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

Nothing technologically ground-breaking: Two front-end apps and the back end to support them. The project gave me an opportunity to try out Svelte and FastAPI in a substantial way, as well as operate in the capacity of product designer and owner which I haven't in many, many years of being a developer, since long-gone days of holding the title, "webmaster."

The two main parts were an administrative list management app, where names are entered and credentials allocated, and a checkin app designed to be used on a mobile device on the day of the festival. The challenges were making a data entry and lookup UI significantly better than the systems which had been used before, which ranged from loose sheets of photocopied hand-written notes to poorly-conceived, resource-intensive, and error-prone spreadsheets. It may sound like a low bar, but some of the biggest hurdles were convincing particular stakeholders who had been doing things one way for years to give up some control in exchange for widespread and timely synchronization.

The most satisfying part was the feedback I received as I made a dozen or so people's lives easier for a moment. The tool I built literally saved several relationships which had been frayed over the years over, yes, the seemingly inconsequential task of managing a guest list. A relatively large one, to be sure. After several years of working for companies and on projects with seemingly no direction and little direct customer feedback, it was extremely gratifying to work on something with clear goals and transparent, timely insight into how people were using the apps, enabling targeted and rapid turnaround for suggestions and requests.

Very exciting:)