Top all-time · #9297
David Brownman
Personal blog · xavd.id/blog · on HN as xavdidprogrammingproductivity
David Brownman's personal blog at xavd.id covers programming and productivity. Since 2022, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 26 times, most often “My Perfect Task App”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Cited in personal-site and short-URL threads as a self-made personal site. Also linked for a Python dataclasses article and a post on task dependencies in task managers. Commenters are the author.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
David Brownman's little corner of the internet.
Most-linked posts?
- My Perfect Task App2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-10-01
- Effective Changelogs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-08-19
- Languages in 12 Months2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-12-23
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-09
- My Year of Rust2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-08-14
What Hacker News says?
Exercism is a great site and I'll be sad if it goes away entirely. It's a really wonderful service and community. I used it [throughout 2023]( https://xavd.id/blog/post/12-languages-in-12-months/ ) to tour new languages and have been on a deep dive of Rust this year in their [48in24 program]( https://exercism.org/challenges/48in24 ). The UI and tooling is great, there are real humans available to mentor and everythi…
Comment linking /blog/post/12-languages-in-12-months/
on “2M users but no money in the bank”Submitted Python-Style Kwargs in TypeScript as a story · 13 points
HN discussionhttps://xavd.id/ It's basically just text and images, but I'm proud that I did the whole thing (content, design, implementation) and the overall attention to small details. Also, I love the domain. @xavdid is my username on basically everything that isn't an account I've had for a very long time (eg this one).
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted Effective Changelogs as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI'm not sure it qualifies as "great", but I am a programmer! https://xavd.id/blog I write about all sorts of things, some of which are technical. Here's a favorite Python article: https://xavd.id/blog/post/python-dataclasses-from-scratch/
Comment linking /blog/post/python-dataclasses-from-scratch/
on “Ask HN: Great Blogs by Programmers”Submitted Archive Your Reddit Data Before It's Too Late as a story · 5 points
HN discussionMy personal site uses .id so the site can match my username everywhere: https://xavd.id I'm really quite fond of it. It's the Indonesian TLD, but there aren't residency requirements (for top-level domains). I've got the relevant `.com`s as a fallback, but I hope this sticks around without drama.
Comment linking /
on “.ai website registrations are a windfall for tiny Anguilla”Submitted My Year of Rust as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've got https://xavd.id , which I'm very proud of. @xavdid is my username across most sites (except for very old accounts, like this one)
Comment linking /
on “Short URLs: Why and How”Submitted My Year of Rust as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOooh, this could be neat! It hits at least a few of the features I touch on in my perfect task app wishlist: https://xavd.id/blog/post/my-perfect-task-app/ Some feedback: - on the web, the slow animations make every action feel clunky. I'm not sure you need animations at all, honestly - similarly, growing elements on the page as I click on them makes me feel like I'm chasing my tasks around the screen. Would be nice…
Comment linking /blog/post/my-perfect-task-app/
on “Show HN: I built a goal-oriented task manager”Submitted Versioning as Communication as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI feel for the author. The space is so wide that an app needs to be either: - totally customizable, which means a less cohesive UI, or - extremely opinionated and you have to find the one that shares your opinions. --- I wrote about my (similar) experience a few years ago: https://xavd.id/blog/post/my-perfect-task-app/ Things 3 has bar-none the best UI of any app. It's not perfect, but I surprised myself with how mu…
Comment linking /blog/post/my-perfect-task-app/
on “Dating Other Task Managers”Submitted Languages in 12 Months as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI know Jira has support for linking tasks semantically (X blocks Y; is blocked by Z) but I wish more task managers had better support for this. A few do, but very few of those will actually show you a task graph. I actually wrote about this exact thing: https://xavd.id/blog/post/my-perfect-task-app/#dependent-tas... My hope for the perfect task tracker springs eternal.
Comment linking /blog/post/my-perfect-task-app/
on “Tasks, Lists, and Promises”Submitted My Perfect Task App as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm proud of a lot of things about my site, but maybe the domain most of all: https://xavd.id I blog a few times a year, a mix of technical topics and media reviews. The blog is meant to be mostly text, but it being in React means I can drop in rich things, like support for hide-able spoilers and nice code blocks. I've optimized the layout for reading text (good font size, max-width, line-height), so hopefully it wo…
Comment linking /blog/post/favorite-media-2021/
on “Ask HN: Share Your Personal Site”Submitted Replicating Reddit's best feature on other forums as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSure, mine is at: https://xavd.id/blog . I've got RSS and JSON feeds too: https://xavd.id/blog/feeds It mostly covers 3 main areas of interest: - tech (lots of Python & JS, but other topics too) - media reviews (big best-ofs yearly) - personal items I post ~ 4 times a year, on average, but I put a lot of effort into what I post. I should probably invert that (more low/medium-effort posts), but haven't. Please tell m…
Comment linking /blog/feeds
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Effective Changelogs as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHa, are you me? I've got an extremely similar setup. I used Airtable to solve 3 problems: 1. With so many free games (Epic, GoG, PS+, Gamepass, etc), it's hard to know if/where I own a game 2. With so many owned games, it's hard to pick a thing to play. 3. Keeping track of what games I've played and how I felt about them. I do a big writeup of "my best media of the year" and it's hard to keep track of what I play. D…
Comment linking /
on “Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket”We recently welcomed a new baby and have been discussing whether she'll ever learn to drive. I love bets with long time horizons, so we put together a survey so friends and family could pick a side. We kept thinking of fun questions to ask, so it grew into the survey I've linked above, which we're opening to the public. It's short, fun, and totally informal. Thanks for looking! There's a little more context about th…
Comment linking /blog/post/predicting-the-future/
on “How well can you predict the state of the world in 2041?”