What Are You Working On? (Feb 2024)

I am working on https://firedating.me/ - a community for FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) enthusiasts seeking friendships and/or romantic relationships.

This passion project of mine aims to decrease the feeling of loneliness within the FIRE community. The site is 100% free and doesn't even have ads.

The site will soon be 4 years old.

The stats are public - https://firedating.me/open/

My current goal is to reduce friction & to reactivate people who signed up, but stopped using the site.

I'm working on Rolepad (https://rolepad.com), a tool that brings together candidates (job application management) and hiring managers / recruiters (better candidate experience). The candidate side is pretty decent at this point, working on the employer side now. The first capability this will unlock is keeping the status of the application in sync between the two, for greater transparency and hopefully reduced ghosting.

I'm building https://comp.lol. It's AI powered mock coding interviews, FAANG style. Looking for alpha testers when I release, sign up if you wanna try it out or just wanna try some mock coding. If its slow to load, sorry, everything runs on free tiers right now.

I really dislike doing leetcode prep, and I can't intuitively understand the solutions by just reading them. I've found the best way for me to learn is to seriously try the problem (timed, interview like conditions), and be able to 'discuss' with the interviewer without just jumping to reading the solution. Been using and building this as an experiment to try prepping in a manner I like.

It's not a replacement for real mock interviews - I think those are still the best, but they're expensive and time consuming. I'm hoping to get 80% of the benefit in an easier package.

I just put a waitlist in case anyone wants to try it out and give me feedback when I get it out

Gonna apologize in advance about the copywriting. Was more messing around for my own amusement, will probably change later

I'm learning FPGAs, using the $25 Tang NANO 9K that I bought on Amazon Prime[1]. I just figured out how to use the PLL to generate clocks of arbitrary frequency, rather than the stock 27 Mhz.

I'm interested in using this board as the core of a SDR transceiver for the HF Amateur radio bands. Driving all the phases for a Tayloe polyphase mixer[4] should be trivial. The real question is, how high of a frequency can I get? ;-) Can I do 2 Meter SSB with it? I think I'll be able to do an NCO up to about 400 Mhz.

The reason I bought it in the first place is that I intend to design a BitGrid[2,3] chip, should there ever be another Google Shuttle, and this is my get to know Verilog project. I may break down and spend actual money on TinyTapeout[5] at some point in the future if Google gives up on the shuttles.

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I help an older friend continue to repair electronics. He's been fixing things since the 1950s, we've tackled everything from a jammed Scotch Thermal Laminator[6] machine through to Cesium Beam Atomic Clocks[7] with "dead" tubes. (Fun fact, usually you can use a high voltage power supply and time to power the ion pump and recover the tubes)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BCXYWV3T

[2] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid

[3] https://bitgrid.blogspot.com/

[4] https://www.norcalqrp.org/files/Tayloe_mixer_x3a.pdf

[5] https://efabless.com/tinytapeout

[6] https://www.scotchbrand.com/3M/en_US/p/pc/laminating/thermal...

[7] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/time/5061/5061B_ops.pdf

I'm changing my Arduino library (JPEGDEC) to be competitive on PCs with libjpeg-turbo. I'm not going to support the libjpeg API, nor every option, but if you need brute force decode speed, mine will be faster :)

Personally? Learning more Finnish, as always. Losing weight. Down about 10 pounds from my peak so far :)

At work? I'm trying to untangle the web of confusion I have around our build process.

We build the systems that show you what your next stop is on an LED or LCD display on busses, trains, trams, you name it - a custom hardware/software beast of an operation. Somehow, however, nobody ever got around to coding up a tool to give us a fully in silico testing environment. Needing physical hardware for everything is expensive!

I am working on https://photorealisticultrasound.com/. It converts 3D ultrasounds of not yet born babies into photo-like images using AI.

I am experiment with the funnel - how aggressive the preview quality needs to be.

Getting into Fuzzy algorithms because we need to normalice a 200k+ database of medical equipment of different suppliers. It's really fun actually, and right now I'm focusing on optimizing the speed of the overall app since I feel that it is the core problem right now.

Building a chatbot for my parents vacation rental. Lots of fun playing around with the new OpenAI assistant features (and nextjs)

https://www.askaway.bot/BanyanRose

An app that allows children to invest their allowance, where the interest is paid by their parents