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potomakon Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

I prompted Claude code from my phone to revive Draw!, a pixel art editor I first published 15 years ago as an exploration using Redis as a DB.

The new version is live at http://pixel.drawbang.com after 1 week of prompting Opus 4.6 with a max subscription.

potomakon Gut–Brain axis

My mother is a dietitian and she started a podcast this year where she’s talked a lot about the microbiota and how it affects our organisms in a lot of different ways.

For instance, did you know that bacteria in our guts help us “digest” and expel heavy metals?

In the third part of the episodes about the microbiota[0] she talks about the gut-brain axis:

> l’intestino può comunicare al cervello uno stato di disagio o disbiosi procurando, oltre al gonfiore, anche un possibile stato d’ansia o abbassamento dell’umore

that translates more or less to:

> the gut can communicate with the brain a dysbiotic state causing, in addition to swelling, a state of anxiety

The podcast is in Italian, but the transcriptions can be easily translated in English.

[0] https://dietista.it/2023/03/29/e-la-pancia-non-c-e-piu-terza...

potomakon Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

I built an app for a family member, who is a nutritionist, that makes it easier for her to stay connected with her patients via WhatsApp. It keeps track of appointments and sends automatic reminders.

Lately I decided to jump on the ChatGPT bandwagon and added a feature that integrates with the OpenAI API to suggest replies to messages from her patients.

It was overall a fun project. It gave me the chance to explore the integration with WhatsApp Business API (used to communicate with patients), OpenAI API (used to suggest message replies), Discord (used to notify events).

Apart from the APIs, it has zero dependencies. It’s deployed as a static website hosted on GitHub. The backend is written as a set of AWS Lambda functions. Data is stored in DynamoDB. Frontend is vanilla JS.

potomakon Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?

http://giovanni.curlybrackets.it

I'm documenting the process for creating an adventure game on iOS and tvOS using SpriteKit.

potomakon Launch HN: Solve (YC S17) – We Save International Travelers Hours of Time

I must say the logo resembles Tomatoes[0] productivity app logo very much.

[0] http://tomato.es

potomakon No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter

A post against modal windows usability that contains a link to a site that use one, that's incoherent.

potomakon A curated list of Terminal frameworks, plugins and resources

That list is missing a section for terminal music players. I created one in Haskell some time ago: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskell-player

potomakon Show HN: MyHours – Time tracking for digital nomads

If you want to stay focused and track your time I built Tomatoes[0]. It's a pomodoro technique timer and a time tracker. It's web based, it's completely free and open source[1]. I built it when I started freelancing and I was in need of both a tool that would have helped me to be productive and to track time that I spent on clients projects.

[0] http://tomato.es

[1] http://github.com/potomak/tomatoes

potomakon Who’s on Your 2016 Web Development Thank You List?

Definitely Matteo Centenaro[0] and Andrea Dal Ponte[1] for their incredible contributions to Tomatoes[2], and our supporters[3] who boosted our morale and made the project sustainable.

[0] https://twitter.com/bugant

[1] https://twitter.com/dalpo

[2] http://www.tomato.es

[3] https://backerpass.com/tomatoes

potomakon Insecam: Large Directory of Unsecure Cameras

This is a hack I build with some friends based on that list: http://surveillance.life/

potomakon Ask HN: Who needs contributors? (November 2016)

Tomatoes (http://tomato.es)

Description: Pomodoro technique® time tracker.

Last month we built the public API. This month we want mainly to rebuild leaderboards using async tasks.

Skills needed: Ruby, Ruby on Rails.

http://github.com/potomak/tomatoes

License: MIT

potomakon Ask HN: Who needs contributors? (October 2016)

Tomatoes (http://tomato.es)

Pomodoro technique® time tracker.

We'd like to build a public API, but there's a lot of other tasks that could be done.

Ruby, Ruby on Rails, CSS, JavaScript.

http://github.com/potomak/tomatoes

License: MIT

potomakon The Squirrel Programming Language

Correct, see https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/engine and https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/scripting_test.

potomakon Ten years on LinkedIn

I totally agree with you, except for the "not leaving LinkedIn" part. I closed my account about 1 year ago after having to deal with spam, bad UI, and useless connections.

Also removing your profile from the network is a bad use experience: I had to send a customer support request to close it because I had more than 500 connections.

I think that I will build something in the near future because I like the idea of collecting connections and achievements concerning my professional career, but I'll never use LinkedIn again.

potomakon Make 8-bit art

Check out also Draw![0], you can use it to draw tiny pixel art pictures and GIF animations.

Update: I made a while ago to experiment with Redis and the <canvas> element. The code is open source at https://github.com/potomak/drawbang.

[0] http://drawbang.com

potomakon How the Pomodoro Technique changed my workday

I tried the Pomodoro Technique to avoid distractions and to stay more focused when I started freelancing. I was also trying to track my work time, so I built Tomatoes, a simple web app to do both.

The app is open source, you can download the code at http://github.com/potomak/tomatoes, or you can use the version running at http://tomato.es.

potomakon Working remotely is hard

I totally agree with you. When I started to work as a freelancer I felt the same for the first year. That's why I dediced to start, with a former coworker of mine, a coworking place with accessible rates near the city where I lived. Now that I'm not a freelancer anymore, and I don't run actively Meme coworking[0] anymore, I'm proud because it's still active and full of interesting people!

[0] http://memecoworking.com

potomakon 365 days of pixel art

Nice, thanks for the suggestions!

I definitely must find some time to make a lot of planned features/fixes. See a list of them at https://github.com/potomak/drawbang/issues.

potomakon 365 days of pixel art

Because I was lazy and you can move left or down by 1 by moving right or up by 15 :)

potomakon 365 days of pixel art

Great project! I'd like to tell to everyone who want to start drawing pixel art, I built a very simple tool to get started with this technique: http://drawbang.com.

Try it, give me your feedback, and share your pixel art masterpieces!

potomakon Why PowerPoint should be banned

Well, about presentations, a couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation about a tool[0] to create text adventures with Markdown and created a slide deck using that tool. So the deck was itself a "presentable" text adventure[1].

[0] https://github.com/potomak/gist-txt

[1] https://potomak.github.io/gist-txt/#737a452d6f38c2b87403

potomakon Replacing jQuery with D3

About the topic of replacing jQuery I really enjoyed reading "Weaning yourself off jQuery"[0] by James Halliday. It shows how to replace some of the jQuery features with the DOM API and/or with npm libraries such hyperquest[1].

[0] http://substack.net/weaning_yourself_off_jquery

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/hyperquest

potomakon A slide deck that is also a text adventure game

Author here: I've done this for yesterday's Manhattan.js to talk about "How to make games with gist-txt[0]", an adventure game engine I built.

[0] https://github.com/potomak/gist-txt

potomakon Show HN: Text-Adventures with Markdown, Mustache, JavaScript, and Gist

Author here: this is a project inspired by Twine[0] and bl.ocks.org[1].

Note: the first game made with this tool is an AdventureJam[2] entry[3], you can play with it at http://j.mp/play-routine

It's also a great way to start collaborating on a JavaScript open source project, see https://github.com/potomak/gist-txt/labels/help%20wanted.

[0] http://twinery.org/

[1] http://bl.ocks.org/

[2] http://jams.gamejolt.io/adventurejam

[3] http://jams.gamejolt.io/adventurejam/games/routine/59416

potomakon Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

On this topic I'd like to share gist-txt[0] a tool I created to build text adventures starting from markdown files hosted on GitHub's Gist.

It doesn't need hosting as your files will be hosted by GitHub and you can write your interactive fiction stories directly form the web.

It uses mustache templates and JavaScript to achieve minimal interactive functions.

I wrote a little introduction[1] at Ludum Dare's blog and I will use it to write a text adventure for the AdventureJam[2] starting next week!

Note: I took inspiration form Twine[3] and bl.ocks.org[4] for the initial development of the tool.

[0] https://github.com/potomak/gist-txt

[1] http://ludumdare.com/compo/2015/03/05/a-minimal-tool-to-crea...

[2] http://jams.gamejolt.io/adventurejam

[3] http://twinery.org/

[4] http://bl.ocks.org/

potomakon Show HN: Find email addresses of people you want to contact

I have a different opinion✢: I think it's a clever service, maybe not one of the most useful, but it's a clear vision and it goes straight to the point.

There are a lot of cases where finding an email is an easy task, as easy as flasname@company.com, but I expect this service to shine when it's hard to guess an email address, so let's see what it could do.

✢Disclaimer: I know yawnt, the guy who wrote this service.

potomakon Atom – Git commit messages

The best git commit message style guide in my opinion is Erlang OTP's "Writing good commit messages"[0] wiki page.

[0] https://github.com/erlang/otp/wiki/Writing-good-commit-messa...

potomakon Ruby talks of 2014

In my opinion one of the best Ruby talks of 2014 is "Refactoring Ruby with Monads"[0] by Tom Stuart held at Barcelona Ruby Conference.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1jYlPtkrqQ

potomakon Don't link to line numbers in GitHub

I totally agree. The problem is not links to line numbers, that I found really useful, the problem is that these links must have a commit context otherwise they become unreliable.

potomakon How to learn new things using side projects

I totally agree.

That's the exact reason why I created two simple open source projects: Draw![1] and Tomatoes[2]; the former to understand Redis better, the latter to know more about MongoDB.

[1] http://drawbang.com

[2] http://tomato.es