I’m building DB Pro, a modern desktop database client for developers who want a fast, local-first workflow.
I started in October 2025, launched v1 at the end of November, and just crossed $1k MRR.
I also post devlogs of life building and marketing DB Pro and am about to post devlog #4. The latest one is here if anyone’s curious:
https://youtu.be/-T4GcJuV1rM
Still very early, but it’s been fun seeing something fairly “boring” resonate once the UX is treated seriously.
When I first got with my wife I seemed a bit crazier than I am because I am a media hoarder for 30+ years. I don't have any VHS, DVDs, etc. laying around because I only keep digital copies, but I have pretty decent archives. Nothing important really, just normal stuff and some rare or obscure stuff that disappears over time.
My wife was interested in the idea that I was running "Netfix from home" and enjoyed the lack of ads or BS when we watched any content. I never really thought I would be an "example" or anything like that - I fully expected everyone else to embrace streaming for the rest of time because I didn't think those companies would make so many mistakes. I've been telling people for the last decade "That's awesome I watch using my own thing, what shows are your favorites I want to make sure I have them"
In the last 2 years more family members and friends have requested access to my Jellyfin and asked me to setup a similar setup with less storage underneath their TV in the living room or in a closet.
Recently-ish we have expanded our Jellyfin to have some YouTube content on it. Each channel just gets a directory and gets this command ran:
It actually fails to do what I want here and download h264 content so I have it re-encoded since I keep my media library in h264 until the majority of my devices support h265, etc. None of that really matters because these YouTube videos come in AV1 and none of my smart TVs support that yet AFAIK.
Ben Mackintyre's book about Colditz reveals that Douglas Bader was actually a pretty unpleasant character, often tolerated by his peers at best, and often loathed by his subordinates whom he would bully. He was an outstanding pilot though and was given the benefit of the doubt as a result.
To his credit, after the war he used his fame to become a vocal advocate for the disabled. I remember him as such when I was young.
I lead a makerspace at my kids' elementary school. We do no coding or modern making, or whatever it is adult nerds like to play with. Mostly because this age group can't manage it, especially in 40 minute session, and I'm competing with a Lego corner. Mostly we try to get new views on the natural world and get exposed to different tools.
This week, we managed to bang out some bee houses of some scrap lumber I had. We learned about why mason bees are great, and got to use power tools in the library. They had so much fun and we were goal-oriented, so that even the troublemakers among them were helpful.
The most engaging activity (especially for younger grades) was a bunch of light bulbs, batteries and switches, all mounted on wood tiles and connected with alligator clips. So simple but let kids experiment with making huge circuits together, debug unexpected behavior (why did it turn off when the switch closed?), and learn about conductors that could substitute for wire.
About the most complicated thing we've done is paper circuits (with copper tape), lighting up LED skull eyes for a Día de los Muertos card. The debugging was hard, and a lot of kids would've benefitted from doing the light bulb activity first with an eye toward this.
My "worst" activity was digging soil samples (fun) and seeing how the layers separated in water after days to settle in order to classify the soil type (boring, pointless). Luckily I also brought our vermicomposter, and everyone had a great time playing with worms.
Another parent did an ambitious sewing project, which took 2-3 sessions to complete but was great to get kids to get exposed to sewing machines, and they had a gift for a parent.
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Yes, pick the topics that you're passionate about because your visible enthusiasm is critical to engagement, but don't make it about, say, 3D printing because you want to use your printer (you'll just end up doing a lot of work for indifferent kids). Keep it simple and learn from what the kids respond to.
Have the class teach you how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Follow their instructions, EXACTLY. If they start off with something like “put jelly on the bread,” put the jar of jelly on the loaf of bread. It’s really fun with kids and they learn a lot about logic. Everyone gets to chime in, the adult looks silly and handles mistakes gracefully, the situation can end up hilarious.
I’ve done this with a kid and also in an intro programming class, and it worked with both age groups.
What about knot tying? I, and a lot of people I work with are big fans.
They are ancient, but still the preferred method of doing many practical things. That's really something special.
Everyone, myself included, seems to love the ambiance of real candlelight, but for basic, utilitarian stuff like finding my keys in the dark or making a snack in a power outage, I'd rather use an LED.
If I want to hang something I'm just going to tie a knot, and I won't be annoyed at all that I don't have some fancy piece of hardware(Not that I'm against such things for hyper specialized applications or to help people with disabilities).
I disagree.
You can teach a 4-year-old the moves each chess piece can make, but expecting them to absorb strategy, or to visualise 2+ moves into the future is an unfair burden.
The following are much better perfect information games for kids. I play each with my kids and have listed the age when they were able to strategise 2+ moves ahead:
"Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive" by Philipp Dettmer
I never really clicked with biology in school - but learning about systems is always fun. A bit of a pop-sci read on the subject that's very approachable. Most chapters are <10 pages. Dettmer manages to distill information very effectively though, he paints a fascinating picture of the complicated machinations of the human immune system.
Don't sell the book, sell your story. People buy stories & how those make them feel as a person, they do not just buy the product.
I have marketed books in the past and they are generally very difficult to sell because discovery is challenging. Cookbook category is especially very competitive and AI tools have made everything worse. So your best bet is to promote your story on social media and try to generate word of mouth. You could try spending some money on Amazon on keywords which are extremely tightly related to your cook book stuff and check if it generates any value, try with a small amount.
As someone who uses zsh + spaceship, what benefits would I gain moving to fish as my main shell? I don’t write many bash scripts so the scripting side is less of a concern.
I used traefik a lot, but man those labels get tedious. I still don’t get all the middleware stuff. I switched to using caddy, a caddyfile feels like a huge improvement. Much less lines for the same results. No routers no middleware just define a port mapping to the container:port.
If you go to a server you get https for free, no extra config.
Hey game devs, check out Legends of Learning! We've built a game based learning platform for k12 education. Units of curriculum are delivered through games built by indie studios all over the world.
We provide the curriculum and materials and you build educational games for our platform.
You get paid a revenue share based on the percent of playtime your game earns. Teachers and students review the games and their favorites rise to the top.
Our game devs have a community on discord for ideas, tips, mentorship and all other aspects of game design and dev.
Wingspan (2019) was my favorite new (to me) game. I like that you can strategize and compete without directly getting in each other's way. It's great if you're tired of making enemies during games.
Other long term favorites are Castles of Burgundy, Scythe, and Viticulture.
EU.org domains can be registered for free and do not expire. I've registered one more than 10 years ago, set up DNS using he.net and never had any issues.
The final section of The Baroque Cycle. Clever, detailed historical fiction epic about the 1600s and 1700s in Europe, The Middle East, and a bit of North Americas east coast. Interactions between fictional and real characters, without anything that can be proved didn't happen (like The Thee Musketeers). And, just a hint of magic. See Isaac Newton as a precocious Cambridge student probing the universe by maneuvering a darning needle through his eye; later, his occult obsessions.
Honorable mention to Children of Time and its sequel. Gripping sci-fi story about transforming, interactions between humans and computers, and other beings. Imaginative world about cultures very different from own own, and how they might evolve under different evolutionary conditions.
A delightful, completed serial that tells an alternate story of the world since 1968, when Apollo 8 crashed into the crystal fabric of the sky and fundamentally broke the machinery of the universe. Now science no longer works, the old ways have power and sometimes people go to bed on Monday to wake up on Wednesday.
I loved the way the fiction intertwined with reality.
Terrastruct | Software Engineer | SF, Remote ok for senior (US) | Full-time | $120-$200K base | 0.2-2% equity
Terrastruct (https://terrastruct.com/) is a diagramming tool for software architecture. Drawing software diagrams on a general-purpose tool like LucidChart or Draw.io feels like coding on Google Docs. It has a lot of the features I don't care about and lacks ones I wish existed. So, I built one for my needs. It focuses on things that software engineers care about, like managing complexity, autolayout algorithms that actually mimic how humans draw diagrams (not squigly lines flying everywhere), and integrations with tools like Github and AWS.
I've been working on it since 2017 as a side project at Stripe, and quit to do it full time at the end of 2019. Been working on it every day since, and now we've recently raised a Seed round, and are looking for our 4th engineer. Would love to hear from you, especially if you also think the visual documentation space is in dire need of a better tool.
One of the cooler pieces of plotter art I've seen was logging the memory state of every byte over time for the playing of a NES game for a few seconds. An NES only has 2048 bytes of memory, so you can plot sparklines for all of them on a poster pretty readably. https://www.michaelfogleman.com/plotter/#nes
tbh I've spent waaay more time than I'd care to admit diving deep into onecoin over the past few years. It's really really really wild the more you dig. Happy to answer any questions.
The ethics are obviously debatable, but its an elaborate application of the hacker ethos to the problem of feeling like you're wasting away 9 to 5, Monday to Friday on a job that in the grand scheme of things no one really cares about or makes any real difference.
I’m building DB Pro, a modern desktop database client for developers who want a fast, local-first workflow.
I started in October 2025, launched v1 at the end of November, and just crossed $1k MRR.
I also post devlogs of life building and marketing DB Pro and am about to post devlog #4. The latest one is here if anyone’s curious: https://youtu.be/-T4GcJuV1rM
Still very early, but it’s been fun seeing something fairly “boring” resonate once the UX is treated seriously.