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Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#111

Post by co0lster »

65 wrote: post #81

Almost all of the software I make in my free time is for my own use. My most used tool I have is a note taking web app that automatically saves markdown files to S3. The most important feature I added was a little button that would automatically make a note for the current day, and put it in the daily notes folder, all sorted and organized. I also have full text search which is very helpful for finding old notes. I a…

I’m stealing Spotify random instrumental music idea! Why I cannot come up with similar ideas by my own? Thats the hardest part I think…

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#112

Post by positr0n »

65 wrote: post #81

Almost all of the software I make in my free time is for my own use. My most used tool I have is a note taking web app that automatically saves markdown files to S3. The most important feature I added was a little button that would automatically make a note for the current day, and put it in the daily notes folder, all sorted and organized. I also have full text search which is very helpful for finding old notes. I a…

How does the full text search work?

On-device copy of all the notes? Text index in another database? Just download them all from s3 when you search?

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#113

Post by rye-neat »

I'm building a streetable rock crawler out of a 78 F150 with a custom radius-arm suspension in the front. I needed to measure the deflection of the drag-link & track-bar as the front axle cycled up and down while changing a few variables: mounting locations, drag-link/track-bar angles, and drag-link/track-bar lengths. I used plain Javascript to display a graph, lines representing the drag-link and track-bar, enabled them to be clicked+dragged along with their mounting points and sizes.

With this visualization I was able to determine the best way to package this on the vehicle with the minimal amount of deflection to avoid bump-steer and death-wobble.

I suppose it would be useful to other people building radius-arm/link-suspensions that incorporate a track-bar but I haven't got around to hosting it any where.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#114

Post by dougdimmadome »

65 wrote: post #81

Almost all of the software I make in my free time is for my own use. My most used tool I have is a note taking web app that automatically saves markdown files to S3. The most important feature I added was a little button that would automatically make a note for the current day, and put it in the daily notes folder, all sorted and organized. I also have full text search which is very helpful for finding old notes. I a…

> My most used tool I have is a note taking web app that automatically saves markdown files to S3. The most important feature I added was a little button that would automatically make a note for the current day, and put it in the daily notes folder, all sorted and organized. I also have full text search which is very helpful for finding old notes.

I have a very similar thing, mine uses a dropbox folder as a backend so I can easily browse on laptop and use whatever. I like the daily notes idea though!

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#115

Post by utensil4778 »

athorax wrote: post #38

I made a CLI tool that templates out jira tickets so I never have to open the jira web client to create tickets. It took me far longer than it could ever possibly save me in terms of time, but it's the small victories over horrible, bloated, corporate software that give me joy

This reminds me of one of my favorite projects.

I once wrote a discord not that interfaced with our Jira system. I wrote a whole chat interface that walked users through the steps required to produce a useful ticket, and they got thrown into a user report category.

The interface was quite thorough and basically forced users to follow a template designed to exctact the relevant details. You could even upload files or screenshots.

It was quite popular with power users as well as our own team. But most importantly, it gave angry users a place to complain instead of directly yelling at a developer.

It was over 10 years ago and I think it's still the project I'm most proud of. The bot as a whole was extremely complex and could interface with several external applications like google sheets and trello. It also had a very nice feature where it would answer my DMs for me. I was a pretty public figure in the community and got a lot of messages that would be better answered by just asking in the general chat. The bot would (respectfully) explain that I can't give 1:1 support to everyone and direct them to better support channels. It also explained that if something really did require my direct attention, I could still be reached by sending another message. Almost nobody ever did. I couldn't believe how effective it was. The DMs still existed in my inbox, but the bot marked them as read so I wouldn't get notified. I'd review them occasionally, I never found any false positives.

But of course that kind of thing is ancient history and will get your discord account banned nowadays. Using a bot to log in as a normal user has been prohibited for a long time. Too bad.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#116

Post by cellularmitosis »

hansonkd wrote: post #102
arnaudsm wrote: post #75

As a freelancer I invoice in multiple currencies, and I couldn't find a program to generate them that wasn't an overly complex $100/mo SaaS. So I build a little cli to generate my invoices. 100 loc and super simple. I miss the 70s when programming was the default way to solve problems. Excessive abstractions and proprietary software often slow us down.

[flagged]

Cancelling your ISP doesn't leave you surrounded by peers who default to solving problems from scratch.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#117

Post by costco »

40 lines of C to control brightness on Linux in the way I like (Pressing brightness up key should make it go up more than pressing brightness down key makes it go down). It took 20 minutes to make. Used as a keyboard binding.

TODO list program and the list is periodically printed on my desktop with conky

Software to automatically book reservations at good restaurants on Resy. Supported proxies, multi account, automatically running every day and getting reservations in a certain time range, and even something with a USB GSM modem to respond to the confirmation texts you get a day before. Used it until I got banned from Resy :\

Family photo search using CLIP (actually uform) and face labels from Synology NAS. So you can search “winter +christopher” and it will only show pictures of me and sort by the most winter related ones. You can also filter out certain names, search multiple names, click on an image to get images most like it, filter by year, or any combination thereof. Took a couple days to make with Flask, pgvector, and some code to scrape data from the Synology web interface. My family uses it sometimes too though.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#118

Post by philip1209 »

I run a little Rails app for myself. I end up putting some random things in it. Here's a partial list:

- My blog mailing list (Sendy) was having a bot signup problem. I wanted to deploy a captcha, but the mailing list software didn't support it. So, I put a simple proxy that validates the captcha before inserting the record to the software.

- Wanted a way to apply an email template to the Sendy mailing list, so I wrote a software that consumes my RSS feed, applies a template, and creates a draft in my mailing list software.

- Wrote a "Scoreboard" that aggregates MRR across Stripe accounts into a graph, and sends auto-emails to friends when I cross thresholds.

- Wrote a script that emails me when the HN "whoishiring" job goes live every month. (Simple crons like Zapier don't work)

There are a few other things in there, too.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#119

Post by torstenvl »

I think most software developers create software that's specific for their own use, not for release.

A big chunk of these are proof of concept programs, test code that is good for trying an idea but won't be complete enough for a test suite in the end result.

Others are random data fixes when you're migrating file formats or end up with a bad CSV or something.

I have a toy program that just tells me what a keystroke looks like via raw mode.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#120

Post by 65 »

co0lster wrote: post #111
65 wrote: post #81

Almost all of the software I make in my free time is for my own use. My most used tool I have is a note taking web app that automatically saves markdown files to S3. The most important feature I added was a little button that would automatically make a note for the current day, and put it in the daily notes folder, all sorted and organized. I also have full text search which is very helpful for finding old notes. I a…

I’m stealing Spotify random instrumental music idea! Why I cannot come up with similar ideas by my own? Thats the hardest part I think…

I actually stole the idea from a guy named Max Hawkins who made a Spotify Daily Random playlist. I made it to be just instrumental music since I wanted it for working.

https://maxhawkins.me/

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