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

Recently:

- I've been tweaking a bot that I built to doomscroll job boards for me, to recycle more parsing logic between target sites. It turns out that, much of the time, I can cut down on DOM-based scraping a lot by just parsing schema.org-based JSON-LD. Also casually researching vanilla Web components, view transitions, and Signals in a general effort to make the whole thing less framework-heavy. (Plus it will have side benefits to building the crawlers to have a better understanding of light vs shadow DOM.) Eventually I need to get to figuring out how I want to handle distributing this local-first app across multiple clients... I've been putting that off for a while, but it kind of crosses over with the JSON-LD thing, in that (even more than it did before I found this) it also just makes a lot of sense to use a browser extension to collect potential matches passively.

- 3D printing experiments. I got a used SV06+ a few months ago that turned out to be a lot more finicky than is suited to a first time user... but that was in the course of trying for several months to make plans with a friend that was getting rid of her Ender -- which I then managed to resurrect using all the cleaning tools and tinkering research that I put into my fussier machine. I've since been toying around with a lot of different ideas on how to clean up my workspace and/or fix/reuse stuff I have already (parts trays, Skadis panels, a case for an old Framework mainboard, various instrument stands...) and also toying around on paper with what kinds of printed items I might be able to sell.

- Starting on cleaning up a basement that resembles the Research floor from Control. Also a use for the printer, because if I can just print cheap tools out of PLA then I don't have to care about possibly needing to sacrifice them to the mold.

- Various Coursera stuff. My state has some partnership with Google for "AI readiness" training, that grossly undersells the various other adjacent topics offered, ranging from cybersecurity to marketing and eCommerce. Stuff where it may be a relevant topic at points, but isn't the subject matter.

I've been working on building hyper-local services, sort of as a love letter to my community in Denver, Colorado. Before decent LLM harnesses, these would've been prohibitively expensive in time and resources to build out and would never break even. Now I think I might be able to at least cover hosting costs and tokens; that's enough to keep these sustainable for my neighbors.

Broomsday: https://broomsday.com sends folks emails and SMS the night before street sweeping parking restrictions for their block(s). Email notifications are free, SMS on a paid season pass. The schedule here is block-by-block and easy to forget, so people get ticketed _a lot_ at $50 a pop. The city has an email-only notification service that's free, but it's poorly supported and the interface sucks. This is ready; I'm testing with friends and family currently before attempting real marketing.

HailPass: https://hailpass.com similarly is a notify-before-pain service that integrates a bunch of open weather services (NWS/NOAA mostly, plus a handful of impact reporters and working on a small hail-specific ML model) to give folks on the Front Range 5-10m heads-up before damaging hail arrives at their location. Weather prediction is (not shocking) hard so I'm still tuning to get as much signal out of the noise as possible; some false alarms will be unavoidable but I want to cut them down before even a F&F release. This year's season is pretty much over with, so aiming for an April '27 release.

There's a lot of ski/snowboard/winter sport culture here, but there's also existing services for those, and I'm mostly trying to offer new coverage where there isn't a good option for my neighbors. Might do an ash borer treatment/prevention service navigator yet.

None of this is going to make me wealthy or famous, but building things that help the people that I actually interact with every day and that are a part of a community that supports my family feels _really_ good.

working on a storytelling app for kids called Tella Stories that goes deeper than just some minimal personalization.. know there's lots of stuff that claims to make them the hero, yadda yadda but then they just give you a shitty digital templated story or try to sell you a printed version. this is focused on a high level digital experience and something parents can actually trust, and that kids actually enjoy.

so yeah.. it builds the stories out of their actual life. their family and friends are in the cast, their dog, the thing they're nervous about this week. the kid doesn't just appear in the story, the story is about their world and imagination and grows with them.

ultimate goal is to keep iterating and get to a level of quality of Bluey, etc but have it actually be the kids world with agency/choices vs. one they have to passively sit back and watch, and that they're not in.

would love any feedback. i know there's been others like Ello shared on here and those threads were really interesting to know HN's opinion on. this does not take an educational and instructional approach. Tella is meant to help develop who they are through stories and be a better screen alternative time to the rest of the algo/curated garbage out there. anyway you guys are a critical and technical bunch and i respect/appreciate that.. especially since this of course leverages multiple AI services to create the stories ~

https://tella.kids/

I use this Highlightly's API https://highlightly.net/

Raygum appears to be refreshingly nice place! Thanks