Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

I'm finally getting my online presence in order...

This week, I'll set up a Hugo blog with the Ed theme, love it, looks exactly what I'm looking for, and as a former LaTeX enthusiast, it's pretty close. It's readable, minimalist. I'll need to customize the theme, though. I plan to publish blog posts about anything I find interesting.

https://gohugo-theme-ed.netlify.app/

In parallel to this work, I'm setting up a simple system to keep my website + subdomains easy to build, rebuild, and deploy with Caddy on a cheap Scaleway compute server. In the past, I had some ideas I wanted to publish, but the system I went with made managing the sites dreadful.

Once that's ready, I'm back to learning Rust and crypto. It's fun, interesting, challenging, remote-friendly, and the salaries are usually 30-50% better. My current tech stack feels like a dead end: it has a low ceiling in terms of salary, the projects are generally not very interesting (I'm grateful for my current project, it's the best there is with this technology), and I believe the technology will see a slow and steady decline.

Apart from work, I'm building the playground for my 2 yo son, and planting blueberries, he loves them.

What tech stack are you currently using that you see as a dead end?

> This week, I'll set up a Hugo blog with the Ed theme.

Perhaps a first blog entry would be to show and tell how you setup the blog with Hugo+Ed on your domain in the first place.

As someone who is being told that they need to increase their non anonymous footprint online, I certainly would be interested in reading it.

As a non-developer, I played with rust and various copilots over the last couple of months. I ended up with a backtesting engine.

Now I figured out I want to go all in actually learning rust and doing the deep dive in crypto. Enjoy the trip.

Curious what projects you use rust on for crypto?

Flutter and Dart. It's not that bad, I'm not saying it's dead, I'm saying it's a dead end for me.

I don't see many opportunities that pay well, are interesting, and available for remote. I'm happy at my current position, but if they were to ever "right-size" the team, I'd be fckd, so I spend my nights learning other stuff.

I started Flutter in 2018, back then it felt "magical" for mobile development, now all the competitors caught up. They also (IMO) waste their time reimplementing Flash on the web, it's horrible for 99% of the cases. The community is also off-putting, you observe obvious flaws, 10 GDEs come at you that you are a POS.

In general, mobile has a lower ceiling than backend, frontend, systems, etc... Mobile is also usually a lower priority for the business than web.

Just thought about it jokingly yesterday that every developer's first blog post is how they set up the blog or how they wrote a blog engine... :)

Long story short: Sign up for Scaleway, get your account approved, launch an instance, they have affordable "learning" instances that still feel "real" and can later run real services that need backend. I don't expect lot of traffic and I don't care if my stuff would go down from time to time, it's for fun. Set up SSH. Buy a domain, set up the DNS records to point to your instance. Run Caddy on the server to serve a dummy HTML file. Set up HTTPS. Verify you see your stuff in the browser. Now, create an actual site. Install hugo, pick a theme, install locally, build locally. Set up a script that copies the build folder onto your server where Caddy is serving, then restart Caddy. Write some content, check the limits of the theme / your set up, make sure everything works correctly. Even with the best of themes, you'll want to fix or change something, do that, if it looks good and you still have energy to work on your blog, start writing posts and let the world know.

I'm still in the "learning Rust and discovering crypto" phase.

As I have a web+mobile background, I'll probably start with some simple mobile or web apps, a wallet, price alerts, seed phrase gen, ens explorer, etc, basically anything that's crypto / defi / blockchain adjacent to understand the field better and ease into it.

Then, I'll also build stuff from the ground up (build your own blockchain, smart contracts, etc) so that I have a deeper understanding of the basics, not just "hand-wavy" ideas like "freedom, sovereignty, decentralized, store of value, trustless, permissionless", etc.

In parallel, I also plan to do non-crypto stuff to practice Rust and to have an escape route to web Rust in case I don't like crypto all that much or can't get a job right away due to lack of Rust + crypto experience..

Then, I hope, as I have a better understanding of the field, I'll have more interesting project ideas, too.

I've been having the thought that I should curate my mostly-anonymous online presence for my career. Is that why you're doing it? Curious what inspired you to do this and what steps you're taking

This could still definitely be a blog post but great and well summarized walkthrough, thanks a lot!

> as a former LaTeX enthusiast, it's pretty close. It's readable, minimalist.

Really nice! But you still need at least basic justification if you want to relate it to LaTeX. ;)

If you find something solid behind the hand-wavy stuff, I’d really love an email with details.