Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Blot – code, art, robots and open source education
For the last few years, I've been working at a non-profit called Hack Club developing tools to support self-motivated teens to learn about technology and build community with other like-minded peers while doing so. This has resulted in the development of a model called "you ship, we ship." We build open source creative coding environments, and when teenagers share the projects they make with these tools, we send them materials to dive deeper into the subject and related technologies. Our approach is predicated on the constructionist idea that people learn best by building things they care…
Blot is an open source creative coding environment developed by Hack Club, a non-profit supporting self-motivated teenagers in learning technology. It serves as a gateway to CNC robotics, allowing young people to build… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Blot – code, art, robots and open source education launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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Shipped.club▲316Lean Next.js boilerplate for indie makers to ship and earn.
2024 · shipped.club · its alternatives →
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Hey! I’m JC. I’m 17 and part of Hack Club, a nonprofit where we help teenagers ship programming projects with their friends while growing technically. A while ago, I asked myself the question, “How exactly do programming languages work behind the scenes?” It seemed really daunting until I went to a half hour workshop at a high school hackathon about writing a tree-walk interpreter and realized that getting started was actually super fun. This guide is designed in the vein of that - to get people, especially teenagers, started on learning how to build a programming language in a literal…
2024 · easel.hackclub.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hack Club▲182Free and open source high school coding clubs 👊💥
2016 · hackclub.com · its alternatives →
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A few days ago, I responded to a comment by bloggergirl offering to read anyone's web copy and help. I shot off an email hoping for a paragraph or two of feedback on my startup's copy. Instead I received a professional, detailed deck of tons of invaluable well thought out feedback. It must have taken her an entire afternoon. Here's a link to it: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bettermeans To top it off, this isn't someone with a lot of free time on her hands, she's only days away from launching her own startup (page99test) This community blows my mind!
2010 · slideshare.net · its alternatives →
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A simple but useful platform to share your amazing projects.
2017 · its alternatives →
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100 Vibe Coding▲351Hi HN, I have been making side projects since I was 14, and my team mate (this is his very first side project! Congrats!) designed and implemented the UI. Over time, people kept asking me how they could start coding and turn ideas into reality. So we had an idea. Coding is changing. With AI, the bottleneck is no longer writing every line by hand but knowing how to prompt effectively to reach a working outcome. Our objective is not to make people code better, or even learn to be a proficient software engineer, but just to keep it simple and start building. We want to remove fear and barriers…
2025 · 100vibecoding.com · its alternatives →
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I'm enthralled with using pen plotters to make generative art. Last August at SIGGRAPH, I built an interactive experience for others to see how code can be used to make visual art. The linked blog post is my trials and tribulations of linking a MIDI controller to one of these algorithms and sending its output to a plotter, so that people may witness the end-to-end experience.
2024 · lostpixels.io · its alternatives →
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Hopper▲100Hi HN, we’re Sai and Aayush, and we’re building Hypercubic (https://www.hypercubic.ai/), bringing AI tools to the mainframe and COBOL world. (We did a Launch HN last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45877517.) Today we’re launching Hopper, an agentic development environment for mainframes. You can download it here: https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper, and you can also request access and immediately get a mainframe user account to play with. There's also a video runthrough at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q81L5DcfBvE.…
May 2026 · hypercubic.ai · its alternatives →
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Dibulo▲83Hi HN community! Proud to have recently become a founder myself and now to submit a "Show HN". We are Dibulo, a young startup which is on a mission to redefine coloring sessions for kids! We have built our first worlds, sold our first coloring books and now we want to let the world know about us :) So far we have been praised by parents, and also got pretty good feedback from institutions like daycares and elementary school teachers. What sets our coloring experience apart? Not only do we bring vibrant templates on paper to life on screens, but we also introduce a captivating group activity.…
2023 · dibulo.com · its alternatives →
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Hello HN. This is a project me and some friends built at university in 2017. It was originally built in a rush, but we've added a few improvements over the years. It's a fun game to host at a demoparty and project on a big screen - We did that at Instanssi many times. The implementation is still rough, and suffers from the fast pace of the modern web - The frontend is likely very outdated, and the backend is built with Vapor 2 and Swift 3.1, both no longer supported. You can host this yourself, but it might be a bit of a pain to set up. The WebSocket protocol is fairly trivial to work out…
2022 · pixel.vkoskiv.com · its alternatives →
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Nomad Dot▲52A living map of indie hackers around the world
Mar 2026 · nomaddot.verifiedtools.info · its alternatives →
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Hello everyone, We just launched a side-project we have been building over the last couple of months -- Coderoulette is a pair programming game for developers, like a Chatroulette for hackers. We match developers in real time and give them coding challenges they have to solve doing pair programming using a collaborative IDE and video conference. You can check it out here: https://www.coderoulette.com/ We also published an article explaining how we built it. I'd love to hear your feedback.…
2016 · its alternatives →
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Hey everyone, I've been experimenting with collaborative learning and active learning for a while (I launched Coderoulette a couple of months ago) and I'm launching something new today that I'm really excited about. Online learning is pretty passive (video lectures) and lonely, and I think we could create an online learning experience much engaging and effective than that. Only 5% of people who start a Coursera course finish it. My hypothesis is that we can increase that number significantly by matching learners online in teams of 2-3 and giving them a real project to build together. On top…
2016 · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! I'm Matt, founder of Frontend Mentor (https://www.frontendmentor.io). We provide front-end and full-stack coding challenges with professional Figma designs, enabling developers to build real projects and grow their skills. The problem: AI coding tools are great, but they can work against you when you're learning. Ask Copilot or Cursor to help with a beginner project, and they'll happily write the whole thing for you. You ship the project, but you didn't really learn anything. What we did: We added AGENTS.md (and CLAUDE.md) files to every challenge's starter code. These files…
2018 · frontendmentor.io · its alternatives →
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The HN community may find the context of the prompts, organized by each turn in each session, the most useful. See the website/docs/prompts.md and session-X.md files. I also started exploring some workflows for the LLM to execute, organized in the website/docs/tasks/ folder. I found it pretty handy to have the LLM document our work as we went and simply embedded the static site into the executable, along with all the music and logic. The whole project took me about a day for the backend. The C++ controller itself took only a few turns. I enjoyed focusing on my son's…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I'm Oliver. I've been in the software and cloud engineering industry for a long time (28 years), and this past year genuinely changed how I think about coding. The bottleneck isn’t syntax anymore. It’s clarity. I now spend more time describing what I want, testing results, and refining instructions than writing code line by line. The spark for this project came from a presentation I gave at my son’s school in December, 2025. I expected mild interest. Instead, kids were completely engaged — hands up, pitching game ideas, iterating in real time. That made me question something I’d…
Jan 2026 · pixelarcade.studio · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I’m an indie developer and I built Codenhack because I’m tired of the "setup barrier" for new learners. I believe that if someone wants to learn, they should be coding within 10 seconds—not spending 2 hours debugging local environment variables or Node versions. How it works: I’ve built a browser-based environment that provides a functional terminal and a code editor with live previews. It’s essentially a "lab" where beginners can execute real commands and see immediate UI/logic results. Why I’m showing it to you: I’m currently building this in public and would love some…
2025 · codenhack.com · its alternatives →
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2021 · dart.rocks · its alternatives →
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Literacy, craft, and code through paper and electronics.
2018 · kickstarter.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →