Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?

Tinder To Decide What To Eat Tonight [0]. Or: Meal Planner For Couples.

It started as a web app for us, but more ppl asked. So I turned it into an app. Basically a meal planner / recipe manager for families and couples.

[0] https://whatdinner.com/

In my quest to master Rust, I'm building a (toy) Soulseek client in Rust. Souleek is an old (2001) closed-source p2p network still used to share underground music.

For learning purposes, I'm imposing the following restrictions:

- I can't use external dependencies (crates)

- I have to reverse engineer the Soulseek protocol myself

So far it's been a lot of fun and rewarding as it touches upon low-level concepts I don't have to deal with normally as a web dev.

When I was a child, my best friend and I were dreaming of making our own game. We got as far as writing (parts of) the story for a Lucasfilm Games-style point and click adventure, but my programming skills as a young teenager were too poor to actually make that game.

That idea has actually never left my mind though, and now, a few decades later, I've started to realize that if I don't get on it soon, I probably never will.

So I've started writing a game for the Commodore C64, 30 years after they stopped making them, and that's what I've been working on lately.

Have a look at the Internet Printing Protocol. I built a NodeJS app that pretended to be a printer and could receive real time transactional data from a legacy POS/software. No drivers required… supports HTTP auth… all OS’s have great support for it.

I have an old tigsource account that in theory I could reactivate... But for now, I'm still in the pre-dev phase, i.e., I'm actively working on it but I haven't written any code yet.

Funnily, compared to my teenage self, I now think that the coding part is going to be the least of the issues. Of course, working with an old architecture that is severely limited in storage and computational capabilities raises some interesting challenges, but I do not expect them to be unsurmountable.

Doing all the graphics and the sounds all while keeping it an interesting gameplay experience (good narrative, challenging but not frustrating puzzles) will be the much harder task, I think. And ultimately there's also the problem that the majority of all indie game projects is facing: sticking with it until the end.