Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (August 2022)

Mostly on MongoDB to PostgreSQL translation server: http://oxidedb.com or https://demo.oxidedb.com.

I have been wanting to dive deep into a Rust project and the challenge of implementing the MongoDB protocol and then translating it into some sort of SQL counterpart was the first thing that really clicked and got me excited enough to get me working on it nonstop for 3 weeks now.

Some backstory:

Quick intro video:

https://youtu.be/nAlWieBS9VA

I have created a product that relies on MongoDB for a document store but doesn’t really need any of the distributed features to really justify having a hosted MongoDB or DocumentDB instance. Now that we’re trying to turn this into a product, we’re seeing that some companies have a little bit of resistance around managing yet another database. Most of our clients already have and manage PostgreSQL in one form or another. I knew that PostgreSQL already offered first class JSON support, but I didn’t want to rewrite the application data layer from scratch if I could avoid it. That’s when I started researching if there was a “proxy” that would translate the MongoDB protocol - that I was completely ignorant about - into PostgreSQL. To my surprise there was nothing ready for production use but I found MangoDB that later on became FerretDB. I delved into the code and was in love with the idea. The team around is really nice, but I found that they had greater ambitions - they basically wanted to offer multiple backends, namely Tigris, on top of PostgreSQL.

On the other hand, I have been waiting to find an excuse to delve deeply into the rust ecosystem but never really found something I was passionate about until I had the idea of challenging myself to see if I could learn about the protocol that MongoDB uses by relying on their public documentation and the hints I found on FerretDB.

Another thing I added to my toolbelt while developing this was about creating parsers. In order to transform MongoDB JSON to SQL queries, I ported an existing library from the MongoDB team from PEG.js to pest.rs!

It’s in very early stages, and it’s work from someone that is not yet super comfortable with the stack so keep in mind this is the beginning of a journey for me that I embarked out of pure joy on getting a tiny bit better on rust and making things click internally.

The startup I was working for went under at the end of May, so I've been putting my focus into a new UI component library I started at the beginning of the year. It's called Skeleton [1] and utilizes Svelte + Tailwind. Makes building UI for SvelteKit apps a breeze.

Reception has been great so far, just trying to get the word out and gather feedback and additional contributors.

I launched a Discord [2] today. Feel free to stop by and say hello!

[1] https://skeleton.brainandbonesllc.com/

[2] https://discord.gg/SdysnXcB

I’ve been working on a music visualizer that runs in the browser by listening to the microphone on your device. Right now it looks just like the bars on Apple Music but I’ll be adding more visualizations like the ones from cool old stereos from the 90’s.

https://soundq.co

Working on trying to sign and notarize a simple mac desktop app, but apparently that's too much to ask of Apple.

Main reasons for me are speed, quality, and showing proof of market.

I have worked on Android previously, but I'm much more familiar with iOS. In a space with competition, product quality is one of the important factors to gain user interest. That's also the reason I didn't go with React Native, since the tech needs will grow to a point where I won't be able to provide a good enough UX. Once I've proven value, I can hire an Android dev.