Hacker News: philajan

New comment by philajan in "Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri"

philajan — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 02:27:14 +0000

I imagined the location has to do with the nearby Callaway Nuclear power plant, and the solar projects that Ameren have been putting up in Montgomery County for the past few years.

New comment by philajan in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

philajan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:18:48 +0000

I’ve been considering new features on Book Bounce for my use cases. I’m pretty hesitant to start anything new on it while I’m waiting for approval for Google Play…

https://bedtimebookhelper.com/

In the mean time, I’m working on a recipe application I’ve had countless false starts on. It’s centered around iterations and version on recipes, tracking changes to ingredients and directions to build new a new recipe from an existing one.

I’m starting with a go Bubbletea tui this time and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it compared to the React SPAs I’ve tried before. Not feeling compelled to style anything while working on the UX has been nice.

New comment by philajan in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

philajan — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:48:29 +0000

Built a book rotation, reading activity tracker, OpenLibrary ebook reader for my son’s story time.

https://bedtimebookhelper.com/

After coming back from paternity leave, I found that my team had really leaned in to AI driven development. This project was half catching up and half attempting to solve the burn out from the repeated books my wife and I were experiencing.

New comment by philajan in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

philajan — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:20:12 +0000

Can confirm this is what scanning the QR code does. I just went through this to get my Google dev account verified.

New comment by philajan in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

philajan — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:02:22 +0000

I’m working on a story time utility.(https://bedtimebookhelper.com/)

You build up a library from your physical books by scanning them in or discover OpenLibrary books to read in app. Then as you mark books in your library as read, it starts building a rotation and recommending books you haven’t read recently. I’ve been using this nightly to track my son’s 1000 books before kindergarten for the last couple of months.

Currently, I’m working to get the app out on Google Play and adding multiple story time attendee support.

New comment by philajan in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

philajan — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:02:33 +0000

I’m getting ready for the first release of a story time app my wife and I have been using for reading to our son.

The scope creeped to book discovery and ebook reading with OpenLibrary from just tracking and personal library recommendations.

But we have been able to incorporate new books into the story time rotation so I’m convinced it’s worth it.

It’s definitely been fun experiencing the range of quality for kids books in the internet archive.

I’m aiming for a May 1.0 release on iOS and Android.

New comment by philajan in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

philajan — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:56:25 +0000

I've been working on an app to track my son's 1000 books before kindergarten. I've also added QOL features like barcode scanning for adding books to the library and creating a rotation based on the last time the book was read and whether I actually enjoy reading it. (The books I don't like make it through the rotation just with less frequency.)

This was an excuse to ship a mobile app for the first time and get familiar with supabase.

After these last few bugs are fixed, its ready for a semi-public TestFlight with our friends who have kids.

New comment by philajan in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (Jan 2026)"

philajan — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 23:07:08 +0000

A hot reloadable menu library for raylib / raygui applications in Zig.

https://github.com/pajanowski/raymenuz

I want to use this for future raylib games as a developer menu.

I wanted to learn more Zig and be able to add or remove game state fields to and from the screen without having to recompile.

New comment by philajan in "Linux is good now"

philajan — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 15:37:33 +0000

From my experience, nice decorations. I haven't gone further than getting a top bar set up and getting my normal shortcuts setup.

I'm sure I'm not getting everything everything I could out of it.

New comment by philajan in "Linux is good now"

philajan — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 03:45:27 +0000

I’m really curious about your experience, what distro you used hyprland on, what dotfiles did damage to your install etc.

I just installed hyprland yesterday and outside of having to switch back to i3 once to install what they had set for a terminal in their default config(kitty), I haven’t had to leave again.

New comment by philajan in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2025)"

philajan — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 16:52:40 +0000

  Location: St. Louis, MO
  Remote: Hybrid or Remote (5 years of WFH)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Java, Typescript, Javascript, Cassandra(NoSQL), AWS, Terraform, Python, Guice, Spring, SpringBoot, Angular, GWT, JUnit, Cypress, React, React Native, Docker, Kubernetes, Keycloak, Kafka, RabbitMQ
  Résumé/CV: https://philljanowski.com/PhillJanowskiResume.pdf
  Email: philajan


I'm Phill, a backend leaning, full stack software engineer with 7.5 years of experience building enterprise SaaS solutions. I have extensive experience planning and leading implementation of large scale features from cloud infrastructure to user interfaces. I have a strong background in software stability improvements, algorithm optimization, and K8s resource management using OpenTelemetry, Grafana Tempo, and Splunk. In my free time, I build software including GreekUtils[1], a Greek Life centric, cloud based CRM.I'm capable of learning anything when met with the challenge. I'm looking for a full time position where I can contribute to meaningful projects while learning new technologies and methodologies in software engineering.
[1] https://greekutils.com/



New comment by philajan in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2025)"
philajan — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 22:53:55 +0000

  Location: St. Louis, Missouri, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Java, Typescript, Javascript, Cassandra(NoSQL), Terraform, Python, Guice, Spring, SpringBoot, Angular, GWT, JUnit, Cypress, React, React Native, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Keycloak, Kafka, RabbitMQ
  Résumé/CV: https://philljanowski.com/PhillJanowskiResume.pdf
  Email: philajan  pm <.> me

I'm Phill, a backend leaning, full stack software engineer with 7 years of experience building enterprise SaaS solutions. I have extensive experience planning and leading implementation of large scale features from cloud infrastructure to user interfaces. I have a strong background in software stability improvements, algorithm optimization, and K8s resource management using OpenTelemetry, Grafana Tempo, and Splunk. In my free time, I build software including GreekUtils[1], a Greek Life centric, cloud based CRM.I'm capable of learning anything when met with the challenge. I'm looking for a full time position where I can contribute to meaningful projects while learning new technologies and methodologies in software engineering.
[1] https://greekutils.com/



New comment by philajan in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)"
philajan — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 12:50:26 +0000

I'm on my fraternity's alumni board. The chapter has been using spread sheets for everything since I was an active member. Every year, information about recruitment gets lost in the shuffle between officers.
I've been working on a bespoke CRM for them to prevent the spreadsheet rot while providing some helpful visualization and making their data easier to use in the feature. The goal is to make the entire recruitment process self documenting.
Its slowly evolving into a way to keep track of actives and alumni, as well as ways for actives to interact with the recruitment process.
https://greekutils.com
There's also a working demo
https://demo.greekutils.com/rush-analyzer/ui/#/