Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

Posted by david927 6/29/2025

What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?

439 points | 1401 commentspage 2

Smaug123 6/29/2025|

Ideas are coming way too fast to work on them all at the moment.

* Expect/snapshot testing library for F# is now seeing prod use but could do with more features: https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Expect

* A deterministic .NET runtime (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.PawPrint); been steaming towards `Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!")` for months, but good lord is that method complicated

* My F# source generators (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Myriad) contain among other things a rather janky Swagger 2.0 REST client generator, but I'm currently writing a fully-compliant OpenAPI 3.0 version; it takes a .json file determining the spec, and outputs an `IMyApiClient` (or whatever) with one method per endpoint.

* Next-gen F# source generator framework (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Whippet) is currently on the back burner; Myriad has more warts than I would like, and I think it's possible to write something much more powerful.

wjgilmore 6/29/2025||

A few months ago I launched SpiesInDC - https://spiesindc.com, a mail-based (as in the real mail) subscription service about Cold War history. Subscribers, ahem secret agents, receive packages every few weeks containing reproductions of famous documents, stanps from the USSR, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, coins, and other fun stuff. I keep refining the packages every week to make it better and it is so much fun.

NaOH 6/29/2025||

Great, novel idea and great that you've been enjoying the process on your end. Is it possible to gift this? I couldn't tell from the Subscribe section where there's a shipping address field but no billing address information was needed. Sometimes the billing and shipping info have to be the same for payment to go through.

wjgilmore 6/29/2025||

Yep it is possible to gift and in fact that is how most subscriptions come in. The latest round was because of Father’s Day. As for matching billing and shipping fields, not sure, everything has worked fine so far!

NaOH 6/29/2025||

Wonderful. Thank you.

deanputney 6/29/2025|||

How are you handling the mailing? I love the idea of a mail-based project, but I worry that I would forget to go to the post office occasionally.

wjgilmore 6/29/2025||

So the answer to this question is a funny one. I started using a Google spreadsheet to manage shipping dates and that quickly became a chore so like any good nerd would do I built a CRM which is now live if anyone wants to try it: https://6dollarcrm.com/

Wasn’t planning on announcing it here but what the hell.

Nextgrid 6/30/2025|||

If you don't mind answering, does this have any users besides you? I've got a few internal tools developed over the years that I don't have the bandwidth to turn into a proper SaaS (not much time for support, polish, new features, etc) but could potentially offer on an "as-is" basis for a token monthly sum but not sure if it would be worth the trouble.

wjgilmore 6/30/2025||

Yep has several users, people I know personally have been beta testing it for a few months now. I haven't started marketing it yet because I have been dogfooding it since February in order to build exactly the CRM I personally want to use.

Also has > 800 automated feature tests, in app documentation, gone through security audits using tools like Zap, etc. I've built a lot of SaaS products over the years, and I'm building 6DollarCRM from the standpoint of having learned a lot of things the hard way. I'm currently working on data importers and browser extensions for easily adding new contacts.

Give it a spin and let me know what you think.

parnold 7/1/2025|||

Are you concerned about the possibility of 5 dollar crm?

wjgilmore 7/1/2025||

In fact we have been laughing about this because it reminds us of the There's Something About Mary bit regarding 7 minute abs.

busymom0 6/30/2025|||

Something similar regarding American history by mail was pitched as a successful business on shark tank this season:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA4h3WBeohc

jll29 6/30/2025||

This seems a dangerous game to play in the era of Donald Trump. Imagine you or your subscribers get their houses searched...

wjgilmore 6/30/2025||

I might have missed something but don't think nerdy stamp collectors are on any watch lists.

serial_dev 6/30/2025||

I'm finally getting my online presence in order...

This week, I'll set up a Hugo blog with the Ed theme, love it, looks exactly what I'm looking for, and as a former LaTeX enthusiast, it's pretty close. It's readable, minimalist. I'll need to customize the theme, though. I plan to publish blog posts about anything I find interesting.

https://gohugo-theme-ed.netlify.app/

In parallel to this work, I'm setting up a simple system to keep my website + subdomains easy to build, rebuild, and deploy with Caddy on a cheap Scaleway compute server. In the past, I had some ideas I wanted to publish, but the system I went with made managing the sites dreadful.

Once that's ready, I'm back to learning Rust and crypto. It's fun, interesting, challenging, remote-friendly, and the salaries are usually 30-50% better. My current tech stack feels like a dead end: it has a low ceiling in terms of salary, the projects are generally not very interesting (I'm grateful for my current project, it's the best there is with this technology), and I believe the technology will see a slow and steady decline.

Apart from work, I'm building the playground for my 2 yo son, and planting blueberries, he loves them.

a_petrov 6/30/2025||

As a non-developer, I played with rust and various copilots over the last couple of months. I ended up with a backtesting engine.

Now I figured out I want to go all in actually learning rust and doing the deep dive in crypto. Enjoy the trip.

DoingIsLearning 6/30/2025|||

> This week, I'll set up a Hugo blog with the Ed theme.

Perhaps a first blog entry would be to show and tell how you setup the blog with Hugo+Ed on your domain in the first place.

As someone who is being told that they need to increase their non anonymous footprint online, I certainly would be interested in reading it.

serial_dev 6/30/2025||

Just thought about it jokingly yesterday that every developer's first blog post is how they set up the blog or how they wrote a blog engine... :)

Long story short: Sign up for Scaleway, get your account approved, launch an instance, they have affordable "learning" instances that still feel "real" and can later run real services that need backend. I don't expect lot of traffic and I don't care if my stuff would go down from time to time, it's for fun. Set up SSH. Buy a domain, set up the DNS records to point to your instance. Run Caddy on the server to serve a dummy HTML file. Set up HTTPS. Verify you see your stuff in the browser. Now, create an actual site. Install hugo, pick a theme, install locally, build locally. Set up a script that copies the build folder onto your server where Caddy is serving, then restart Caddy. Write some content, check the limits of the theme / your set up, make sure everything works correctly. Even with the best of themes, you'll want to fix or change something, do that, if it looks good and you still have energy to work on your blog, start writing posts and let the world know.

DoingIsLearning 6/30/2025||

This could still definitely be a blog post but great and well summarized walkthrough, thanks a lot!

y-curious 6/30/2025|||

I've been having the thought that I should curate my mostly-anonymous online presence for my career. Is that why you're doing it? Curious what inspired you to do this and what steps you're taking

taegee 7/1/2025|||

> as a former LaTeX enthusiast, it's pretty close. It's readable, minimalist.

Really nice! But you still need at least basic justification if you want to relate it to LaTeX. ;)

mrFinance 6/30/2025|||

What tech stack are you currently using that you see as a dead end?

serial_dev 6/30/2025||

Flutter and Dart. It's not that bad, I'm not saying it's dead, I'm saying it's a dead end for me.

I don't see many opportunities that pay well, are interesting, and available for remote. I'm happy at my current position, but if they were to ever "right-size" the team, I'd be fckd, so I spend my nights learning other stuff.

I started Flutter in 2018, back then it felt "magical" for mobile development, now all the competitors caught up. They also (IMO) waste their time reimplementing Flash on the web, it's horrible for 99% of the cases. The community is also off-putting, you observe obvious flaws, 10 GDEs come at you that you are a POS.

In general, mobile has a lower ceiling than backend, frontend, systems, etc... Mobile is also usually a lower priority for the business than web.

valgor 6/30/2025||

Curious what projects you use rust on for crypto?

serial_dev 6/30/2025||

I'm still in the "learning Rust and discovering crypto" phase.

As I have a web+mobile background, I'll probably start with some simple mobile or web apps, a wallet, price alerts, seed phrase gen, ens explorer, etc, basically anything that's crypto / defi / blockchain adjacent to understand the field better and ease into it.

Then, I'll also build stuff from the ground up (build your own blockchain, smart contracts, etc) so that I have a deeper understanding of the basics, not just "hand-wavy" ideas like "freedom, sovereignty, decentralized, store of value, trustless, permissionless", etc.

In parallel, I also plan to do non-crypto stuff to practice Rust and to have an escape route to web Rust in case I don't like crypto all that much or can't get a job right away due to lack of Rust + crypto experience..

Then, I hope, as I have a better understanding of the field, I'll have more interesting project ideas, too.

aklemm 7/2/2025||

If you find something solid behind the hand-wavy stuff, I’d really love an email with details.

ruieduardolopes 6/30/2025||

I am a PhD student and for a while now I'm designing and developing a distributed network protocol that enables dynamic resource allocation across heterogeneous nodes, to which I called Rank. It's designed to handle computational, network, and temporal resources in fully distributed environments without central controllers, but that could also handle a centralized environment. Rank implements four core functions: discovery (finding paths between nodes), estimation (evaluating resource availability), allocation (reserving resources), and sharing (allowing multiple services to use the same resources). What I think it makes it unique is its ability to operate in completely decentralized environments with heterogeneous nodes, making it particularly valuable for edge computing, cloud gaming, distributed content delivery, vehicular communications, and grid computing scenarios. The protocol uses a bidding system where nodes evaluate their capability to fulfill resource requests on a scale from 0-1, enabling dynamic path selection based on current resource availability. I've implemented it in C++ and then also created a testing framework to validate its performance across different network topologies. This is still a work-in-progress and I am eager to publish results someday!

mdnahas 7/6/2025||

This sounds interesting. If you want to discuss it or just want a proofreader, please email me. I have done research in both distributed algorithms and economics. hackernews@mike.nahasmail.com

If you don’t know about these already, read about “self stabilizing algorithms”. They are fault-tolerant (to a certain definition) which is important in large distributed algorithms. I used one to build virtual networks with 10,000 nodes.

ruieduardolopes 6/30/2025|||

Thank you so must for your interest! I am working on publishing results and trying to create a proper webpage to reference Rank and all the documentation. My goal is to open this project as an open-source project as soon as I can so that everyone is able to build their solutions out of it and also contribute to the project. I'll keep you posted on that!

TheAceOfHearts 6/30/2025|||

That sounds really interesting and I would also like a social media link or somewhere we can be kept abreast of updates.

erdaniels 6/30/2025|||

This sounds promising. Keep us posted! If there's anywhere we can track progress, please link :)

Weryj 6/30/2025||

Orleans would be good to checkout

ruieduardolopes 6/30/2025||

Thanks! Actually I was not aware of Orleans as I never got close to .NET environments, but thank you for noticing it to me.

dbetteridge 6/30/2025||

Hopefully it comes across as helpful and not condescending.

You're probably looking for "showing it to me" or "making me aware of it" rather than "noticing it to me" as noticing is usually used like "I noticed thing x" or "You have been noticed"

ruieduardolopes 6/30/2025||

Oh, you're right, I am sorry! Yes, I meant "for showing it to me" or "making me aware of it"... I am not an English native speaker, and it was too early in the morning, I guess :)

rorylaitila 6/30/2025||

Working on a physical and digital archive of all American vintage print advertising. I've built the archival and database software on Lucee & MySQL to store images and automate, and I use OpenAI to analyze images and extra meta data. All of the full page ads are pushed to https://adretro.com.

I've gotten the process to fully catalog all of the advertisements in a magazine (about 150 on average) down from over a week to a few hours. I should be able to get through the material within my lifetime now :)

devenson 6/30/2025||

A category for politically incorrect ads would be cool.

rorylaitila 6/30/2025||

Good idea! There are certainly some ads where I think "no way that would fly today." Though its not necessarily being PC or not (because a lot of the ads would be considered offensive today). It more like "What were they thinking, this ad makes no sense"

DamnInteresting 6/30/2025|||

It's funny...I absolutely despise being advertised to, yet I find vintage ads fascinating. I don't know what that says about me.

I feel the same about a lot graffiti; if it's recent, it's an eyesore, but old graffiti can be extremely interesting. I guess both domains expose some elements of the zeitgeist seldom explored in other mediums. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nice site, by the way!

gwbas1c 6/30/2025|||

I think it's more about how there's a lot more advertising now than in the past; and just how generally intrusive advertising has become overall.

Think about a newspaper / magazine: The ads didn't suddenly block the article, move the page around, or phone home to the advertiser. Likewise, the ads wouldn't slow the magazine down, flash, or make noise.

DamnInteresting 7/1/2025||

Those elements certainly amplify the awfulness, but I am old enough that I remember reading magazines, and I despised the ads there was well. I'm trying to read this OMNI article about colonizing Mars, and this stupid full-page ad for calculator wristwatches is getting in my way. *shakes fist*

I'm sure glad that the inline ads model never caught on in novels.

rorylaitila 6/30/2025|||

Thank you!

Yeah, there is a subtext to the advertising that changes over time that is very interesting. For example, early appliance ads are about saving household labor to spend time with the kids, later appliance become more about status and the allure of technology.

DustinKlent 6/30/2025|||

You should organize it both by industry as well as by brand and by year. For instance, if I want to look up vintage Rolex ads from the 1960s I could do that.

rorylaitila 6/30/2025||

Okay thanks for the feedback!

nkg 6/30/2025||

[flagged]

rorylaitila 6/30/2025||

Incidentally, I have come across few vintage ads containing or targeted to black people explicitly. Most of the vintage publications I come across are Life, Saturday Evening Post, and Look. I am on the lookout for regional and local publications which may be different, but they're hard to find because they were not really circulated enough to have survived. But there are so many publications I randomly find it's sometimes daunting how much I feel I'm missing out finding!

pruufsocial 7/1/2025||

https://sewerreport.com I am a dev/sewer inspector, done over 20k inspections for real estate alone. I built the ultimate, AI report generator based on my voice to text notes. Reports, email notifications, stripe integration. Payments and invoices. Unlock reports when paid. Square appointments integrations. Pulls all appointments and fills outs new report fields for me. No copy pasting anything ever again. Very niche but saves me 3 hours a day. Next js, it’s really been life changing for me.

pandemic_region 7/1/2025||

Dev/sewer inspector is an interesting combination. Were you a developer first, and took up sewer inspection as a side job, or vice-versa ?

wonger_ 7/1/2025|||

Nicely done! Those time-saving features are really valuable. I'm working on something similar for home inspectors.

- looks like your output report is an HTML page of text and media. Do you generate any PDFs?

- how much time does a report take to complete?

- how long have you been developing sewerreport.com?

- how many customers do you have?

billsunshine 7/1/2025||

Nice. You make any coin on this yet?

stonlyb 6/30/2025||

https://inlovingmem.com/ - is a tribute to my recently deceased mom that I vibe coded over the last week. I felt her life deserved to be celebrated widely but wanted to be sensitive to her privacy. I've also built in a number of interactive features for participation in funeral services etc, before, during, and after.

Folks have reached out about having an 'In Loving Memory Of' site for their loved ones, so I'm turning this into a side business to help out more with my (now widowed) father's retirement and care.

croisillon 6/30/2025||

My sincere condolences for your loss, she must have given you incredible peace and strength to be able to produce this so early!

stonlyb 7/1/2025||

Thank you. This didnt come from place of peace or strength but from grief and a sense of need to honor her. One possibility for vibe coding is that it may turn app / web development into a form of therapy for more non-professional developers, and eventually all non-developers.

muzani 7/7/2025|||

https://inlovingmemory.to is available and you can add names at the end e.g. inlovingmemory.to/marie and then give people their own segments

southernplaces7 6/30/2025|||

This is one lovely concept. What did you use to vibe code it?

stonlyb 6/30/2025||

Loveable

rollinDyno 6/30/2025||

I'm sorry for your loss.

stonlyb 7/1/2025|||

Thank you. I for one appreciate the curtsey of expressing sympathies. I don't question the motivation or whatever. It's just a kind gesture.

I will note that I'm trying not to think of her death as a loss. It certainly is in many ways for grandkids and others who were just starting to get to know her. But for the rest of us, I like to think we have a part of our deceased loved ones with us that we now have the responsibility to cary forward.

kurtis_reed 6/30/2025|||

You killed her?

NotAnOtter 6/30/2025||

I'm cynical in general, but this type of stuff always sticks out. "I'm sorry for your loss" from one nameless headless stranger to a different nameless headless stranger feels as sincere as an AI bot, and that's to say it absolutely isn't.

Same as people saying things like "Don't say no one loves you, because I love you <3" but it's in a forum like this, or on Reddit. You don't know them. you don't love them.

jolmg 6/30/2025||

You don't need to know them to empathize with them.

NotAnOtter 6/30/2025||

But is it real empathy? Did they actually pause and feel bad and convert their emotional response to some written message?

Or did they just short circuit. "Dead relative -> Say sorry for your loss". Like an AI bot.

It's the second one.

smoyer 7/1/2025|||

NotAnOtter smells like IsASkunk ... Why not just sit this one out instead of crushing the sentiment? I lost no mom in February and appreciate when people offer their condolences. And I'm this case, when I offer my condolences, I have at least some idea of what they're going through.

pmcjones 6/30/2025||||

One of my younger brothers died a few weeks ago (he was 67; I'm 75). When people offer sympathy, I accept it and don't question their motives or involvement.

peterm4 6/29/2025||

Not as exciting or big as some of the projects on here, but just a small personal one I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

I recently impulse bought an Epson receipt printer, and I’ve started putting together a server in Go to print a morning update every day. Getting it to print the weather, my calendar and todos, news headlines, HN front page. Basically everything I pick up my phone for in the morning, to be on paper rather than looking at a screen first thing. Very early days but hacking away and learning escpos/go! (Vibecoding a lot of it)

https://github.com/petertjmills/escpos-server

andrewrn 6/30/2025||

Wow this is a really interesting concept. I have had many ideas for how to loosen the grip of the digital maelstrom on my brain. You're right, not looking at the phone in the morning is critical, and reading a few things on a page seems a lot more weighty and important than flitting by things on a phone.

bix6 6/30/2025|||

Very cool. I’ve thought about a digital dashboard for something similar (wave / weather report mostly) but I love the printer aspect.

tim-- 6/30/2025|||

This reminds me of a project for using a receipt printer to print of physical tickets of GitHub issues. https://aschmelyun.com/blog/i-built-a-receipt-printer-for-gi...

jodrellblank 7/2/2025|||

Did you see the recent submission "A receipt printer cured my procrastination [ADHD]" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44256499 ) ?

peterm4 7/3/2025||

I did. My idea has preceded me seeing that article for a while now, but reading that was definitely a push finally try it out.

santana16 6/30/2025|||

You have an interesting point. Screens are always changing and rarely taken seriously. Words on paper create a sense of weight and permanence. Make it work!

VMG 6/30/2025|||

Watch out for the BPA in the receipt paper

peterm4 6/30/2025||

Where I am, BPA receipts are banned, fortunately. Also making sure to buy BPA free alternatives.

kleinishere 7/1/2025||

Are there any keywords that help with identifying the most clean/neutral paper? Went down the rabbit hole briefly and had a tough time feeling confident in what was credibly Bpa free (at least on Amazon).

martin_a 6/30/2025|||

Which printer did you buy? Only gave it a quick glance but there seems to be a wide variety of printers...

czarofvan 6/30/2025|||

Very different from all the magic mirror sort of solutions. Nice!

larodi 6/30/2025||

Love it I should do the same. We compare results :))

WilcoKruijer 6/30/2025||

The last couple of weeks I've been building 'Recivo', a very simple way to receive emails programmatically. There are plenty of API-based services that can be used to send emails, but receiving them is harder. My service exposes a simple REST endpoint + event webhook that makes it a 5 min setup to start receiving. Attachments are included as well.

The main use-cases I'm thinking of right now is triggering agents using email or a very simple document upload flow to any SaaS (just forward an email to the SaaS).

https://recivo.email/

Lord_Zero 7/12/2025||

I have a use-case maybe you can help. I use PocketBase + JS SPA and I want to Playwright test it. Testing password reset relies on an email. I extract the verification code and use it in my tests. Today I use mailhog container + rest API but parsing out the email is a PITA.

d_burfoot 6/30/2025|||

This is a good idea. I think email is poised to become a more influential user interface tool, due to the advent of LLMs.

shayneo 6/30/2025||

this is awesome, good work!

sethops1 6/29/2025|

I'm working on https://tickerfeed.net - a new kind of forum for stock market discussion.

After HashiCorp was acquired by IBM I decided to take time off from corporate life and build something for myself. For years I've also been a casual retail investor on the side.

Forums like /r/stocks and /r/wsb in the past have been useful resources for finding leads and interesting information. But meme-ification (among other factors) have substantially degraded sites like Reddit, to the point where interesting comments are much fewer and far in between. With TickerFeed I'm hoping to recapture what was lost - a platform where investors can discuss companies and all things stock market through meaningful long form content.

It's also a chance to build something with my dream stack - Go + HTMX + SQLite, and that's been fun :)

mcrk 7/9/2025||

Cool idea! Is there any way to contact you in case I notice any bugs, issues?

snthpy 6/30/2025|||

Cool!

Bogleheads used to be place with serious folks but I haven't been there in a decade or more so no idea what it's like these days.

+1 on your tech stack

ashwinsundar 6/30/2025|||

HTMX is so much fun, and the HATEOAS framework it encourages is a breath of fresh air in web development

sgt 6/30/2025||

Wonderful stack that. Site loads really quick too (except for some ads that took 3-4 seconds to load)

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