I'm working on DB Pro [1]

A modern database client with dashboards, saved queries, workflows, and yes, AI built into it.

I've focused on building brilliant UX over the last year, and it has paid off. I've had two emails saying that they have cancelled their Jetbrains subscription for DataGrip which has been so validating.

It's been a labour of love and I'm super happy to have disrupted even a small part of the ginormous market that is database clients.

[1] https://dbpro.app

I'm going whole hog on LLM-driven development to build out an old school FOSS forum that can run in resource-constrained environments with a minimum of fuss. Think phpBB but written in Rust with modern UI niceties and a SQLite backend. My hope is that interested parties will be able to deploy this on random SBCs or Unikraft and use cloudflared to expose their service to interested parties. Watching old forums that I used to frequent get gobbled up by VerticalScope makes me pine for the days of small self-hosted communities that existed for the hell of it instead of monetized interaction.

In the last few months I have been building an AI assistant that is quite possibly saving my life.

It's an iOS app that uses LLMs to estimate and track nutrients and calories in all the food I eat. It is plugged in to Apple Health so it sees all my activity, sleep, body metrics, etc. I have set some general health goals in the app and it uses this to rate (poor, neutral, good) and advise me on the food I log. A calendar view shows how each day has gone in a traffic light coloring system. I can also log contextual notes to help it make sense of my day, and it has a memory system so each session has continuity.

The assistant can save extracted or inferred nutritional data in a library, like when I give it photos of nutritional labels for foods I eat frequently or I log the same thing repeatedly, for easy reuse later. Also useful for home made meals and recipes.

I've connected it to my workout tracker app Hevy so it can keep tabs on my exercise and also adjust my programs based on me chatting with it in the app about how a workout went. This is really useful for swapping out exercises I struggle with, for example, or to keep a well-balanced program over time.

Recently I added an Apple Watch companion app with a watch face complication so I can keep an easy eye on things like up-to-date calorie deficit.

All built in Swift with Opus on the $20 plan. I realize I can probably use existing AI nutrition tracking apps, and probably also connect Claude to Apple Health, but the joy of building and getting this to be completely tailored to me has been so fun and extremely useful. I've shared it with a few friends, but since I am paying for all the API tokens currently I have not yet tried to get more users onboarded.

Working on the chainsaw for my centaur form factor robot. Have one part to machine then just need to weld everything up and will be ready to try it out. It uses a motor and controller sourced from an E foil, and has 2DOF position control. https://www.satyress.com/buildprogress

I've also been slowly chipping away at a Jagged Alliance 2-like game in Godot. Nothing to share yet but if anyone else is also frustrated that there hasn't been a good video game since Jagged Alliance 2 and you want to work on it reach out to me through the contact in my profile.

I got sick of being on Zoom calls and having things lag or glitch, and not knowing if the issue was something I'm responsible for or not. Is it my LAN/Wi-Fi, my ISP path, some broader Internet issue, or Zoom?

So, I built a tool to answer that. Major goals have been to keep low energy/cpu usage (so I can run it 24/7), have it adapt to the apps/traffic I'm using (rather than use static monitoring endpoints), and to deliver both at-a-glance answers in the menubar and in-depth detail in the dropdown.

It's called Breakdown. It's a free (for typical uses). It's Mac-only for now (but if enough people ask for Windows I'll port it).

https://breakdown.live

I’m making Stacks, an open source ebook manager and server, as a lightweight alternative to Calibre.

Written in Swift, it consists of a SwiftUI browser and a Mac/Linux server and CLI. Shares are automatically discovered via Bonjour/avahi and also published as OPDS feeds.

It can import Calibre libraries and has basic support for managing books on Kindles, but I’ve only tested it with a MTP Paperwhite as that’s all I’ve got.

https://github.com/MattKevan/Stacks

I built macrosforhumans.com because I had been using cronometer since 2020 on and off and was familiar with tracking macros but always hated the entry. Measurement is something that you have to do regardless but the annoyance of having to suffer through their search/recipe/diary CRUD UI was unbearable. With MFH there is no mobile or web app. it's just a phone number that you text. This reduced the friction for me significantly and I've already lost a few pounds and, after recently turning 30, hopefully a few more with more diet and exercise.

I've been building this for a while but I'm working on getting my first 100 users now which is my first foray into the marketing/sales side of things and any tips would be helpful. Also I didn't realize until later that the name, while I think is pretty cool, might be extremely poor SEO? :-)

I also think that these kinds of post-app apps are a curious idea and will become more popular, although likely (hopefully not) through sms as the communication medium. I am off this week and plan to write some stuff about it but it feels really cool to remove the terrible CRUD UIs entirely from this part of my life. I tell my friends that even if it doesn't take off I'm never shutting it down because I enjoy using it over myfitnesspal/cronometer/macrofactor etc so much.

I left my job as a principal software engineer a few months back and have been working on an agentic harness and https://blackbear.app -- a local first, end-to-end encrypted everything app with file editors for notes, documents, sheets, free-hand canvases, slides, and a whole lot more. Also features a calendar and task system, and a lightweight discovery engine. There's a BYOK agent system (Pax) that works with you across the whole app (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and local Ollama support). Works in a browser, from the CLI, and from native mac and linux apps (mobile on the way). Not exactly sure my end goal yet, but it's been fascinating building these things

Multi-language libs with implementations in TypeScript/C#/Swift/Zig so that they can be used directly in web or native apps:

- A Markdown parser/renderer (https://github.com/andrewjk/allmark). The TS version of this was hand written and the other versions are AI translations.

- A Git client (https://github.com/andrewjk/gitologist) and a diffs parser/renderer (https://github.com/andrewjk/differator). These were vibe coded in TS, checked and then AI translated.

I’ve used these libraries to build a native Mac Markdown notes app (https://staunchapps.com/stash) and a JS script launcher (https://staunchapps.com/launch).

I too got laid off at the end of April. So what I've been working on since then has been AI. But of course, being the contrarian that I am, I'm trying to make small language model AI usable. The end goal is to complete all the pieces I need to create an AI empowered tool that you can point at an authorized Network, and it figures out on its own. What needs to be monitored. Learns what normal looks like on your network. Build your dashboards. Working both as systems monitoring and network monitoring. So right now my GitHub is full of both things that I need, for personal use, in this goal. Also with things that I need because they will become tools for the final product. https://github.com/linuxrebel. You'll get to see my contorted mind at work