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clintmcmahonon Every Fucking Website (2020)

Is the beef with the design or the pop ups, chatbot, banner, etc?

If it's the design, not everyone is a web designer so the bootstrap theme is great to get up off the ground.

If it's the other stuff then, yeah, totally.

clintmcmahonon How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story

Or attending a local job fair with a stack of printed resumes.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

The main worker is a .Net API with Hangfire that hits a public facing API from the radio station. That data is stored in a MySQL database that feeds a React dashboard front end.

There's some caching that happens behind the scenes to help with some of the large data crunching.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

Yeah, me too. KEXP has a public facing API that could be easily used to create a new KEXPlorer.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

A dashboard to see what my local commercial free radio station (89.3 The Current) in Minnesota is playing. It shows how often tracks are played, track and artist play history as well as some other fun lookups and visualizations.

https://theundercurrent.fm

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: Burned out on AI and want to go part time

I did this about ten years ago when I was feeling burned out. I started a t-shirt company in the off hours which eventually grew to be large enough for my wife and I to live off.

Running a business is a lot of work so I'm not sure if that is the type of transition you were looking for. But a starting a side business doing something you enjoy could be a worthy path to check out. Obviously, it's not as easy as applying for a part-time job at an established company.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: Are Tech Meetups Dead?

The meetups in Minneapolis are still going strong. There was the COVID pause when most went to Zoom but the majority are back to in person now.

A good amount tend to revolve around breweries so their definitely much more social leaning than educational. But our JavaScript meetup is very strong and they do a good job of education/learning with a good mix of socialization. I'm still waiting for the .Net group to come back to in person, however.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: Am I getting old, or is working with AI juniors becoming a nightmare?

It's still crucial for senior level people to review and scrutinize code generated by Jr and AI developers.

There's always been the need to verify the code matches the business requirement, right? It used to be when you asked someone why they wrote the code the way they did, they'd tell you they thought it was the right way because X or Y. But with AI they can respond saying they actually don't know why they wrote it a certain way. That's just what ChatGPT or Claude told them to do. So, that's the nightmare part that people are experiencing.

Code reviews are important and software architecture skills are just as important now.

clintmcmahonon Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

Just got our Tin Can a few weeks ago. The hardware is "eh", but the service is pretty great. The ability to approve incoming/outgoing numbers before being able to call/receive calls is very handy to cut out any spam calls that you'd get with a normal land line.

clintmcmahonon Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

We've got a tin can phone and the biggest positive for us is the phone can't make calls or receive calls from numbers that we don't approve first. I know other parents who have the phone line through the cable company that gets hammered with spam calls.

clintmcmahonon WFH is becoming a benefit again

Been working remotely for a long time now and was beginning to feel that loneliness. So, I started going to a co-working space to be around people again. Two/three days a week I'm in the "office" with my new "coworkers". It's been great to get to socialize and talk to other tech folks who are working on interesting and different things.

But I also love that freedom of staying home whenever I want to. IMO, more offices should operate more like this.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: Burned out from tech, what else is there?

I was in the same boat around the 10 year mark as well. I started a t-shirt business on the side. It took a while but after a few years made enough to live off of.

Eventually I came back to tech as a contractor/consultant and like it so much more. My passion for development and engineering is much higher now.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://clintmcmahon.com

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)

A React Native mobile coffee shop map of all coffee shops in New York City. It's integrated with Google Places so I can return summaries of each coffee shops via Googles AI summary feature.

The next step is going to explore building a local LLM into the application itself to then skip over the entire Google part. I want to implement some question/answer features that I THINK could be solved with a local LLM integration. But for now it's just a quick app to help you find coffee.

iOS - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nyc-coffee-map/id6755573635

Android - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.parkasoftw...

clintmcmahonon Instagram data breach reportedly exposed the personal info of 17.5M users

My guess is that it might a couple things:

1. There's a map feature where users can assign their location to a photo that was taken. I suppose this could qualify as 'physical address'.

2. Businesses often have their physical addresses as part of their profile.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

https://nyccoffeemap.com

React Native mobile app + React web app that shows all the coffee shops across New York City. The idea is that you can open it and the app instantly displays the closest coffee shop to you. It integrates with Google Maps reviews AI summaries for a lowdown on the coffee shop and vibe.

clintmcmahonon Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void

This is a good way to look at it. I recently starting thinking something similar now that chatgpt.com and Perplexity are showing up as referral sources to my blog. So there is some verification (or hope there is) that someone got to my content and learned something from it.

clintmcmahonon The Junior Hiring Crisis

What about hiring junior developers to do the work I don't want to spend time training AI to do? Humans retain context, over time learn the ins and outs of the business and will sit in a meeting with stakeholders to gain understanding of the business rules and ask the 'stupid' questions that need to be asked.

I would much rather have that junior take some hacks at building some features with AI along with my guidance than context switching over to AI just to walk it through doing a task which means having to explain the business and our business rules over and over again.

To me cutting out a junior developer adds more time for senior developers than making their work lighter.

clintmcmahonon .NET 10

There used to be a Visual Studio for Mac (since retired) but they never could get it right in comparison to the Windows version.

VS Code on a Mac works great and with the ability to run SQL Server in Docker you can have the old stack right there on your Mac.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: What are some impressive vibe coding projects?

Ooh, good call. Thank you.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: What are some impressive vibe coding projects?

I created a website and mobile app to display all the coffee shops in the state of Minnesota. It's a .Net Core MVC website and React Native mobile app that is pretty much entirely vibe coded.

I've had fun with building the data loaded, website and mobile app via Claude Code from VS Code. However, I didn't find building the project as enjoyable as actual coding myself. The code is a mess and is definitely overengineered and hard to read. I have had to consistently fix bugs and calibrate my prompts so the machine could produced the features that I was trying to create.

Another thing I learned is to commit early and often. Then create PRs to check what code was updated as things got away from me quickly without me knowing or asking the machine to do the thing it did. A few times entire sections of code were removed that had nothing to do with the feature I was working on. Being able to go back to the previous working commit probably saved me hours.

Vibe coding an entire project was a good experience. There's a lot to learn and focus on the next time I go this route.

Take a look! https://mplscoffee.com

clintmcmahonon Data Viz Color Palette Generator (For Charts and Dashboards)

This will come in very handy for me. Thanks for working on this and putting out there.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: Generalists, when do you say "I know enough" about any particular topic?

Is there really ever enough?

Try to stay up to date on anything you don't know, but suspect you probably should know to provide value in whatever it is you're doing. You could treat this to everything under the sun, but I try to apply this principal to current .Net topics that make me a valuable .Net consultant.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: To anyone who cares to read this. How old are you roughly?

44! Got into programming in my early teens. Landing my first dev job at 19. Still love it.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

Actual tech, nothing. Company politics and "being a culture fit", unfortunately in some companies it means a lot.

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)

A simple coffee shop app that shows the nearest coffees shops that are closest to you. Using Google's AI, each shop has a Gemini AI overview that describes the shops offerings and other information that might be useful to the user.

I've only built it for Minneapolis and Chicago for now.

https://mplscoffee.com

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (April 2025)

SEEKING WORK | Minneapolis, MN | Remote | C# .Net Consultant

I am a software consultant with 24 years of experience specializing in healthcare and legal software solutions.

Technologies: C# .NET, SQL Server, React, Angular, Azure

Experience:

- Develop mutli-tier web applications for healthcare and legal organizations in C# WebAPI, Angular and React.

- Modernize legacy systems for improved performance, scalability, and compliance.

- Implement data visualization tools to transform complex data into insights for stakeholders.

Recent Work:

- Built a healthcare data portal that streamlined clinical decision-making through enhanced data visualizations and secure data management.

- Migrated a critical research system from a legacy .NET Framework to .NET Core.

- Designed and deployed scalable, cloud-based architectures for a leading healthcare institute.

Contact:

Email: clint@parkasoftware.com

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/clintmcmahon

Website: https://www.clintmcmahon.com

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: What's your blog / portfolio stack?

.Net Core MVC with Bootstrap CSS and a markdown file for each blog post.

Github CI/CD publishes my main branch to Azure AppService.

Blog: https://clintmcmahon.com

clintmcmahonon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (March 2025)

SEEKING WORK | Minneapolis, MN | Remote | C# .Net Consultant

I am a software consultant with 24 years of experience specializing in healthcare and legal software solutions.

Technologies: C# .NET, SQL Server, React, Angular, Azure

Experience:

- Develop mutli-tier web applications for healthcare and legal organizations in C# WebAPI, Angular and React.

- Modernize legacy systems for improved performance, scalability, and compliance.

- Implement data visualization tools to transform complex data into insights for stakeholders.

Recent Work:

- Built a healthcare data portal that streamlined clinical decision-making through enhanced data visualizations and secure data management.

- Migrated a critical research system from a legacy .NET Framework to .NET Core.

- Designed and deployed scalable, cloud-based architectures for a leading healthcare institute.

Contact:

Email: clint@parkasoftware.com

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/clintmcmahon

Website: https://www.clintmcmahon.com

clintmcmahonon Why legacy .NET projects fail

Yeah, you're totally right. I'm the OP of the post and was writing from seeing a pattern with .Net projects abandoned by the original creators and then eventual failing. Since I'm a .Net developer that's what I'm seeing more of. I imagine if I were Java or Ruby I'd be seeing the same thing.