Ask HN: What are you building this weekend? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you building this weekend?

27 pointsforgotOldPas46 comments

What personal projects, hacks, fun ideas are you working on this weekend?

I spent about a year and a half building a SAAS project - very sophisticated, lots of moving parts.

About 18 months ago I realised I was building a solution without a problem - I was building something technically cool that I could not work out a business model for. So I dropped it.

Recently I think I've worked out the business model. So now I'm trying to get the damn thing running again - it's got many interacting servers and bits and pieces so trying to get it all to work again is a challenge.

Fortunately I tend to write reasonably good notes that would be unintelligible to anyone else but make alot of sense to me, and these are helping me get it going.

Also I wrote ALOT of build and config scripts, without which the task would be impossible.

Ben Eater's breadboard computer design, and an assembler for it, written in Rust. First program in Rust. It's nice.

My https://frame.work/ laptop arrived today, so I will be doing the final assembly and installing nixos on it.

That looks so cool. What’s the thought process in buying one?

My personal laptop has been an Acer-C710 Chromebook for some time now. I bought it because it was inexpensive, upgradable, clearly could run linux, had an Intel (specifically non-ARM) CPU which meant that I could use nixos's binary cache for programs (non-ARM is probably somewhat less problematic today than it was in 2013). I went through several layers of rooting my Chromebook, eventually replacing the BIOS. I upgraded the RAM and (this year) replaced the HD with an SSD.

But my laptop is getting old. The bezel is cracked and the screen cable seems ... ungrounded? Black isn't quite black. Still, I have been hesitant to upgrade to modern, non-upgradable laptops. But a few months ago Graham Christensen posted about running nixos on the frame.work <https://grahamc.com/blog/nixos-on-framework>. And then this guy also seems pretty excited <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rkTgPt3M4k>.

Unlike the Acer Chromebook, the frame.work laptop is not cheap. However, I'm no longer a post-doc and I am in a fortunate position that I can afford to splurge a little. So, ignoring the sunken cost of my recent SDD purchase, I decided to go ahead an place an order back at the beginning of August. The cheaper processor I ordered was shipping in October, and here we are in October.

At least part of what I'll be doing is migrating a bunch of infrastructure from Linode to OVH. Depending on how that goes, I may spend some time on other stuff.

One thing I am hoping to find some time to work on is a tool for helping me manage my huge collection of e-books. The basic idea is a sort of combination file-indexer / search engine, and a note-taking app. But with some very specific functionality designed around the way I prefer to do things, which is why I'm not just grabbing something like Calibre and using that.

I’ve never used Linode or OVH (I’m mainly using DigitalOcean) - interested to hear why you’re moving from Linode and why you chose OVH?

Price, mainly. At the point when I decided to switch, OVH simply offered more "bang for the buck" than Linode.

Thanks!

Repotting a GIANT 7ft tall cactus on my deck. I've got some gloves and am gonna wrap it in newspaper so I don't get stabbed.

Created first release of `ftd`, a mark-up language for defining schema and data, and UI: https://www.fifthtry.com/ftd/

  -- record product:
  description: caption
  type: integer

  -- list products:
  type: product

  -- products: iPhone
  type: 12

  -- products: Google Chrome
  type: 123

  -- ftd.text: ref product.description
  $loop$: products as product
  size: 30
  color: red

This weekend working on improving `ftd playground`: https://play.fifthtry.com.

Mocking playground in playground itself: https://play.fifthtry.com/?ekey=xzdf7HJFB6LxfpGER2X9Bg

Will be open sourcing it soon, have built it in Realm, a full stack web framework using Rust+Elm, want to use it as a demo to showcase some features of realm: https://www.amitu.com/realm/.

This is cool! Congrats on the first release.

Moving my home automation notifications (mix of DIY and Home Assistant) from Twilio SMS to Signal using signal-cli Docker image.

I might even get confident enough in this solution to allow commands to be sent (e.g. lock front door).

I really like using Pushover[0] for this stuff. The app on iOS is really great, including ability to include images and custom icons in the (native) push notifications, custom sounds, punching through silent mode for emergency alerts and even custom actions I believe (haven’t used the latter).

I’ve toyed with doing something with Signal but the Pushover route has always felt a bit better suited for my use case.

The custom icons are particularly handy as I get push notifications from all sorts of systems (from home automation to GitHub Actions) and it’s really easy to see at a glance where the notification is coming from.

Good luck with your project!

[0] https://pushover.net

Looks interesting, will check that out!

An app with a recommender system for Jokes. Swipe up means funny, swipe down means not funny. Then you see the next recommended joke.

You should let people make profiles, these profiles can accumulate points. Make a leader board. People submit their own jokes, most upvoted go on the leaderboard. And find a way to monetize without selling their data pls

5 posters on hackernews walk into a thread...

...and they downvote each other.

Working on my Investment Scorecard:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tBrZEMFK9XNWxiqOxE8o...

Very interesting, I'm thinking of building a portfolio of Indian stocks with exactly something like this.

What's the purpose of multiple Coffee cans?

That's great. Let me know if you end doing so!

Why Multiple coffee cans? A few reasons

1) As new money comes in, I build new coffee cans based on current circumstances and prices offered by the market.

2) Provides Time Diversification. Not all times are created equal. At certain times, opportunities are better. But since marketing timing is difficult, especially since this is somewhat of a passive strategy, I'd rather simply invest periodically.

I wrote about coffee cans here: https://playingfordoubles.substack.com/p/the-coffee-can-port...

Just launched the first all-out sale of my content booklets 2020/1, which is already stirring the pot a bit! From ramen profitability, (hopefully) to the budget for a different side project I am planning for 2022. Get them while it lasts and help me spam HN again next year (pun intended, ehehe)! On a more serious note, I am willing to see how time-resistant is the content I put forward in the last 18 months, and if slashing the price, some can get a bit of traction on its own.

Very interesting project! I’ll link it for you [0] since you were too polite to!

Do you have any purchase options aside from Kindle? (Or is this something you’d consider in the future?) I’d quite like something like this in PDF form really (or perhaps Apple Books, or even print form!)

I would imagine that any potential piracy issues from being in a more open format would be relatively minimal for your intended audience (but maybe I’m being optimistic??)

Also the very nature of your content feels like it should be in a more technology-agnostic form to me, but I totally get the trade offs here.

[0] https://www.tenproblems.com/

EDIT: Also, just pinged you an email :)

It's an API + noCode tool to generate images on the fly.

Pass css like design and data into query string and get an image returns.

Example https://img.bruzu.com/?bc=gold&a.t=HN+News

Adding more templates https://bruzu.com

Screenshot utility that doubles a measurement tape and a screen magnifier (https://shottr.cc/). Wanted to add ui to control styling of the annotation drawings for a while now, will hopefully get to it this weekend.

Trying to finish a blog post about how different program state spaces are easier or harder to understand. Also working through Concrete Semantics and thinking about building a programming language with some kind of integrated testing / verification.

A Quora clone on Rails 7 using some html template from themeforest i reckon... yeah, why not...

https://github.com/mathaou/termdbms

I'm adding line wrapping support for format mode. Managing SQLite db of poetry to test it's been fun.

Building a better life.

Getting ready to move to a new place. Realized that I own only one trunk worth of stuff and happy about that. Frugal living is key to clear conscience IMO.

Will be looking for a new job too, this time not FAANG kind.

Technically building a home microk8s lab for full CI/CD.

Learning in-depth Kubernetes (microk8s), have been for a few months now. It's amazing, yet deeper than any tech stack I've worked with before.

Learned Ansible and Docker earlier, now working on k8s next is Helm charts, Juju, Gitlab CI/CD.

I am assembling new storm shutters using multiwall polycarbonate sheets rather than plywood. They let light in and are much easier to handle.

An update server for all my tools. I'll probably end up having a CI server build the applications for me and upload the artefacts to my server.

You may ask, why not just check for the latest build artefacts in the tools themselves? Some of the tools are private, so ensuring access to the respective repositories can be a bit of a pain, especially if the application is shared with someone.

Toy OpenGL renderer

Working on adding support for PBR materials + image-based lighting from HDR environment maps

Will hopefully look really cool when done

I'm late on a work project so... EDI to some obscure ERP through middle ware I'm writing in Go.

I have been finishing up on also serving my Linux Phone site, FOSSphones, over Gemini.

https://fossphones.com gemini://fossphones.com

Learning 3d programming using libgdx and java... Time to build a killer FPS! :)

Continuing work on a Blazor Server app + building out some related CI stuff.

And possibly messing around with hacking together some custom software for a Stream Deck.

Doing a 10 hour run as the final piece to build my endurance for the 130k Ultra I will do on the 30th.

Finishing up a squat rack platform.

A handwritten condolence letter.

People (including myself) really liking getting hand written letters these days. For birthdays, I've been exclusively mailing letter to family and friends. I've never heard that many positive things about a card before.

I wrote one for father's day for my dad and it took me a while to get though because I started to cry with tears of appreciation. Writing that kind of stuff out really makes you feel it.

I'm sure condolence letters are the same. I'm sure they'll appreciate it.

This is so awesome to read. Thanks so much.

Automating build processes across projects with esbuild and postcss.

Distilling juniper :)

Ikea kitchen

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