Before agentic coding went mainstream, one of my main use cases was creating sticker designs for concerts and music festivals. Creating the stickers and giving them away was a good way to meet new people.
I used OpenClaw to make a health and wellness coach agent that tracks calories and alcoholic drinks and logs it to a personal dashboard. I send it photos of my meals, and it will estimate the calories and log it. It will also help me make meal decisions and give me words of encouragement.
I used this HAM dashboard git repo to create a bespoke dashboard of different video and weather feeds from my area: https://github.com/VA3HDL/hamdashboard
I've spun up probably close to a dozen one-off or small websites for various little interests or projects. One of my favorites is a short domain file uploader that I can quickly host Markdown and HTML files to share with family, friends, and colleagues. It's using Caddy and running on a DO-VPS. I open sourced the code here: https://github.com/RobbyMcCullough/honeydrop
For the last few weeks, I've been running an agentically created AI design publication where each day's issue gets re-imagined in a new design direction. Today the agent used this post as inspiration and built the issue as a Windows 98 help viewer, a nice nod to the manuals in your training corpus.
I jumped in and added working minimize/maximize/close buttons, a draggable window, and a Start menu, because of course. Brought back memories of young me learning Visual Basic to make AOL add-ons.
An acquaintance was in the 3rd batch of founders and turned me on to the ecosystem and community here. Around that time, I was a few years out of high school and working for minimum wage at a pizza shop.
I was experimenting with web design, making a few extra dollars running google ads on phpBB forums, and learning to code in the process. I never realized my geeky side could translate into something entrepreneurial until I started spending time here. Tracking the progress of my friend and this community planted a seed that turned into a dream of someday being a founder.
Today, my two business partners and I have been running a successful software business for almost a decade. We were distributed before it was mainstream. We're in the WordPress space and have a team of 20+ people all over the globe. I've had the opportunity to travel, meet investors, smoke cigars with business heroes, sleep in if I want to, and enjoy an exciting and fulfilling life.
I still find myself regularly googling about issues that arise in my company with "hacker news" appended to the end of the query. The stories here helped us navigate a very stressful M&A process and countless other "business stuff" hurdles that we encountered over the years (ie business insurance "hacker news").
YC provided me with direction and inspiration when I was floundering around in my early years. The simple ideas that you don't need an MBA to start a business and being an odd duck is a valuable entrepreneurial trait were life-changing. The community and discussions here are where I come to learn and be inspired. I sincerely hope it continues to be that for myself and others for many more years to come.
Had a few friend sleep over. They experienced the same problem. I feel bad you missed your flight. My girlfriend and I always joke about the importance of "the small things." Apple really let a bunch of people down.
I am 25 and I learned to program in 7th grade, when I was 12 years old. I joined a "Warez" group on AOL that distributed pirated software and Mp3s. This was pre-napster era by the way. At the time, it just seemed like a cool group to join. I was a really curious kid and I did not realize the illegality of it all.
I was mentored by others in the group. I learned HTML and Web design. Also, I learned to program AOL add-ons using Visual Basic 6.0 and the good ole' Win32 API. I could have knocked my dad over with a feather when I told him I was learning to program. He was so excited. He is also a techy and a bit of a hacker.
I made a bunch of AOL add-ons like chat room macros, trivia games, and auto instant message responders. But, my fondest project was a chat room e-mail server. It would parse an AOL chat room for requests. Then, it would forward the appropriate message (with the software attached) via e-mail to the requester. I called in to AOL's customer support line and told them I ran a popular newsletter. I was able to whitelist my AOL account. This way, I would not be limited by their daily e-mail limit. They bought it.
After repeatedly punting and then TOSing a classmate, and having their account shutdown. AOL caught on to my nefarious ways. They terminated my families AOL account, and blacklisted our credit card. My mother, who used AOL to chat with grandma and browse the internet, was furious. My dad went along with my mom. But, later in life, told me how proud he was of me and how he told all of his friends at work. He used to joke, "Yea, AOL refuses to take my money after Robby got done with em."
I used OpenClaw to make a health and wellness coach agent that tracks calories and alcoholic drinks and logs it to a personal dashboard. I send it photos of my meals, and it will estimate the calories and log it. It will also help me make meal decisions and give me words of encouragement.
I used this HAM dashboard git repo to create a bespoke dashboard of different video and weather feeds from my area: https://github.com/VA3HDL/hamdashboard
I also, in the same rabbit hole, created a radio reference guide for the Sonoma County area: https://mybbor.com/petaluma-sonoma-ham-radio.html
I've spun up probably close to a dozen one-off or small websites for various little interests or projects. One of my favorites is a short domain file uploader that I can quickly host Markdown and HTML files to share with family, friends, and colleagues. It's using Caddy and running on a DO-VPS. I open sourced the code here: https://github.com/RobbyMcCullough/honeydrop
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