Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

Working on a little "passion project" that has ended up consuming a lot of weekends now, but it's been a lot of fun.

I've been building https://photoweather.app because I never end up having time to look at weather forecasts, which means I also don't go out with my camera enough since outdoor photography is quite a weather dependent activity.. so I'm trying to turn this around by having the app tell me when and where I could be photographing instead.

It's a bit of a challenge for sure, weather forecasts are not always the most reliable, not to mention learning enough about weather to forecast photographic opportunities.. but it's also been really enjoyable to finally build something real and something that I myself actually use all the time.

AskUCP – UCP protocol explorer showing all products on Shopify (https://askucp.com/)

On January 11th, Google and Shopify announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (ucp.dev). It's an open standard that lets any application query products across e-commerce platforms without needing APIs, integrations, or middlemen. AskUCP is one of the first applications built on it.

Right now, if you want to buy something online, you have to know which store sells it. You go to Amazon, or you go to a Shopify store, or you go to Etsy. Each one has its own search, its own interface, its own checkout. The experience is fragmented because the infrastructure is siloed.

UCP changes this at the protocol level. If products are described in a standard format, any application can discover them. You don't need permission from each platform. You don't need to build integrations. Anybody or any AI agent just querys the protocol.

AskUCP is designed to be a single pane of glass into online commerce. You search once, and you see products from across the ecosystem. Currently, that means the entire Shopify catalog. As more platforms adopt UCP, their products become explorable too. Eventually, it should be everything.

This is a proof of concept. It's early, and there are rough edges. Let me know what you think, refinements, ideas etc etc.

Micropay - Stripe for the next billion people (https://micropay.dev/)

Hi HN, I built this because I got tired of fighting with integrating payments in Africa.

M-Pesa processes over $300B annually, it's how 50+ million people in Kenya pay for everything from groceries to rent. People don't have bank accounts, but rather pay straight from their cell phone nummber. But integrating it into your app? That's a different story. Most developers spend weeks on what should take hours, it's almost impossible. And existing solutions for Mastercard, Paypal, Apple Pay etc are useless because most don't have bank accounts.

Micropay is essentially what Stripe did for credit cards, but for mobile money.

Sponder - Filter and transform RSS feeds or Podcasts (https://sponder.app)

Different RSS clients provide different filtering options, and lots of them limit you to a few keywords and/or put them behind a $7-12/mo subscription. I'm building Sponder so you can curate what you see, and it just presents another RSS feed, so you can keep using your favorite client but fill in the feature gaps.

Right now it can merge and filter by string or regex, and next I'm building (because it's what I want) history replay and smarter podcast rerun detection. it's new and I'm very open to feedback and feature requests.

I'm an embedded software engineer by day and like it or not I have to acknowledge that AI tooling is coming to our work, so I'm currently working on learning to interact with AI coding tools like Claude Code more effectively and efficiently by "vibe-coding" a game for a family member on my personal time. Something inspired by a blend of 'Recettear' and 'Stardew Valley' with the touch that the player shopkeeper is an anthropomorphic cat.