Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

Currently I'm working on a few different developer tools, as part of my continuing mission to make my own life easier. I figure they're probably cool because if I'm scratching my own itch then I should be scratching itches for other devs too.

* GitHubReminder - serendipitous email reminders about your starred repos on GitHub. https://githubreminder.org/

* JSComplexity - code complexity metrics for JavaScript. http://jscomplexity.org/

* CoffeeComplexity - code complexity metrics for CoffeeScript projects (still in development).

* GrepSrc - regex-based source code search engine (still in development).

Excellent. Two of my clients need exactly this service. We have the pain point you describe, i.e. needing to build out AWS, Rackspace, etc. Currently we build custom AWS images, however we'd much rather pay for a HIPAA stack. Kudos!

I'm working on a gmail replacement to deploy on my own server. It's called kite. It uses a lot of cool techs like vagrant, puppet, angularjs and of course, postfix for mail handling.

For the moment, it doesn't do much besides displaying a list of emails in a maildir but in a week or two I should have thread handling written.

The source is at: http://github.com/khamidou/kite (sorry for the lack of readme, I should get around to do this tomorrow)

I feel bad for those guitarists...

I've been using Guitar Pro for most the time that I've been playing guitar and bass, and the fact that the playback is Midi has not been much of an issue (and I wasn't sold on Guitar Pro 5 "real sound engine" or whatever it was called). Though I've been playing bass which has less subtleties in my main genre (rock/metal). Even with guitar the heavy lifting for me is to learn what fingers goes where on the fretboard. After that, I can listen to the actual song and polish whatever nuances I feel that I need, without referring to the tab (since I know where the fingers goes on the fretboard at this point).

I'm working on a JSON based website layout and component system.

For example: a component that lists blog posts could be represented by:

  {
    options:{
      elements:[image, title, author, date]
    },
    criteria:{
      sort:date.desc, 
      published:true, 
      limit:10
    },
    request_vars:{page:3}
  }

That would show the last 10 posts that are published, ordered by date, on page 3 of the results.

That's a simple example, this site: volumeone.org is built almost entirely this way.

Since it's in JSON format, JavaScript can be used to build UIs that build the components and layouts.