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

1

Medium

I'm writing more software-related articles. Just finished my 2nd in the past month, this one on why you should "always be refactoring." https://medium.com/@DougDonohoe/ce45d56c8773 Writing well is hard and takes time. Was it Mark Twain that said "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."? I can totally relate to that this month. Getting your point across without being long winded is challenging.

#Blogging #Blogging Platform #CMS 2545 social mentions

2

Qwikrank

#Blogging #Content Creation #Content Automation 1 social mentions

3

Anytype.io

Expanding some - the tags concept is similar to AnyType[0] types, but the rest of the software I’m writing is more oriented towards dump-first, tag, and let it sort itself out, whereas AnyType requires careful management and configuration of the workspace. [0] https://anytype.io/.

#Task Management #Personal Notes #Bookmarks 57 social mentions

4

Twine

Some sort of escape room backbone software that links together all of the hardware according to a script is such a neat idea. It would be so cool to have something like Twine [0] to build out the story graphically, where input/output is via cues to staff/hardware rather than just text on screen. An old boss of mine used to run home-haunts for halloween. (a walk-through haunted house experience scaffolded-up in his yard) I helped him a few times, and I was always amazed by how big of a community there was. There were at least 5-6 people doing a haunt next week and would come help out at his, then he would help at their haunt the next week. My boss was even making a magazine for the community for a while. Something for those folks doing quick popup theatrical events/escape rooms that could handle some "duct tape engineering" would totally have an interested market, and if it was open source you'd get great patches. BUT I also get what you mean, have find out what works first. Do you have a blog for your escape room progress? That sounds like such a cool thing to follow you making! [0] (https://twinery.org/).

#Visual Novel Engine #Conversion Optimization #IDE 282 social mentions

5

Image Assets Generator

Frontend is textbook modern react: React19,next15,tailwind4 - AI mostly writes the code in the frontend (Cursor + Cline + sequentialthinking + context7 + my own custom "memory bank" process of breaking down tasks). AI is really, really good at this. I wrote this https://image-assets.etelej.com/ in literally 2 days 2 weekends ago with less than 10% of code being mine (mostly infra + hono APIs).

#Design Tools #Photos & Graphics #AI Image Generator 1 social mentions

6

NumPad

I launched my web-based notepad calculator, https://numpad.io/, a few years ago. Right now I'm working on a version 2 that has user accounts, multiple documents, markdown support, and document exports. Everything is local-first and it uses CRDTs to sync documents. It looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/Plk1DQ4.png the calculator is mostly the same for now, with a few improvements. It's unstable right now, so I don't want to publicise the dev url, but if you'd like to become a beta tester email me at contact@numpad.io.

#Calculators #Productivity #Unit Conversion 5 social mentions

7

Bangle.io

I’m working on a web based note taking app that is open source and lets you own the notes in your file system - https://bangle.io.

#Office & Productivity #Word #Note Taking 9 social mentions

I am building a couple of apps: https://spicychess.com: A real-time chess playing app where you can taunt your opponent and smack them during the game! If you smack them enough times to completely drain their health, you can steal their turn and make their move. There is also has a progression system where leveling unlocks increasingly fun abilities designed to torment and troll your opponent. https://wordazzle.com: Inspired by the quote 'the limits of my language are the limits of my world,' it's a daily game delivering 7 carefully chosen, sublime words designed to genuinely elevate your verbal prowess. You can also save the words you love as flashcards to review them later!

#Games #Android #iPhone 3 social mentions

9

TestDriver.ai

#Developer Tools #Testing #AI 1 social mentions

10

Productivity Power Tools

Https://github.com/dh1011/c2p I’m developing a VS Code and Cursor extension that helps developers quickly copy all code in a workspace to the clipboard for use with LLMs. It also displays the token count for each file, as well as the total token count across the workspace. By default, it ignores files listed in .gitignore, but this behavior can be customized in the extension settings, along with many other options.

#Regular Expressions #Programming Tools #Development 470 social mentions

11

TheBlue.social

#Social Media Tools #Social Media Scheduling #Bluesky 2 social mentions

12

Mastodon

For awhile I've been working on an MPE MIDI controller called the Mosaichord. It uses a tuning system called just intonation, where the frequencies of all the notes are related to each other by whole number ratios. I'm using a scale that has 28 notes per octave. Keys are pressure sensitive. A few weeks ago I got a video of one of my friends playing it at a show: https://mastodon.social/@DesiderataSystems Something I'm working on right now is trying to implement a basic on-board synthesizer so people can use it without a laptop or external hardware synth. (I added a DAC a couple hardware revisions back, I just haven't done anything interesting with it yet.) The firmware is open source and there's a fairly detailed user manual.

#Decentralized Social Network #Open Source #Social Network 720 social mentions

13

OnlineOrNot

I recently spent a week building a pricing experiment to test whether moving OnlineOrNot from feature based pricing (upgrade to a higher tier for more features) to pure usage (all features enabled, additional monitors cost money). Not your regular "idea" but still interested in how it plays out. https://onlineornot.com for the curious.

#Uptime Monitoring #Website Monitoring #Monitoring Tools 63 social mentions

#AI 3 social mentions

15

ProductMe

ProductMe App: A Duolingo-like app for learning product management theory — perfect for those who don’t want to spend thousands on PM bootcamps or courses. It’s free to use with a reasonable daily limit (5 lessons). To access unlimited learning and additional utility features, it's ~$4.99/month https://productme.org.

#Education #Online Learning #Elearning Platform 2 social mentions

16

DaemonStack

Working on adding Job schedule and cron features in Daestro[1]. About Daestro: Daestro is workload orchestrator that can run compute jobs across cloud providers and on your own compute as well. More like cloud agnostic batch jobs or step functions. [1]: https://daestro.com.

#Cloud Computing #Cloud Infrastructure #Cloud Management 2 social mentions

I've been building an intentionally annoying app against doomscrolling [1]. I've recently started with marketing, but oh boy is that out of my comfort zone! I never thought that as an engineer I'd be doing TikToks. And here I am. It's fun to crack the algorithm little by little, but also frustrating because it's like a black box. So far, I've discovered that going to the point works best. For example, I was sharing student tips and including my app in there. But conversion was terrible. Instead, I'm doing founder stories and tutorials, which get less views but more downloads. Plus, I can ask people in the comments for feedback on the app! I'm happy to be doing something that devs overlook so much: marketing. Even if it's tough and slow. It's been an awesome learning experience. [1] https://speedbumpapp.com/en/.

1 social mentions

18

Checkvist

#Outliner #Task Management #Project Management 17 social mentions

19

InvoiceDen

I built a simple PDF invoice generator a few months ago. Been polishing that up recently: https://invoiceden.com/.

#Accounting & Finance #Billing & Invoicing #Invoicing 1 social mentions

20

Pinggy.io

A one command tunneling tool to get public URLs to localhost. No installation required. https://pinggy.io.

#Localhost Tools #Testing #Webhooks 111 social mentions

21

Birdfeeder

I’m working on supporting photo posts on my blog (Kirby), I bought a new camera and thought it would be nice to share them in one place (Cross post to Mastodon). I’m still looking for a new SaaS idea, so if you have something you want to partner on do reach out. Preferably Rails or Go. Previously I built stuff like https://getbirdfeeder.com/.

#Bookmarks #Productivity #Twitter 5 social mentions

22

Quasar Framework

Cool, could also check out a unified App platform framework: https://quasar.dev/ Cheers =3.

#Development Tools #JavaScript Framework #Developer Tools 7 social mentions

I'm working on https://kaiboard.com which was at first throwaway project that somehow survived and now has couple of users who love it :).

1 social mentions

24

LowRes NX

#Game Engine #Graph Databases #Game Development 3 social mentions

25

Hey Meta

Working out some smaller bugs of my meta tags checker / builder HeyMeta, which I've rebuilt in Svelte (prevously used Node.js for both FE and BE and it was buggy as hell) https://heymeta.com Also revisited and updated Let's see, an eye trainer, which is basically a PWA you can "install" on your tablet/mobile/e-reader. I'm not a scientist, but have had some success training my eyes with this technique and wanted to make a simple app that I can share with my friends to try. https://letssee.publicspace.co/ Any feedback welcome :).

#Documentation #SEO Tools #Web App 1 social mentions

26

TextQuery

I've been working on https://textquery.app -- query raw data from your desktop. I love exploring data, but it always felt clunky to juggle multiple tools, write scripts, or run commands just to import and query a dataset. TextQuery is the tool I built to solve that mess. You can import CSV, JSON, and XLSX files and start querying them instantly using SQL. Want to create a chart? Just hop over to the Visualize tab. I'm also rolling out a major update this week — adding tabs, filters, a redesigned UI, and keyboard shortcuts. Looking ahead, I’m planning to expand support for more formats (like Parquet and ORC) and data sources (like Postgres and BigQuery), so you can import data from anywhere, and query it right from your desktop. Something like a local data warehouse. With Apple Silicon, the capability of a desktop can make it very cost-efficient compared to something like BigQuery, Snowflake, or Athena. Happy to hear any feedback!

#Productivity #Developer Tools #Diagrams 1 social mentions

27

Glicol

After trying to start a business for a year, I basically gave up negotiating with VCs. My current goal is to spend half of my time on the development and maintenance of open source projects, such as Glicol (https://glicol.org/). The other half of my time is to do some profitable business. I just found that the VC model is not suitable for my current situation.

#Music Generation #Music Tools #3D 33 social mentions

Building a foot traffic API to see the busiest venues (bars, shops, museums, etc) in (your) worldwide neighborhood: https://besttime.app.

#Music #Events #Tech 2 social mentions

29

Go Micro

Two things. I have revived my work on Go Micro (https://github.com/micro/go-micro). As a VC funded company there was a lot of confusion around the tools we were building and we veered off in a direction that alienated the community. With the company dead, funding gone, etc there's an opportunity to rebuild value around the Go Micro framework. The second thing I'm working on is the Reminder (https://reminder.dev && <a href="https://github.com/asim/reminder">https://github.com/asim/reminder</a>). As a muslim I feel like it's my duty to spread the word of Islam and as an engineer I feel like an appropriate way to do that is build an app and API for the Quran, names of Allah and hadith. It's a slow patient building of something as opposed to expecting anything from it. In terms of new ideas, maybe not new but less screen time, less phones, more nature.

#Developer Tools #Web Frameworks #Python Web Framework 7 social mentions

30

Orbiter.Host

Working on static website hosting. Thinking about how I can build backend functionality for customers as well while maintaining the openness that the static hosting has offered. https://orbiter.host.

#Hosting #Web Hosting #Static Web Hosting 1 social mentions

31

Camelcamelcamel

I shared this last month as well but I’ve added a couple new features since then: a weekly digest email, a list of what you’re tracking and a price history chart. I’ve been building https://lowlow.bot, it tracks price changes on any website. I was inspired by https://camelcamelcamel.com, but wanted something that worked for more than just Amazon.

#eCommerce #eCommerce Tools #eCommerce Platform 401 social mentions

32

Resume YaY

Resume builder 7 months ago, I was looking for a job and got frustrated with the current resume builders, so decided to build one exactly how I wanted a resume builder to be. - Free (like really free). - No signup, no login. - Has AI features to improve text. - Find jobs matching the resume. https://resumeyay.com.

#Careers #Resume Builder #AI 2 social mentions

33

PodSnacks

PodSnacks (https://podsnacks.org) — Personalized AI summaries of top podcasts, delivered to your inbox. I've been building PodSnacks because I found it overwhelming to keep up with podcasts across tech, business, and science. PodSnacks uses LLMs to summarize the most popular episodes from shows like Lex Fridman, Acquired, All-In, Invest Like the Best, and more. You choose your favorite shows, and we email you short, high-signal summaries — no audio to skim through, no endless backlog guilt. So far: 126K+ episode summaries generated.

#AI Tools #Email Newsletters #Podcast 1 social mentions

34

Internet in Box

The D Library - 100% decentralized operating on the D.Licence (pun intended). Currently working on a solidity upgrade for a leader-board, and public analytics. D-Safe for children, adults and plants. I am looking for contributors to integrate it on https://internet-in-a-box.org . No worries, I'll do it myself if everyone is busy. https://datapond.earth Email: data at datapond.earth.

#Cloud Computing #Control Panels #VPS 20 social mentions

Https://drawbeats.com This is one of my long-standing passion projects, a simple web-based music sequencer built to have a very low barrier to entry.

#Audio & Music #Music #Web App 3 social mentions

Https://domdb.com - aftermarket domain name aggregator and search engine. It has integrated BIN inventories from Afternic, Sedo, Namecheap, Porkbun, and Gname. Currently working on custom price alerts and an API.

#Domain Names #Web App #Social Media Tools 1 social mentions