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

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221–230 of 900 posts

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

#221
For a long time I've been wanting a private, E2EE social media app for sharing pics/videos of my son with friends and family, but haven't found anything fitting that description. Like most people, we've just been using group texts; the closest alternative I found was shared photo albums, but we wanted the ability to make "posts" with a few pictures and some text. So I've been building it and using it for a couple months with some friends, it's a strange feeling to have the ergonomics of social media with none of the toxic nonsense.

Most people I know are using group texts for this, but I find that unsatisfying because my wife and I want to share stuff with ~20 people, but we don't want to be blasting all of them with texts all the time, or put those 20 people in a group text with each other. We wanted something pub/sub, but with the privacy of E2EE chat apps, and so easy to use our parents will use it.

It's a React app running on Cloudflare Workers, and there's an iOS app in the works using Capacitor; the E2EE is built on OPAQUE. There's a landing page/signup at freefollow.org if you'd like to learn more. I'm working on some demo videos.

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

#222

I'm finishing up a "book tour" (mostly podcasts) for my recently released book on how the country of Estonia modernized so quickly post re-independence from the Soviet Union and became a leader in e-government services and a top EU startup hub (Skype, Bolt, Wise, etc.). I'd love if people checked it out and gave feedback as it's my first big published work and the culmination of quite a few years of research and writ…

Is the story about the Scottish football fans I once heard about them staying true, and partly to blame for some of the entrepreneurial mindset?

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

#223

My roommate and I are still working on Tornyol, our mosquito killing drone! It uses ultrasonic sonar to detect mosquitoes, and missile control theory to ram into mosquitoes and grind them in its propellers. Our target platform is a 40 grams tinywhoop so it’s safe to fly everywhere and makes almost no noise :). A Roomba for mosquitoes! The main plus compared to traditional systems is that a drone can cover an enormous…

Any problems with the blades getting dirty?

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

#226
post #20

90s.dev. Well, kind of. I've been working a ton on some variations and ports of it over the last couple months, but the problem is that I need funding. So my plan is to setup github sponsors, where for each project people want me to work on, they can donate any amount, and for each $25, I'll work one hour on that project. It'll have a few related projects that all come from a unified vision I have for 90s.dev -- to b…

[deleted]

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

#227

Working on fabric construction blocks (like Lego of clothing), that you can use to build clothing and accessories completely by hand without any tools or machines. Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_eKc6c5tDw

Clever seams. Have you tried washing any of the garments?

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

#228
I am currently in the process of implementing a TLV message protocol (think MsgPack, CBOR, etc).

This is something I've been kicking tires on since my time at $BIGCORP; JSON without the bloat, Protobufs without the ceremony. I've drawn a lot of inspiration from MsgPack, CBOR, and Ion 1.1. Big emphasis on a tight set of core primitives, low-cost extensions, storing reused values/schemas, optional pre-negotiation, etc. That said, I've now been spending time trying to study the performance angle to make sure the design doesn't have a negative impact on encoding/decoding performance before committing to the implementation.

Regrettably nothing much to show (at least yet), but hopefully if nothing else it will become my go-to format for other personal projects that I work on.

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

#229
I'm working on my game "Night of the Trickster". It's a Christmas themed stealth/horror game

After tinkering with game technology for years now, I'm pleased I've finally managed to use all that knowledge to create something (soon to be) releasable

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3407760/The_Night_of_the_...

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

#230

I am working on DataGrid Toolkit. Based on my experiences building and selling (Excel like) data grids, people always look for your data grid, "but can it do this"? With DataGrid Toolkit, a developer can choose his own building blocks/modules and make a more Excel-like data grid, or make a more DataTables style traditional paginated table. The toolkit is headless and stateless by design and comes with different rende…

What are some of the more obscure requirements people have on data grids?

Well not really obscure, but some want formulas, some want advanced filters, grouping/pivoting. Nothing that's not done before but you don't want to say yes to all these things as the product will lose its core identity and strength.

So I will release my new data grid component based on my own toolkit, and if people want tweaks or "add these features", I will demonstrate them the toolkit.

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