Alternatives
Products that do what Home-made database with log-structured writes does
Hi, I'm Marcus. I've spent the last 15 months or so home-coding on a document database, after work, on weekends (every waking hour). My plans for this particular weekend was to implement log-structured writing. It went faster than I thought and the results were faster querying times and fast, append-only writes. I've been working on this for almost a decade and being this close to the finish line feels surreal. This is my seventh iteration I believe. Everytime I realized I had an architecture built on a bad model I walked away, often in fury, depressed over my weak coding abilities but…
- 15D
597 days ago, I posted about the project our team was developing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183322 - here on HN, and today we're finally taking the wraps off what we've been working on since then. At it's core, what we've been building is an end-to-end solution for creating, storing, and working with structured content in a way that's accessible to anyone. You can check out an introduction - http://team.marquee.by/introducing-marquee/ and dig into the technical/philosophical details of our approach -…
2013
- 2T1
Two and a half years ago, Edward, Dylan, and I started this journey to build a new database for an old problem that has long plagued the infrastructure software industry. Today, we are proud to announce that this database, TiDB, is production ready. Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘the best way to predict the future is to create it.’ The future we predicted 771 days ago we now have created, because of the hard work and dedication of not just every member of our team, but also every contributor, user, and partner in our open source community. Today, we celebrate and pay gratitude to the power of…
2017
- 3SL
So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)
2011
- 4MP
My weekly(ish) video logs tracking my progress of building a completely sound statically typed language and structural editor. The motivation is to make lots of invalid programs unrepresentable.
2022 · petersaxton.uk
- 5MF
Hey HN. I've just launched my very first webappp and would love your feedback. http://www.7bks.com It's a book list sharing website - kind of like playlists for bookworms. The site is built on pyton/appengine - and I learned to code in under 4 weeks to build the site. There's more details on the background of the site here: http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001 I've also published the full Python code for the site here: https://gist.github.com/670034 Feedback is really important to me and I want to work hard to make the site better so any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated. Contact…
2010
- 6IL
Sysadmin is my bread and butter, but I taught myself PHP and have been coding on and off for the past 6 years. I've worked on numerous freelance gigs, but mainly internal apps that I use for my real job. I worked on this project (on and off) for the past year and I'm happy to finally release it to the public. Even if it doesn't succeed, I'm happy that I was able to "scratch an itch" I've had for the past couple of years. I wanted to make something and prove to myself that I can program. I'm not the greatest, but I'm proud of what I've achieved. http://www.ikeepm.com
2011
- 7IM
I am a non-hacker "idea guy" with zero discernible talent. Like most, the story starts with me doing things the hard way. I dreamt of a tool that would save me countless hours. Like most of my ideas, it was supposed to die in a couple of hours, but this one had some legs.... "If I needed this, surely others did too" kept looping in my head. Could I get this built? Could I build it myself? Nah...too lazy to learn how, but before I did anything, I had to promise myself one thing: No more ideas! If ideas were sit-ups, I would have a six pack instead of this tire. It was a constant mental…
2012
- 8GA
Hello HN! These last few months I've been working on my first open source project: an embedded database written in pure-go. That took me some months, as I had to learn how to deal with such large packages. Until then, all packages I had made were quite small an did not require much. I usually did not have to worry about things like allocation optimization and instance pools until This project. It started when I wanted to make a port of a tool to a TUI environment. I'm actually used to working with TUIs in golang, so that was my language of choice. The tool I wanted to port is written in…
Feb 2026
- 9IM
Hi HN! Writing has been a big part of my life for the last few years. It's helped me make sense of the world around me through journaling, and my blog and technical books have made wonders for my career as an engineer. Something I've always been missing is an online community where I can practice my skills and learn from other aspiring writers. I built Tavern, hoping to solve my own problem. Its main concept is that every Monday everyone in the app gets asked the same writing prompt and you have seven days to submit your answer. You can look at what others have posted, but only after you've…
2023 · writerstavern.io
- 10IW
Hi all, I like RethinkDB a lot. One year ago, I started to document it because I want to learn more about it. At first, I blog, at one point I started to writing it in markdown, using pandoc to convert it into PDF then I switched to Leanpub. At some point, I almost abandon it. But finally I make effort to go back and almost finish it. Here is the result of one year: http://leanpub.com/simplyrethinkdb I also open source it on here(But it helps if you make an purchase on leanpub anyway :D): http://github.com/kureikain/simplyrethink The book is still WIP…
2015
- 11PB
Hi HN, have been working on this as a side project, would appreciate any feedback :) LogUnify is built around schemas based on protobuf and all the events in LogUnify are structured. By schematizing events, we offer the following benefits: - Consistency: All the events across all platforms and languages are produced in a uniform way with the generated type-safe SDKs, which ensures data consistency from the root. - Shared Understanding: Event schemas with rich data types and metadata are self-explained, which enables different departments from developers to business stakeholders to share the…
2023 · logunify.com
- 12LN
Logbooks adapts some ideas from structured notebook computing environments like nbdev and Papermill for Claude Code and other coding agents. This is a pattern I found myself repeating across a few recent projects, and thought I'd try to formalize it and reflect on it a bit. Research and scientific computing rely on notebooks because they often consist of complex sequences of one-off variations, and demand both flexibility and reproducibility. But my experience using Cursor and Claude Code with Jupyter has been quite poor. What I've found here is that creating a "notebook", naively, as a…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 13IB
Fully leaned into vibe coding this time around. Started on v0, at some point ejected into running locally (getting v0's exported folder to run locally was a challenge), then iterated with Cursor over the course of a few hours. Really neat how much can be accomplished just conversationally these days.
2025 · macrodata-refinement.arjit.me
- 14AD
Hey hackernews! I'd like to share a hobby and passion project I've been working on for almost a year now. It's an open-source storage engine (underlying component of a database(s)) similar to that of LevelDB/RocksDB but written entirely in C. The storage engine is called TidesDB. TidesDB is written entirely in C. It's designed as a fast, transactional key-value storage engine built on a log-structured merge-tree (LSM-tree) architecture. My journey with TidesDB began nearly 2 years ago whilst I was experimenting with various data structures and databases in Go. When I encountered the…
2025 · github.com
- 15FW
I’m specifically looking for a tool a user shared on here that facilitated writing for content by scrolling up and disappearing text as new text was inputted. I believe it was a HTML/JSS only solution - a small personal project. I’ve done a lot of focused searches, but haven’t been able to find this comment. That said, I love these sorts of projects. I know they’re a self-indulgence and often a distraction. I’m celebrating that for a moment, personally. Please share your favorites writing tools, the smaller and more personal the better.
2021
- 16IB
Hi HN, A lot of the dev teams I have worked with had a lot of issues with their documentation. In fact, some of my easiest clients to get were from clients that had "black box" solutions that devs no longer at the company had created. Personally, writing documentation is like grinding nails on a chalkboard. I have been having a lot of fun with building solutions that can run in a distributed way, not something a dev needs to run themselves. And after a significant amount of testing and building out several different solutions, I finally have a solution that is easy to set up and runs in the…
Dec 2025 · codesummary.io
- 17IB
The main goal of this was to be able to not just run multiple Claude Code sessions at once, but actually manage them and keep track of what I was doing. Sometimes this is multiple attempts on the same task, sometimes I work several tasks at once. Really I was just sick of twiddling my thumbs waiting for the coding agent to finish, and I wanted it to be easy to work on/review/test another change while I waited.
2025 · github.com
- 18OI
I'm trying to get the motivation up to actually finish building out a "real" product, and I found myself needing a "win" to keep my momentum up. So, I hacked out a little one sentence journal app last night. I experimented with a few UI things (e.g.., the autosaving of the sentence for today and so on), so it was a good learning experience also. You can check it out at: http://osod.im
2012
- 19IB
Hey HN! Last week I was working on a website and needed a way to synchronise visuals with live music. I've used MIDI controllers for this before, but I am travelling right now and don't have mine with me. So I had the crazy idea to build a browser extension that uses the keyboard as input and includes a sequencer. I gave myself 24 to work on it. It ended up taking longer (of course), specially since I ended up creating a demo, a small landing, docs, and an intro video. Took me one week from idea to launch (pushed quite a bit tbh). Features: - Works as a browser extension. Atm distributed…
2024 · minitap.io
- 20SH
This is my hobby C compiler project. Decided to publish the code today, as it finally compiled itself. The readme on the linked GitHub page has a bit of information on how it works. I wrote the thing for fun, but if anyone gets a better understanding of the dark corners of C because of it, I am happy.
2022 · github.com
- 21IA
Hey HN, I am making an 8-Bit CPU in Logisim and blogging about it.t's nothing fancy, really simple, unoptimized dumb CPU for sake of learning. I am no electrical engineer, I am just a self-taught dude who has programming as a hobby and wanted to dive deeper into abstractions. So here it is, so far I wrote 2 parts: [links redacted] I welcome any and all critique and feedback, as I can be wrong about everything for sure.
2017
- 22WT
I've been lurking on HN for years. You know the drill: interesting headline, 200+ comments, you dive in thinking "I'll just skim for 5 minutes"... and an hour later you're 36 chambers deep in a thread about memory allocation patterns in Postgres and you've completely forgotten what the original article was about. I don't just want a "summary" (which usually just shortens the noise). I want the meta-consensus: "What is the actual trade-off being debated? Who is winning the argument? Why does this matter?" So I built HNSignals. Think of it less like a "summarizer" and more like a Chief of…
Jan 2026 · hnsignals.com
- 23DA
I have never been able to keep a diary. Tried paper notebooks, journaling apps, daily templates. Always the same arc: a week of momentum, then nothing. The busiest days vanished first, because I was too busy living them to write anything down. At some point I noticed that I was already recording my life without trying. My calendar had every meeting. Slack had every conversation. GitHub had every commit. The raw material was there, just scattered across a dozen APIs. So I wrote a set of collectors and a cron job that pulls it all together every morning and has an LLM write a diary entry from…
Mar 2026 · deariary.com
- 24IB
Disclaimer it is a heavily AI assisted project. The goal was not to be the most performative but the kind that's easier to learn from. I wanted to share this in case there are people who had the same idea or wanted to see something like this.
Jun 2026 · github.com
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