The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
Latest posts:
Show HN: 2d web paddle game
Simple retro paddle arcade game written in Javascript, using good ol' Canvas.
Show HN: 2d web paddle game
Simple retro paddle arcade game written in Javascript, using good ol' Canvas.
Show HN: 2d web paddle game
Simple retro paddle arcade game written in Javascript, using good ol' Canvas.
Show HN: Mesop – Open-source Python UI framework
I’m excited to share about Mesop - a new, open-source Python UI framework that enables Python developers to quickly build delightful web apps in a scalable way.<p>A small team of us at Google have been developing Mesop as an unofficial 20% project for the past few months. A wide range of research and product teams at Google have been using it to rapidly build internal apps and we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback internally so now we’re looking to get feedback from the open-source community.<p>We think that Mesop provides a unique approach to building web UIs in Python - making it both easy to get started and also flexible enough to build customized UIs for a wide range of use cases. You can learn more about why we built Mesop here: <a href="https://google.github.io/mesop/blog/2024/05/13/why-mesop/" rel="nofollow">https://google.github.io/mesop/blog/2024/05/13/why-mesop/</a><p>To look at some example Mesop apps, check out our demo gallery: <a href="https://google.github.io/mesop/demo/" rel="nofollow">https://google.github.io/mesop/demo/</a>. Also, the demo gallery itself is built with Mesop: <a href="https://github.com/google/mesop/blob/main/demo/main.py">https://github.com/google/mesop/blob/main/demo/main.py</a> which demonstrates the type of flexibility you have in building apps with Mesop.<p>A couple of us will be on here answering questions. Let us know what you think!
Show HN: Mesop – Open-source Python UI framework
I’m excited to share about Mesop - a new, open-source Python UI framework that enables Python developers to quickly build delightful web apps in a scalable way.<p>A small team of us at Google have been developing Mesop as an unofficial 20% project for the past few months. A wide range of research and product teams at Google have been using it to rapidly build internal apps and we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback internally so now we’re looking to get feedback from the open-source community.<p>We think that Mesop provides a unique approach to building web UIs in Python - making it both easy to get started and also flexible enough to build customized UIs for a wide range of use cases. You can learn more about why we built Mesop here: <a href="https://google.github.io/mesop/blog/2024/05/13/why-mesop/" rel="nofollow">https://google.github.io/mesop/blog/2024/05/13/why-mesop/</a><p>To look at some example Mesop apps, check out our demo gallery: <a href="https://google.github.io/mesop/demo/" rel="nofollow">https://google.github.io/mesop/demo/</a>. Also, the demo gallery itself is built with Mesop: <a href="https://github.com/google/mesop/blob/main/demo/main.py">https://github.com/google/mesop/blob/main/demo/main.py</a> which demonstrates the type of flexibility you have in building apps with Mesop.<p>A couple of us will be on here answering questions. Let us know what you think!
Show HN: Original 8x16 ASCII Fixed Width Font: Classic Console Neue
Show HN: Original 8x16 ASCII Fixed Width Font: Classic Console Neue
Show HN: Laudspeaker – Open-source mobile push, SMS and email automation
Hey HN, we are sharing again, after a year of updates!<p>Laudspeaker (<a href="https://laudspeaker.com/">https://laudspeaker.com/</a>) is an open source customer engagement suite (also called marketing automation software). If you've used tools like Braze, One Signal, Airship, Iterable, Customer.io or some others, Laudspeaker is an alternative to these. Here is a quick demo: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/4b309390ee274ea491981e1394e9abc4" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/4b309390ee274ea491981e1394e9abc4</a>. And here is a link to sign up and try free (no cc needed): <a href="https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup">https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup</a>.<p>Or if you prefer to just jump in, go to <a href="https://app.laudspeaker.com/login">https://app.laudspeaker.com/login</a> and use this test account:<p><pre><code> email: test94@laudspeaker.com
pw: test93@laudspeaker.com
</code></pre>
The main things Laudspeaker lets you do are:<p>1. Define 'segments': which of your users should receive messages.<p>2. Define 'messaging journeys': when, where and with which channels you want to reach users. Right now we support push, email, SMS, and soon we'll also include in-app messages and WhatsApp.<p>For example, one customer of ours runs a journey like this: "Wait for a user to complete onboarding on our mobile app, then send a welcome push. If they complete an action the next day on the app, stop sending messages, otherwise send a followup email."<p>There are quite a few big updates since our last Show HN (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34835559">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34835559</a>):<p>We now have a mobile SDK for sending and receiving push notifications. We have revamped the journey builder, and made our segment builder much more comprehensive. Our application is also a lot more battle tested - we are deployed with a major fintech in Asia and are sending XX million messages a week to more than x million users.<p>We've seen a lot of demand from consumer focused apps and websites who find most of the existing solutions' pricing models prohibitively expensive so please reach out if that sounds like you. We have successfully migrated people over from Braze, customer io and others.<p>If you're interested in the mobile SdK, see our tutorial: <a href="https://laudspeaker.com/docs/getting-started/setting-up-mobile-push">https://laudspeaker.com/docs/getting-started/setting-up-mobi...</a>,<p>and sample apps: <a href="https://github.com/laudspeaker/android-sample-app">https://github.com/laudspeaker/android-sample-app</a>, <a href="https://github.com/laudspeaker/ios-sample-app">https://github.com/laudspeaker/ios-sample-app</a>.<p>Our Github is <a href="https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker">https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker</a>. Try it out for free at <a href="https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup">https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup</a>.<p>We'd love to hear your feedback and comments!
Show HN: Laudspeaker – Open-source mobile push, SMS and email automation
Hey HN, we are sharing again, after a year of updates!<p>Laudspeaker (<a href="https://laudspeaker.com/">https://laudspeaker.com/</a>) is an open source customer engagement suite (also called marketing automation software). If you've used tools like Braze, One Signal, Airship, Iterable, Customer.io or some others, Laudspeaker is an alternative to these. Here is a quick demo: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/4b309390ee274ea491981e1394e9abc4" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/4b309390ee274ea491981e1394e9abc4</a>. And here is a link to sign up and try free (no cc needed): <a href="https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup">https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup</a>.<p>Or if you prefer to just jump in, go to <a href="https://app.laudspeaker.com/login">https://app.laudspeaker.com/login</a> and use this test account:<p><pre><code> email: test94@laudspeaker.com
pw: test93@laudspeaker.com
</code></pre>
The main things Laudspeaker lets you do are:<p>1. Define 'segments': which of your users should receive messages.<p>2. Define 'messaging journeys': when, where and with which channels you want to reach users. Right now we support push, email, SMS, and soon we'll also include in-app messages and WhatsApp.<p>For example, one customer of ours runs a journey like this: "Wait for a user to complete onboarding on our mobile app, then send a welcome push. If they complete an action the next day on the app, stop sending messages, otherwise send a followup email."<p>There are quite a few big updates since our last Show HN (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34835559">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34835559</a>):<p>We now have a mobile SDK for sending and receiving push notifications. We have revamped the journey builder, and made our segment builder much more comprehensive. Our application is also a lot more battle tested - we are deployed with a major fintech in Asia and are sending XX million messages a week to more than x million users.<p>We've seen a lot of demand from consumer focused apps and websites who find most of the existing solutions' pricing models prohibitively expensive so please reach out if that sounds like you. We have successfully migrated people over from Braze, customer io and others.<p>If you're interested in the mobile SdK, see our tutorial: <a href="https://laudspeaker.com/docs/getting-started/setting-up-mobile-push">https://laudspeaker.com/docs/getting-started/setting-up-mobi...</a>,<p>and sample apps: <a href="https://github.com/laudspeaker/android-sample-app">https://github.com/laudspeaker/android-sample-app</a>, <a href="https://github.com/laudspeaker/ios-sample-app">https://github.com/laudspeaker/ios-sample-app</a>.<p>Our Github is <a href="https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker">https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker</a>. Try it out for free at <a href="https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup">https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup</a>.<p>We'd love to hear your feedback and comments!
Show HN: Laudspeaker – Open-source mobile push, SMS and email automation
Hey HN, we are sharing again, after a year of updates!<p>Laudspeaker (<a href="https://laudspeaker.com/">https://laudspeaker.com/</a>) is an open source customer engagement suite (also called marketing automation software). If you've used tools like Braze, One Signal, Airship, Iterable, Customer.io or some others, Laudspeaker is an alternative to these. Here is a quick demo: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/4b309390ee274ea491981e1394e9abc4" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/4b309390ee274ea491981e1394e9abc4</a>. And here is a link to sign up and try free (no cc needed): <a href="https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup">https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup</a>.<p>Or if you prefer to just jump in, go to <a href="https://app.laudspeaker.com/login">https://app.laudspeaker.com/login</a> and use this test account:<p><pre><code> email: test94@laudspeaker.com
pw: test93@laudspeaker.com
</code></pre>
The main things Laudspeaker lets you do are:<p>1. Define 'segments': which of your users should receive messages.<p>2. Define 'messaging journeys': when, where and with which channels you want to reach users. Right now we support push, email, SMS, and soon we'll also include in-app messages and WhatsApp.<p>For example, one customer of ours runs a journey like this: "Wait for a user to complete onboarding on our mobile app, then send a welcome push. If they complete an action the next day on the app, stop sending messages, otherwise send a followup email."<p>There are quite a few big updates since our last Show HN (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34835559">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34835559</a>):<p>We now have a mobile SDK for sending and receiving push notifications. We have revamped the journey builder, and made our segment builder much more comprehensive. Our application is also a lot more battle tested - we are deployed with a major fintech in Asia and are sending XX million messages a week to more than x million users.<p>We've seen a lot of demand from consumer focused apps and websites who find most of the existing solutions' pricing models prohibitively expensive so please reach out if that sounds like you. We have successfully migrated people over from Braze, customer io and others.<p>If you're interested in the mobile SdK, see our tutorial: <a href="https://laudspeaker.com/docs/getting-started/setting-up-mobile-push">https://laudspeaker.com/docs/getting-started/setting-up-mobi...</a>,<p>and sample apps: <a href="https://github.com/laudspeaker/android-sample-app">https://github.com/laudspeaker/android-sample-app</a>, <a href="https://github.com/laudspeaker/ios-sample-app">https://github.com/laudspeaker/ios-sample-app</a>.<p>Our Github is <a href="https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker">https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker</a>. Try it out for free at <a href="https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup">https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup</a>.<p>We'd love to hear your feedback and comments!
Show HN: Foosbar – My autonomous foosball-playing robot
Show HN: Foosbar – My autonomous foosball-playing robot
Show HN: Foosbar – My autonomous foosball-playing robot
Show HN: Huewords, a Word and Logic Puzzle
This is a game I wrote over the last month and a bit.<p>The effort allocation was pretty different from what I've done in the past.<p>The game design snapped together very quickly: I had the initial idea, played a couple of games on a spreadsheet to get a feel for the idea, and made one change based on those plays. After that everything felt just right through multiple rounds of playtesting. Likewise the puzzle generation is nowhere near as elaborate as in my previous game, fairly simple methods worked well and provided good variety.<p>Instead I ended up spending silly amounts of time on curating the word list (including using LLMs to guide the curation) and on iterating on the UI. The basic UI concept never changed, but the details basically never survived for very long after starting a new playtest round.
Show HN: Huewords, a Word and Logic Puzzle
This is a game I wrote over the last month and a bit.<p>The effort allocation was pretty different from what I've done in the past.<p>The game design snapped together very quickly: I had the initial idea, played a couple of games on a spreadsheet to get a feel for the idea, and made one change based on those plays. After that everything felt just right through multiple rounds of playtesting. Likewise the puzzle generation is nowhere near as elaborate as in my previous game, fairly simple methods worked well and provided good variety.<p>Instead I ended up spending silly amounts of time on curating the word list (including using LLMs to guide the curation) and on iterating on the UI. The basic UI concept never changed, but the details basically never survived for very long after starting a new playtest round.
Show HN: Web Development with Htmx, Type-Guided Components, Pure Python
Ludic is my personal project I started working on as I saw an opportunity to write websites in Python without the need to use template engines and write complex JavaScript (thanks to htmx.org). Ludic prioritizes simplicity - no convoluted HTML, straightforward and responsive CSS, and minimal JavaScript requirements.<p>I'm looking for feedback for the documentation I was building:<p>* <a href="https://getludic.dev/docs/" rel="nofollow">https://getludic.dev/docs/</a><p>This documentation showcases the range of features the framework offers, providing a comprehensive overview of its capabilities.<p>I would also appreciate if you checked the layouts section and tell me what you think:<p>* <a href="https://getludic.dev/catalog/layouts" rel="nofollow">https://getludic.dev/catalog/layouts</a><p>Additionally, I've developed a convenient cookiecutter template:<p>* <a href="https://github.com/paveldedik/ludic-template">https://github.com/paveldedik/ludic-template</a><p>I eagerly await your feedback and insights as you explore these resources.<p>I believe Ludic can be expecialy good for personal blogs, project websites, in-browser slides, while using htmx.org properties to add interactivity.<p>Since my last update on Ludic, I've concentrated on the following areas:<p>* Building comprehensive documentation with Ludic to showcase its capabilities
* Enhancing the UI components catalog
* Crafting Layout Components inspired by the Every Layout Book
* Introducing support for Themes<p>Future plans for Ludic include:<p>* Enhancing HTMX support with compatibility for HTMX 2.0
* Implementing speed improvements through caching
* Expanding the features in the catalog
* Improving typing support
* Exploring the creation of a cookiecutter template for generating Ludic-powered slides
Show HN: Shortbread App – AI-powered, romantic comics for women
Hi HN! Fengjiao and Evan here. We are building Shortbread App, Netflix for webcomics. We publish guilty-pleasure romance series (think 50 Shades of Gray) as comics. Like the mature version of Webtoon.<p>You can see two comics episodes at <a href="https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/3d25370c-a4eb-4df4-af8e-9980a72f2bd5" rel="nofollow">https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/3d25370c-a4eb-4df4-af8e-...</a> <a href="https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/866c2873-9962-4ebe-8f0c-64a154c263bf" rel="nofollow">https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/866c2873-9962-4ebe-8f0c-...</a>, and read more in the app via <a href="https://www.shortbreadapp.com/">https://www.shortbreadapp.com/</a>.<p>All comics in the app are made by artists using the Shortbread AI Comics Studio (<a href="https://shortbread.ai" rel="nofollow">https://shortbread.ai</a>). It is a powerful Photoshop-like editor that speeds up comic creation 10x with AI. The editor provides consistency and granular artistic control. More below.<p>We first posted on HN 6 months ago when we built a prompt-to-comics AI (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792444">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792444</a>). We sunsetted this soon after - it was a fun experiment but it didn’t meet the real need of comic artists. Shortbread Studio now changes this by enhancing how creators naturally work instead of replacing them.<p>The tech:<p>One-shot Character LoRA: Artists upload a single photo of their character. Our backend uses prompt engineering and ControlNet pipelines to generate a synthetic dataset from this photo. This dataset shows the character in all kinds of angles, poses and facial expressions that the artist can pick the best from. It’s then sent to our LoRA training service to create a LoRA model. This takes about 7 minutes.<p>Control -> Redraw -> Refine Workflow: In real life drawing, you draw, erase, and draw again. The human creative process is iterative.
In Shortbread Studio, artists can start from a text prompt, a sketch, a web image or a pose reference as a basis, create an initial panel and quickly modify and regenerate until they get what they want. If you spend 5 seconds, you get a decent panel. If you spend 10 minutes, you can push the limits and get pro results.<p>Built-in Post-Processing: The editor’s features include liquify, upscale, remove background, and outpainting to extend an image. This allows artists to remove, add, or modify parts of an image on a pixel level without drawing by hand. We combine this with segmentation models like Segment Anything (<a href="https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything">https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything</a>) to support intelligently selecting and editing a part of an image.<p>Google-docs like collaboration: The Studio runs in the browser and supports comments and collaboration.<p>LLM Powered Copy Editor: Comics need text. An AI agent proofreads speech bubbles, fixes lettering and identifies grammar mistakes.<p>Read our comics: <a href="https://shortbreadapp.com/">https://shortbreadapp.com/</a> (free to download + read, iOS + Android)<p>All of the above are built by a team of 3 engineers including myself. I will be around to answer any questions in this thread!
Show HN: Shortbread App – AI-powered, romantic comics for women
Hi HN! Fengjiao and Evan here. We are building Shortbread App, Netflix for webcomics. We publish guilty-pleasure romance series (think 50 Shades of Gray) as comics. Like the mature version of Webtoon.<p>You can see two comics episodes at <a href="https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/3d25370c-a4eb-4df4-af8e-9980a72f2bd5" rel="nofollow">https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/3d25370c-a4eb-4df4-af8e-...</a> <a href="https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/866c2873-9962-4ebe-8f0c-64a154c263bf" rel="nofollow">https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/866c2873-9962-4ebe-8f0c-...</a>, and read more in the app via <a href="https://www.shortbreadapp.com/">https://www.shortbreadapp.com/</a>.<p>All comics in the app are made by artists using the Shortbread AI Comics Studio (<a href="https://shortbread.ai" rel="nofollow">https://shortbread.ai</a>). It is a powerful Photoshop-like editor that speeds up comic creation 10x with AI. The editor provides consistency and granular artistic control. More below.<p>We first posted on HN 6 months ago when we built a prompt-to-comics AI (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792444">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792444</a>). We sunsetted this soon after - it was a fun experiment but it didn’t meet the real need of comic artists. Shortbread Studio now changes this by enhancing how creators naturally work instead of replacing them.<p>The tech:<p>One-shot Character LoRA: Artists upload a single photo of their character. Our backend uses prompt engineering and ControlNet pipelines to generate a synthetic dataset from this photo. This dataset shows the character in all kinds of angles, poses and facial expressions that the artist can pick the best from. It’s then sent to our LoRA training service to create a LoRA model. This takes about 7 minutes.<p>Control -> Redraw -> Refine Workflow: In real life drawing, you draw, erase, and draw again. The human creative process is iterative.
In Shortbread Studio, artists can start from a text prompt, a sketch, a web image or a pose reference as a basis, create an initial panel and quickly modify and regenerate until they get what they want. If you spend 5 seconds, you get a decent panel. If you spend 10 minutes, you can push the limits and get pro results.<p>Built-in Post-Processing: The editor’s features include liquify, upscale, remove background, and outpainting to extend an image. This allows artists to remove, add, or modify parts of an image on a pixel level without drawing by hand. We combine this with segmentation models like Segment Anything (<a href="https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything">https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything</a>) to support intelligently selecting and editing a part of an image.<p>Google-docs like collaboration: The Studio runs in the browser and supports comments and collaboration.<p>LLM Powered Copy Editor: Comics need text. An AI agent proofreads speech bubbles, fixes lettering and identifies grammar mistakes.<p>Read our comics: <a href="https://shortbreadapp.com/">https://shortbreadapp.com/</a> (free to download + read, iOS + Android)<p>All of the above are built by a team of 3 engineers including myself. I will be around to answer any questions in this thread!
Show HN: PlayBooks – Jupyter Notebooks style on-call investigation documents
Hello everyone, Dipesh and Siddarth here. We are building PlayBooks (<a href="https://github.com/DrDroidLab/playbooks">https://github.com/DrDroidLab/playbooks</a>), an open source tool to write executable notebooks for on-call investigations / remediations instead of Google Docs or Wikis. There’s a demo video here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e-wOtIm1gk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e-wOtIm1gk</a>, and our docs are here: <a href="https://docs.drdroid.io/docs/playbooks">https://docs.drdroid.io/docs/playbooks</a><p>We were in YC’s W23 batch working on a data lakehouse with support for dynamic log schemas. Eventually we realized it was a product in search of a market and decided to stop building it. When pivoting, we decided to work on something that we originally prototyped (before even YC) but didn’t execute on.<p>In our previous jobs, we were at a food delivery startup in India with a busy on-call routine for backend & devops engineers and a small tech team. Often business impacting issues (e.g. orders dropped by >5% in the last 15 minutes) would escalate to Dipesh as he was the lead dev who had been around for a while and he always had 4-5 hypotheses on what might have failed. To avoid becoming the bottleneck, he used to write scripts that fetched custom metrics & order related application logs every 5 minutes during peak traffic. So if an issue was reported, engineers would check the output of those scripts with all the usual suspects first, before diving into a generic exploration. This was the inspiration to get started on PlayBooks.<p>We’ve put together a platform that can help any dev create scripts with flexibility and without requiring to code much. Our goals were: (1) it can be automated to run and send updates; (2) investigation progress can be shared easily with other team members so everyone has the right context; (3) It can all be done without being on-call or having a laptop access.<p>Using PlayBooks, a user can configure the steps as data queries or actions within their observability stack. Here are the integrations we currently support: - Run bash commands on a remote server; - Fetch logs from AWS Cloudwatch and Azure Log Analytics; - Fetch metrics from any PromQL compatible db, AWS Cloudwatch, Datadog and New Relic; - Query PostgreSQL, ClickHouse or any other JDBC compatible databases; - Write a custom API call; - Query events from EKS / GKE; - Add an iFrame<p>The platform focuses on not just running the tasks but also displaying information in a meaningful form with relevant graphs / logs / text outputs alongside the steps in a notebook format. Some of our users have shared feedback that on-call decision making overload has reduced with PlayBooks as relevant data from multiple tools is presented upfront in one page.<p>Here are some of the key features that we believe will further increase the value to users looking to improve developer experience for their on-call engineers: - Automated surfacing of PlayBooks against alerts & enriching alerts with above-mentioned data; - AI-supported interpretation layer — connect with LLM or ML models to auto-analyze the data in the playbook; - Logs of historical executions to ease the effort of creating post-mortems / timelines and/or share information with peers.<p>If this looks like something that would have been useful for you on-call or will be in your current workspace, we welcome you to try our sandbox: <a href="https://sandbox.drdroid.io/">https://sandbox.drdroid.io/</a>. We have added a default playbook. Just click on one of the steps in the playbook and then the “Run” button to see the playbook in action.<p>We are excited to hear what you like about the PlayBooks and what you think could improve the oncall developer experience for your team. Please drop your comments here – we will read them eagerly and respond!
Show HN: PlayBooks – Jupyter Notebooks style on-call investigation documents
Hello everyone, Dipesh and Siddarth here. We are building PlayBooks (<a href="https://github.com/DrDroidLab/playbooks">https://github.com/DrDroidLab/playbooks</a>), an open source tool to write executable notebooks for on-call investigations / remediations instead of Google Docs or Wikis. There’s a demo video here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e-wOtIm1gk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e-wOtIm1gk</a>, and our docs are here: <a href="https://docs.drdroid.io/docs/playbooks">https://docs.drdroid.io/docs/playbooks</a><p>We were in YC’s W23 batch working on a data lakehouse with support for dynamic log schemas. Eventually we realized it was a product in search of a market and decided to stop building it. When pivoting, we decided to work on something that we originally prototyped (before even YC) but didn’t execute on.<p>In our previous jobs, we were at a food delivery startup in India with a busy on-call routine for backend & devops engineers and a small tech team. Often business impacting issues (e.g. orders dropped by >5% in the last 15 minutes) would escalate to Dipesh as he was the lead dev who had been around for a while and he always had 4-5 hypotheses on what might have failed. To avoid becoming the bottleneck, he used to write scripts that fetched custom metrics & order related application logs every 5 minutes during peak traffic. So if an issue was reported, engineers would check the output of those scripts with all the usual suspects first, before diving into a generic exploration. This was the inspiration to get started on PlayBooks.<p>We’ve put together a platform that can help any dev create scripts with flexibility and without requiring to code much. Our goals were: (1) it can be automated to run and send updates; (2) investigation progress can be shared easily with other team members so everyone has the right context; (3) It can all be done without being on-call or having a laptop access.<p>Using PlayBooks, a user can configure the steps as data queries or actions within their observability stack. Here are the integrations we currently support: - Run bash commands on a remote server; - Fetch logs from AWS Cloudwatch and Azure Log Analytics; - Fetch metrics from any PromQL compatible db, AWS Cloudwatch, Datadog and New Relic; - Query PostgreSQL, ClickHouse or any other JDBC compatible databases; - Write a custom API call; - Query events from EKS / GKE; - Add an iFrame<p>The platform focuses on not just running the tasks but also displaying information in a meaningful form with relevant graphs / logs / text outputs alongside the steps in a notebook format. Some of our users have shared feedback that on-call decision making overload has reduced with PlayBooks as relevant data from multiple tools is presented upfront in one page.<p>Here are some of the key features that we believe will further increase the value to users looking to improve developer experience for their on-call engineers: - Automated surfacing of PlayBooks against alerts & enriching alerts with above-mentioned data; - AI-supported interpretation layer — connect with LLM or ML models to auto-analyze the data in the playbook; - Logs of historical executions to ease the effort of creating post-mortems / timelines and/or share information with peers.<p>If this looks like something that would have been useful for you on-call or will be in your current workspace, we welcome you to try our sandbox: <a href="https://sandbox.drdroid.io/">https://sandbox.drdroid.io/</a>. We have added a default playbook. Just click on one of the steps in the playbook and then the “Run” button to see the playbook in action.<p>We are excited to hear what you like about the PlayBooks and what you think could improve the oncall developer experience for your team. Please drop your comments here – we will read them eagerly and respond!