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j-romon Ask HN: What niche task/tool websites have you built?

I build a minimal site that shows the current time in UTC. The goal was to create an effect like a "wall of clocks" that you see on TV and in movies.

https://currenttimeutc.com/

I also made a site that lets you schedule a Google Calendar meeting in 1-click:

https://carvemeetings.com/

j-romon Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on

Schedule a meeting with cynthia@yourdomain.com

Find 45 minutes with Cynthia next week, title it "1:1”

These two flows are the ones I'm interested in building out. Something low friction where you don't have to spend time trying to find a common free slot on each other's calendar

j-romon Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on

I just read through that page, thanks for linking it! My vision for Carve is that I just want users to say "I want to schedule a meeting with A, B, and C people". And then Carve would handle the rest: finding availability, making sure the meeting time is during working hours, etc...

The additional features would let users set filters on:

* What times they wanted to schedule meetings

* Schedule meetings at least 24 hours in advance

* Set some people as optional

* etc..

j-romon Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on

I built Carve, a site that lets users schedule Google Calendar meetings with 1-click. There are a bunch of features I want to add but I want to make sure that this is a real problem first.

Link: https://carvemeetings.com/

j-romon Show HN: Carve – 1-click meeting scheduler

Hello! Carve is more of a proof-of-concept at this stage and I am looking for feedback. The problem I'm trying to solve is that it takes too long to schedule meetings with people.

Some key areas where I'm looking for feedback:

1. Does this solve the problem?

2. Is it intuitive?

3. Would you pay money for this?

j-romon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (August 2023)

I've been working on a solution to 1-click schedule meetings: https://carvemeetings.com/

I'm looking for users to test it out as it's still in the early phases

j-romon Kenny Log-Ins

The ideas are endless!

* Timber company - Kenny's Loggin'

* Craft gin - Kenny's Log Gin

* Exponent-related math discovery - Kenny's Log(in)

j-romon Show HN: Minimalist Time Zone Converter

Hello! I just added ~1k airport codes to the site. If there's an airport that isn't there, let me know and I can add it!

j-romon Show HN: Minimalist Time Zone Converter

Thanks for taking a look! Adding airports are an interesting idea. I'm going to try adding a few and see how it goes.

j-romon Tell HN: These Are Tough Times

I think all the interpersonal connection eventually got removed since it started becoming more overtly about the money.

j-romon Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?

Vanilla Javascript / HTML is the fastest for me. Maybe a couple of Python scripts for automation.

j-romon Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

Static Hugo site running on Cloudflare Pages: https://clippyfrontend.pages.dev/

The majority of the video processing and indexing work is done offline. I have a CLI tool that creates the data files for Hugo on my local box. Because of this, I don't need a database. I just run the tool, git push, and the data on the site automatically updates. The frontend is vanilla HTML, JS, and CSS.

j-romon Ask HN: What do you do in your free time?

Building side projects - This is usually my go-to activity when there is an active project. More often than not, I'm searching for a project.

Running - I try to run a few times a week with my long-term goal being a 25 minute 5k

Reading - This is more ad-hoc but I've gradually been reading more recently

Tennis - I sign up for lessons. I used to take them once a week but I'm planning on going multiple times a week for faster improvement

j-romon Removal of Heroku free product plans

This is really disappointing. I've used Heroku for many years to build out small proof-of-concept apps. It was one of the first platforms that I used to make my small projects public. Sad to see the free tier go.

j-romon Ask HN: What fun have you had with tech recently?

https://www.twitch.tv/ortopilot

j-romon Ask HN: What fun have you had with tech recently?

I follow an incredibly talented musician Twitch streamer who creates covers of songs during his streams. He uploads vods of his streams to Youtube and these can be anywhere from 3 - 5 hours. I used yt-dlp and ffmpeg to process his videos so I could create a table of contents that contained a list of timestamps of when he starts playing each song. The 2nd step (which I haven't done yet) is to create a small site that lets me search for different song covers and create playlists out of them.

One of the reasons I enjoyed building this was because it was just for me. There was no pressure for it to be production-ready or to make a profit.

j-romon Ask HN: Do you prefer Markdown or a rich-text editor for blogging?

I was using Jekyll but my blog was super old so I used the opportunity to try out a new static site generator.

j-romon Ask HN: Do you prefer Markdown or a rich-text editor for blogging?

Markdown. I recently make the switch to Hugo and hugo server makes it easy to iterate on writing while also seeing the preview. I think it also depends on complex your blog is. For me, a flat file with words and maybe some images and math symbols are enough.

j-romon Using TODO For Everything

I believe that categorizing comments will save some time down the road if you're specifically looking for something like "BUG". However, searching and aggregating all comments becomes more difficult, which is, in my opinion, one of the main benefits of using "TODO".

j-romon Ask HN: Has anyone had luck with starting an apartment garden?

> artichokes, peas, basil and other herbs like tarragon as well as having a couple lemon trees

That gives me hope :) I think I'm going to try out basil and go from there.

j-romon Ask HN: Has anyone had luck with starting an apartment garden?

Did you have any issues with fruit flies in general or only when the tomatoes fell?

j-romon Ask HN: Has anyone had luck with starting an apartment garden?

Very cool! I was considering something like basil or peppers to get started. Does your geographic location get a lot of natural sunlight? I'm wondering if I need supplemental lighting since Seattle doesn't always get a ton of natural sunlight.

j-romon Ask HN: I keep forgetting the new habits I'm trying to form

I started tracking my habits using Daylio 3 years ago and haven't looked back: https://daylio.net/. This combined with reading Atomic Habits has helped me stick to habits I'm trying to form. Basically, set the bar super low. Instead of 10 minute sessions, set it for 30 seconds. If you meditate for 30 seconds in a day, that counts as you meditating. The goal is to get into the habit of being consistent. Increase the duration (if you want) can come later.

j-romon Show HN: Good Plates – A minimalist recipe website

Good call. Right now I have a loading spinner while talking to the backend but I didn't consider the time to fetch the image from the recipe site.

j-romon Show HN: Good Plates – A minimalist recipe website

Thanks for taking a look! The goal was to give a quick snapshot of a recipe to make it easy to evaluate. The images are pulled from 3rd party recipes websites so it's hard to filter those out.

j-romon Ask HN: How many projects do you work on at a time?

Thanks for pointing that out! There's a known bug where if the DB has less than X recipes for a given filter, it throws a 4xx. One way to fix it is to fix the bug. The alternative is to always have more than X recipes for a filter :D

j-romon Ask HN: How many projects do you work on at a time?

Just one.

It's too much context-switching otherwise and I end up not finishing anything. Right now, for me, that's https://findgoodplates.com/

j-romon Ask HN: Does anyone use an Oura sleep ring?

I'm not the person you asked but I think it's because it looks like it gives organizations the ability to track biometrics of its members / employees.

j-romon Ask HN: Does anyone use an Oura sleep ring?

I use my Oura ring to gauge how well I'm sleeping. It doesn't magically fix my sleep but I use it correlate which activities result in poor quality sleep. For example, sleeping late and waking up early will result in a low "Sleep" score because my "Timing" and "Total sleep" metrics would be low.

It does gamify sleep for me but I personally think sleep is very important so having any kind of metric and then incrementally working to improve it is useful.

I don't really pay attention to the "Readiness" or "Activity" metrics but maybe I should? At least for now, I want to focus on "Sleep".

j-romon Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

I built GoodPlates [1] using Netlify [2] for rendering the HTML, JS, CSS. Instead of using vanilla CSS, I used TailwindCSS [3]. My backend consists of API Gateway [4], Lambda [5], and DynamoDB [6]. I also use CircleCI [7] for deploying my API Gateway / Lambda changes.

[1] https://findgoodplates.com/

[2] https://netlify.com/

[3] https://tailwindcss.com/

[4] https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/

[5] https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/

[6] https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/

[7] https://circleci.com/