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

https://ewatchbill.com - a fair schedule generator that uses simulated annealing to minimize a ‘unfairness’ heuristic. I wrote it for my friends in the Navy who have to write duty bills every month.

https://bearingsonly.net - a submarine combat game in the browser.

Fostrom (https://fostrom.io)

A developer-focused IoT Cloud Platform. The idea stems from pain points experienced while automating an indoor farm a few years ago where I had to spend way too much time building the data collection and analysis infrastructure instead of focusing on the actual automation.

Devices connect via secure MQTT, HTTP, or WebSockets and send structured, typed data. Each device gets its own sequential mailbox for messages. You can trigger webhooks or broadcast messages to other devices based on incoming data, powered by programmable actions.

Just deployed to production. Currently working on Device SDKs (coming very soon) and time-series analytics. Check out the platform, we're in technical preview now. Happy to answer questions and appreciate any feedback.

Mathbreakers 2 (https://mathbreakers.com)

A 3D game to help students in grades 5-8 learn Arithmentic, Fractions, Geometry, and Algebra.

50% or more of middle school students experience math anxiety, and it's no wonder that so many people grow up believing, "I'm not a math person." Math can be incredibly fun and beautiful if approached and experienced the right way. Mathbreakers is a vibrant, interactive world where all game mechanics are built on intrinsic mathematical properties, so simply by playing the game, a foundation of understanding of those concepts is built.

We're doing early prototype testing now with a planned launch in September 2025. The game engine is PlayCanvas (engine-only) and the platform is WebGL (Mac/PC/ChromeOS).

https://easel.games

A game engine that lets you code multiplayer games without coding the multiplayer! My idea was to put multiplayer into the fabric of the programming language itself. This allows the engine to automatically turn your game into a multiplayer game, without you needing to learn anything about networking or synchronization. I imagine there are lots of people who have the talent and creativity to create a multiplayer game but don't have the interest or patience in learning how to code multiplayer, and so that's who this is for!

I've been working on this for 3 years and there were lots of tricky parts rolling back and deterministically executing a whole programming language, but it's working now! My next phase is to increase the breadth of features so better games can be made with it!

I recently quit my salary job after 16 years and am consulting in nuclear engineering now. I have a few passion projects that I'm working on (between the somewhat substantial consulting work that came out of the woodwork):

- Nuclear Reactor Starter Kit --- an open source set of procedures, processes, templates, and maybe even some IT advice that should help newcomers start companies with nuclear quality assurance programs easily and quickly while also making a new format in which nuclear companies can share lessons learned in efficiency.

- Reactor Database --- similar to the iaeas PRIS but focused on reactor development rather than power reactors. Will include nuclear startup company tracking with details gleaned from statements and maybe extrapolated where necessary from simple simulations. Will include things like fuel cost and licensing progress. This way people can more easily separate vaporware from real nuclear, and keep track of promises vs delivery.

A mobile app called Trip o'clock (https://tripoclock.com)

An AI-trip planner with a nice twist. It shows you everything you need to know about a place even before getting there: Images, a great summary, cost of living broken down weather conditions etc. It also comes with the usual features you'll expect in a trip planning app (ai itinerary suggestions, travel expenses tracker, group chat for group trips, google places integration for looking up places to eat, things to do, healthcare places and transportation centers, and a private travel checklist). You should check it out today!

OpenCLI - https://github.com/bcdxn/opencli

A document specification for defining command line interfaces.

It's really just a fun side project to get more familiar with Go. The goal is to be able to generate boilerplate code in a few languages/frameworks and to generate documentation in a couple formats.

Love these threads..

Decided to do an extended sabbatical after being part of one of the many tech layoffs the last years, and I'm thus working on things I like, instead of things that pay..

Collecting and cataloging craft beer venues from around the world, at https://wheretodrink.beer Still a WIP, and it's not trying to be the most extensive list, but I want it to be a substantial list. Once I reach a certain maturity in the data I'll probably look to spawn minor projects off from the data set.. have a couple ideas already that I'll just keep to my self for now :D

I also had a set of left over domains relating to beer that I'm offering up for use with BlueSky handles, and beer related link pages at https://drnk.beer - a bit on the back burner.

I've been collecting and digitizing vintage print advertisements and publishing them (https://adretro.com).

I have tens of thousands of ads in the collection and it would take me many lifetimes to complete, but I've been using AI to extract and catalog the meta data. I can get through about 100 ads/day this way.

One of my favorite ads, a computer from 1968 that "answers riddles": https://adretro.com/ads/1968-digi-comp-digi-comp-1-table-top...

I'm collecting a collection of PEG grammars here https://mingodad.github.io/cpp-peglib and Yacc/Lex grammars here https://mingodad.github.io/parsertl-playground/playground both are wasm based playgrounds to test/develop/debug grammars.

The idea is to improve the tooling to work with grammars, for example generating railroad diagrams, source, stats, state machines, traces, ...

On both of then select one grammar from "Examples" then click "Parse" to see a parse tree or ast for the content in "Input source", then edit the grammar/input to test new ideas.

There is also https://mingodad.github.io/plgh/json2ebnf.html to generate EBNF for railroad diagram generation form tree-sitter grammars.

Any feedback, contribution is welcome !

Ive almost finished the first version of a desktop video library app I've been writing for myself. I had the idea last year, but the cost of sending images to an LLM made it too expensive (to run over about 1500 videos), but now it's fairly reasonable.

In the app you pick a folder with videos in it and it stores the path, metadata, extracts frames as images, uses a local whisper model to transcribe the audio into subtitles, then sends a selection of the snapshots and the subtitles to an LLM to be summarised. The LLM sends back an XML document with a bunch of details about the video, including a title, detailed summary and information on objects, text, people, animals, locations, distinct moments etc. Some of these are also timestamped and most have relationships (i.e this object belongs to this location, this text was on this object etc). I store all that in a local SQLLite database and then do another LLM call with this summary asking for categories and tags, then store them in the DB against each video. The App UI is essentially tags you can click to narrow down returned videos.

I plan on adding a natural language search (Maybe RAG -- need to look into the latest best way), have half added Projects so I can group videos after finding the ones I want, and have a bunch of other ideas for this too. I've been programming this with some early help from Aider and Claude Sonnet. It's getting a bit complex now, so I do the majority of code changes, though the AI has done a fair bit. It's been heaps of fun, and I'm using it now in "production" (haha - on my PC)

A web os; it's full recreation of the Lisa Office System GUI in Javascript. The entire thing is output to a single canvas element, which has forced me to write a number of the UI components from scratch that I'd normally take for granted. It's got an IndexedDB filesystem, and it's got apps. I'm almost done working on the first real app for it - a word processor akin to LisaWrite. Once I roll that out, I intend to do a ShowHN post.