What is something exciting you're working on?

I've felt strongly for a few years that there is a market (strong interest, if not financial) for a small computer designed to let you be creative and expressive and to learn how computers really work. Over the past year and a half, I've built up a BASIC-like system on my own bare metal kernel on ARM64, giving a boot-to-BASIC programming and prototyping environment in a few seconds. I've worked down the stack as far as building an SBC-based custom hardware with HDMI and keyboard that also works as a handheld portable with onboard display & speaker. You can also do inline ARM64 assembly and memory peeking/disassembly as well as instruction-level step debugging. Polyphonic audio, direct I2C/SPI/GPIO/etc. access (i.e. at the byte level), and more.

It's just radically freeing to not have to wait for a boot, to have direct control over hardware resources like the frame buffer and audio registers, but to start with something as simple as Hello World and go in either direction from there — up in programming complexity or down in systems understanding. I'm very close to getting it into friends' (and their kids') hands. I'd love for it to take off, and have experience actually selling services and products, so I don't think it'll just be a hacker toy, but who knows? Regardless, it's been probably the single best learning project I've ever done. And it's so fun! It'll continue to be so for me whether it sells and/or has a community that builds up around it, or if it's just my passion.

I am making a Lovecraftian text editor called Tentacle Typer. It's a text editor / game where you play as a tentacle monster with a magic mechanical typewriter.

Creative writing releases psychic energy that activates machines / opens doors and all sorts of other things. It also exports .txt files.

Depending on what you write, you'll learn different sigils you can arrange into a circle that will activate when you're in danger. Writing a romance novel gets you different powers than a horror or sci-fi short story, for instance.

https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1459527876118814728

It's pretty weird, but I'm really proud of all that I've done myself this last year. Solo indie gamedev is a perilous, extremely stressful, maybe stupid career choice but I'm realizing a lifelong dream.

I also think I might be inventing/innovating a new genre of game so it's fun to maybe leave a mark that way too. I hope it'll squeeze some creative writing out of people they never would have written otherwise.

I started my own bioinformatics+AI services firm that specializes in cell-type specific biomarker discovery and immune-repertoire profiling (i.e. we use single-cell and NGS technologies). I have developed a pipeline that integrates/automates state-of-the-art algorithms, which I use to serve clients (biotech and academic labs).

My clients are mostly local (i.e. Switzerland) acquired through word-of-mouth. Client acquisition is a challenge because I have to juggle sales and execution. However I am super excited to be in this field because I believe this is exactly what precision medicine is.

The company is called YugaCell (http://www.yugacell.com)

I'm having a lot of fun making a virtual ant farm as a side project.

https://meomix.github.io/antfarm/

I found some code written in 1991 for Unix (in C) and decided I would port it to React and get it running on the web. I have to implement persistence and iron out a few bugs, but it's at least functional at this point.

I wrote the original coder and let them know I'm rewriting their code 30 years later. They're stoked to see it come back to life and I find that motivates me to do a good job. Plus, some of my friends' kids have started to take an interest in it.

I'm not sure which direction I'll go with it long-term. I kind of wanted to get it running on an e-ink screen and have it sit on my desk or become more like a tamagotchi. I don't have any experience working with hardware and think it would a cool way to learn some of that stuff.

I'm probably going to add some more features to it like a queen ant, food, pathfinding, etc. I saw this cool "ant-based solution to the TSP" https://www.theprojectspot.com/tutorial-post/ant-colony-opti... which I could see being solved by the ants over time and then introducing variables like weather or user-interaction which disrupt the path and then watching it get solved again, etc.

idk! I just played SimAnt when I was young and impressionable and am taking it way too far now. :)

I founded a YIMBY group where I live, because I did not want to be part of tech workers pricing other people out. Now we're a chapter of YIMBY Action: https://yimbyaction.org/

It's interesting in that it's very different from tech, but also rewarding to make a difference in people's lives.

Two years ago I quit my SRE job and took a leap of faith to develop a game I would love to play myself. It's a crossover between Factorio and RimWorld. It is by far the most complex software project I have worked on throughout my 20-ish years in tech, and I'm loving every moment of it. It will likely flop, and I did ruin my career for this, but it was my childhood dream to make games, and I can finally say I'm doing it. If you're interested to see the progress of my two years of work: https://stardeusgame.com - there is a demo on Steam.

I'm starting to get involved in the space industry (currently an undergrad student), and there are some wild things coming in the next few years. Be ready for people on the moon and Mars, commercial space stations with 50+ people, in-orbit manufacturing, and early asteroid mining by the end of the decade. I'm very excited for the stuff I'm working on, as well as what's coming in general.

I'm trying to grok quantum computing, all the way down to the electronics. Watch/read lots of stuff over my head, until some little detail fits with my world view, then go back and watch/read stuff again... slowly figuring it all out.

I have a really good mental model of superposition. I'm pretty sure I understand quantum annealing. I'm working on the bloch sphere and quantum gates.

Once I'm sure I understand things, I'll write up some code to simulate it, and then see if that code matches up with the stuff already out there, result wise.

I'm consciously guarding my ignorance of how it is simulated, lest I fall into the same mode of thinking about it as everyone else.

I think I can simulate quantum annealing with an almost trivial amount of code.

- openstreetmap renderer server - https://github.com/severak/lunarender3

- in-browser audio suite - https://severak.github.io/cyber-music-studio/

- my very own social network - https://kyselo.eu/

These are my major software hobby projects. Social network one is more useful than interesting. Audio suite is very interesting but not that useful. I hope that openstreetmap renderer can be the middle ground - both useful and interesting.

I love when technology intersects with non high tech environments.

So I built BuzzMeIn that hooks up to old school phone based apartment buzzers via a Twilio phone number and now the sky's the limit of what I can do.

Plus it solves real people everyday problems, making life more convenient (which I'm also a big fan of)

https://buzzmein.ca

I’m building a hosted data warehouse for different verticals. My goal is to target people interested in doing analysis, but acquiring data and setting up even datasette is too complex, especially if the data needs transformations to be easier to comprehend.

Then I’m building that into a platform where people can fork any query, modify, and publish with their own analysis in order to build a portfolio.

My first market is sports data. There are many aspiring analysts, and I want to 10x the number of people who do this work. And I think the best way to learn Analysis is SQL, and the best way to learn SQL is by building off other peoples queries (learn by example / exploration).

I am working to educate municipalities about the risks of building new gas stations as EVs begin to get market share. Gas stations are expensive to cleanup and the insurance to cover spills is often insufficient.

I envision a future 20-30 years from now as profits dry up the industry collapsing and leaving municipalities holding the toxic asset of an expensive to cleanup site. These sites will then require municipalities to write grants, hire construction staff, etc.

https://postpump.org

I'm working on alternative discovery methods for discovering websites. I've built a sort of semi-stumbleupon, but I'm trying to add more of a sense of control.

This is where I'm at now: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

I'm leaning toward some sort of categorization or tagging system, but trying to figure out ways of designing it that are inherently resilient to sabotage and manipulation.

I am working on a gameshow-like quiz website primarily for classrooms. [0] It's really cool to see people using my site, and working around the challenges I come across. I did a Show HN last month [1] and the comments I got were super encouraging which was awesome.

[0] https://quickz.org [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29836852

I'm playing to see just how much of a stack I can cram into postgres. Using postgrest functions that set custom headers to return html. And then...

I'm using plv8 to set up a deno-type runtime in postgres lol. It's silly but so fun and weird-feeling to me.

It's very finicky right now and most build tools are not ever going to work like this obviously but I have a little tiny "server" running out of postgres just using js tag functions for templating.

I'm building a little platform to experiment with embodied / real-time multi-modal learning. Basically I have an old boom box that I gutted, stuck a USB power bank and a USB charger in there, along with a Raspberry Pi. The Pi will connect to one or more cameras, one or more microphones, and a handful of other sensors to let it sense its environment to various degrees. The main ones I want to work with are accelerometers so it can sense motion, temperature, and possibly GPS.

The form factor was intended to allow for portability (it has a handle and I can carry it around with ease, and the Pi can run off of the battery when then AC supply is disconnected) and to have enough space to allow for positioning multiple cameras for binocular vision and multiple microphones for stereo "hearing", as well as room for the other random sensors. Oh, and I'm re-using the existing speakers for the audio out so I can work on integrating speech synthesis into the whole kit and kaboodle.

For the software, I'm looking at starting with a super-simple BDI interpreter for the basic "cognitive loop", using an RDF triplestore for semantic knowledge, neural network models where appropriate (object recognition for example), and then start trying to build up from there. Also looking at systems like SOAR, ACT-R, OpenCog, etc. for inspiration.

Of course most of the "heavy lifting" from a computational viewpoint will need to happen on a server somewhere, since a single Raspberry Pi can only do so much. So there's a corresponding server backend piece that will work in conjunction with the remote portion. For now it'll be a fairly low-end server that's physically here at home, but if/when I start needing to scale things up I'll probably switch to using cloud resources on AWS as needed.

All in all, the basic idea is to have an "AI bot" that is alert, observing, and (hopefully) learning all the time and that will learn more like a child learns, compared to the way we train ML models today. That's not to say that there might not be some batch mode training as part of this but I'm hoping to experiment mainly with learning modalities than can happen in real-time. There's no fully fleshed out theory that I'm working off of, but I plan to tinker with a variety of things - Hebbian Learning, Reinforcement Learning, etc. Maybe I'll learn something interesting, maybe not. But it should be fun in either case.

I am working on a project aimed at reinventing book discovery online... my goal is to recreate the feeling of walking around a physical bookstore (but reimagined for the online world).

It is called https://shepherd.com/

I launched about 10 months ago we are slowly getting there :)

How does it work?

I ask authors to recommend five around a topic/theme (so every book on the website is personally recommended by an author who is passionate about it). So you get some great recommendations on things like:

The best books on artificial intelligence that are not full of hype and nonsense https://shepherd.com/best-books/no-hype-and-no-nonsense-arti...

The best books that tell a cautionary tale about world-changing technology https://shepherd.com/best-books/cautionary-tales-about-world...

The best books whose dystopian visions were eerily prescient https://shepherd.com/best-books/dystopian-visions

Then, I build out bookshelves (aka topic pages) using NLP. This is very new and only 30 days old so I am still improving the engine / topics. But, it is all tied to Wikidata so you can search via Wikipedia topic (and some other cool stuff down the road).

Bookshelf on artificial intelligence https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/artificial-intelligence

Bookshelf on neuroscience https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/neuroscience

Right now I am working to roll out a big improvement to the recommendation engine. And, then to integrate book genre data, which is a massive project. I want to be able to go to the World War 2 section and say "show me all historical fiction", or on the AI bookshelf to show me all "science fiction".

Let me know what you think :)

I'm trying to solve my addiction of refreshing tabs constantly to get updates from my social media profiles, by building something that does it for me instead

Think rss, but for my personal feeds.

Still mvp, lotsa bugs, but if anyone has similar problems -> https://fetcher.page

I'm making a PC game about that weird and ethereal (and scary) feeling you get from empty public buildings. I've already sold over 2000 copies and it hasn't even left beta yet.

https://q-andrew.itch.io/anemoiapolis

https://veloren.net/

It's pretty wild that it's possible to make an open source 3D MMORPG where everything is procedurally generated and combat is in real time. That's a combination of words that shouldn't work.

I'm on and off spending some time on a (probably) completely useless and really bad idea: a filesystem based document "database" with very basic indexing capabilities, in nodejs.

It sounds so horrible, I can't get my mind off it! :P

I've just released a WebGL experiment that uses music to animate particles. It's meant to be exciting to both watch and create (the music - not composed by me - is pretty epic).

https://polygonjs.com/particles-music

And it's done with a visual node-based editor I'm working g on. Here is a tutorial of it in action.

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2WfjN_pVGgj32-ZJc_VNaZ...

I'm researching how we can use technology to improve the way we learn and think.

I'm currently exploring how AI/Natural Language Processing can automatically organize personal knowledge and notes by tagging and linking ideas / content together [0], removing the friction of organization to help you find new connections and ideas.

If you're interested in this domain, I'd love to talk to you!

[0]: https://github.com/Uzay-G/espial

I’ve been working on the EdgeQL query builder for TypeScript for around 6 months. This is part of my day job, but the prospect of taking point on this project is what first attracted me to EdgeDB.

The goal is to provide a library that’s autogenerated from your DB schema that can express any EdgeQL query and statically infer the result type.

I’ve done a lot of digging into various SQL query builders for TypeScript, and while some noble efforts have been made, there are structural issues with SQL-notably the fact that it’s tricky to write queries that return nicely structured results-that kneecap those efforts.

By starting with EdgeQL as our target query language, The problem gets more tractable. It still required some truly nextlevel TS wizardry. I’m the developer of Zod and tRPC too, so it’s not my first rodeo, but this is the thing I’m most proud of. Not to sound too grandiose, but this really does represent a “3rd Way“ beyond the usual “raw SQL vs ORM” debate.

[0] https://www.edgedb.com/docs/clients/01_js/expressions

I've started upping my woodworking skills. For years I would cut and screw together boards cut from construction grade lumber (cheap 2x4 pine for example). I now work with at minimum Poplar (still a bit on the soft side, but works much like hardwood), Oak, Maple, basically what I can get in the premium lumber section at a big box store, and did some alignment on my compound miter saw. What a difference that makes, have cranked out a hand full of desks and other furniture that is getting better with each piece I made.

Also got into 3D printing, using OpenScad for creating the models. It is almost magical when you can think of something that you want, but they don't make, yet you can make it yourself (different brackets for holding accessories on a bicycle, clips that holds a plexiglass screen in front of the TV to protect it, etc, things like that).

These are a couple of ideas of things that a technical mind can work on (woodworking and 3d printing both require some amount of precision and design). Keeps things interesting.

I am working on meme tournament platform, which I am calling PlanetMeme. Bracket-style, single-elimination. The platform generates tournaments from current events and trending things on social media.

Users create memes and enter them into their preferred tournament(s). Other users on the app are invited to judge the memes. Eventually a winner is chosen, and they can win a real prize like a digital gift card. Tournaments are free to enter for all users. Each user is given free daily tokens to enter as many tournaments as they want.

Users can also host their own tournaments (for a fee). Users can be regular people, social media influencers, and companies big and small. Users can give away whatever prize they want.

Web: https://planetmeme.com Social links on the website.

I’ve been working on a job board for startup jobs[0]; if you want to work at a startup, there are more companies than ever, but it’s also harder than ever to know which one to work for. I track number of job posts over time so jobseekers have some data about how much a startup is growing, and I’m hoping to add more types of data as time goes on. Why should investors be the ones who get all the data about startups? Job seekers should, too!

It’s been fun to work on, plus it’s a challenging technical problem: in order to scrape job posts for many companies, you need to make a very generic scraper since they all have different formats and you can’t rely on HTML structure.

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

I'm working in a spiritual successor for the dBase/Foxpro family of languages (https://tablam.org).

I have published my initial attempt, and now trying to get serious on the parsing (the internals are far more powerful than the porcelain let it see). This is to be able to show errors like in https://docs.rs/ariadne/0.1.3/ariadne/ (yesterday finally the first!) and get some type inference/checking.

Plus, lossless parsing so it could work well with a editor.

This have proven to be harder than expected!

----

After it, I wish to work on the UI and embed a DB (sqlite) but also wish to build my own rdbms, how hard it could be? :)

I am building a browser runtime for Animate CC exported animations, kinda like Lottie. It can be utilised by a web component for simple use-cases. It is designed to integrate nicely with React, Vue, or immediate mode contexts, and run on a 2d canvas context (although it is quite simple to facilitate other “targets” like the DOM, ThreeJS, etc).

I am building this because the Texture Atlas exporting feature from Animate CC is actually pretty awesome, yet only an Adobe Air runtime currently exists for it. I find Lottie restricted in its use-cases, can’t handle many animations, and I require raster images. My library can be used from loading spinners all the way up to entire games, with a simple but powerful model for manipulating animations dynamically at runtime.

Derw[0], an ML-family language that targets TypeScript or JavaScript. The aim is to have a language similar to Elm, but can do interop with TS a lot easier. I'm mostly excited that this will make my TypeScript projects a lot more enjoyable for me to work with.

[0] - https://derw-lang.github.io/

Github - https://github.com/eeue56/derw

Announcement post - https://derw.substack.com/p/why-derw-an-elm-like-language-th...

I've been working on an encrypted note taking web app called 'fieldnotes'. It's designed to remove friction for writing down everything I might want to reference later by having a very clean and uncluttered interface. It started out as just a side project for myself and to learn the full scope of software development: From concept to design, architecture, implementation, deployment and monitoring etc. It's been extremely valuable as a learning tool and has increased my confidence in my own skills quite a bit. Some weeks ago I realized that I was so happy with the result that I will pursue monetizing it. There is still some ways to go but I'm very exited with the whole project :)

I am working with a bunch of fellows to make scalable teaching/training tools. Most of it will be open source, some will be free to access (since we have to use platforms like youtube).

The current project in that direction is a timeline-maker targeting research labs. Imagine joining a research lab (for MS/PhD) and getting a timeline of key papers in their field. This will set a baseline for "literature survey". Some of my professors from my college have already shown interest.

It is nothing fancy though. A python script that take YAML input and produce an HTML output. Now producing that YAML input with all the data from 100+ papers is the tedious task. I am currently doing it for my field - speech recognition.

A secure, encrypted, containerized microservice to store personally identifying (pii) data (contact info, names, govt id info etc). The idea is for it to be a drop in microservice that can keep all PII in one place for compliance, security, and convenience.

I am working on a typeface — Berkeley Mono.

It started taking shape conceptually 5 years ago, but really started putting effort into it after the pandemic. It is such an intense pleasure to work on typefaces, and if I could, I would do this for the remainder of my life.

Latest update: https://neil.computer/notes/berkeley-mono-february-update/

If you're interested, please sign up here: https://berkeleygraphics.com/

Not much in the grand scheme of things, but our research firm works in a specialized field and I recently decided to put together a little package and database API for internal development -- especially R&D -- that encodes all the domain knowledge present in the company into rich representations of the subject matter at hand, along with efficient ways to manage the data for analysis, inspection, training, etc. It's more exciting than my current day job and it gives me a chance to explore the DevOps-y side of things in the company.

Social & local still has room for new useful solutions.

Most people don't need new randos in their lives. They might have time to be in group chats with peeps of value. Selecting interests by unverified people isn't the solution, even though most apps go this route. Value + ease, is key to this. The are clever ways to group people and semi verify that have not been exploited yet.

What I am working on. If you are a skilled iOS dev or backend pro (cloud functions to be written!) and interested, DM. (or anyone else).

I'm working on an online reading group centered around the classics where people can see each other's notes and highlights and start conversations within the book.

Very slowly working on implementing AWS/cloud-like APIs on my homelab (EC2, EBS, S3, DNS) running Hyper-V, TrueNAS, and opnsense written in Python and some go

I'm trying to create a ML model which can detect if my dog is in pain just by looking at its face. Maybe, I'll create an app for it too if it works well.

Just launched: http://PageWal.la

It turns Facebook Business Pages into Web Sites. Give it a try!

Virtual tech talks for/by folks hacking on databases, emulators, compilers, operating systems, etc. Next one is this Thursday at 8pm EST with folks talking about writing JPEG encoder, talking about postgres wire compatability, and possibly a talk on bazel.

https://www.meetup.com/hackernights/

I quit my job to work by myself full time on an application development platform that I plan on using to roll out several developer/founder applications and services with. Eventually, I plan o building a no-code solution around and on top of the libraries and infrastructure I’ve been building. Also, will use it to relaunch my budgeting application @ budgetbloom.com

I am not working on anything specific but I have three ideas around a interesting alternative for google maps/yelp, a dating app that addresses the unbalanced experience of men/women, and a crypto idea that helps reduce your chances of your funds getting seized by the likes of the Canadian govt.

But ideas are cheap, a minimally viable product would be more impressive.

I'm building pagespace.app, a platform to create, publish and sell longer form rich content. The vision is a cross between Substack and Github.

I mention Github because much like code, good content and knowledge should change and improve over time and have lots of commits and pull requests.

I mention Substack as users can subscribe to authors (they can also buy individual books).

Working on a full-stack JavaScript framework: https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick.

Currently splitting my time between framework improvements in prep for a 1.0 (wrapping up a PostgreSQL integration today) and working on a deployment automation tool.

I'm working on a no-code platform [1]. Given that this space is getting crowded I am starting to investigate adding the ability to create NFTs and make the web3 space more friendly to non-developers which is exciting! (at least to me! :-)

[1] https://www.webase.com

Setting up a platform/cloud agnostic PaaS that a scrappy preproduct/early stage/pre-revenue startup can use without incurring large, spiky, unpredictable costs.

Because at this stage the startup has too much going on, this PaaS is very low overhead - so no Kubernetes complexity.

Think EC2/EBS/ELB at flat predictable rates.

I’m working on a free tool for job seekers. 1/ To protect them against not meaningful recruiters messages 2/ To help understand what values are important for them.

It will be called inbox.jobs. No central website but each user will have its own xyz.inbox.jobs and xyz@inbox.jobs email

My main area of interest is developer infrastructure -- hence I'm making a Git-like version control system for huge repos: https://www.haberdashervcs.com/

It's in crude form now, but I'm working to change that.

A robo-therapist (https://locserendipity.com/Rogerian.html) that might be a little better than Eliza, especially when used as an aid by a human therapist using Rogerian techniques.

I'm contributing to https://benthos.dev, the Go data streaming processor. The community around it is amazing and, even if it's not my own project, I feel that I'm doing something useful.

Home automation with arduino and Nodered.

I have already implemented the garden lights and the heat on off. I get temp and humidity data from the garden and i want to add some security features and implement a morning routine (warmup the espresso machine, start the heat, open the curtain)

I am training a reinforcement learning agent to defeat bosses in one of my favorite video games (dark souls 3)

https://youtube.com/channel/UCmoHCPYZviZ0iQ_t_j8cfaw

I'm having the time of my life working on Kit55 [1], a headless website builder based on Jinja2/Nunjucks, and specialized in multilingual site generation & SEO optimization.

[1] https://stack55.com

A spreadsheet that syncs two-ways with other SaaS apps (like Jira). Been working on something in this space for about 6 years, and it's really just started taking off.

https://www.visor.us

I am building something on top of GPT-3 that translates free form text into SQL commands.

I’m learning Vue. For both professional and hobby usage.

So far, the switch from jQuery, thrills me.

I love table tennis. I am fiddling around trying to make a 2d table tennis simulator that is focused on tactics, I am excited to find out if it can increase IRL table-tennis skill.

I'm converting my whole mindset and toolchain to reactive with Vert.x and Mutiny. It's really inspired me to build cooler things, with such convenient access to concurrency.

I want to build something where people can publish their own blog via their browser using webrtc and indexeddb. but i haven't started yet

I'm working on a better source-control, starting with game developers.

CUE powered developer tools and learning resources.

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof

https://cuetorials.com

Live streaming their development has been super fun too https://twitch.tv/dr_verm

A game that you play as a hobo.