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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1d ago (text post)   223 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 15th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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A few months back I was notified that my employer will no longer need my services in around 90 days from the notice. That 90 days will be up October 19th.

I posted here a few weeks ago about my hardware project which is still going strong! I now have a reproducible process to go from a netlist that describes the connections on a board to doing all of the floorplanning and routing: https://imgur.com/a/3BMLd1I. This is some really dense analog for the lock-in amplifier I was talking about.

Doing this basically more than full time is leading to a bit of burnout. (Being realistic, I'm not doing my day job any more -- it's only training my Indian replacements and I'm not that motivated to do that if you can imagine.)

So, I'm about to release my other side project! A full lifecycle API toolkit: aat! Adaptive API Toolkit.

Presenting: https://gburgyan.github.io/aat/

It handles all sorts of things that get in the way of developing, testing, and integrating with APIs. This addresses the pain points that I've continually run into: local testing of services, testing from a CI/CD perspective, sharing those tests with your colleagues, and even supporting AI-led integrations for people using your APIs.

Here's an example of the usage of this for the travel booking service Duffel: https://github.com/gburgyan/aat-duffel

And it's all open source!

The way I'm figuring, I'm a 53-year-old dude. The AI revolution is coming for my profession: software development. I have no chance to land a job when I'm competing in the traditional way with the tens of thousands of programmers out there. If I do exactly the same thing as everyone else I will be nothing but frustrated and still lack a job. This may be better shot.

Assuming I even want a job of course. The hardware project sounds like it might be more fun anyway.

Being realistic, I'm not doing my day job any more -- it's only training my Indian replacements and I'm not that motivated to do that if you can imagine.

They threaten to withold severance or something? Jokes on them I guess, you'll pretend to train your indian replacement and he'll pretend to work.

Grats on having fun. I can't wait till im paeudo retired and have time for personal projects again.

Hasn't gotten to threats or anything, thankfully. I'm doing what I need to for another month. It's just so disappointing to see the quality of my "replacement."

I'm giving her remedial training on Windows and how to use AI -- despite the selling point from her firm that they are an AI first shop. I told her to install Copilot CLI (because that's what's authorized to be used, not my choice) and she was doing the equivalent of a blank look of "how?" She hadn't even thought to hit up Google and type "install copilot cli," which of course brings back the correct result at the top.

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