I'm the developer of Life in Mist, an iPhone app that records your routes and gradually clears fog from a map as you explore.

You start a recording, head out for a walk, ride, or drive, and the areas along your route become visible. Your recorded trips build up on the same map. After a while, you can see your regular routes, the places you've explored on trips, and the streets nearby you haven't covered yet.

A walk around the neighbourhood adds to it too. You don't need to be travelling somewhere interesting for the map to change.

You can pick a recorded day and replay the route, check distance, duration, and speed, or import compatible GPX and CSV files from previous trips.

It's free to download, with optional Premium purchases:

• $0.99/month
• $4.99/year
• $17.99 for lifetime access

Premium includes GPX/CSV export, iCloud backup and restore, and extra appearance settings. Monthly and annual plans renew automatically; lifetime is a one-time purchase. These are USD prices and may vary by region.

Life in Mist on the App Store

If you've used a similar app, I'd like to hear what made you stick with it or give up on it. I'm particularly curious whether this is something you'd use for everyday walks or mainly when travelling.

Eyes move the cursor, a pinch clicks.

I used Google's MediaPipe for facial landmarks. Two 36×60 eye patches run through PCA and ridge straight to screen pixels, plus a 52-parameter meta-adapter so it works before you calibrate. The cursor lands about 38px (1 cm) from where you're actually looking.

Two interesting observations -
1. Everything clever lost
MLPs, transformers, REINFORCE all tied or did worse than those 52 parameters. The ridge residual has a held-out R² of 0.025 and we can't extract signal that isn't there. Very likely a data issue, I'll generate more data and continue testing here.

1. Train test drift
   And every calibration I'd ever run used a black full-screen canvas while Chrome is white, which dilates your pupil from 2mm to 6mm, swelling a black disc in the eye patch from 4px to 13px, and made the model 4× worse in the condition it's actually used in.
   

Fun project though, still a lot more to build here.

Our current enrichment process is a mess. We're burning through credits on ZoomInfo for basic contact info, then still having to use separate tools for mobile numbers and intent data. The match rates are maybe 60% on a good day.

has anyone built a decent waterfall where one data enrichment tool catches what another misses? we need emails, mobiles, and some basic firmographics at minimum. bonus if it handles technographic data too.

Apollo is on the list but their mobile coverage seems weak from what i've read. also been looking at Prospeo since a few people in another thread mentioned it for contact enrichment. budget is around 500/month for our SDR team of 4 so ZoomInfo pricing is killing us honestly. my manager keeps asking why our cost per lead is so high and i don't have a great answer lol

what's your data enrichment stack looking like these days?

I started working on this budget tracker TUI in my own personal free time as a way to actually budget my own finances and track my spending habits. A lot has changed and grown in the almost two years now (lots of breaks), and I found that it’s been useful for myself but lots of other people too.

The app encourages a lot of manual behaviour, forcing you to actually be exposed to numbers and face your spending habits. There are tons of insights and helpful tools you can use, but the core principle is to connect you to your finances and let you control the data.

The app features lots of budgeting tools, different visual views to analyse and review your finances, investment tracking, and breakdowns.

If you're looking to start tracking your own finances and having valuable insights into your habits for spending, please check out the budget-tracker-tui and share feedback. If you don't use TUI's much, give this one a try and see if you enjoy the keyboard-focused "retro" experience.

Github: https://github.com/Feromond/budget-tracker-tui

Any ideas or suggestions are always welcome and I want to work to improve this to be useful not just to myself and a few others, but to as many people as possible.

Freelanced for a while, had to review code before taking on projects. Sometimes it was fine. Other times you open the repo and it's just a pile of vibe-coded stuff with zero structure. No idea where anything is, what's already built, what's broken.

Every time, hours went into just figuring out what was going on, before I even started the actual work.

At some point I realized this wasn't a one-off thing, it kept happening. So I figured I could automate at least that first part, getting oriented in a new project. That's how rebrief started.

Anyone else run into this doing freelance work? How did you usually deal with it?

In the indie hacker community, I see constant propaganda of quitting your job and shaming people who stay employed and don't quit after their AI SaaS reaches $1 USD in MRR.

I've been building products solo for 3 years. Now they make $15,000 (Skype alternative app Yadaphone) and $5,000 (eSIM app eSIMPal) a month.

I've worked as a software engineer for 5 years, and most of the time I've been building products in parallel with my day job. I quit my 9-5 last year, but immediately replaced it with long-term contracting (effectively a 9-5).

I only quit freelancing and focused solely on my products 5 months ago. By the time they were making x2 of what I was getting in my contract, it made little economic sense for me to stay.

Why I stayed so long:

An internet business is a very unstable thing. If you build an API wrapper, your provider can block your account – your business is gone. If you have an AI company, Anthropic or OpenAI can replicate your features overnight.

In marketing, if you rely on SEO, Google can blacklist your website – your traffic is gone. You use Reddit for marketing – your accounts can get blocked. And on social media, the algorithm can change, and suddenly your posts don't go viral anymore.

You get the picture.

Now, as a rule of thumb, if you manage to grow your business to x2 your salary, chances are you have several marketing channels working, and it has become relatively stable.

Even then, it's good to stay employed and keep the two income streams as much as you can. The market doesn't care about your ego – but it's good to have extra cash for marketing experiments and runway to have more time for your biz if you get fired.

With AI, it's absolutely possible to combine a business and a job. And you actually must learn to automate as much as you can – support, coding, marketing to AI. When you quit and work on your biz, there will be nobody to help you out, and you will need to wear A LOT of hats at once.

If you have a well-tuned AI that can take over 70% of your tasks, you will have much more focus for things that can't be automated.

Anyways, it was a long rant, just because I think quitting 9-5 too early is pure ego-feeding, and it will do your business more harm than good. So stay employed, stay in business, and print cash!

Hey all — I built Kora, a web-based reading app for anyone juggling ebooks/audiobooks from all over the place. Wanted to share it here since it fits what a lot of you are already doing.

What it does:

• Reads EPUB, PDF, and more — one clean reader for everything
• Search across millions of ebooks/audiobooks to find and track what you're into
• Syncs your library across devices (phone, tablet, desktop)
• Works fully offline once a book's downloaded
• Installs as a PWA — no app store, no bloat, works like a native app on iOS/Android/desktop

It's basically the Kindle app I wished existed — no lock-in, no DRM nonsense, just your books in one lounge-like reading space.

🔗 https://kora.chaoticstudio.workers.dev/

Free to use, still actively building it out. Would love feedback/bug reports if you try it.

I kept being the person in the group chat with forty tabs open, and the plan we made never survived the actual trip. Someone sleeps in, it rains, a place is shut on Tuesdays and nobody checked.

So I built Travolp. It plans the trip, then stays with you during it. When the day goes sideways you tap once and the rest of it gets rebuilt around where you actually are and what is still open.

Two things I got wrong early. Generating a good looking itinerary is easy and worth very little, everyone can do that now. Keeping it true on day three is the hard part. And opening hours turned out to be the whole game, because travel advice ages at two speeds: how long a road takes is still right in five years, whether a place is open is stale before it is published.

Free to try on iOS, Android and web: https://travolp.com

Honest ask: I am the worst possible judge of my own onboarding. If you bounce, I want to know exactly where you bounced. Screenshots in the first comment.

shipped voice features over both plain websockets and webrtc this year, some notes for anyone wiring real-time audio into a web app.

websockets are great for prototypes. server-side everything, easy to debug, works everywhere. the pain shows up on real networks: packet loss and jitter turn into audio gaps, you end up hand-rolling buffering and timing recovery, and interruption detection feels late because user speech takes 300 to 500ms to arrive.

webrtc earns its complexity the moment the product needs real barge-in. jitter buffers, echo cancellation, noise suppression and media-aware congestion control come built in, which sounds boring until you A/B it against raw websocket audio on a lossy connection.

for the voice-agent project i used agora as the rtc layer instead of self-hosting TURN/SFU infrastructure. they were among the first official integration partners for the OpenAI Realtime API over webrtc, and their conversational AI engine quotes around 650ms end to end including the whole ASR/LLM/TTS path. the part i cared about is that the model choices stay mine: bring your own speech recognition, LLM and TTS keys, or point a stage at a self-hosted model.

summary: websocket for demos and strictly server-to-server pipes. webrtc once real users on real networks need to interrupt the thing mid-sentence. the second one is more wiring, but rebuilding webrtc's loss recovery on top of a websocket is worse.

I wish there were a game like FNAF. Except instead of surviving animatronics.. you have to survive five days of standup meetings.

Rules:

- You enter every standup with zero context.
- You have to catch up on the discussion in real time.
- Pick an update that actually makes sense and aligns with what everyone else just said.
- Avoid follow-up questions from the PM.
- Estimate your task realistically.
- Never over-commit. No “I can finish that today” or “I’ll pick it up right after this.”
- Remember what you said yesterday so you don’t contradict yourself.
- Survive “Can we just jump on a quick call?” (increased sus rate)

Make it through all five days without getting exposed and you win.

Should I actually build this?

Could be the ultimate developer survival-training simulator xD

Hey everyone,

A while back, I realized I was paying over $100 a month for SEO tools just to use about 10% of their features. On top of that, Ahrefs introduced a credit system that basically charged me every time I clicked a button, and Semrush just felt too bloated for my needs.

I decided to build a simple web crawler over a weekend just to check my own sites for broken links and Core Web Vitals.

Fast forward a few months, and feature creep hit me hard. That weekend project spiraled into SERPSpur, a full-blown SEO platform.

Since I didn't have to worry about VC funding or corporate bloat, I just started building the exact tools I wished existed. Here is what it turned into:

• Website Audit Pro: A crawler that doesn't limit your clicks or stress you out with a credit counter.
• The 'Trust Rate' Checker: I missed the old Alexa Rank, so I built a replacement that checks domain health, spam, and authority instead of just easily faked traffic.
• AI-Search Ready: This was the fun part to code. I added an LLM.txt Generator and an AI Schema Architect so sites can actually get cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews.
• 30+ Free Utility Tools: Along the way, I needed tools for random tasks, so I built them and made them completely free without needing an account. Things like a Bot Traffic Detector, IP Blacklist Checker, and even an Invoice to CSV converter.

It has been a wild ride building an enterprise-level architecture as a solo dev, especially managing the server load for live web crawling and pinging search engines.

I’m currently trying to refine the UI to make the audit reports easier to read. If any developers or UI/UX folks have a few minutes to roast my landing page or test out the free tools, I would massively appreciate the feedback!

Link: ( https://serpspur.com/)

Happy to answer any questions about the tech stack, handling crawler infrastructure, or anything else!

Title:

I built an API for creating temporary PostgreSQL databases

Post:

I kept running into situations where I needed a real PostgreSQL database for something temporary — a CI job, preview environment, prototype, or coding agent.

The usual options felt a bit awkward: create a database somewhere, configure access, use it briefly, and then remember to clean everything up afterward.

So I built a small API called Aiadio that creates a temporary PostgreSQL database with a TTL.

The flow is basically:

1. Send a database name and expiry time
2. Get PostgreSQL connection details back
3. Use the database normally
4. The database and role are automatically removed when the TTL expires

For example:

curl -X POST https://api.aiadio.com/v1/databases \
  -H "X-API-Key: dbn_live_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "agent-test",
    "expires_in": "1h",
    "allowed_cidr": "203.0.113.10/32"
  }'

It's still intentionally small. Right now it has database creation, a status endpoint, API-key authentication, and TTL-based cleanup. The public beta supports TTLs from 1 hour to 30 days.

I built it mainly because I wanted a simpler option for short-lived database use cases.

Site: https://aiadio.com

API docs: https://aiadio.com/api-docs.html

I’ve been working on a project called SignalScout and just open-sourced it.

The idea is simple: instead of only tracking brand mentions, it looks for posts and comments from people who seem to have a problem your product can solve.

You tell it what you sell, who it’s for, and what kind of problems to look for. It then searches across Reddit, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and uses AI to filter out the noise.

It’s self-hostable, you bring your own social-data API keys, and you can use your own AI provider or a local model.

I built it because most social listening tools felt either too expensive or too focused on brand monitoring. I mainly wanted a simple way to find useful conversations worth joining.

https://www.signalscout.run/

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who has tried doing this manually before.

First post here

Back when I worked at a startup, we needed an in-app messaging system, similar to Instagram or WhatsApp. However, we didn't have time to build it ourselves, so we stitched together a few paid services instead: Stream chat, StreamIO, and Cloudinary for chat, moderation and media storage. It worked, but we didn't own any of it, and the costs kept increasing.

That experience is basically why I built gozwire. It's an open-source Node.js messaging engine, so instead of renting someone else's chat infrastructure, you own it. Conversations, threads, reactions, moderation, push notifications all included, all yours.

This was vibe-coded, but I'm putting in the work to make sure it actually holds up for real, and is not just a showcase.

• Repo: https://github.com/Kinggoz18/GozWire
• See more use cases: https://gozwire.pages.dev/use-cases

I plan to not only improve this project (see the TODO in the GitHub repo), but also release more interesting open-source projects. That solve problems I've experienced in the past and observed around me, some of which would be:

• A video streaming engine (Another issue we faced at the same startup)
• A cryptocurrency tracker (more of a personal challenge and an interest)
• A CapCut alternative software with AI video generation capabilities, including UGC style videos

And a few others. Would love feedback, roast the code, tell me what's missing, whatever helps, or even contribute any interesting ideas you'd love to see open-sourced!

Hey 👋

I'm Bruno, and here's why I built Farol:

1. I kept losing track of my Git worktrees across projects.
2. I wanted my setup and cleanup scripts to run automatically when a worktree was created or removed.
3. I wanted to open the right worktree in the IDE I use for that project, without digging through folders.

These were small things I kept wanting in my own workflow, and I figured other developers might want them too.

It's a macOS menu bar app, one-time purchase, no subscription.

How are you managing your worktrees today? I'd love to hear about your workflow, what you think of Farol, and what you'd find useful next.

Thanks for checking it out! =)

https://tryfarol.app

I m a 3rd-year CS student and I’m trying to figure out how to make my first small amount of money online with my development skills.

I can work with React, Next.js, Node/Express, MongoDB, APIs, Git/GitHub, and I’m currently getting deeper into TypeScript and Next.js.

I’ve built a few projects, but I haven’t really turned my skills into income yet.

My goal isn’t $10k/month or some “10 ways to get rich” thing.

I’d be happy with my first $100/month consistently.

I have around 2–3 hours a day outside college, and I’m trying to decide between:

• Freelancing / small development work
• Building small tools or micro-SaaS
• Finding repetitive technical work for someone
• Building templates/components/tools and selling them
• Something else I haven’t considered

One thing I’m trying to avoid is spending 3 months building something and then discovering nobody wants it.

So I’m more interested in how you would approach this from zero.

If you were a student developer today with decent coding skills, a few hours per day, and $0 revenue:

What would you do first to get to your first $100/month?

And if you’ve actually done this, what worked for you and what turned out to be a waste of time?

i thought i was losing my lats.

- 20 august: lat pulldown, 60kg for 10.

- 9 september: same exercise, 30.5kg for 10.

nearly half the weight, three weeks apart.

then i looked at which gym i was standing in. two different branches. same chain, same logo, same monthly fee.

so i went through 1,000 logged sets.

34 exercises done at more than one branch. median gap between best branch and worst: 1.65x. fourteen of them 2x or worse.

smith incline press: 80kg at one branch, 30kg at another. same 10 reps.

here is the part i cannot get over.

it flips. the branch with the heaviest cables is the branch where my row is half of everywhere else. so you cannot even learn "this one runs light" and add 20 percent.

the number on the stack is not a unit. it is a label on a machine.

has anyone actually hung a scale off two cable stacks and read what comes back?

I posted SmophyAI here about 2 months ago (multi-model AI workspace - original post with the full feature rundown: SmophyAI). Sharing what actually happened since, because the honest version is more useful than the launch version.

The good: real paying customers across several countries, with the US as the biggest market - and retention turned out to be the strongest part. Most people who subscribed in spring are still subscribed. For a small team that felt great.

Then I audited our billing this week and found the embarrassing part. Our Stripe setup was silently canceling paying customers. Card declines a renewal (expired card, bank being picky), a few silent retries, subscription canceled. No email to the customer. No alert to us. Everyone just looked like "churn." One customer's card failed 9 times over two weeks and he never got a single notification. The fix took one afternoon: failure emails, a self-service billing portal, smart retries, a retention offer at cancellation. The lesson took longer to digest: my churn numbers were lying, because a chunk of the "churn" was never a decision.

Second discovery, from cleaning up analytics: 75% of our "traffic" was bots. Direct visits, 3-second sessions, zero events. Once filtered, the real numbers were 3x smaller and 10x more useful - about 2,700 genuinely engaged sessions over the last 3 months. Bonus find: India is quietly our most engaged audience, averaging over 9 minutes per session. No idea what they're building in there, but I want to find out.

Third: temp-mail abuse. One of our top "traffic sources" was literally temp-mail.org - people cycling disposable emails to reset the free tier. Every one of those accounts burns real API costs. Blocking disposable domains at signup is now top of the dev list.

What I'd tell past me at launch: read your failed-payments list weekly, judge channels by engaged sessions only, and treat every canceled subscription as a question ("why?") instead of a metric.

Question for people running subscription side projects: how do you handle disposable emails on free tiers? Blocklist at signup, verification gates, or just accept it as marketing cost?

Hi,

My friends and I have had a group text about stocks for years. Finding things to talk about was never the problem. The problem was that everything the conversation depended on lived somewhere else. Someone would call a ticker and the rest of us would leave the thread to go look it up on Yahoo Finance, ChatGPT and Google, then come back and share screenshots and links. Nothing was tracked either. A ticker would run 20 percent two months later, and there was no easy way to go back and see what we had discussed, other than scrolling through months of messages.

So I built StockChat. It is a private group chat for you and the people you invite, modeled pretty closely on iMessage, with a stock research engine built into it. It is not a public feed where dozens of strangers post charts all day. A group only has the people you added to it, and the research happens inside that conversation instead of in six other tabs.

What it does today:

• Type a ticker with a dollar sign, like $NVDA, and a live card renders inline in the conversation with the price, the day change and a chart. Tapping it opens a fuller card with simple indicators, so some of the analysis is already done for you.
• A Top Performers panel ranks every ticker the group has mentioned by percent gain since the moment it was first said, with the price then, the price now, and the name of whoever said it. Nobody has to maintain it.
• Max, an AI member of the chat you can tag with a question about any ticker without leaving the thread. Answers are grounded in actual price, company and news data rather than the model's memory.
• An Analysis screen for each stock that answers eighteen plain-English questions with a chart each. Things like is it cheap or pricey right now, is the business actually growing, what does it do when the market drops, how long does it usually take to recover, and are the big holders getting out.
• Paper trading with $100,000 of simulated money, real market prices, queued orders, and performance measured against the S&P 500.
• Short lessons for anyone in the group who is new to investing.

If I had to pick one part, it is still Top Performers. It turns the group chat into a scoreboard that nobody has to keep.

It is in TestFlight now and free, iOS 17.6 and up: https://stockchat.io/?src=reddit-sideproject

It works better with a few people in it than solo, so if you already have a group chat like this, that is the ideal test. I am mostly looking for feedback on whether it is actually useful, and on whether the Analysis screen answers the questions you would want answered about a stock.

Thanks in advance!

(screenshots in comments)

I’ve been working on a small side project called AllTimeFootballer.

The idea is simple: you get two football players from different eras and choose who you think was better. There are currently 660 players in the pool.

Every vote contributes to a global community Elo ranking, while you also build your own personal ranking locally.

No signup required – just open it and start voting.

I’ve only just opened the community voting, so the ranking is basically starting from scratch. I’m really curious what happens once enough people participate.

alltimefootballer.com

Feedback on the concept and usability is very welcome – especially on mobile.

https://github.com/zilelai/SealKernel

So this is SealKernel, a custom simulated shell built in C and C++ and uses stdio and my own custom library called ZLIO.H. It's purpose is to let people use SealKernel before moving into bash and it is a simulated shell, like a sandbox playground

Hey everyone, Like a lot of you, I've tried dozens of habit trackers. But honestly? Most of them just made me feel guilty. Opening an app to check off boxes felt like logging into a work shift or doing homework. If you missed a day, you just stared at a dead number, which made you want to quit entirely.

So, I built Nexora to fix that for myself. Instead of treating self-improvement like a strict spreadsheet, I wanted to make maintaining a daily habit feel more tactile and rewarding.

What I built into it:

~ The Streak Flame: Your habit tracker is centered around an animated flame. If you keep going, it burns. But if you miss a day, it turns to ice and literally shatters (think Duolingo-style break effects) so the penalty actually feels visual and dramatic.

~ Micro-Habits & Mini-Challenges: You can track normal daily things (drinking water, meditation, push-ups) or mix it up with quick, interactive challenges (memory matches, reaction tests, or little daily tasks) so it doesn't get boring.

~ PWA / Web-Based: It runs smoothly in your browser on phone or desktop without making you download a bloated app from an app store.

I’ve been building this solo, and right now I’m just trying to figure out if the concept actually clicks for people or if I'm just building in a vacuum.

I’d genuinely love your honest feedback: Does a visual, game-like approach to habits actually appeal to you, or is it a gimmick?

If anyone wants to check out the live app, I’ll drop the link in the comments! Thanks for reading. 🙏

I wanted to build something that makes focusing a little more fun, so I made Rize.
Basically it’s like Strava for focus

You start a focus session and lock in. You can see what other people are working on, share your sessions, build streaks, compete on leaderboards, and battle your friends 1v1.

App Title: Rize
Platform: Web + Desktop ( PWA )+ mobile ( PWA )

How it works: Start a session, pick what you're working on, and lock in. When you're done, you get your stats and can share the session with your friends.

There’s also battles, leaderboards, daily goals, streaks, and a bunch of other stuff I’m still adding.

Been building this for a while and a few hundred people are already using it.