Ask HN: What projects are you working on this weekend?

Fixing the map https://www.openstreetmap.org/fixthemap That's not coding but looking at data issues. There's many data validation tools https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_assurance#Error_...

Specifically I'm looking at USA postcodes that contain special character, or are too short or too long. I've done that now for 10 European countries. It's 1000s of small issues, some errors are 10 years old, a huge fun variety. For each I open the online editor, a nice satellite image is presented, and fix one issue. For example finding a restaurant's website.

If you're interested in your local area http://osmose.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/ or https://www.openstreetmap.org/ click the layers button and click 'show map notes'. For global projects there's https://tasks.teachosm.org/explore

Among other things, I'm working on migrating a bunch of infrastructure from Linode to OVH. As part of that, I'm working to ensure that every. last. drop. of this stuff has an automated deployment using Ansible. Having a bunch of hand-rolled, "pet" servers causes issues.

One very noticeable problem is that it's really easy to let things get out of date because upgrading them is painful without automation. So, for example, our CRM application is really old. Like, really, super, painfully old. Which means the other half of this project is "currency" - that is, updating software to current versions, and generally modernizing things.

The web server and xmpp server have been updated, and now I'm working on the server that hosts SugarCRM (which is no longer OSS, so we're migrating to a different product which was forked from Sugar), Mediawiki, and some locally developed stuff.

There's a few other miscellaneous improvements being made as part of all this as well: migrating all DNS records to ONE provider is one. Before, we had stuff on Route 53, and Rackspace. The latter was a legacy of our first website having been hosted on Slicehost way back in the day, and so we wound up being Rackspace customers for a time after they acquired Slicehost. We moved away from them for VPS's years ago, but DNS records for two domains got left there, and we've been dutifully paying an invoice of like $1.50 every month for DNS hosting all this time. Nothing against Rackspace, but I want things more centralized, so that is migrated to Route 53 now.

Should probably look at moving all of our domains to one registrar as well, eventually.

Revising a sci-fi story about the first pizza place on Mars: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wdwj6fn2qjywoct/Best%20Pizza_Cook2...

Also, trying to figure out how to distribute ~1000 arbitrary meshes in 3D space (https://github.com/Cook4986/Longhand), and installing the window AC units (Boston suburbs).

I'm trying to figure out how to play "Holding My Breath" by Jadis[0] on my violin, by ear. Once I get past that keyboard intro it shouldn't be too hard.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f6F1KQhhyM

(I don't like to do anything computer-related on weekends. Too much like work.)

Working on open sourcing my search engine. Trying to get gitea to perform well off a Raspberry Pi 4.

The entire thing is in one big repo with code for all marginalia.nu projects. Needs structure to be accessible to more devs.

Also reworking the test strategy as what I did before makes a lot of assumptions that do not generalize, experimenting with TestContainers for E2E-tests.

A few days ago I decided I would try to minimize content consumption (YouTube videos, forums..etc) and use that time to build small projects using cool tech like SQLite (among others like Next.js or Blitz.js + Vercel) as the base of the stack.

I just finished the first one: hodlbitcoin[0] – a simple website to visualize your Bitcoin holdings value over time. It is powered by an SQLite3 embedded database, WASM (WebAssembly) SQLite client, and one GitHub Action (every day at 00:00 UTC it runs to fetch the Bitcoin price and insert it into the SQLite database). The code is open source and the README contains more info of the technologies I used [1]

[0] https://hodlbitcoin.vercel.app

[1] https://github.com/alfonmga/hodlbitcoin.vercel.app

I'm rewriting a ERP system my late father wrote in Delphi (with my help when I was a teenager), to be a modern system in PHP (to be hosted for dirt cheap) with a GraphQL api. As I don't have the manpower to write this API manually, I wrote a JS code to read and parse a MySQL Workbench diagram file, where I define the tables and relationships in the visual editor, and then I parse the XML config file to create the GraphQL Schemas and Resolvers.

This API is already working with queries, filters (conditions for the 'where' clause in sql) and forward and reverse relationships (depending on which table points to the other). This system already create 'create' mutations, but I still have to do 'update's and 'delete's. And the entire frontend still.

I'm writing software to present audio and textual recordings of bible verses word by word in a similar fashion that some speech synths highlight words as they are being said in reader programs. This works with audio recordings from my own voice though. I couldn't find software that did this off the shelf. But thanks to Mozillia/Baidu DeepSpeech I have a complete solution now running in the terminal. I'll upgrade it tomorrow to produce broadcast quality 4k presentations via ffmpeg and a custom setup in imagemagick.

I have a big video game project and a small video game project. Gonna work on the small one and if it reaches a state where I can release the first version for testing, I will then work on the big one.

Mostly two things at the moment. Both game related.

The first is try to make a website for small, quick games I develop. I'm going to try to make some light scaffolding to help facilitate this. In particular, one of my games I've come up with so many small tweaks to over the years, that I'd like them to actually get out in the world instead of just living in a notebook.

The game is called Proximity[1], it's a simple turn-based game I initially released 18 years ago that I've been working on sequels off and on since) and I was thinking I could call the site 'Proximity Variations', kind of like the composer Elgar did 'Enigma Variations' (name might be a bit pretentious, but it was the inspiration for the idea). I need to make a really lightweight version of the game first for that though.

The other is the heavyweight sequel to the game (technically Proximity 3, I released Proximity 2 a while back) I'm working on in Unity. I've got a lot of ideas for new and interlocking mechanisms to make it a game that's still pretty simple to understand, but has deeper strategy.

I was actually relatively far along in developing a sequel to the game using Monogame, but giving modern VR a try managed to shake my brain off the design guard rails and I came up with so many cool ideas to deepen the core system without it getting too complicated I felt I might as well switch engines since I was already fighting Monogame to do anything more than some basic 3D anyway. Game already looks prettier in Unity.

I also think it might be a good idea to build in support for VR at some point, maybe not for the initial release, but keep it in mind as I'm building the game.

There's also a board game design I kind of want to get polished up for pitching to publishers at Gen Con later this year, but I haven't done too much with it recently. It's an area control game about building pyramids. Basic theme, but a clever core mechanism. I took it to a Protospiel convention (for board game designers and playtesters) and got a lot of positive feedback and some good ideas for making it better.

[1]: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/183428

Building a music-related hobby project to manage/organize my music discoveries (things I want to listen, things I listened to, things I liked) and easily share them with friends.

I'm building it in Ruby on Rails and Postgres. Trying to keep JS usage to a minimum and make it work without JS too. Recently I added support for Bandcamp links and I'm maintaining a changelog.

https://digs.fm

I'm working on GlosSurly - a strongly opinionated take on text markup / aka Annotation. The basic idea is to toss out HTML, and actually have layers of content that aren't interleaved with their markup. Markup will be layers on top of the text. (In a separate file, even) I've got lots of "pie in the sky" application ideas which rest on this.

I set out the main ideas for basic text structures a few days ago, and wrote up some test cases. Last night I had a vision of the test GUI I wanted to build... did the GUI, menus, etc... then started writing code to load the test cases, and parse it. Then the testing engine, and finally the actual code to be tested.

It's all a big hack right now, but I've got it up on GitHub - https://github.com/mikewarot/glossurly

Most of my tests pass... ;-)

I'm just happy to have something I can now build upon up and running. I was feeling pretty depressed as I've had eye surgery and have limited vision... this helped, a lot!

Fixing the toilet flush.

Trying to make my wife happy.

Entertaining the kids.

I am drawing a series of wallpapers dedicated to Ukrainian embroidery, because May 19 was the day of Vyshyvanka! So far only 1 is ready [0], but I hope to have 6-7 more by next week.

[0] https://vlad.studio/wallpaper/ukraine_embroidery_1

Trying to solve a large problem set from a statistics textbook. If I can finish them on time, I'll probably tinker with the simulations around those problems in R and try to build more intuition about hard concepts.

The rest is family time. I can perhaps sneak one or two papers to read that I really look forward to.

I'm re-coding prototype versions of the app I spent the last decade building, but on new stacks. This serves as a learning exercise as well as research into different solutions that are possible/reasonable now that were not reasonable 10 years ago when I first coded it.

Also, mowing the lawn. And spending time with kids. And spouse.

I’m working on upgrading my server to Debian 11 from Debian 9.

Technically it’s fresh install, been investing some times to fix my ansible scripts, and it comes handy at case like this.

For my learning purpose will setup k3s on hetzner, for less than $20/m it worth every cent

Received my paperd.ink display. I have no experience with programming directly on these kind of boards so I'm planning on building/documenting small projects to teach myself and others how to do it.

This weekend, like any other time when it's possible, I'm continuing to work on Next Generation Shell. It is a fully-fledged programming language for the DevOps-y niche (the one which was once dominated by Perl). The language contains domain specific facilities such as convenient running of external programs and data manipulation.

https://ngs-lang.org/

Working on a compiler for a “Universal Programming Language” and adding features to a Roguelike game in Unity I have been working on for a while.

Making a personal website for a friend of mine. Trying to get back into web development/learn tailwind/react in the process.

Timestamping the latency between when a packet arrives and poll() returns.

I used this written by someone else at work the other week, but I wanted to do it myself to understand it better.

Working code: https://github.com/superjamie/linux_udp_poll_latency

I'm planning the MVP of a status page feature to add to my uptime monitoring product (https://onlineornot.com) - already worked out how to provision SSL certificates to custom domains that CNAME to my service, which is nice.

I made a selfhosted wayback machine, to manage my thousands of mhtml、html、webachive。

https://hamsterbase.com/docs/what-is-hamsterbase.html

Washing my truck and mowing the lawn.

Prepping for system design interviews so I can move to a different company.

Cryptocurrency portfolio management and market data collection system for personal use, because most crypto exchanges don't provide reasonable PNL dashboards. Only using Binance for now though.

I'm gonna finish two Leetcode contests (virtual) by Sunday evening. Fixing up my Guitar strings as well.

I am also searching for a good Java personal project to work on. Suggestions are welcome!

I continue to improve https://ktool.io core parser. For the context, KTool allows you to send online articles on your Kindle.

I recently updated so that it works with articles behind paywalls too

Working on my home assistant installation - slowly finding more and more ways to make it useful!

exams :(