I built a reference site for the recurring hard problems in software
Details
- External ID
- 47920257
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I built a reference site for the recurring hard problems in software
- Website domain
- thehardparts.dev
- Launched
- April 27, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 9
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5501285347043702
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hi HN, I've been working on this for a while and it was hard to decide when to stop, either on the way information is presented or when to stop with adding entries. It's not meant as a blog, but rather as a reference that keeps growing.Link: https://thehardparts.devCurrently I've created 4 main section:- Failure Modes: ways project go wrong- Red Flags: early signals that are worth taking seriously- Tech Decisions: common and not so common trade-offs for hard choices- Playbooks - guided approach for situations that repeatI've also focused on creating links between them to show how connected many things are: a red flag usually precedes a failure mode, which might connect to a forced decision, etc.Some entry points to give you an idea:- The Invisible Deadline: a date that exists socially but not explicitly enough to manage honestly- Eveyone Asks The Same Person: when one person becomes the default source of truth- Build a Practical Rollback Strategy: how to build a reliable rollback strategyIt has 151 entries across the 4 sections.Curious what you think about the content, format, grouping.
Enrichment
- Theme
- indie hacker passion projects
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- reference guide for common software engineering problems
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The site is a content-driven static reference guide built with Astro or a standard SSG, consisting purely of structured markdown articles, cards, and categorized documentation.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Visual hierarchy unclear - everything appears bold/highlighted, making it hard to distinguish importance, Too many UI elements emphasizing content simultaneously reduces parsing clarity
Feature requests: More detailed code examples and snippets in SQL/NoSQL sections, Better visual differentiation to signal varying levels of importance
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 44 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #19 of 45 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 178 days after the earliest competitor.
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- ProblemHunt · hn · 2026-01-22 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.37
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- A cemetery for failed side projects and what founders build next · hn · 2026-08-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- I wrote down every expensive hardware development mistake I've seen · hn · 2026-03-08 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- I built a standup app so I'd stop switching between Linear,GitHub,Slack · hn · 2026-03-04 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.36
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.