Ask HN: What Project are you the most proud of?
Hey HN, I was wondering what projects you've finished that made you think that you actually made something really cool. I'm looking for some revolutionary, or just cool REPOs or tools I can check out, lemme see them :)
A Rust matching engine + OUCH/SoupBinTCP order-entry gateway, built to understand what production exchange connectivity actually looks like under the hood.
ITCH 5.0 replay, top-100 symbols: 5.6M book ops/sec single-threaded, p50 100ns (book management, 0 trades). Flat-array levels took cancel at depth-1000 from 78µs to sub-µs vs BTreeMap; BBO is a cached field read. OUCH gateway p50 ~10µs order-to-ack over loopback with software timestamps.
https://github.com/AsthaMishra/matching-engine
It was super fun to build it. Keeping minimal allocations on hot path and watching every microsecond was quite addictive
Long, long ago, Ward Christensen mentioned that someone at work (IBM) told him "You can't write OS/2 programs in Assembler". Discussions followed, and eventually he gifted me the entire C programming suite for OS/2. It was quite a hefty package. I used the Macro Assembler included therein to write Forth/2, a direct threaded Forth for OS/2 written in assembler.[1]
Later, Brian Mathewson from Case Western wrote up a really good manual for it, and I actually got paid a few times for it. (Shareware, back in the day)
At one point, I had a self contained boot floppy with OS/2 minus it's GUI, Forth/2, and a bit of room left. You could load up Forth/2 and do a directory and play Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor simultaneously. I thought that was pretty cool.
I do a lot of professional recordings with a Zoom H5 field recorder, sampling everyday sounds (mowing the lawn, a plane taxiing, an engine rumbling, a fire crackling, rain, wind, etc) for use in video and game dev.
The issue is that the sounds can't be used in a loop without it being very obvious where the start and end points are of the wave file. So I put together Loopweave which automatically detects and extracts “cinemagraph-style” audio loops. You drag an audio file in, and it automatically generates a seamless, repeatable loop you can use in ASMR projects or video games.
There's a demonstration video in the GitHub repository.
Free and open source (runs 100% clientside in your browser)
In terms of "finished" projects, I wrote a program that generated new, empty, histories for Crusader Kings II. It could create new cultures, religions, and titles, and did a simple simulation of them spreading over the map.
I also wrote a server-side plugin for Assetto Corsa that monitored track limits, and could integrate into the program the league I was in used to find the pace of drivers for when we needed multiple servers.
In terms of "finished" meaning "I stopped working on it", I did write a compiler for a static concatinative language.
I had the opportunity to maintain https://bitcoin.org/ for a few years. I'm proud that in that time I was able to help a bunch of new people all around the world learn about and get starting using bitcoin.
At the same time, it was difficult working with the domain owners behind it who at times were self-serving and very ad-hoc with respect to wanting to push their own agendas.
So definitely one of my most proud projects, but also bittersweet. :/
I have been building a coding agent, VT Code, in my spare time. It's a way of me to self-research and explore how coding agent works in practice by building one. https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode
ghidra-delinker-extension [1]. It's a Ghidra extension for exporting relocatable object files from programs, which enables all kinds of heresy I've dubbed "Mad Max-driven development".
Somehow, it landed me an academic poster presentation [2] at the 2025 SURE Workshop, part of ACM CCS 2025 held in Taiwan. As a hobbyist playing Doctor Frankenstein with bits instead of gibs in my spare time, that is "received an invitation from Hogwarts"-levels of impossible, given that ACM CCS is the biggest academic cybersecurity conference in the world.
It also somehow grew a small community online around it, mostly within the Windows decompilation scene. It's not finished (as it is the kind of project that is practically endless), but I don't see how I could top that.
[1] https://github.com/boricj/ghidra-delinker-extension
[2] https://boricj.net/2025/10/25/ghidra-delinker-extension-and-...
https://github.com/shuxueshuxue/spexcode
A tool that allows me to command dozens of coding agents. Magic happens when you solve the spec-drifting problem of SDD.
I am proud to have https://www.ymant.com/ for IT services.
A simple interpreted programming langauge and terminal IDE.
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/spade
But it is not finished!
[0] - https://github.com/con-dog/snibble/blob/master/README.md
Over-engineered word game
Checked it out, looks extremely cool, couldn't move in the beta playtest, will bookmark and check again later :)
Sorry, Try deleting “demo” from the url and it will take you to the tutorial (you will be blue)
Really interesting idea, had fun testing - tho tbh it gets repetitive and slow after a few minutes, power ups or other ways to interact with player would be cool.
Thanks for checking it out and I agree 100% with your conclusion - it was an insanely fun engineering problem to work on, but I forgot to make the actual game fun lol.
I know that for my next game! Next one will be fun not interesting :)
This one: https://agenticworldcup.ai/
We just launched it too. ;-)
https://github.com/HaseebKhalid1507/SynapsCLI - a lightweight embeddable agent runtime written in Rust.
Interesting, tho I gotta ask how much of it is done by ai/what role AI played in this project, because Claude even added itself as co-author lol. Will check it out later
a deep dive down noise framework and perlin noise made me write my own.
Ohhh, that is such a cool project
did you ever want to generate emails and plug them into monitoring tools & whatever you receive there becomes an API call? (To telegram API, Matrix, create github issue, jira ticket, ...)
I’m most proud of ThreatNexus.
a free, community-driven platform that makes nation-state APT intelligence and actionable hunting queries available without the usual paywalls security analysts hit every day.