While the language itself doesn't seem very interesting (which is perhaps the point). The idea of building a new language on top of the CLR runtime feels very wise. Instead of a new language suffering from a lack of ecosystem, you get everything else that's already built, even in other (CLR-based) languages. This does leave me wondering what the trade off is. Do you sacrifice any potential language features for CLR compatibility? Or provided you can get it compile, it will run?
Also, are there other language ecosystems with a similar capability?
While I think this is good advice, I do think one can make the given writing more accessible by adding small details, like expanding acronyms the first time you use them. Or providing a link to introductory reading for a given topic, or just explain yourself. I've found that sometimes I was being too terse when describing something, and it made it hard for everyone to understand, not just beginners. But it took my less-technically-inclined friends to point it out because they were unable to understand it at all, as opposed to those who could understand it a little.
This post appears to be a newsletter with links to some of their recent posts. Admittedly nothing super interesting stood out to me this time. But I am still waiting very impatiently to hear more about PlayBook, which is supposed to be their ultimate interactive paper product with all the learnings from their previous experiments and research.
Widgets are possible to do with Flutter, but you have to implement them natively and do a bunch of FFI for passing data. I went cross-platform from the start because I have only so much time, and it's much easier to write 95% of the code once instead of twice.
Funny story, I actually used a very AI-generated Astro template made by someone else, and it's gotten me annoyed enough that I'm now making my own from scratch. So perhaps there will be a writeup about that.
Hahaha. I hear you. Despite the complaining (I actually forgot to talk about the week long pain that was figuring out why tracing and telemetry would break the build), this project was a lot of fun. I went with flutter (and making a whole app) very much because I wanted something that was smoother than a PWA in actual use. I think that the feeling I was able to get the app to, was much more comfortable than what is possible to do with web apps. Perhaps next time tho I'll try something else.
Hi HN!
OP here. This is my first post and I'm very grateful to see it on the front page. This app was a lot of fun to build, and I really enjoyed putting together the writeup. I've been very inspired by the other stories shared here to write my own, so seeing the comments has been very validating.
I guess I'll be around answering questions and comments as I see them. Thanks for reading and responding.
I totally agree. Don't get me wrong, LLMs helped a lot here, Copilot has been my trusty tool from the day it hit the market, But agents were not really a thing then.
In general, my policy is to do it myself until it stops being fun, so as long as stuff doesn't feel like a slog, I'm still pretty productive all on my own.
Agreed. Perhaps I'll write a follow up that talks about the actual technical details more. I didn't want to lose sight of the story by getting bogged down in the technical details too much, but there are so many good little technical bits to share.
I don't strictly disagree, but as I mentioned in the article, those weren't really an option at the time. Claude code was nascent and not very reliable, and I actually like writing code sometimes, heck, I'm currently rewriting this site by hand.
I agree with you that at a large scale this is a problem. The one thing I decided very early on (when thinking about if/how I would grow this app beyond my family), is that this is for people who trust each other. If you don't trust the other people in your group to be responsible with the vehicle, then this app isn't gonna help. I'm trying to make the experience more smooth, not necessarily completely painless.
Regarding automatic tracking tho, the easiest option is Bluetooth based, the app knows the identity of the car, when the phone connects, it knows you're probably starting a trip. And the same goes for connected car APIs, those can much easier take the place of an OBD-II reader.
Heh, this is indeed rather unfortunate. Right as I finally got the look and feel to a relatively polished point, Liquid Glass dropped, making it rather obsolete. But to be honest, the app doesn't feel that out of place anyway. I don't know if that says something about me or about Liquid Glass, but it does say something.
[Verifying my OpenPGP key: openpgp4fpr:4BCF3BA4BE9FC8194C6FF7BC0A6BE3C9CD4A46F4]