Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Home-made database with log-structured writes
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…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Home-made database with log-structured writes launched in 2017; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →
- 2
Long-simmering side project that is finally ready to see the light. HAMTs are a cool persistent data structure and implementing one has been a lot of fun. Beyond the code, there is likely some value in the extensive and largely complete implementation docs; basic benchmarks are linked in the README, too. Kind of aiming to be "the libavl for HAMTs". That is obviously a high and aspirational bar but a distinct possibility if it stirs up a little interest and/or contribution. Anyways, it's time for this to go out, collect feedback and maybe even some use outside of toy projects. Let me…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…
2024 · leanpub.com · its alternatives →
- 45D
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 · its alternatives →
- 5MP
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 · its alternatives →
- 6GA
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 · its alternatives →
- 7IM
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 · its alternatives →
- 8PB
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 · its alternatives →
- 9
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 · its alternatives →
- 10
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 · its alternatives →
- 11
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 · its alternatives →
- 12
Hey HN! This is a fun/educational project I built to learn OS programming. I started working on it right after graduating high school last year and have been working on it on and off during my first year of university. It features a TCP/IP stack, an HTTP server, a RAM file system, a BIOS bootloader, paging and memory management, and concurrent tasks based on cooperative scheduling, along with a custom library. It's written in a C programming style focused on safety (based on a custom library of core abstractions) that's inspired by the writing of Chris Wellons (nullprogram.com).…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
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 · its alternatives →
- 14WS
This is the first project I haven't written a single line of code. The entire codebase was prompt generated in Cursor using mostly Claude Sonnet 4.5. It's also the first time I'm genuinely happy with the end result from AI coding. What do you think?
Dec 2025 · wordsnake.co · its alternatives →
- 15
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 · its alternatives →
- 16
deariary▲10I 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 · its alternatives →
- 17
Monghoul▲8Last year I decided to start a fun side project - a love child of VS Code and NoSQLBooster. I wanted a GUI that looks modern and snappy, minimal, not like 2003 MS Excel with dozens of buttons and dropdowns everywhere. I also wanted it to have a smart autocomplete that actually knows a schema, not just keys of the current collection, but their types and enum values. I wanted to type find({status: "}) and see "pending", "active", "cancelled" in the autocomplete suggestions. As a tech stack, I chose Tauri for the shell, Bun for the sidecar running the MongoDB driver and a tRPC server, and…
May 2026 · monghoul.com · its alternatives →
- 18MA
Still pretty rough ... Emphasizes: 1) Simple, no-frill dashboard for managing posts (files). 2) Lightweight markdown editor 3) Relationships: taxonomy (file tagging) and fast linking (content to other posts) Some of the important key bindings I have are ctrl+c for code, ctrl-L for linking text to other posts. Right now this is baked in but I'd want to allow users to customize it. It's still pretty beta but let me know what ya'll think! Here's the github page if you want to help out: https://github.com/keera/matrix
2014 · ec2-54-83-122-123.compute-1.amazonaws.com · its alternatives →
- 19IA
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 · its alternatives →
- 20
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 · its alternatives →
- 21
I've been using LLMs for long discovery and research chats (papers, repos, best practices), then distilling that into phased markdown (build plan + tests), then handing those phases to Codex/Claude to implement and test phase by phase. The annoying part was always the distillation and keeping docs and architecture current, so I built Unpack: a lightweight GitHub template plus docs structure and a few commands that turns conversations into phases/specs and keeps project docs up to date as the agent builds. It can also generate Mintlify-friendly end-user docs. There are other…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Over the past three months, I’ve been working with my dad on this app as a way to learn Cursor, shadcn/ui, and Next.js. I’m currently studying UX design at the University of Michigan, and I’ve been really impressed by how much vibe-coding tools have advanced over the last six months. This work journal includes private AI-generated insights with scheduled summaries that can be shared with your team or manager. You can also choose to make a summary public—like I’ve done here for my work on this web app: https://www.workjourney.ai/summary/mkblt2zt-hn2kdbus If anyone has…
Jan 2026 · workjourney.ai · its alternatives →
- 23CO
First tutorial to date. Writing your first C program, includes a link at the bottom with a detailed look at printf() as optional reading. I would love some feedback, as I intend writing up a lot of dev articles for people to learn from : www.xanthu.com/first-c-program
2013 · its alternatives →
- 24IM
Hello everyone. I'm a relatively new developer and I started my first project to go full production recently. It is a directory of payment processors and payment service providers. It's free to use and gives detailed info on their pricing, business model, supported business types, available countries, prohibited businesses and high risk business support. So far only 40 have been added with more to come. And I allow processors to contact me so that they're details can be added to the database. I'll eventually automate this and add verification the months to come. I hope you'll find it useful.…
2025 · sourcefees.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 →