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

I'm working on tooling to turn kids from consumers into creators. I'm focusing on game development initially, but have plans for video production and hands on crafts.

For older kids I've been making it easier to write games in Godot using TypeScript:

https://breaka.club/blog/godots-most-powerful-scripting-lang...

I'm building tooling using this technology which allows kids to create their own games, this is itself presented as a game kids can play through. Basically, imagine if Roblox actually delivered on its promises to kids.

Most of what we're building will be open sourced, so that older kids / young adults will be able export their projects and share their creations stand-alone.

Of course, telling kids they can create their own game is only relevant is kids want to do that. We're not locked into one way of thinking. We've also modified Overcooked 2, a traditionally co-op game and introduced a visual scripting platform which allows kids to code their way through levels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ackD3G_D2Hc

Overcooked 2 won't be the only game for which we do this. Introducing coding to existing games is a fun way to teach kids to code, without yet burdening kids with too much creative freedom. Kids already want to play these games, so this approach allows us to bring educational tooling to kids rather than vice versa.

I used to be Head of Engineering at Ender, where we ran custom Minecraft servers for kids: https://joinender.com/ and prior to that I was Head of Engineering at Prequel / Beta Camp, where we ran courses that helped teenagers learn about entrepreneurship: https://www.beta.camp/. During peak COVID I also ran a social emotion development book subscription service with my wife, a primary school teacher.

I’m working on https://spoken.me language practice for intermediate and advanced learners of English and Spanish. Hoping to launch a new flashcard experience in the next few days and a new role playing mode in the coming weeks. We’re small fry at the moment but it beats working at FAANG (except for the money)

Now that Claude 4 is out, I’m making some updates to the project I’ve built primarily just with Claude Code: https://github.com/mwalkerr/BookmarkCanvas

It’s just a basic IntelliJ plugin which provides an infinite canvas to add code bookmarks to. I work on a large code base and often have to take on tasks involving lots of unfamiliar areas of code and components which influence each other only through long chains of indirection. Having a visual space to lay things out, draw connections, and quickly jump back into the code has been really helpful

The canvas and UI is built using Java AWT since that’s what IntelliJ plugins are built on, but it occurred to me that I could just throw in a web view and use any of the existing JS libraries for working on an infinite canvas. React Flow has seemed like the best option with tldraw being what I’d fallback to.

But then.. if the canvas is built with web technology then there’s no reason to keep it just within an IntelliJ plugin vs just a standalone web app with the ability to contain generic content that might open files in IntelliJ or any other editor. I’m pretty sure the “knowledge database on a canvas” thing has been done a number of times already so I want to also see if there are existing open source projects that it’d be easy enough to just add a special node type to

Same, always wanted to do this, especially without looking stuff up, which feels like cheating. I haven't yet figured out the recursive tree search thing.

"Make games with Ease," and the cursor forming the "l," is really nifty.