alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (November 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
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Currently, I'm in the midst of ricing my 3D printer - an Ender 3 V3 SE which has been sitting unloved for quite some time. Fresh filament, cleaning, mechanical tuneup, and now running through the very nice suite of calibration prints that are included in Orca slicer (which is new to me). It's been fun to get my hands around something physical.
Also been playing a bit of Blood Dungeon, which is pretty fun. I've also got a Factorio save that has mildly petered out after landing on Vulcanus (which I have kinda taken advantage of to break the addiction lol, but I'm sure I'll get back in there sometime over the winter).
I've been kinda deliberately taking a bit of a break from programming "side projects" after spending a humongous amount of free time and energy on a conference talk I gave a few weeks ago. It was titled "Human Creativity in the Age of AI" (which I later learned was an unfortunately generic title, lol), and I built this whole big musical and visual contraption that drove the presentation, including a "guitar solo generator" which recuts phrases of my own playing into a new solo on the fly.
It was a really rewarding project overall but definitely made me remember why I hadn't done public speaking for quite some time before - I am way too perfectionistic about it and it just becomes a massive time sink.
This one was worth it though, got a great reception and I'm really proud of the talk on the whole.
In the 2-3 weeks after the talk I spent a ton of time editing and laying out a really nice video of it, which I am also quite proud of. I didn't know anything about Davinci Resolve and I was able to get a really nice jump start with some help from Codex. I'm sure I don't know 98% of what a software package this big can do, but I did learn enough to be dangerous, and also enough to cut together some nice short clips of the talk as well.
It's been pretty rewarding to get a handle on a powerful bit of creativity kit like Resolve. It's incredibly capable and I'm really delighted with the results I was able to get. Obviously I am a rank amateur but to my untrained eye, my videos look pretty damn good. (And I could go on for another few paragraphs about how much work it took to get good results from the relatively shitty source video and audio I was working with).
I'm planning on doing some writeups because there was so much interesting tooling that came together as I worked on the talk and the videos, I could mine this one project for a year's worth of blog posts if I wanted to!
Anyway: links.
OrcaSlicer calibration guide - seriously great: https://www.orcaslicer.com/wiki/guides/calibration_guide
Blood Dungeon: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2431080/Blood_Dungeon/
I assume a link to Factorio is unnecessary here, ha.
My talk "landing page": https://epiccoleman.com/tripulator
Talk video: https://youtu.be/kD5qYiLIhJc
One of the shorts - the guitar solo part. I'm really stoked on the "presentation" bells and whistles in this video (though I think they're a bit mismatched to the regular intent of YouTube Shorts - analytics indicate that the intro part I slaved over is probably too long and people swipe away before the good stuff, but oh well).
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quantum stuff
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I made a browser-based recreation of the popular 1999 MMORPG "EverQuest" - and it plays itself! https://idlequest.net/
Have 70+ people online today playing it, it's been fun to see it get so popular recently (for a free niche audience hobby project).
Also have some other cool browser-based 3d game projects listed here: https://brynnbateman.com/
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