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

I just launched ‘The Phonics App’ to teach kids phonics.

I made a v1 about 5 years ago just for my daughter because I didn’t like any of the apps available. They were just games with a sprinkling of learning on top. She’d spend hours on there and learn F all except how to be addicted to dopamine.

So I made something very clean and very simple that we’d do together for 3 minutes a day. She learned to read really fast!

But… then I forgot all about it for 4 years, only remembering it when my second daughter needed to learn to read. She’s 3 and I taught her the first 26 sounds already.

At this point I wondered if it’d be good for other people so I contacted a phonics expert and they liked it too, so we spent the last 6 months making it into a proper app.

https://apps.apple.com/app/the-phonics-app/id6742649576

It’s going well so far. Lots of lovely messages from parents! If you have a 3-6 y old please let me know what you think of it!

I'm learning FreeCAD and 3D printing. My goals are to be able to print involute gears, and eventually various mechanical arithmetic devices, leading up to a mechanical version of my BitGrid. Also, I want to make an Armstrong shaper.

A friend gifted me a large box of semiconductors, and I'll be testing 7400 and 4000 series chips for the next week once my T48 EPROM Burner/IC tester shows up.

Still working on my software project for live music production [1]. At the moment, it only creates, forwards, and records MIDI note events, so it can't produce audio on its own. It has to be connected to external or virtual MIDI devices that can create sound. Turns out this is too much of a hassle and kind of a deal-breaker for most people (and to be fair, it is a hassle), so now I'm working on adding VST hosting support directly inside the app. If you're not familiar, VST (Steinberg Virtual Studio Technology) is pretty much the industry standard plugin system that most DAWs support. Different VSTs can create and filter audio data, and in a hosted context audio data can be sent between VST instances before going out to the speakers.

It's been tricky but interesting. VST plugins are basically packaged as DLL files of Windows COM(-ish) objects. Despite primarily being a Windows dev myself, I never worked directly with COM libraries or objects before. My app is written in C#, and .NET does have built-in "COM Interop" support, so it is possible. A few years ago, .NET added a new COM Interop Source Generator system [2, 3], and I'm trying to get it working with that. So far I've been making some progress, but it's still a lot of tedious work to setup.

(There are libraries/packages out there that implement VST in .NET already, but they mostly focus on plugin creation while I only need hosting. They're a lot heavier and more capable than I need. They also didn't use the newer Source Generator approach, so I figured I'd give it a shot myself.)

1. https://www.pulselyre.com/

2. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/native-int...

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZd1SGd7dSU

I've been working on extending Postgres to run on top of FoundationDB, effectively turning Postgres into a distributed database with all the modern features one would expect. Hoping to release an initial version for people to try out very soon!

I would use that!