Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)

This is one of my long-standing passion projects, a simple web-based music sequencer built to have a very low barrier to entry.

Yes, customer is a special snowflake but they still need 90% or whatever every other client in this industry needs.

Feeling increasingly like this is a fools errand.

Even though we've proved this out with tool sets strung together with duct tape and safety pins, and are therefore the most profitable group within our department, we still need to be 100% billable.

It's only because we're the most profitable group that we can pretend we're all billable while I work with two other people to bootstrap this crazy project

Edit: anyone hiring? Just found out my boss is quitting.

If it strikes a chord with anyone, I’d love to collaborate! The concept is centered around organization bubbling up naturally from dumping info in with tags, and “typing” your tags so that when you go to a tag’s page, the layout is customized based on what it is - a project, person, etc. A project could have all relevant tasks and notes listed, whereas a person might have name, contact info, etc.

https://github.com/weakphish/yapper

I'm a member of the JSON Schema Technical Steering Committee, and been making a living consulting with companies making use of JSON Schema at large. Think data domains in the fintech industry, big OpenAPI specs, API Governance programs, etc. The tooling to support all of these use cases was terrible (non-compliant, half-baked, lack of advanced features, etc), and I've been trying to fix that. Some highlights include:

- An open-source JSON Schema CLI (https://github.com/sourcemeta/jsonschema) with lots of features for managing large schema ontologies (like a schema test runner, linter, etc)

- Blaze (https://github.com/sourcemeta/blaze), a high-performance JSON Schema C++ compiler/validator, proven to be in average at least 10x faster than others while retaining a 100% compliance score. For API Gateways and some high-throughput financial use cases

- Learn JSON Schema (https://www.learnjsonschema.com/2020-12/), becoming the de-facto documentation site for JSON Schema. >15k visits a month

Right now I'm trying to consolidate a lot of the things I built into a "JSON Schema Registry" self-hosted micro-service that you can just provision your schemas to (from a git repo) and it will do all of the heavy lifting for you, including rich API access to do a lot of schema related operations. Still in alpha (and largely undocumented!), but working hard to transition some of the custom projects I did for various orgs to use this micro-service long term.

As a schema and open-source nerd, I'm working on my dream job :)