Disc is a re-implementation of Gel, my favorite database which itself is essentially a damn good layer of goodness atop Postgres. It's not public yet but it will be soon.

— (future) homepage: https://dap.sh

Why work on this? A few reasons:

1) The team behind Gel got acquired by Vercel to work on Python/AI stuff so Gel is currently "in the hands of the community" (dead).

2) This isn't my first rodeo with a favorite dead database (RethinkDB was my first database love). The AI chat interface in the official docs doesn't seem to be working anymore and that means I have little recourse for figuring things out that way. I'll have better luck hosting my own.

3) disc.sh was available and man, what a dope domain. Are you kidding me?! I gotta use it.

4) If I'm gonna make my own database, I'm gonna replace some things I don't like from Gel. Disc is written in Typescript for Deno and I intend to replace the database viewer that Gel uses with SvelteKit. I'm allergic to React and the tech industry's laziness has made it the default and it sucks!! Anyway.

I'm gonna release it when I dogfood it with a few projects so I can claim production usage on the marketing site.

Dap is a blockchain-based decentralized alt-root of the DNS (Domain Name System). Essentially, I'm building the foundation for a new "phone book" for what I call, "The Neue Internet." If that sounds interesting to you, check these links:

— Homepage: https://dap.sh
— Whitepaper: https://whitepaper.dap.sh

Why work on this? Two reasons.

1) I spent ~5 years of my life building a TLD portfolio and developing a domain registry/registrar as well as releasing smaller apps and writing and evangelizing and essentially becoming a trusted voice in the Handshake community. I quit out of protest of a proposed takeover and money grab of locked tokens of the blockchain and man, that's a lot of work and experience I have in this space, which leads me to the most important reason:

2) I've had this dream since I was ~15. Blockchain didn't exist so I resigned myself to grow up, get a tech job, and eventually save $185k to apply for a TLD with ICANN. Handshake showed me it was possible and my work within it showed me it was inevitable.

Blockchain has a reputation for being exceedingly wasteful computation so I engineered Dap to be ~90% more efficient whilst keeping the security of difficult computation. Blockchain naming systems have a reputation of simply being "squat chains" and I believe I've solved that with squatting being financially costly.

Dap is in active development but I'm happy to report that mining appears to work without issue, haha!

Uh, we're here on a forum in 2026. Incredible.

Setting up a bunch of stuff and customizing the CSS for this theme...5k+ lines and things aren't optimized at ALL. I also have to setup some boards/rooms/whatever for all my projects.

I wonder if anyone's making forum icons and smileys for the modern era. Everything in the post editor is pixellated and blurry.