Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

I’m working on a help center that keeps itself up-to-date - https://happysupport.ai (landing page is German, product is English)

Creating and maintaining an up-to-date help center is a huge hassle. In many companies there is no one that really feels obligated to take care of it.

We want to optimize this process:

- Creation: Just click through your process. We take a screenshot on every click and generate a full written article with screenshots and a GIF. You can also talk while recording to add additional context.

- Maintenance: Connect to your tools (GitHub, Asana, Slack, …) and we automatically suggest changes to your docs if your product changes.

- Consumption: Users can consume the content as they like: Read the docs themselves or ask a Q&A bot.

At the moment the creation and consumption parts are already working well. Now I’m working on the maintenance part.

A few things!

1. After hearing Cell by Pannotia, I became obsessed with trying my hand at making a bit of electronic music. I have an Arturia Keystep 32, a Korg NTS-1 and a Korg SQD-1 to mess around with, but I'd really love to learn how to capture the sound on the Pannotia's album since it speaks to me on a visceral level (album link for the curious: https://pannotia.bandcamp.com/album/cell)

2. Turning some old telephones into fun "audio guestbooks", have some additional features lined up that I am going to add (just waiting on parts to arrive), trying to improve a bit on the ones shown in this excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI6ielrP1SE

3. Managed to get a blog post up recently. My work is not exactly what I would call "HN worthy" but if you need a laugh or some decent toilet reading, it probably qualifies (my blog: https://futz.tech/)

I love these threads. So many people working on so many different and interesting things. Renews my hope for the future, a bit.

I just started on an old-school forum software. Go + Sqlite. Good old server-side HTML templating.

Why? I don’t like Discourse and Flarum that much. I want an even simpler solution with fewer bells and whistles.

But I guess the market is dead anyways for forums. I might replace my phpBB instance that has been running for 15 years.

Broadly: Still forging ahead building a game server framework in Erlang. I've shifted my attention away from Godot integration (which AFAIK is still working) and toward LÖVE and Lua. Godot is great, but having to write GDScript on the client and Erlang on the backend has caused me many headaches in my game logic. My current goal is to have a beautiful, concurrent, Erlang-based control plane with Lua-based game logic running on both the server and the client.

To that end, I've most recently been hacking on Robert Virding's Luerl (https://github.com/rvirding/luerl), working to adapt the Lua test suite to chase down some small compatibility issues between PUC Lua and Luerl. While Lua is a lovely language, it would also be swell to get Fennel working under Luerl. I wrote a game for the LÖVE jam a few months ago in Fennel and it was a pleasant way to dip my toes into lisp-likes.

I've also been adding things to control plane software, Overworld, here and there: https://github.com/saltysystems/overworld Happily all of the Protobuf and ENet stuff that I've already built nicely carries over into the LÖVE world.

This might be a bit off-topic, but I've been working on my drum sounds. I was pretty unhappy that snares + kickdrum ended up being really loud, so I'd turn down the drum sounds, so the hihat and cymbals also went down and couldn't compete with the guitars... Ended up splitting the drums into a bus per function, so I could control and possibly compress or effect the snare and kick separately.

Now I have wonderful crashes and hihats cutting through the guitars and bass, without the snare and kick overpowering everything. This also taught me some insights about balancing relative volume levels and/or lowering dominating buses against each other and compensating upwards on some upstream bus as necessary, which I think also improved the balance of the entire rhythm section.

Except, now I'm kind of unhappy with my kickdrum sound. Some of the bands I listen to and saw at the festival I just was on have some amazing, epic kick drum sounds. It's like a giant mountain troll hammering into the gates of a castle and - on the right PA - kicks you right in the gut, literally. We had a good laugh a few days that some dudes jacket moved with the kickdrum. My kickdrum currently sounds more like wet cardboard flopping against a wall though.

Besides that, I'm however looking at moving some of my notes on audio engineering on linux onto a blog to end up with something like Protondb at a smaller scale, as well as some of the steps and things to do to get audio plugins working on linux, what audio plugins work well, which I could not get to work. I am just realizing, I need to learn quite a bit more about wine, architectures and such to write good articles and ideas about this. But maybe that's my perfectionism speaking.

If you're reading this and are yelling "But what is the magic?", the magic is largely called yabridge. Many simpler plugins just work with that. It may not be up for professional audio engineering, but it certainly is up for home recording and dabbling around.