When our company was doing more active Go development, a colleague and I built Charlatan.
https://github.com/percolate/charlatan
Ended up saving us a lot of time writing mocks for tests.
Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
11–20 of 30 posts
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#12I wrote a custom documentation tool that we use on all of our projects. It's a few input fields for heading/paragraph/images and a few buttons. You can add as many "sections" as you want. It exports HTML/CSS that you can stick in any and it scales well, handles popups for images, and such. It's made our life much simpler when adding documentation to our sites.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#13I wrote a shim layer for all our packer/vagrant OS workflows to operate against an unreliable vsphere ecosystem. It exposes a suite of posix sh functions for sysadmins/developers to easily operate against this very unreliable environment. It adds automatic logging, retrying, and adjustable verbosity because of the numerous ways this environment randomly fails.
People can just . source the file in from a shared location and often find that their scripts just start to work better. It's not perfect, nothing's perfect. It's not even that clever. But when builds and deploys start to work twice as good, even with the remaining failures, well, that's something. None of the 65000 employees using it will ever know, but it feels good to know we were dropping 2/3 orders and now we're dropping 1/3.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#14At a company of 10,000, it's important to know the 100 people you'll be working closest to. I built a "memory" game as a webapp which matched the faces of 4 people on your team to a single name and a list of self-assigned skills. You click on a photo to match a name to a face, and once you guess right a new set loads. You can randomly click through your whole team and learn a lot about them in just 15 minutes or so.…
This sounds very interesting and useful. I was thinking about making something similar but with my personal contacts & people I meet socially.
Is your code opensource or only for internal use?
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#15Python 3+:
Blue - A dead simple event based workflow execution framework.
I always find it easier to model systems from an event driven perspective. Especially when you have to move fast and evolve unpredictably. I wanted a framework anyone could learn to use within 5-10 minutes. At the same time it should be able to solve all kinds of use cases that require event based coordination between tasks in a distributed environment.
Works well for us for simple use cases (eg. data processing workflows) and complex ones (eg. our entire retail order fulfilment system).
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#16In the past week I've written a broken-link checker, in perl, to sanity-check the output of a static-site-generator.
I've also written a trivial PHP parser which was designed to match up class-definitions with comments above them:
https://blog.steve.fi/parsing_php_for_fun_and_profit.html
Both of these tools were designed to be invoked by CI/CD systems, to flag potential problems before they became live.
Most of my work involves scripting, or tooling, around existing systems and solutions. For example another developer-automation hack was to automatically add the `approved` label to pull-requests which had received successful reviews from all selected reviewers - on a self-hosted Github Enterprise installation.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#17I wrote a shipping container tracking system for ~7 shipping lines.
Each shipping line offers a tracking service through one of these methods -- email, RSS or website form. Our container numbers are collected into a Google Spreadsheet via our freight forwarders. Our employees use an antiquated ERP with no API.
The script collects relevant container numbers from the Google spreadsheet, scrapes the update and the scrapes the ERP system to enter the update.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#18I built a code generator package in Kotlin which generates codes for Kotlin, Swift, Web (JS), and React-Native (TypeScript). Basically, you provide your class definition in a DSL style (Similar to TOML) and it will generate the implementation and interfaces of the bridge for different technologies.
This is great! We're working on code generation from class definitions right now. Any good resources worth looking at?
Not familiar with GPs use case but TypeScript has a glorious compiler API that could handle the heavy lifting here.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#19At a company of 10,000, it's important to know the 100 people you'll be working closest to. I built a "memory" game as a webapp which matched the faces of 4 people on your team to a single name and a list of self-assigned skills. You click on a photo to match a name to a face, and once you guess right a new set loads. You can randomly click through your whole team and learn a lot about them in just 15 minutes or so.…
This sounds very interesting and useful. I was thinking about making something similar but with my personal contacts & people I meet socially. Is your code opensource or only for internal use?
I agree, I think thats a great idea. I would like to put it on at my place. Mostly for me, as I can never remember people and its not that big of a company but there are so many people I do not know.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#20At a company of 10,000, it's important to know the 100 people you'll be working closest to. I built a "memory" game as a webapp which matched the faces of 4 people on your team to a single name and a list of self-assigned skills. You click on a photo to match a name to a face, and once you guess right a new set loads. You can randomly click through your whole team and learn a lot about them in just 15 minutes or so.…
Nice. I've done a similar thing using spaced repetition software like Anki to practice everyone's name right after I join a company.