Me and a friend of mine are designing a HAB (high altitude balloon) payload meant to go on Hack Club's Apex: https://apex.hackclub.com. It's designed to measure how altitude, temperature, and much more affect photosynthesis, and in turn, chlorophyll fluorescence in algae. We learned a while back that when you shine blue light on chlorophyll, it fluoresces red, and it's really quite a cool phenomena. We're designing custom PCBs for powering and processing data, and even. It'll all go to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W which will beam data back to earth over 915Mhz LoRa when it's 100k feet in the sky.

I was working on a ray-casting game engine in C, with the focus on enabling the largest worlds yet seen in such an engine (Minecraft scale etc). [0]

A ray-casting engine is an old style of game engine (think 1990 - Wolfenstein or Duke Nukem). The most famous, well-known example is probably Wolfenstein-3D created by ID software (John Carmack and John Romero etc!) You don’t see these engines used anymore in modern games.

So to me, they are novel and a great challenge to try and modernise. Especially as a solo dev! And for further context, raycasted levels are usually teeny tiny (Wolfenstein 3D or Shadow Warrior are the largest worlds I’ve seen, so nothing impressively scaled). I have never ever come across a raycaster with levels the scale of something like Minecraft. So that’s what my ambition is.

I spent a period of 2-3 months roughly 8-10 hour days every day on this project, not knowing much C and not knowing anything about game engines or graphics, and average at mathematics.

But I’m on a break from the project and coding after my 7 year relationship broke down. Realised I had tunnel vision with my life and ambitions, and am now “touching grass” daily instead. It’s hard to put effort into your hobbies when you feel other areas of your life are suffering.

So now I’m lifting weights and doing cardio and reading books instead, trying to keep active and my mind occupied.

I do want to pick this project back up, I’m really proud of what I was able to achieve with no knowledge coming in and I think the project has good bones.

And I loved coding, still haven’t found a hobby that scratches a similar itch

[0] - https://github.com/con-dog/chunked-z-level-raycaster/blob/ma...

I'm working on MailTrigger — a customizable SMTP server that turns any email notification into a message on platforms like LINE, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, SMS, or pretty much anything else.

The idea is simple: if your app can send an email, it can trigger notifications across multiple channels with no extra coding. Think of it as "SMTP Server to Anything."

One of the cool parts is MailTrigger supports WebAssembly (WASM), so you can customize your own notification logic and automate workflows. I’ve used it for tasks like monitoring internal systems, forwarding alerts to different chat platforms, and even adding basic decision-making logic before sending notifications. It’s been a huge time saver.

I’ve also experimented with using LLMs to assist in rule creation — you can configure notification rules using natural language instead of writing manual code. It’s like giving your infrastructure a smarter way to handle incidents.

At my company, I’m using MailTrigger for real-time price drop alerts and server health monitoring, along with integrations like Jenkins and Sentry to forward alerts to our DevOps Telegram channel.

It’s still super early, and things like the docs, pricing, and overall user experience are definitely a work in progress. But I’m iterating quickly and would love to hear feedback from this community!

Check it out here: https://mailtrigger.app/

Curious to hear your thoughts!

I'm working on AssetRoom, a free service to email you noise-free, easy to digest summaries of SEC filings from companies you're interested in.

I often read about interesting public companies (from an investment perspective or otherwise), but fail to then keep up with them over time (sometimes reading many months/years later how successful they were - or not!). I built this to make an easy way for me to follow updates from said companies.

https://www.assetroom.net/

I'm continuing to develop Uncloud [1] — an open source tool for deploying and managing containerised applications across multiple Docker hosts. Includes WireGuard overlay network, ingress with automatic HTTPS, and simple Docker-like CLI. Unlike traditional orchestrators such as Kubernetes, Uncloud has no state reconciliation or quorum needs which makes it easy to understand and use. If you ever wanted something simpler than Kubernetes for self-hosting your apps on cloud VMs or in your homelab, Uncloud might be for you.

Key updates from the past month:

- New demo screencast [2]: Deploy a highly available web app with automatic HTTPS across cloud VMs and on-premises in just a couple minutes

- Added initial Docker Compose support for service deployment. The same Compose can be used for developing locally and deploying to your cluster

- Completely revamped how service and container specifications are stored, enabling proper implementation of the service 'scale' command and selective container recreation

My goal for Uncloud is to create a more capable and modern replacement for Docker Swarm, which is no longer being actively developed.

[1]: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud

[2]: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud?tab=readme-ov-file#-qu...

I dove into using LLMs together with MCP servers for the first time this weekend. Absolutely incredible.

In addition to the code assistant, I configured a Grafana's MCP server with Cline, so that I can chat with an LLM while having real-time metrics and logs.

For context, I self host grafana in addition to a bunch of services on a raspberry pi. Simple prompts such as "why has CPU been increasing this week?" resulted in a deep analysis of logs/metrics that uncovered correlations I had never been aware of.

Incredible. I can only imagine what this will all look like in a few years

My pursuit of happiness, I'm in fear of quitting my current job and go for a working holiday to Australia, I'm excited while still trying to overcome the fear of not having a stable and well paying job because I don't find any joy in this job no more , so I am working on mentally getting out of this, I want to truly let go "money is more important than my happiness" idea.

I’m working on https://pikku.dev

It’s a TypeScript web framework that’s runtime agnostic, so it can work on serverless and servers (similar to Hono).

What’s different is that the focus is primarily just on TypeScript. There’s a CLI tool that inspects all the project code and generates loads of metadata. This can include:

• services used

• all the HTTP routes, inputs and outputs

• OpenAPI documentation

• schemas to validate against

• typed fetch client

• typed WebSocket client (and more)

The design decision was also to make it follow a function-based approach, which means your product code is just functions (that get given all the services required). And you have controllers that wire them up to different transport protocols.

This allows interesting design concepts, like writing WebSocket code via serverless format, while allowing it to be deployed via a single process or distributed/serverless. Or progressive enhancement, allowing backend functions to work as HTTP, but also work via Server-Sent Events if a stream is provided.

It also allows functions to be called directly from Next.js and full-stack development frameworks without needing to run on a separate server or use their API endpoints (not a huge advocate, but it helps a lot with SSR). Gave a talk about that last week at the Node.js meetup in Berlin.

It’s still not 1.0 and there are breaking changes while I include more use cases.

Upcoming changes:

• use Request and Response objects to make it truly runtime agnostic (currently each adapter has its own thin layer, which tbf is still needed by many that don’t adopt the web spec)

• smarter code splitting (this will reduce bundle size by tree-shaking anything not needed on a per-function basis)

• queues (one more form of transport)

Check it out, would love feedback!

I’ve been dissecting stock market data with code to see how dark pool and automated trading behaviors are evolving and impacting the market. The market is the most adverse possible brain battle where actors constantly try to outsmart and make money off of each-other. Greed and fear playing out and conditions changing constantly. AI is also used but it gets funny when the market adapts and plays against past behavior to take advantage of AI traders as well.

    > see how dark pool and automated trading behaviors are evolving and impacting the market.

My toddler has a LeapFrog talking dictionary that drives my teenage daughter crazy. So I just started a project to replace its logic board with a RPi Pico 2 and interfacing with all ~45 of the toy's buttons and LEDs via a couple of GPIO expansion cards.

We'll have about ~300 short audio clips to record, and we'll store/access them via an SPI SD card reader peripheral. Audio output via a MAX98357A combo DAC/class D amplifier that we'll talk to via I2S. Powered by 2 AA batteries. Programming will be in CircuitPython, which is a cool way to teach the kids programming. (There are easy libraries for talking to all those peripherals.)