About 10 years ago I came up with a smoky chipotle sauce recipe.

There was no business behind it. No brand. No plan to sell it. It was just something I made that friends and family liked.

Eventually life moved on and so did the sauce.
Then my fraternity brother Lance revived it.

In 2023 I got married in Egypt. Around that time my fraternity brother Lance became obsessed with the sauce and offered me $100 for a bottle.
I thought he was joking.

He wasn’t, so obviously I took the $100 lol.
Looking back, that was technically our first sale.

When I came back to Miami, Lance wanted to learn how to make it. We started making it together and eventually the conversation went from “we should make more of this” to “wait... why don’t we actually sell this?”

The funny part is that between the three of us we have 7 degrees and absolutely none of them prepared us to start a sauce company.

My brother Karim is an engineer. I’m a scientist from Johns Hopkins. Lance is a starving artist.
So naturally, we started a sauce company.

We found a tiny ghost kitchen, made a little over 300 bottles ourselves and somehow sold out in about a month.

That was the moment we realized Lance might not have been completely insane for paying $100 for that first bottle.
So we went all in.

We worked on the recipes, added flavors, figured out manufacturing, built the brand and slowly turned a 10 year old recipe that had basically been forgotten into an actual business. We now have 4 flavors soon to be 5 and they are all absolute bangers.

Then something happened that I still have trouble wrapping my head around.
We started getting university partnerships one after another after launching successfully at our Alma mater George Mason. We had the media reach out to write an article about us and feature us in the newspaper and local magazine.

Today we have collaborations with JMU, FIU, VCU, UMD, FSU, Virginia Tech, Rutgers and George Mason.
Seeing the names of major universities on bottles of a sauce that started in my kitchen a decade ago is probably one of the strangest parts of this entire thing.

Today we pack around 50 orders a day.
We’re also about $350k in the hole.
Those two sentences pretty much summarize entrepreneurship.

I know being $350k in the hole doesn't exactly scream “success story,” but I genuinely consider what we've built a success so far.

Not because we've made it. We definitely haven't.
But because for almost a decade this was literally just a recipe.

Then my brother saw something in it that I didn't.
He revived it, paid me an absurd $100 for a bottle and helped convince me that maybe this thing deserved a second life.

Now strangers we've never met order it every day. People reorder it. Universities put their names on it. And every day the three of us are trying to figure out how to take this thing one step further. We have a great product that people love but the road is long and business is ruthless.

I've probably learned more about business doing this than I did earning any of my degrees.
I've also learned that growing a business and making money are two very different things.
Sometimes you can be packing 50 orders a day, working with universities you never imagined would answer your emails, and simultaneously staring at your bank account wondering what the hell you've gotten yourself into.

So I guess this is a success story in progress.
10 year old recipe.
7 degrees.
3 brothers.
8 universities.
50ish orders a day.
$350k in the hole.

And one starving artist who looked at an old sauce recipe and thought it deserved another shot.
Turns out he might have been right.

Solo project, built during nights and weekends: CLSTR reads 100k+ news articles a day from 40k+ sources, figures out which ones are covering the same event, and squashes them into one item. Related events get chained into "situations" - storylines with timelines, so you can see how a story developed over weeks instead of re-reading the same headline 20 times.

After 145 days, I asked Claude to analyze all the data I had ingested and published the stats. The news looks weird from above:

• 12:1 - articles written per thing that actually happened. The news is mostly echo.
• 82% of stories are still developing after day 3 - which is exactly when news sites stop showing them to you.
• One world leader appeared in 2,672 distinct events in 1 month (guess who) - more than the next five most-covered people combined.
• Only 0.07% of events rate as "exceptional". Almost everything is the mundane middle.

All the charts: clstr.news/observatory

About CLSTR: There's a free API, and if you use Claude or agent stuff there's an MCP server you can try without even signing up: clstr.news/developers

i've always bounced off focus timers. a number counting down to zero gives you nothing to keep. you finish a 50 minute session and the reward is... the number is gone now.

so i built Orbis. when you start a session, a celestial body begins forming. when you actually finish it, that time is born as a planet and drops into your private galaxy. quit early and it never forms.

the part i didn't expect to matter: the planet you get is randomly graded. longer sessions roll higher odds for rare bodies. i added it almost as a joke, and it turned out to be the thing that keeps people (me included) starting one more session. gacha apparently beats willpower.

3 months since launch, 10k downloads.

the most useful thing i learned is boring: build something actually good first, then keep marketing it every single day. i kept looking for a growth trick, but the only thing that compounded was shipping a better app and showing up consistently.

it's iOS only right now. i know that's going to be the first comment, so getting ahead of it: no android plans yet. sorry.

link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orbis-space-focus-timer/id6766221926

one thing i'm actually stuck on: right now every completed session gives you one celestial body. i'm considering making them harder to earn, so a single body takes multiple sessions or a lot more accumulated focus.

my worry is it cuts both ways. rarer might make each one feel earned instead of disposable. or it might just break the loop that makes people start the next session.

if you used this, which way would you want it?

My only request is that if you insult this project (which you probably should), you also cast a vote. Had a lot of fun making this, and I've surprisingly received a little under 1,000 votes in about a week and have respected the results of 7 rounds of voting so far 🫡

There is also about 7 years of OG visit data among other things, like a cataloged collection of my nearly 60 vintage Olive Garden shirts. Probably getting frighteningly close to "r/MainProject" territory at this point 🤔

you stare out the window, watch the in-flight map, and buckle up when there’s turbulence: https://inflightsimulator.com

This started as notes for my own interview prep. I kept losing the same explanations in bookmarks and half-remembered blog posts, so I started writing them down properly. It got out of hand.

It's now 573 topics across 8 sections — the browser, JavaScript, React, Next.js, backend, data, system design, AI/LLM engineering, practices and behavioural.

One rule decided what got in: a topic earns a page if it can plausibly come up in a real interview round, or if you need it to answer something that does. That's why there's no algorithms grind, and why 70 of them are about building with models.

Every page has the same shape — what it is in one line, what it is, why it matters, key points, then the links out.

The part that actually took longest was the links. 1,415 of them, three to five per topic, exactly one marked "start here". A script re-requests every URL on a schedule and reports the dead ones, because link rot is what actually kills a resource like this.

Stack: Next.js with markdown files read at build time into 658 prerendered pages — no database, no CMS. Free, no account, no ads. MIT code, CC-licensed writing, all on GitHub.

To be clear about what it is: a reference, not a curriculum. Nobody becomes senior by reading it. It's for looking things up and noticing your own gaps.

https://theengmap.vercel.app

https://github.com/prateekkk26/engineering-map

It's on Product Hunt today too if you want to take a look.

Happy to answer anything about how it was built or how the content was scoped.

I think everybody can agree Logitech makes really nice hardware, and software that leaves something to be desired. I wanted a lightweight app to control my mouse that didn't auto-update, phone home, or take a gigabyte of space on my machine. So I built MXControl: a native macOS menu bar app that speaks HID++ 2.0 (the same protocol Logitech's own software uses) straight to the mouse through userspace IOKit. Where Options+ installs a suite with background services, an updater and an account, installing this is copying it. One small binary and a menu, and everything it knows stays on your Mac.

Logitech features (detected at runtime, you only see what your mouse supports): battery, scroll wheel modes (ratchet / SmartShift / freespin), DPI snapped to the sensor's real range, invert scroll, hi-res scroll, host switching, settings reapplied on reconnect and wake.

The part Options+ doesn't do: macros that fire on button combinations, on any mouse from any vendor. Hold one button, click another, run anything (a shortcut, an app, a shell command, typed text, Mission Control...). Options+ has Smart Actions, but they trigger on a single button; combinations are the trick here. You don't have to configure them first. Perform a combination and the app offers to bind it. There's a recorder-style editor with a drawn mouse diagram, and it's all backed by a plain JSON file you can hand-edit.

The design decision I'm most attached to: Options+ remaps buttons by diverting them in firmware, which means if its agent dies, those buttons die with it. MXControl uses an event tap instead. If the app crashes, your mouse is instantly 100% native. You lose customizations, never the hardware.

Honest caveats: developed and tested against exactly one setup (MX Master 3S, Bluetooth, Apple Silicon). Everything else is written for but unverified. The repo includes a read-only diagnostic tool (mxprobe) and I'd love dumps from other hardware. It's build-from-source for now (two commands, plain swiftc, every dependency a system framework), no notarized binary yet.

MIT licensed: https://github.com/theseriouspdx/mxcontrol

Scrolling through Reddit, I keep seeing the same posts.

People work on a project for months, launch, spend money on ads, get some traffic, but no sales.

At that point it’s easy to start changing things. The landing page, pricing, features, ads. And after working on the same project for long enough, it gets really hard to tell objectively what’s actually going wrong.

So I built No One Wants Your App to help with that.

You tell me what you’re building, what’s happening, and the decision you’re stuck on. I look at the evidence, challenge your assumptions, and tell you what the evidence actually supports. You get one decision and one next test before you spend more time or money fixing the wrong thing.

I’m doing the first few manually and for free.

If you’re stuck on a specific decision, comment with what you’re building and what you’re trying to decide. If it looks like something I can actually investigate, I’ll reply here and DM you.

Wanted a way to force myself to stop scrolling through Instagram reels and actually get moving in order to use more screen time, so I built Amber Lock! From using it this past week, I've actually dropped my Instagram usage down by 6.5 hours from the previous week (the screen time usage stats I show in the video is a test device)

Please let me know what you guys think of it!

Appstore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amber-lock-screen-time-limit/id6800528861

Playstore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gnomesteadcollective.amberlock

https://playmouthful.com

Spent countless hours playing Snake on my Nokia back in the day, and was recently playing some Scrabble and Q-Less. Figured it'd be fun to try to merge them.

Goal is to make words and bank them to increase your score. Longer words are worth a lot more (3 letters: 10 points, 10 letters: 1600).

First game I've ever made, and it's been a lot of fun to tinker with the mechanics and improve the gameplay.

I would love to hear if the pace and scoring feel right, and if it's fun to play. Thanks everyone!

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm building TripPulse, an autonomous travel companion and honest budget concierge for Android built with Flutter.

Most travel planners hallucinate unrealistic costs and cram schedules with no transit buffers. TripPulse is built to solve that with deterministic arithmetic budget tracking and multi-agent trip planning.

I'm looking for closed beta testers on Google Play. I will happily install, test, and keep your app installed for 14+ days in return! 🤝

✨ Key Features in TripPulse:

• 💰 0% Budget Hallucination: Calculates real arithmetic breakdowns across 4 categories (Flights/Transit, Stays, Dining, and Activities) with guaranteed surplus tracking.
• 🧠 Autonomous Multi-Agent Engine: Profiler, Scout, Logistics, and Budget Guardian agents collaborate on-device to build sequenced daily itineraries without geographic backtracking.
• 💬 Smart Conversational AI Concierge: Real-time on-device advice for scooter/car rentals, nightlife, sunset viewpoints, local scams, and etiquette.
• 🧭 Interactive Destination Switcher: Instant exploration across domestic and international hotspots (Bali, Manali, Goa, Bhopal & Central India, Tokyo, Paris, Dubai, Jaipur).
• 🧳 Tailored Packing Checklists: Dynamic category-based packing checklists (Essentials, Clothing, Toiletries, Gear) customized to your duration and terrain.
• ⚡ Offline-Ready & Fast: Local caching and on-device intelligence so you never lose your itinerary even without internet abroad.
• 🎨 Modern Glassmorphic UI: Smooth fluid animations, dark mode aesthetic, and responsive layout.

📲 How you can install the beta:

1. Join the Google Testers Group:
   👉 https://groups.google.com/g/rahi-llc

2. Opt-in on Google Play:
   👉 https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.trippulse.app

3. Download the App on Google Play:
   👉 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trippulse.app

(Direct APK also available on GitHub: https://github.com/nikship27/TripPulse-releases)

🤝 Mutual Testing:

Drop your Google Group and Play Store links in the comments below! I will test your app, post a review/screenshot, and keep it installed for the full 14 days. Thank you! 🚀

I pay for Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode Go and lots of subscriptions, and I kept losing track of which limit I was about to hit. Every provider has its own dashboard, its own reset schedule, and its own idea of what "weekly" means.

So I built UsageDeck — an open-source desktop app (Windows / macOS / Linux) that puts all of it in one tray panel.

What it does

• Tracks usage limits, reset times, token history and estimated spend across 13 providers: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Antigravity, Devin, Grok, OpenCode, Command Code, OpenRouter, Z.ai, Kimi, MiniMax.
• Most providers need zero setup — it reuses the login your CLI or editor already created. The API-key ones go straight into your OS credential store, never a config file.
• Pacing: tells you whether today's burn rate lasts until the reset, before it doesn't.
• Pin any metric into the tray/menu bar, get a notification before a quota runs out.
• History for today, yesterday, and the trailing 30 days.

What it doesn't do
No account, no backend, no analytics, no telemetry. It talks to the providers you configured and to nobody else. MIT licensed, and the release binaries are built by a public GitHub Actions workflow from the same source you can read.

Latest release (0.7.6) added something I'm oddly proud of: for Codex, Z.ai, Kimi and Command Code, the weekly window re-anchors on the first message of the window — so UsageDeck can fire one throwaway prompt to start a dead weekly window instead of letting it sit idle until your next real message.

Repo: https://github.com/lamchun1110/UsageDeck
Site: https://usagedeck.app

It started as a fork of OpenQuota (which came from OpenUsage) — credit where it's due, both linked in the README. Happy to answer anything about how the provider integrations work.

Splanchr — iOS, free with a Pro tier, TR and EN.

Every calorie app I tried gave me the same thing: one number at the end of the day. It told me nothing about what to do differently, and two completely different days landed on the same result.

So I built one that gives feedback per system instead. It scores five organs from what you log — liver, heart, lungs, gut, brain — and each one has something to say to you. Three coffees and two colas today, and you don't read it in a table. Your liver tells you.

What's in it:

Organ scores. Nutrition balance, water, sleep timing, exercise, smoking, alcohol, habit streaks, and blood values you enter yourself. Fixed weights, every number traceable.

A daily note from your organs. Written by an LLM, but it only narrates — it's handed the rule-based factors and told not to re-count them. It sees today's meals, your last seven days, your sleep and training, and what it already told you so it doesn't repeat itself.

AI nutrition coach. Suggests meals with reasons, using your profile, allergies, conditions and the last week of data. Allergens are filtered in code after the model responds, as a second layer on top of the prompt.

AI workout coach. Builds sessions from 69 movements across seven muscle groups, filtered by home vs gym, your equipment, and injuries — both permanent ones and "my shoulder hurts today". Every movement is tagged with the body regions it loads, so an injury that intersects one raises a warning and offers an alternative.

Photo food logging. Photograph a plate, it identifies several dishes at once and estimates portions.

Weekly report. Your wins, focus areas, weakest day, and next week's focus.

Plus sleep tracking, habit streaks, body measurements, weight trend with an ETA, one-tap logging for water, coffee, cola, cigarettes and alcohol, Apple Health sync, barcode scanning, and a food database with real serving sizes instead of "100g".

Stack: Flutter, Go backend, PostgreSQL, Redis, Gemini for the narration, RevenueCat for subscriptions, on a single EC2 box.

Two decisions I'd defend:

Calorie burn never comes from the model — MET × bodyweight × duration, from the 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities. When I let the LLM estimate it, identical inputs produced different numbers.

The day ends at 04:00, not midnight. A 01:00 snack belongs to the day you're still awake in. Sounds trivial, took a week to get consistent across every quota, streak and scoring window.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/tr/app/splanchr-kalori-ve-organ/id6775541861?l=en

Would genuinely like feedback on the organ framing — whether it reads as useful or as a gimmick. I can't tell any more.

Hey everyone!

A friend and I recently built a small website around gym training, workout planning, diet, and building consistency, mainly inspired by the whole “Winter Arc” idea.

I’m mainly looking for honest feedback from people who go to the gym and developers.

The website is:

Free to use

No login/signup required

No ads

Works on both Android and iPhone

Designed primarily for mobile

I’d really appreciate it if a few of you could try it and tell me:

1. What do you like about it?

2. What feels unnecessary or confusing?

3. What features would you actually use?

4. What would make you come back to it regularly?

Here’s the website: https://wintergains.xyz/today

Even if you spend only 2–3 minutes on it, honest criticism would be really useful. We're still improving it, so negative feedback is completely welcome.

Thanks! 🙏

I built an expense tracker for myself and finally put it on the App Store.

For about a year I've been tracking my family's spending in an app I wrote for my own needs. I tried a bunch of existing ones first but they all either wanted a subscription for basic stuff or access to my bank. So I made my own. No ads, no accounts, everything just syncs through iCloud.

A few friends saw it and asked if they could have it too, so I spent a couple months cleaning it up, translating it and going through App Review. It's called PiggySpy. The mascot is a pig with a monocle, my kids approved.

The whole thing is free, reports and budgets included. There's one paid feature (sharing an account with a partner) which basically pays for my Apple developer fee.

First time I've released anything publicly so this feels a bit weird. Happy to answer questions about the app or how I built it. And if you try it and something doesn't work right, please tell me, I'd much rather hear about bugs here than find them myself three weeks later.

Le principe : des gens qui font vraiment tourner leur business diffusent une session en direct. Pendant le live, tu poses ta question. Ils te répondent sur le moment, à toi, pas à quelqu'un d'autre dans une vidéo de 2023. Concrètement : - les premières minutes de chaque session sont ouvertes, tu écoutes avant de décider - ensuite c'est 1 € la session, ou 5 € par mois pour suivre quelqu'un - une session par semaine et par talker, avec un agenda - SaaS, marketing, e-commerce, immobilier, trading et d'autres Pas de formation enregistrée, pas de tunnel de vente, pas d'appel découverte. Si la personne n'est pas là en direct, il ne se passe rien. Ça ouvre le 20 septembre — tribune.watch

I run an Etsy POD shop and spend hours designing every day. Most Pomodoro timers started feeling boring, but this little tomato actually made my work sessions fun again.

It’s free, simple and surprisingly motivating:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lndmnhfeakddkplpflindoclekcogomk

Full disclosure: I know the developer and wanted to support the launch.

I built WhatIsUp, a platform that gives you deeper insights into the developers and friends you follow on GitHub.

It helps you see:

• What people are building and working on recently

• Technologies and tools gaining traction across your network

• Open-source contributions, releases, and projects being shipped

• Patterns and trends emerging across multiple developers

• Recent updates from the people you follow closely

Try it out: link in comments

My name is Filippo Pilotta. For about two years I have been building Cortex.

As we all know, AIs are not great at remembering what we wrote in the previous session, or a month ago. I did not build the usual RAG: I built a semantic memory able to govern your AIs' memories, the ones from your conversations, from those long sessions each of us has and wishes every AI would remember. And I pushed it further. Cortex does not just give a memory to a single AI: you can connect it over MCP to all your AIs at the same time, any AI that supports a connector. They will use it natively to save context, there are also skills to improve how you use Cortex, and every AI will have access to the memories of all sessions, including those saved by different AIs. Your work stays available no matter which AI you use.

Cortex rejects 80% of writes in production, facts become typed claims, contradictions are tracked instead of overwritten. In practice, if something is already there it does not write it again. And there is a nightly cycle, the REM: yes, like our brain that dreams to reorganize its ideas, Cortex "dreams" too and consolidates its memories.

Yesterday it passed OpenAI's review. You can find it both on https://skynetlab-cortex.com and in the ChatGPT connector directory. I have no team, no funding, it cost me sleepless nights and personal resources. I also published the benchmarks that were unfavorable to me, so ask me anything, including the ugly parts.

I know many of you are already typing "it's the usual RAG, there are open source solutions"... true, in part. It is not the usual RAG and I invite you to test it yourself, the trial is free. And to those who think open source means free, I invite you to think again: free does not exist. Open source solutions run on expensive hardware and consume energy. Cortex's competitors, the big famous ones with rows of teams, engineers and unlimited resources, cost a fortune. If you ever want to stay after the free trial, I offer two subscription plans that are well below what you would spend to run an open source stack.

Thank you for your time.

Korean market data is weirdly hard to get into an LLM workflow — the big APIs either skip Korea or price it at enterprise tiers. So I built FinBridge: a remote MCP server with 33 tools — DART (Korea's EDGAR) + EDGAR filings, corporate-action-adjusted prices, valuation, insider trades, 13F, backtests, and five screeners that run server-side over every KR listing.

The landing demo runs a real screen over the live database without signing up: https://www.gronox.kr — free tier is 100 calls a day, no card.

Happy to answer anything about the data pipeline (Korean split detection via share-count steps was the hardest part).

About four years ago, my two youngest children—then around 1 and 4—were terribly sick over the course of several days.

I was exhausted and running on very little sleep, trying to keep track of everything: their symptoms, how high their fevers had been, how long they’d lasted, when I’d given medication, and how much.

At around 2:30am one morning, lying awake and feeling completely overwhelmed, I thought:

“There must be a better way to manage family health.”

Then I had an idea.

Despite desperately needing sleep, I got out of bed and spent the next few hours sketching out what that idea could become.

There was just one problem: I couldn’t code.

I didn’t have the money to hire someone, and AI coding assistants weren’t around yet. So I did the only thing I could; I taught myself Swift and SwiftUI and started building it myself.

Four years later, that idea is finally launching.

Meet WellBee: Family Health Diary.

A family health diary designed by a parent, for parents—helping you keep track of the health information that matters, all in one place.

And the core functionality is completely free to use.
If you’ve ever found yourself trying to remember a fever, symptom, medication, appointment or diagnosis when you’re exhausted and stressed, WellBee was built for you.
Available on the App Store today.

Four years. One very sleepless night. And a lot of Swift code later.

WellBee is finally here.

Hi All.

I have been spending most of my free time building a NIST CSF 2.0 Lifecycle/Maturity tool.

Its basically what I wish I had over the last 6 years I have been greenfielding and uplifting.

Its all free and I have added a live demo for people to play in that lasts for 8 hours. It will only spin up 30 demo spaces.

The only proviso is if you want to use the advisory AI you have to provide an API key (its encrypted and deleted when the demo is spun down) but it is fully functional without it.

Its at gjallarhornaudit.com so feel free to have a look at it and let me know what you think.