sorcery")
This site is: https://srcuri.com/
Source code: https://github.com/browserup/sorcery-desktop
AskUCP – UCP protocol explorer showing all products on Shopify (https://askucp.com/)
On January 11th, Google and Shopify announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (ucp.dev). It's an open standard that lets any application query products across e-commerce platforms without needing APIs, integrations, or middlemen. AskUCP is one of the first applications built on it.
Right now, if you want to buy something online, you have to know which store sells it. You go to Amazon, or you go to a Shopify store, or you go to Etsy. Each one has its own search, its own interface, its own checkout. The experience is fragmented because the infrastructure is siloed.
UCP changes this at the protocol level. If products are described in a standard format, any application can discover them. You don't need permission from each platform. You don't need to build integrations. Anybody or any AI agent just querys the protocol.
AskUCP is designed to be a single pane of glass into online commerce. You search once, and you see products from across the ecosystem. Currently, that means the entire Shopify catalog. As more platforms adopt UCP, their products become explorable too. Eventually, it should be everything.
This is a proof of concept. It's early, and there are rough edges. Let me know what you think, refinements, ideas etc etc.
Making improvements to https://engineering.fyi/ - an aggregator for big tech blogs
Added summaries so readers can quickly see if it's worth reading the entire article e.g. https://engineering.fyi/article/towards-self-driving-codebas...
In my spare time https://bookclub.cloud.
It’s a tool that leverages your drm free ebooks to help manage your book clubs. The epub file offers more rich info such as:
- word counts per reading
- chapter selection
- the ability to highlight sections and share
- ai summarization and spoiler free discussion about the contents of a given reading
I use it for my own book club right now. I doubt I’ll be able to monetize the app due to the need for drm free epubs which is a pretty high barrier for entry to most non-technical users.
My long term plans would be to have an agent help readers learn hand in hand while reading. I’d like to have the agent facilitate deeper analysis by prompting the users and clubs with questions that encourage more critical analysis of each section. I’ve been building all the infrastructure for running the club so that’s the next more interesting step I haven’t explored yet.
The end game is no/low touch weekly meal plans send directly to your inbox, with meals you love to cook but with none of the hassle around planning the meals, shopping list etc (which I spend hours doing every week).
An important feature for me was improving the recipe discovery experience, you can build a cookbook from chefs you follow on socials (youtube for now), or import from any source (Web, or take pic of cookbook etc) - it then hastight / easy integration into recipe lists.
Utilising GenAI to auto extract recipes, manage conversions, merge/categorise shopping lists etc - as-well as the actual recommendations engine.
If anyone is interested in beta testing / wants to have a chat I'll look out for replies, or message [email protected]
Humetrical ( https://humetrical.com ) -- A wellness platform that puts people's mental health first by showing work metrics that matter. Because burnout blindness leads to exit interviews.
It wasn't until we had a leadership retreat at my day job with a fantastic speaker (Woodrie Burich) that the idea for my platform spawned. She talked about how the $50B wellness industry is doing it wrong. Your company is giving you useless yoga stipends, when truth is they should be paying attention to your overall well being. One idea she presented that resonated with me was using a traffic light-like system to gauge where your employees are mentally at.
I took that to heart and verbally applied it to my team. Then I realized that a platform would give better visuals of the data and be easier to incorporate into everyone's day to day. A couple months later I finally released it.
I've been on and off attempting to reverse engineer old Sierra games in Godot. I've brought in AI to build tooling to speed up asset extraction from the old game files which has been a huge help. I just got building placement working last night which was a huge win.
This is part of a small hobby where I try to recreate aspects of old games myself to see how I would implement them. I eventually hope to have the skills to create the kind of game I miss playing when I was a kid 30 years ago.
I'm working on lots of projects. My favorite is what I call "context bonsai" where I'm giving LLM harnesses the ability to surgically edit the context. It's available as a tool. You can say "remove that failed debugging session and write a summary of what we learned." Or you can take a more hands-on approach and say "remove messages msg_ID1 through msg_ID2". The removal leaves a summary and keywords, and the original messages can be pulled back into context if the LLM thinks they're useful.
I would really like people to try it out and report bugs, failures, and successes.
https://github.com/Vibecodelicious/opencode/blob/surgical_co...
I'm currently trying to get the LLM to be more proactive about removing content that is no longer useful in order to stay ahead of autocompaction and also just to keep the context window small and focused in general.
I've been building several things lately in my spare time:
- After Actions (https://www.afteractions.net/) - The company I work for pays for retrospective software, and I figured I could make my own. So I did! Good for agile retrospective ceremonies
- Data Atlas (https://www.data-atlas.net/) - Right now, it's a basic JSON Schema form builder with a UI on top, but I intend to expand it and improve it to be more than that this year.
I've been working on a BuddhaBoard-like app and a few other projects, but nothing I'm prepared to share right now. Maybe next month :D
Bitwit: Learn CS, logic, and math theory (_not_ DSA) with spaced repetition: https://bit-wit.com/
I was hit by a big wave of depression last year. That crisis gave me a couple of periods of hyperfocus, and I thought I might as well use them to try to improve my mind and my ability to reason.
I haven't had good results learning certain subjects, like CS/math, with Anki or other flash card systems. The only thing that ever seemed to work for me was doing a lot of problems with pencil and paper. But without problems exercising those tools or techniques, they tended to just evaporate from my mind.
So my idea was to combine spaced repetition and problem presentation, and create a system for generating problems and validating their solutions randomly and parametrically. So successive presentations of the same card would present a different problem... and the overall effect would hopefully be that you learn the invariants that each card is trying to present, instead of memorizing some combination of variables and values. Sort of MathAcademy but for CS.
I _think_ it's feature-complete at this point, though I'm still working on validating and publishing cards (and there are a couple of things I wanna do to improve security). I'm pretty early in the dogfooding process, and I'm still the only person using it, and there are definitely bugs. But if anyone would like to try it out, I'd be delighted to hear your feedback (email in profile, also on site). Just maybe go a little easy on me right now, lol :/
The Boolean Logic and Lambda Calculus subjects are free forever, and the first topic of each other subject is also free, so if you're intrigued you can use it for quite some time (literally months) before even needing to provide an email address. No need to pay for anything.
Still working on
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - map of the Internet domains
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds - database of RSS feeds
- https://github.com/rumca-js/yafr - very simple RSS reader
- https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy - crawling project
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - another RSS reader
I’ve been exploring graph theory and built Overtone, an interactive graph that maps musical artists, genres, albums, labels, instruments, and their relationships using MusicBrainz data. This spun out of a separate graph-based fraud-detection project that I hope to introduce on HN sometime soon.
It’s a beta, but already works well on desktop and makes it easy to explore musical neighborhoods and discover new artists by traversing the graph.
Here's the link in case you wanna find some new music to listen to, or look at the artists you know and love in a different light - https://overtone.kernelpanic.lol
Feedback welcome — especially on UI/UX and scalability limits.
I've been building VVM: a language for agentic programs where the LLM is the runtime.
Most stacks today keep orchestration in Python/TS and treat the model like an API. VVM inverts this. You write a `.vvm` program, paste it into an agentic session with the spec, and the model simulates the VM and executes your program. This is configured via a plugin, no SDK or build step required.
```
agent researcher(model="sonnet", skills=["web-search"])
agent writer(model="opus")
papers = @researcher `Find recent papers on {topic}.`(topic)
# semantic predicate — semantic if condition
if ?`sufficient coverage`(papers):
report = @writer `Synthesize findings.`(papers)
papers = @researcher `Expand search.`(papers)
```
It's open source and current runs as a Claude code plugin and the repo includes 37 examples from basic agent calls to advanced patterns that showcase building resilient workflows.
Still pre-alpha -- the spec is fairly complete, but tooling is early. Mainly looking for feedback from people building agentic systems who've felt the impedance mismatch between imperative code and what agents actually need.
back working on my lighting desk, after a couple of years of hating it because the communications bus between the many different modules was flakey and so the whole thing wasn't fun to use. I bit the bullet last year and re-implemented everything with CAN-bus communications and it's actually fun to use now.
Current work has been improving boot time. Was nearly two minutes because of one board, and that's a long time for the lights to be out if you have to reboot during a show. I'd wanted to use buildroot to get a custom kernel that should boot much more quickly, but the buildroot learning curve was steep for me, particularly as I've no expectation of ever needing the knowledge again.
Independently but concurrently I decided I really ought to understand what all this AI stuff was about, for fear of getting left behind. That coincided with the release of opus 4.5, and holy heck has it made a difference! With a little guidance from me Claude got the buildroot environment working and the boot time down to less than 10 seconds. I've been _really_ impressed. I've had Claude write a few boring utilities that I could easily have done but Claude managed much faster and with less boredom on my part. Fortunately for my AI revolution I think I'm a better Business Analyst/writer than I am a coder, so it fits with my temperament.
Working on a little "passion project" that has ended up consuming a lot of weekends now, but it's been a lot of fun.
I've been building https://photoweather.app because I never end up having time to look at weather forecasts, which means I also don't go out with my camera enough since outdoor photography is quite a weather dependent activity.. so I'm trying to turn this around by having the app tell me when and where I could be photographing instead.
It's a bit of a challenge for sure, weather forecasts are not always the most reliable, not to mention learning enough about weather to forecast photographic opportunities.. but it's also been really enjoyable to finally build something real and something that I myself actually use all the time.
Sponder - Filter and transform RSS feeds or Podcasts (https://sponder.app)
Different RSS clients provide different filtering options, and lots of them limit you to a few keywords and/or put them behind a $7-12/mo subscription. I'm building Sponder so you can curate what you see, and it just presents another RSS feed, so you can keep using your favorite client but fill in the feature gaps.
Right now it can merge and filter by string or regex, and next I'm building (because it's what I want) history replay and smarter podcast rerun detection. it's new and I'm very open to feedback and feature requests.
Micropay - Stripe for the next billion people (https://micropay.dev/)
Hi HN, I built this because I got tired of fighting with integrating payments in Africa.
M-Pesa processes over $300B annually, it's how 50+ million people in Kenya pay for everything from groceries to rent. People don't have bank accounts, but rather pay straight from their cell phone nummber. But integrating it into your app? That's a different story. Most developers spend weeks on what should take hours, it's almost impossible. And existing solutions for Mastercard, Paypal, Apple Pay etc are useless because most don't have bank accounts.
Micropay is essentially what Stripe did for credit cards, but for mobile money.
A project builder.
I often have ideas, then spin cycles on starting the project, getting auth in place, making a marketing page, doing SEO, building and configuring pipelines for mobile app release, etc, etc.
My project builder just takes a name, a few configuration options (do you need payments? Analytics?) and spits out a templated build with Terraform that I can 1 (okay maybe 3) click deploy to GCP + App Stores.
The nice thing (I got help with Claude Code) is that now all my projects are in one place, I have a dashboard where I click in to and edit the code (with hot reloading - it deploys code-server and the applications in a small Kubernetes cluster, each project has its own pod) and when I am done editing I just click Deploy and it updates the "production" service in Cloud Run.
Not really interested in selling it as a service or anything (it's a bit too opinionated for that), but it's a very fun project to work on. I need to make Git + Versioning of the code work right now you only have a single copy of the code which isn't great!
https://github.com/debba/tabularis
I’m working on tabularis, a lightweight desktop database management tool designed for developers. It provides a modern interface for managing MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and SQLite databases through a native desktop application. Built using Tauri v2 (Rust backend) and React 19 (TypeScript frontend), it offers native performance while maintaining the flexibility of web technologies.
I also am building Phaestus, a 0 to product system, that builds entire products from scratch.
https://www.mikeayles.com/#phaestus-wip
It is capable of creating a PCB (and outputs gerbers, bom, pick and place files), an enclosure (written in SCAD, outputs an STL for printing), and firmware, which it's able to compile using a pio runner on railway and provides a binary, but also has a webserial flasher for ESP32's.
There is a blog here, but i've been focussing on getting things finished, as I built it for a hackathon ending today.
I need to update the blog & writeup, because I have the first product it created, a bluetooth remote control. It wasn't without issues, but I have a working PCB, in an enclosure that was printed from it's design, running firmware it generated.
Lately I’ve been interested in how budgeting apps model cash flow over time. A lot of tools are either expense trackers or monthly budgets that assume clean month boundaries, which breaks down quickly if you’re paid biweekly or irregularly.
Envelope budgeting (the method) works by allocating money up front so future obligations are actually covered before spending happens. But the hard part is handling income timing and paycheck variability without overfunding the future.
Anyways, I’m currently adding a cash flow detection algorithm to Envelope (the budgeting app) https://envelopebudgeting.com that only allocates paychecks to obligations before the next paycheck unless future funding is strictly required. That approach has avoided a lot of timing edge cases I kept running into.
Borrow This And Improve It - an app for tracking repairs to a thing (right now it's bicycles only, planning to extend to other things like leaf blowers and electronics) and giving away half broken things or repaired things to others but with the advantage of also giving away the repair history for something. So for example, I found a bicycle in the trash, fixed it up with a few new parts (less than $6) and soon I'll try to give the now repaired bicycle away to a new home, plus a QR code that links to its repair history. The idea being that knowing how something was fixed once will make it more likely that it would be fixed again.
How Home Alone My House - A fun app I'm making with my children using computer vision. The idea is I can scan the room with my camera before unwittingly walking into their traps and becoming a hapless adult who didn't pay close enough attention to tripping hazards and choke lines.
I’m building lightweight-css to teach kids aged 8+ the fundamentals of programming using the web and JavaScript.
Link to Github: https://github.com/joshuamabina/lightweight-css
Keep working on MatGoat (https://matgoat.com/en/) - management software for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and other martial arts' academies.
I train BJJ and kept hearing the same pain points from academy owners regarding attendance tracking, communications, missing payments, etc.
So I built a tool for martial arts academies in 2024 with belts progression, automated payments, attendance tracking, and a tablet check-in system. Nowadays I'm still onboarding new academies every week and working a bit more on the marketing side to keep growing.
My friend and I have been working on https://www.vespper.com its essentially an ai-native word editor for long-form content.
it comes with a suite of tools (multi-agent tools to do search over many docs, RAG out of the box, prompt generation per section to reduce context drift, granular AI steerability, structured block generations for 100+ page reports ect.)