Co-founded Beaver Builder (WordPress page builder, FastLine Media). Currently heads-down on AI and how it changes the way people build for the web. Occasional writing at robbymccullough.com; side projects include Art Direction Daily. Photography, travel, and disc golf otherwise.
Submissions
The programmer and the princess frog.
lettur.com
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Hot Launch - Startups from the Launch conference I will be using.
guitarwithrob.com
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Rich Cook On Programming
lettur.com
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10 Awesome Optical Illusions
lettur.com
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Chat With Dad On Business Ethics
lettur.com
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Differences Between You And Your Boss
lettur.com
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Need some inspiration for your blog/article titles?
lettur.com
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Rate my weekend project, Lettur.com
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Show HN: Lettur.com
lettur.com
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My new project needs a few testers.
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Save The Plastic Trees
guitarwithrob.com
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CleanTab's Library goes Mobile
prweb.com
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Ask HN: Is it a bad idea to do a launch on New Years?
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CleanTab's Library Is Going Mobile
blog.cleantab.com
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The Holiday Log (in HTML5)
guitarwithrob.com
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An Animated Gift For You
youtube.com
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A Little Animated Gift (A Tale Of Philanthro Puss)
Em dashes really came on my radar, and I started using and appreciating them after reading Barack Obama's AMA on Reddit. His responses there felt very personal, genuine, and conversational and I think a lot of it had to do with the way he used em dashes (although, looking back at it now, they weren't "proper" em dashes).
I co-founded a page builder for WordPress. Myself and my co-founders would joke about the "friends and family" problem. When friends or family asked us to help build their website, we usually pointed them away from our tool+WordPress for something simpler. It's nice to see more options out there that reduce the friction from someone with an idea to something published and sharable.
Several weeks ago, I got frustrated hitting the free tier limits on Netlify, and was looking for a self-hosted solution for this problem. I built it using a DO VPS and Caddy in the backend. It's free on Github. I was able to get the whole thing set up in an hour or two with the help of an agent. Feel free to give it a spin.
Yeah! I meant impressive more in the “big sturdy woodwork” sense, not lightweight. They had to hold a heavy mirror and still move smoothly enough to aim by hand. The Dobsonian design, plus Teflon on Formica bearings, made big aperture amateur telescopes way more accessible to hobbyists. From what I gathered it was definitely a “bigger is better” kind of thing, and weight seemed pretty secondary.
Love this. Thanks for sharing. My friend and I pulled an old Dobsonian telescope of my Dad's from the garage when we were teenagers. We spent hours and hours out with it under the stars, and on cloudy nights I would read a book about telescope construction. Back then, cabinet makers were building the most impressive wood frames. Interesting to see how the technology has changed.
I tend to wake up before my partner, and I can only imagine the look on her face when the ritualistic grinder noise gets joined by a noisy brewer.
In all seriousness, people tend to have a routine around coffee, but I think the Aeropress showed that people will change if the result is meaningfully better.
That's relatable. Sometimes I feel like my short attention span is well-tuned for this kind of workflow, bouncing between the different projects I'm working on and swapping between one or the other while waiting for an AI to complete a task. I also worry that it's exacerbating a bad habit and only going to further impede my ability to actually concentrate.
I think one of my favorite workflow hacks is to instruct the various harnesses to use the same format for writing handoffs, instructions, and context for me and for the next agent.
Instead of a Claude.md file, I have all my agents look for and use a generic, agents.md, file and a create/update a humans.md file throughout projects. Regardless of whether I'm using the CLI or a harness app, I almost always create a new folder for new projects, and I'll use subfolders for subprojects.
The humans.md file is for me so I can look at it and remember which harness I was using last. If this was a Claude project, a Codex project, or an OpenClaw project, etc. It also includes some human-readable details to bring me up to speed with the project context. I found this makes it a lot easier to switch models mid-project.
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."
"Geographically, the Silicon Valley encompasses all of the Santa Clara Valley including the city of San Jose (and adjacent communities), the southern Peninsula, and the southern East Bay." - Wikipedia.
I hope this resource fills out. I work at the YMCA in Palo Alto and I meet a lot of people as they move in to the area. I will have to introduce them to this wiki.