I built JsonBlob[1], to help mock out JSON APIs so that building backends could be decoupled from front end development. I'd been needing this tool forever and then finally spent a weekend about 8 years ago building it out. I've been trying to find time to rebuild it with Kotlin and Micronaut, but just don't have the free time I used to have...
[1] https://jsonblob.com/
Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
121–130 of 617 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
#122React Frontload, a library to load data into components that works with the same code on client and server render.
Why? I wasn't happy with the pattern of hooking data loading into a router, and having to load all data needed for a page upfront at the route level and then plumb it through. I just wanted a way to let components specify what data to load themselves, and then do it on the fly as they render, whether on the client or on the server.
It still surprises me a bit that React itself never built in an async lifecycle method for server render that would solve this problem. React Frontload basically acts as a polyfill for that feature - it's been slowly ticking up towards 500 stars over the past couple of years, so I can't be the only one who finds this useful :-)
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
#123I was building a touchscreen music-production app for Windows, and I wanted it to have a phone/tablet style interface. It would have a stack of modal popup Views that the user could tap (or click) off of to close the top View and go back down. I ended up splitting the UI system off into a separate library and kept working on it. It now has DI (with scoping) and some other features. I've since used it for a few other…
Pretty neat. Is the Music app written somewhere ? Also question to the room, is DI really worth it ? All that complexity to switch out sub-classes . A clean design but in practice it just feels like too much work for the benefit.
Thanks. The music app code is closed. There's a public demo still online, but I got terrible feedback, so I'm slowly rebuilding it from scratch with a completely different design.
As for DI: in my case, it was definitely worth adding. The original music app didn't have it, so I had to come up with convoluted mechanisms to share cross-cutting services with different ViewModels, and it got messy. Some had to keep references to services that they didn't actually need themselves, but their child ViewModels did... With DI, I just register the services with the library, and let it inject whatever a ViewModel needs.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
#124At this point I've made a habit out of building homebrew tools and languages. Very few of these are purely because I was dissatisfied with off-the-shelf solutions; many of these just exist because I thought it would be fun/educational/challenging to build an X for myself from scratch.
I've made
- A dynamic programming language, Ink (https://dotink.co), which runs in "production" (for whatever that means for side projects) for around a dozen projects written in it.
- A compiler to compile that to JavaScript (https://github.com/thesephist/september)
- A bunch of language tooling around that language, like syntax highlighters, editor plugins, code formatters (for example, the code formatter https://github.com/thesephist/inkfmt)
- A small UI library (https://github.com/thesephist/torus)
- A suite of productivity tools (https://thesephist.com/posts/tools/) like notes, todos, shared whiteboard, contacts/CRM
- Twitter client (https://github.com/thesephist/lucerne/)
- Theres a few dozen more at (https://thesephist.com/projects/) :)
Many of these end up building on top of each other, so across the few dozen projects built on top of these tools they form a nice dependency graph -> https://twitter.com/thesephist/status/1367675987354251265
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
#125I wrote a small library https://github.com/paulbares/spring-testcontainer that provides integration between the Spring (Data JPA) testing framework and Testcontainer library to easily test my application with different containerized database instances.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
#126A fully featured feature store for our machine learning platforms to plug into.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
#127Before I answer I'll just test whether this account has been shadowbanned like my previous accounts. It is a sad thing that I have to test for this but I'm not putting time in answering interesting questions for my answers to be blackholed again.
- edit -
Yes, shadowbanned again. Have a look at the comment history on this account and decide for yourself whether this is in any way defensible.
I'm done with HN.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
#128I built a "Pokemon for Sushi", where I kept track and collected all the different sushi that I ate, and where I found it. It connects to the Foursquare API, so I can just pick the sushi shop from a drop down through my phone
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
#129I built a website for making it easier to read Wayland protocols documentation (which are originally published as XML): https://wayland.app/protocols/
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
#130I wrote in my own markdown flavor. It was based on ParseDown (PHP), and I was ended up extending it too much, to a point that I rolled it as a my own private library.
I recently started to write more often, and having a consistent and surefire syntax helps a lot.
It started with custom anchors for header tags, table rows, custom classes for block quotes, highlights in code snippets, line break patterns, etc.