xakpc

Author here. I build MCP Canary, a monitor for MCP endpoints, and the probe behind this is its inspect step (official C# SDK, Streamable HTTP with SSE fallback, no credentials, never calls a tool)

Things that not surprised me with all AI slop: listings not updated since April are broken 40% of the time; Railway and Render endpoints are broken 50% / 39% vs 6% on Workers; 78% of servers behind auth don't declare a required header in the registry

I draw a clear line between using agentic tools at work (I basically put my team on Lode-coding) and just tinkering with things.

I do plenty of tinkering, and AI isn't really that great at it. When exploring something like Windows widgets (my latest hobby), AI helps, but official docs, sample repos, and debug-driven experimentation help way more.

After all the fun tinkering part, when I have working solution, I could build new widget in a second with AI if I ever need to produce them en masse

The entire AI-pilled side-software development has a single goal: shipping as fast and as much as possible. The problem is that it’s not better code or a better product—it's just more

I can understand why people who aren't interested in "shipping daily" and are more interested in figuring things out are kinda annoyed by all the LLM noise

just want to share if someone wanted to explore this shit

If you think Microsoft breaking Windows is a new thing - think again

They've killed their own widget platform 6 times in 30 years. Each one died from a different spectacular failure.

But the last iteration might actually be done right

I traced full history of windows widgets from Active Channel Bar to latest Windows Board

What do you think?

Hey HN, just wanted to share the side-project I created with you.

One of my responsibilities (or rather extra-activity) is to do technical interviews. Usually, it is some mid to senior-level developer, sometimes S1-S2, for some random .NET-related position. It's a pure evaluation of the technical knowledge: C#, ASP-net, cloud, SQL - all that stuff we use daily.

I have a checklist and a set of questions that I ask again and again. Each time before an interview, I adapt the list of questions a bit to fit the job description and evaluation chart for HRs.

You could see where it's going. Because all I ask is quite average common knowledge, I thought that AI could do it better. And it does: by feeding the job description and some comments I was able to get a good list of related technical questions for the interview.

I liked the result so much, that I paused my OSS project and wrapped the idea into a tool. A simple tool that creates a tailored assessment matrix (the checklist) and a list of questions and answers. Not a SaaS, no subscriptions, no accounts. You provide a job description, click a button, and download a tailored PDF with questions to use wherever you want.

So my educated guess here is that I might be not the only one who needs this. I might be wrong, I usually am, but, well, it's there and I intend to push it forward for some time.

Distribution-wise, it's a LinkedIn product. All HR-related stuff is always LinkedIn and I have 700+ connections there which might actually be finally useful.

Or not. It all might be another flop, but that's how this thing works.

Built with htmx+dotnet btw

htmx works great with dotnet btw (wrote a series on that)

as htmx CEO I approve this message

that's ok I gave up too (after a 6 years on my second company) I get back to a full time job I have more sleep, earn more, travel more and much more relaxed Now if I build something, I do it just for fun without any expectation Maybe in couple years I will try again, maybe not

I do agree, slack and discord become way to heavy and bloated. Forums might be the best way, but it need a new iteration or something. phpBB is way too old

this is nice.

I built a couple of side-projects and startups - all on .net.

First one was on Xamarin even before it was bought by MS - the progress from that times is amazing, the last one - built fully on Blazor.

I believe more startups should try to adopt .net stack - it's fast, fun and efficient and becomes better every day.

Congrats .net teams on launch

Maintain and support existing successful products is the laziest job ever.

I know a developer who single-handedly supporting a product - like a couple of days in a month for a full-time salary. He is paid because he is available, not because he works. He led a team that built this product, then dismissed it and supporting the product from then.

Usually, it is possible in non-tech companies, where you don't really care about the domain, just ensure that everything works fine.

Hey hackers.

Wanna show you what I built essentially from 2015 or even 2014. In that year telegram, chatbots were introduced - the same time around I build a simple XML-based chatbot hosting on a local AngelHack hackathon which I won.

The next year I expand this project even more, especially on HackJunction Helsinki hackathon in 2015 where I and my team built one of the first apparel selling chatbot for Shopify - and take first place there. At the same time, I made a chatbot platform that I never published but decided to use internally.

I made a decision to move enterprise because they were ready to pay - and for the past 5 years, my company built tons of chatbots for automating HR: employee support, adaptation, recruitment, and so on - all with the help of our own engine/platform.

But 2020 and covid shit basically destroyed my company, so I scraped most of the internal services (13 to be precise), wrap it with Azure API Management (you can check how cryptic it was [here](https://xakpc.info/connecting-azure-api-management-azure-ad-...)) and published it so anyone can save their time building bots.

Now I mostly use it for myself to support several last clients and showing it around in the hope it might be useful for someone besides me and a couple of people I know.

Stick to Microsoft learning resources, they provide much anything you need https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/?view=aspnetcor...

They also provide tons of great educational video content for example on WebAPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIkpVzqLuhA