Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

Simplification of my digital self. Removed most of my online accounts. Removed all my VPS's. Removed most apps from my phone except core ones. Cancelled a lot of online subscriptions.

In the real world finally moved everything to USB-C. Gave all my old cables away. I have two chargers in my home and a handful of C to C cables. Everything connects to everything now.

Home is now downgraded to a dumb home. Lights work on physical toggles. No hubs or sensors anywhere. Heat and AC is with a dumb panel on the wall.

It feels freeing.

Building an app that scans file systems prior to being migrated into M365. Looks for common governance issues and file and folder trees that won’t play nice in SharePoint. Not a migration tool as such, just something to scratch a consultancy itch. Python and Tkinter for now until I hit something that requires more complexity. Also a command line version that I’ll use more often. This probably could have been a PowerShell script but this is more fun.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blazingban...

Completely free, no ads, no in-app purchases and no accounts / network required offline voice transcription.

I have also built the macOS/Windows/Linux versions which I'll also make free to download and available on my site soon (https://blazingbanana.com/).

iOS version is built and works (extremely well), just waiting for the Apple Developer signup process to complete.

Big shout out to https://github.com/mybigday/whisper.rn and https://huggingface.co/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/tree/main for making this even possible.

Any suggestions are welcome.

I'm working on "Cargo but for C".

It started out as something marginally more useful than vendoring your dependencies as submodules + baking in the knowledge of how to build a bunch of common projects.

I realized, though, that there was somehow a huge gap in the insane world of C build tools. There's nothing that:

- Lets you pin really precisely and builds everything from source (i.e. no binary repository)

- Does not depend on either a scripting language or a completely insane DSL (Conan uses Python, CMake is an eldritch horror, ditto Make, lots of other tools of course but none of them quite hit the mark)

- Has a good balance of "builds are data" and "builds are code".

Anyway, it's going great. There are, of course, a ton of problems to solve. Chief among them is the obvious caveat that C is not a monoculture like Rust. There will be zero upstream libraries that use this tool natively. But I don't think it matters. I think I can build something which is as much better to the existing tools as, say, UV was to existing Python tools, even with that disadvantage.

I'm working on hand-building mugs. Throwing clay around in a studio, etc.

But I'm also thinking about it as a product manager based on my tech experience. Looking at what people like in mugs, creating templates to exactly size the mugs to people's preferences, creating re-usable molds to put repeatable components together, and taking detailed notes on exactly what I am doing in-studio to create a repeatable, reliable process to create a product that will sell.

It is going poorly so far, but each iteration gets better, so hopefully I have everything down before I end up with 100+ unsellable mugs in my kitchen.

Deploying a bare metal k8s cluster with Talos on OVH. Talos is awesome.

https://diverticulitistracker.com/ I tried to vibe an app to track my diet and symptoms during a diverticulitis flare up.

I'm working on porting KiCad to the browser. It's a lot of sweat and tears, multithreading issues and some more sweat. I've updated a port of WxWidgets and now I support all the features KiCad needs with ~200 tests.

Right now I have a build that loads in the browser, but I really want to have "multithreading" which means workers in the web. One can use asyncify with emscripten to translate blocking C++ to WASM, but that transition is not perfect, right now I'm debugging a bug where there's a race condition that halts all execution and the main thread runs in an infinite loop waiting for the workers to stand up. I guess I'll have a few of those ahead.

The main goal is to 1. just have fun 2. use yjs as a collab backend so multiple people can edit the same PCB. This will probably work with pcbnew, KiCad's layout editor, since it has a plugin system and AFAIK I can do the sync layer there. For the rest ( schematic, component editor etc. ) I'll have to figure out something.. KiCad does not sync automatically if you modify a file, I'll have to do some lifting there.

Anyway, it's a lot of fun, I really want this thing to exist, I'm hoping that I won't run into a "wellll, this is just not going to work" kind of issue in the end.

Indoor walking as à FPF game. Works on any device, even smartohones. Light as feather. https://free-visit.net

I shared this last month, but I’m still having a lot of fun working on it.

I made a daily word puzzle called Tiled Words.

https://tiledwords.com

Currently about 2,000 people play every day and I’ve released 59 puzzles!

One feature I’m excited about is crowdsourcing puzzles. Today’s puzzle is a “community puzzle” made entirely from clues that players submitted! I plan to do this every week or two.

I wrote about launching and the first month of puzzles if you want to learn more!

https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/a-month-of-tiled-words...

I'm building a utility to help DJs find "play-out" versions of tracks they already like[1]. You can play with it here[2]. Streaming services are optimized for Radio Edits. But to actually mix a track, I usually need the Extended Mix, Club Edit, or a specific Remix. Manually searching for the "DJ version" of every single track in a 50-song playlist is tedious administrative work that kills the joy of digging.

Remixify automates the search while leaving the selection to you. You paste a Spotify playlist URL, and it helps you or provides you a good starting point for digging. It groups the results by the original track so you can quickly preview and save the versions you want to a new playlist.

We don't try to recommend new music or use AI to guess your taste. It just finds the usable versions of the music you already selected.

[1]https://github.com/kwakubiney/remixify

[2]https://remixify.xyz/

I’m working on a video game, purely for fun.

Here is a work in progress build:

https://muffinman-io.itch.io/space-deck-x

It is a combination of a shoot-em-up and deck building. You fly and shoot until you get to the boss, when you get your deck out to fight them.

That genre combination is definitely too ambitious, but I think it is fun to play and I’m enjoying making it.

I have a bunch of ideas how to combine the two parts better. But over the years, I’ve learned to control scope creep and actually ship pet projects.

Right now I’m in a middle of changing how enemy waves are spawned. After that I want to make a short tutorial and add two more bosses as well as more enemies.

If you end up playing it, please share your feedback I’ll be glad to hear it.

The game is made using Kaplay, a game dec library which brings me joy to use. I can best describe it as my friend described Pico-8: “easy things are easy”. But compared to Pico-8, Kaplay doesn’t have virtual console limitations and comes with a big library of components. Try it out, the community is small, but the library itself is really fun and easy to use.

EDIT: For context, this is about two weeks of work, in the evenings when my kid is asleep.