I am writing a newsletter, https://www.clientserver.dev, which started with the writing prompt “what if someone tried to make Money Stuff for software engineering?” I’m still iterating on the format a bit, but I just crossed 100 subscribers and made the Hacker News front page, so I feel like I’m on the right track.

I had a daughter almost 2 years ago, and for a while I didn’t have any free time. But once I started getting a few hours in the evening, I wanted to start up side projects again. I found it frustrating to work on coding projects in 1-2 hour windows. But writing is a little easier; I feel like progress is a little more linear with writing, and having the Monday/Thursday deadline has helped me just ship.

Taking shader programs (they have a main() functions), hacking up their source code / AST to turn the into modularized code packages, and then enabling composition of shaders by injecting the output of one module into another (essentially calling the main function of one shader in another). This enables arbitrary shader composition. One application is Photoshop-style stacking of shaders as layers, like https://shaderfrog.com/2/editor/cm6y90vai002mpaxio3zjhfvq

Or getting real freaky with it by composing many effects deep https://shaderfrog.com/2/editor/cm1s7w23w000apar738s9d1x0

For those few living in NZ, I've made a site that lists all the bank saving rates (and TDs), and ranks them by best to worst. This is mostly intended for people who know what they're doing. So don't just pick the highest and roll with it. Higher return usually comes with more risk.

Also, the biggest banks usually have the worst rates, this also goes for Kiwisaver, don't put your Kiwisaver with a bank, it'll do poorly compared to the lowest fee options we got in NZ. e.g. InvestNow (Foundation Series funds) / Kernel / Simplicity.

Still needs some work, like showing which rates are variable, or extra high risk.

Pretty quickly hacked together, to be very utilitarian, and practical. Don't see ever making money on it, made it more for me.

https://savingrates.netlify.app/

I've been working on Zigpoll as a one-man project for a while now: https://www.zigpoll.com/ it has traction and solid growth (~100% YoY for the past 3 years) but the larger the numbers the harder it gets to double each year.

In a past life I would have thought this would be the easy part given the product market fit but it's hard to figure out growth channels that are scalable and cost-effective at this stage. Burning what would otherwise be a large salary month on month in search of growth is mentally taxing when it doesn't deliver. Metrics across the board only seem to tell part of the story so it's tricky to figure out what needs changing and what's worth doubling down on.

If anyone has experience doing this sort of thing - please get in touch!

RSS reader through Bluesky custom feeds: https://github.com/tfederman/stroma-news

Bluesky API library spun off from the other project: https://github.com/tfederman/pysky

Haven't really started it yet, but a master list of RSS feeds and the code I used to source them: https://github.com/tfederman/huge-rss-list

And also a new project to fetch all links seen in the Bluesky firehose and gather metadata to build a database of sites and pages at a more granular level than the domain. For example, is account X posting video links from one YT channel or many?

I'm making a log search engine that fits in your pocket: https://humanlog.io/

The idea is to be able to ingest your logs locally and run queries against them without having to resort to a hosted prod-like environment. It's all focused on localdev-first experience. I use it when the o11y tools at work don't do what I need: I can just pull the raw logs locally and run my queries there.

It's still very rough around the edges but it gets better day by day. I want to add features like alerts and monitoring, metrics and tracing. A full o11y platform in a single binary with zero config. I would love any feedback.

(Also please excuse the poor onboarding experience, I haven't polished it as this is a side project and I have a day job)

We're building the killer app for books

Starting with a native iOS app to to track and discover books [1]

Focusing on notetaking and cozy social this year as we try to grow from 100k to 1m+ users

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6737528718

I'm in the exploratory phase of a few projects, meaning I haven't decided if they are compelling enough (or within my skillset) to push me to develop them properly. That said, the one project I've explored multiple times, each time getting a little closer to making the full mental commitment, is a word processor.

Not a "text editor" for code and whatnot, but a real-deal word processor for writing novels and such. I cloned Visicalc (onto the Pico-8), so my "How does a spreadsheet work?" itch has been scratched. I think it's finally time to answer for myself, "How does a word processor work?" (in pure C, to level-up those skills as well) So lately I've been working on small programmatic experiments to understand the underlying subsystems necessary to build one.

I'm beta testing a SaaS called ChimeraHR that helps bridge the divide between developers and HR when it comes to assessing programmer's skill. The main idea is that the programming languages we use reveal a lot about how we think and problem solve.

When devs put their top languages on their resumes, they are also saying a bit about how they prefer to work and what they value. This signal is largely lost on HR since a lot of it is insight you get from actually coding over time. I strongly believe that we can get more people hired and into the right organizations and cultures if people could see beyond the surface level of the keywords on a resume.

I'm looking for first customers now and people to give feedback on the idea and the upcoming offerings. There's a proof of concept now that hints at how it all works.