Posted by david927 6/29/2025
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
Also, every region has different ways of representing a “neighbourhood”, so I get to learn how to extract viable data from each city. Lots of map stuff, I’m genuinely enjoying it!
- It felt like what I wanted to achieve is pretty simple (GPS coordinates -> display all on the same map), so didn't want to subscribe for a monthly fee. I couldn't actually find an app that would dump all my HealthKit data directly onto the map, which was surprising.
- Last year when I wrote my app, I wanted to see how fast I can learn simple mobile development loop
- Now, I couldn't really find anything that divides the coverage areas into real-world neighbourhoods. So, think of West Village of NYC, or Yorkville in Toronto, or Yoyogi in Shibuya and etc. Back when I used to live in Vancouver, I would look at my own app, and kinda say in my head "aight, I've walked through every street in West End, Vancouver". Figured it would be cool to have a proper way of tracking it. So working on it currently.
- It's kinda fun to work on an app for my own needs
I'll take a look at the squadrats though! Looks pretty cool.
- https://uceed957a657be57d7d53af97504.previews.dropboxusercon...
It felt good when I was able to figure out how to generate all the neighbourhood data for any given city. A bunch of fun OSM data manipulation though.
If you meant the app that I wrote last year, it's here - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mapcut/id6478268682. The idea is much simpler though, as I mentioned.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/relevant/fdhnccpldk...
Two months ago I posted an update that I had begun work on my Chrome extension [1] for Relevant. Relevant is a crowdsourcing website where users can categorize the channels they watch into a defined hierarchy of categories ranging from broad topics like "Science" and "Gaming" to more specific ones like "Phone Reviews" or "Speedrunning".
Although I had a little bit of engagement on the website, I found myself looking for something that could bring the experience onto YouTube, so I began work on a Chrome extension. It turns out there's a lot more complexity in building a Chrome extension than I realised. It's basically like building a website for the popup window, a javascript server for the background service workers and a message bus for the service worker.
After 2 months' of working weekends, I finally released a version of it that lets users see the categories of the content on the page, discover more channels matching those categories and contribute to the categorisation effort!
But no hornworms or caterpillars this year. Very strange!
As there is no open source version of Excel except Libreoffice, working to build the core Excel functionality with other open source packages. Then bringing in agentic editing functionality for real world data.
What is also has been interesting is to introduce banker/consultant formatting guidelines to the agent and making it beautify its work whether in tables or models.
It helps you track, understand, and plan your personal finances — with a proper accounting foundation.
It's interesting in many way. Using double-entry (it's a perspective shift), the technical challenges of building local-first app, UI/UX & visualizations, privacy and more.
> A: Your financial data is stored locally on your device. ...
Good stuff! This was the first thing I checked, and it means I am now reading more about the app. Really nice to see this approach.
I know this is still WIP, but is feedback ok? The plan buttons say "Get starterd" which is a funny typo :) Also, I was not sure, but is this a website app, or a local app? For local data, I would strongly prefer an actual local app. Some screenshots of how it looks on multiple devices (directly comparable, as in, this is the same view and same data on iOS/Mac) would be great. Finally, do you have bank links? _The_ killer app I want in a personal finance app, and you'd be surprised how many make this really difficult, is to track my actual income and spending.
I signed up for your newsletter. Rare for me to do. Looking forward to hearing more!
The app is a PWA website (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app). Eventually, we would be able to build other clients (e.g mobile/native app) with the synched db, but not in near future. The data is stored in sqlite in browser which is synched with other devices. With backup to local filesystem, and soon dropbox.
The app supports multiple devices, but ui for mobile has not been our priority. We hope to fix it soon, at least for data entry.
And bank linking, again, we don't support. This is partly limitation of FinBodhi being webapp.
As and when we have support for things you are looking for, we will write to you (via newsletter :)
Thanks for catching the typo, and the feedback.
On multiple currency, we have support for it as a commodity. We are planning to make it easier, in future. There is support for split transactions. So, transactions with more than one currency will work by associating them with accounts in different currency.
Thinking about:
How will various Human Computer Interaction change as many of current apps (which are screen based UI with some background code) simply get replaced with chat/voice/gesture based requests to LLM
A Lucene-based search engine on top of S3 block storage.
Index schema is immutable (but supports migrations), so you cannot just screw up your index.
Separate indexer/searcher tiers, so heavy indexing load does not affect search latency.
And embedding/reranker local inference, so you can run the whole AI search within a single docker container.
The site itself isn't anything "special." I've had a personal website for about 25 years; the past few years I finally moved from making HTML by hand to using various CMSes. I tried a "no database" CMS that my hosting page had, then I wrote my own CMS, https://github.com/GWBasic/z3, to learn node.js, but then I had to go back because Heroku dropped the free tier.
Jekyll is interesting. As a Mac user, I'm surprised there isn't a push-button app, like MAMP, to just run it. Instead, I got exposed to some weirdness with Ruby versioning that, because I don't have any Ruby experience, was frustrating.
The default Jekyll template has warnings, but when I tried to fix them, I ended up jumping into a rabbit hole of sass versioning.
I also ended up jumping into a rabbit hole with setting up redirects from old urls on my blog to their new locations. I don't touch Apache / cpanel that often, so there was a bit of a learning curve for me.
One funny thing was that I set up two redirects, in cpanel, from the same url to two different urls. (It was a mistake!) I couldn't delete them, so I had to submit a service request with my host.
Two interesting things that I do not have time to do:
- Set up Github actions to deploy on my original host (andrewrondeau.com) - Set up redirects from blog.andrewrondeau.com -> andrewrondeau.com
