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kenrick95

1,270 karma · joined December 13, 2013

https://kenrick95.org/

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/kenrick95; my proof: https://keybase.io/kenrick95/sigs/Wo8V4JYUQ3nJGybkceG4luJFbxg4sP9sbhXfzyj7a3o ]

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kenrick95··on I don't like passkeys
Passkeys have a marketing problem where no one is able to describe simply what it is without having to use technical jargon. There's also the problem where each OS tries too hard in pushing this to the face of end-user
kenrick95··on Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way
One big change I had when learning Japanese was that someone introduced to me Cure Dolly videos on YouTube, and it has been an eye-opener: All these verb conjugations are actually attaching another verb to extend its meaning
kenrick95··on Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
Congrats on the 1.0 milestone!

I had a Show HN that built with Instant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44247029 The common request from that thread was to add guest auth, and few months later Instant had it baked in, so it was really easy to add that feature. Great dev experience :)

kenrick95··on I found the perfect yearly calendar (for me)
I used to save Timeanddate's calendar as HTML and adjust them so they fit A4 paper perfectly (also like to remove their logo oops), but have moved on to generating my own: https://kenrick95.github.io/calendar/ Suprisingly CSS Grid is perfect on my use case :)
kenrick95··on Alarm overload is undermining safety at sea as crews face thousands of alerts
My gripe is with multi-layer approvals for permission request tickets. If it's only 1 layer, the only layer will make sure the person it's correct. However once there are >1 layer, each layer will think the other n-1 layers will check and turn out no one will check and blindly approve things...
kenrick95··on Nova Launcher added Facebook and Google Ads tracking
I switched to KISS Launcher several years back and had been loving it. I like the philosophy of search-based launcher. This way, if I don't actively search for an app, I won't be distracted into opening one
kenrick95··on Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
Today I learned about the difference betweeen "preconnect" and "dns-prefetch": https://web.dev/articles/preconnect-and-dns-prefetch

I have thought that they were the same...

kenrick95··on Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
I want to learn driving.

I live in a city with well-connected public transport (Singapore) so I don't feel the need to learn. However, this year I travelled to some rural areas in Japan and started to feel the pain of relying solely on public transport which is either extremely sparse, or sometimes non-existent which limits the places I want to visit. That's why I felt like if I obtain this skill, I can explore more places in my travels

kenrick95··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
I submitted my travel planning web application [1] few weeks ago as Show HN [2] and it received tons of feedback and ideas that resonates with me. So I'm still working on it :)

[1] https://ikuyo.kenrick95.org/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44247029

kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Thanks. Noticed this too after I added Sentry, should be fixed already :)
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
I feel like once I list down the places in the map, I sort of can grasp which places should go together or play around with the schedules to make things work. Yes it's more manual work, but I feel that's part of the 'fun' in planning? (some people get stressed, but I love the planning part of the trip too)
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Thank you. This app is meant for me to replace my "Excel trip planning workflow" and I'm glad that you like it :)
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
The whole back-end is using InstantDB https://www.instantdb.com/ . I don't have export function yet
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that everyone have their own workflow and this might not suit your prefered workflow. Having a 'idea list' is requested several times and I have started working on implementing it. But I don't think this app supports that 'democracy' collaboration yet, nor ticketing constraints...
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah I think over time I ended up making way too many of the fields being non-optional. I also agree that this is not for everyone, and lean towards my style of having all things planned out.

For now, my workflow of how this app should be used is together with other apps. For example, in a desktop mode, half the screen being this app, and the other half being Google Maps or AI chatbots giving suggestions or searches...

kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Thanks for the feedback and trying them out. Having a 'bucket list' of activities (without exact times) is definitely on my horizon to implement next. The 'region' to select is mainly used for map so I can scope down to that region only, but I do see some need to specify several regions as it could be a common case for travel in Europe/Schengen area
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Yup, it's using CSS Grid and since I have to declare the grid templates upfront, and my granularity is at minute level, it means I have to declare each minute of the day, i.e. 24 * 60 = 1440, as the rows of the grid
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
That's a very valid use case I haven't thought of. Thanks for pointing it out!
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Hi swyx, great idea! Thanks for your tips
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Yeah this is not that obvious, but the selected 'destination time zone' is the only time zone that one will be working with when planning the activities within the trip. (When inputting/reading the activities' time zone, they are all the destination's time zone)

The only local time zone used is at the comments (but hopefully it is clearer since I show the time zone offset there? I don't show it on the events since I feel it could be way too verbose)

I understand that there could be case where one's trip crosses multiple time zones, but at this moment that wasn't supported yet.

kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Thank you for trying them and providing such a detailed feedback!

- On Trip Sharing, hmm that seems weird. While I understand that there's no 'loading' indicator yet, one should be able to do so if one is the 'owner' of the trip

- Expense split: because that feature isn't there yet

- Thanks I'll consider it

- The map I chose on MapTiler is OpenStreetMap, but I limit it to Point-of-interest only, maybe I need to expand it to match more kind of objects

- Aha, for that case, I find that it's so troublesome that I have to split the activity into two different elements for display in the timetable, so I disabled the case for now. Thanks for a great use case!

- Hmm strange, the activites should reflect live. Maybe the 'back-end' is a bit slow

Anyway, the 'back-end' is InstantDB ( https://www.instantdb.com ) and it's opening a WebSocket connection, that's why you don't see network calls when doing operations

P.S. I don't think I'll monetise this ever. If someone forks it and monetise it, as long as it doesn't affect me, I think I'm fine with it. If I run out of my 'free usage' quota, I'll probably limit the users to only handful of people

kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Thank you!

Probably you just need to copy `.env.example` into `.env` and replace the required API keys. [1] The whole 'back-end' is an external dependency hosted elsewhere by InstantDB [2] While they claim that you can self-host it too, I haven't been bothered to self-host it myself. Other than that, I'm using MapTiler Cloud for the mapping service [3] since I find that while there are free ones, those can be quite limited when doing things like geocoding (querying keyword to coordinates).

[1] https://github.com/kenrick95/ikuyo/blob/main/.env.example

[2] https://github.com/instantdb/instant

[3] https://www.maptiler.com/

kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Hmmm okay so I come from Excel world and when I arrange my plans in timetable view (in Excel), I need to 'merge' several cells together. However if circumstances change and I have to rearrange those events to other days or other timings, it become a pain to unmerge cells and move them around.

I think this is one of the main reason I started this web app as a 'timetable' view first and then build other features later on

kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Thank you for the ideas!
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Thanks for the encouragement!

Thank you too for the ideas to extend and enhance the current features :)

kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Thanks for your kind words and ideas!
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
It is React on the front-end with InstantDB ( https://www.instantdb.com/ ) as its back-end.

I was trying not to add more external SDK since it contributes to the bundle size. Adding Sentry soon for some observability.

kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Thanks for your kind words! Yeah great suggestion, I'll add them soon :)
kenrick95··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Several things, but wide adoption is NOT one of them.

First and foremost, it's for my own personal use. I like to organize things and I find that the messy doc/spreadsheet way is way too messy for my liking, especially when I find a need to coordinate plans with other friends overseas. That's why I started this.

Secondly, it's for fun and for learning. I enjoy build websites and explore what browser can provide. I learned that browser have API for drag-and-drop element to pass data to a target element

So at the end of the day, I see it as a fun side project and nothing more.

Thanks for sharing your experience too :)

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