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Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

#293
I'm building an uptime monitoring service, in Elixir, called https://larm.dev. It's a tough field because for some reason people vibe coding apps think this is very easy to do, and there are new apps coming out pretty much every day. I'm still figuring out how to effectively stand out in the noise.

I really enjoy working on the app though. The backend is Elixir, with a Phoenix LiveView dashboard. I've got a cluster of 3 nodes running, talking to each other. The probes that check the monitoring targets are tiny go binaries, spread across hosting providers across the world. I've also got synthetic probes now, running in little playwright sandboxes.

A lot of the challenges have been around how to distribute work across the probes, with different strategies for the basic TCP/HTTP probes vs the synthetic workers, and how to effectively store large amounts of events (Clickhouse).

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

#294
I'm building a program that should help golf courses and golf course architects design better courses. I've been writing about it on my blog. My goal is to start a golf architecture consulting company, and help design/redesign courses that are better.

The general thesis on identifying architecturally interesting areas on the golf course: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/i-spent-the-last-month...

Identifying dynamic golf design so you get more interesting play on the same course: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/friday-pins-vs-sunday-...

Measuring the addition and removal of hazards and how it dynamically affects different skill levels, and how to measure that: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/measure-2000-times-cut...

How I created a golf dispersion pattern generator -- which I made open source -- so that it can be improved, because the golf analytic companies already have the data and almost certainly won't share it: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/how-to-bake-a-dispersi...

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

#295
I have a keyboard I bought in 2020 called the Makerdiary M60 keyboard. It runs Python, and over the years I've coded in various functions. But it was somewhat buggy, and the upstream firmware was never upgraded.

I love the hardware because it's the only keyboard I've been able to find that keeps a live Bluetooth connection and lets you toggle back and forth between USB and Bluetooth instantly using only a keyboard shortcut. That means you use two computers, and switch back and forth as fast as you can type. Years ago I also added a feature that changes the backlight color based on the active connection, so you can instantly tell which computer your typing will go to. I haven't been able to find any other keyboard that's quite as nice.

Lately I've spent weeks using an LLM to update the extremely old keyboard firmware to the latest firmware of its components (e.g., Circuitpython, the BLE firmware, the boot loader) and implementing all of my dream keyboard features that I never had the gumption to spend hours implementing pre-LLM. I finally resolved years-old bugs, and I added things like layer-based backlighting (so that the individual keys with relevant functions are lit), a better battery gauge, better sleep/suspend timing, backlight calibration, better debounce, and so on.

I've also upgraded the hardware and added batteries to each of the keyboards (I have three of these, one at home, one in the office, and one for travel).

It has been a very satisfying project, finally scratching a years-old itch.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

#297

I've been building the most advanced automotive diagnostic app on the market I used to be a mechanic, and spend a lot of my free time working on project vehicles, motorcycles, tractors, trucks etc. I wanted a tool to track the tasks I needed done, then a way to easily access VIN info for parts search, then I DMV records, and finally built an iphone app to scan the OBD2 diagnostic codes and hook them up to a custom ai…

Looks great, I would like to try it out. Can you recommend any OBD2 adapter? I’m driving a Ford from 2019.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

#298
hi! i'm building https://easyinvoicepdf.com - a free and open-source invoice generator.

currently building a backend for recurring invoices, a public API, and an MCP server. recently hit 1k stars on GitHub =)

https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf

features:

- no sign-up required and no ads

- live PDF preview & instant download

- save seller & buyer profiles

- flexible tax support (VAT, GST, sales tax, etc.)

- fully customizable invoice templates

- 120+ currencies and 10 languages supported

- and much more

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

#299
i'm working on a mobile app which spins up https://sprites.dev/ sandboxes, allows you to log in with your coding agent cli/subscription (claude code and codex currently supported), connect other services (github, vercel) and run+manage your coding agents in a convenient chat interface

it's for people who dont own a home server, don't like to keep their laptops open and working, don't want to trust on magical stuff openclaw does and instead would like to work with the usual harness they are working with day-to-day, don't want to be vendor-locked (crush/opencode/glm-5.2 and other models/providers support to come) but want to have a way to execute ideas while being away from their laptops

the demo is available on testflight and going to be released to play market soon as well

it's very alpha version but it's functional

lmk if anyone would like to test

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