Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

This is why I stick to layouts with separate keys for " and the dead-key ¨ Plenty of european layouts with qwerty and the necessary dead keys, that work on every OS.

I mostly code my own games with a target group of 1, my favourites are

http://lalo.li/lsd/

https://updownredgreenetc.franzai.com/

https://spinner.franzai.com/

https://dance.franzai.com/ (basically a lava lamp you can interact with)

from the app side i like

https://qrpwd.franzai.com/

coded to save my 2 factor backup codes qr encoded and encrypted in my photo stream

and

https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/thisismy

a command line trim&copy&paste tool for files and webpages

That's a neat idea! As an adult who also recently learned to swim, I have the exact same issue as you! It's surprisingly hard to do long distances and the biggest challenge is breathing. Might check out the app

Fun topic! These days I build everything for myself, then publish and see if someone else is interested (mostly not :-)

First thing I built, when I started doing full-stack stuff: https://pushdata.io It's a super simple time series data storage. You don't even have to register an account, just do "curl -X POST https://pushdata.io/youremail@yourdomain.com/temperature/47" and you've stored your first value. I use it a lot to log various stats about all the things I've built, like user signups or whatnot.

Then I wanted to create simple crosswords with image clues to help my kids learn to read. That resulted in a crossword generator backend and a simple game: https://puzzlepirate.net

Puzzle pirate is great, but I wanted to print the crosswords on paper also, so I slapped together https://crosswordcomputer.com. The UI is rather ugly (like Pushdata) but you can create pretty cool crosswords for kids with it.

Then I wanted to create more flexible shields.io so I created https://supershields.io - basically a shields.io but with programmable (in Lua) logic for the shields you create. I'm not using it myself anymore though so not maintaining it very well and it seems there is something funny with the Lua execution right now. It is using AWS Lambda servers to run Lua scripts, perhaps they're not firing as they should or something. If someone wants to use it, get in touch and I'll see if I can get the Lua execution operational again :)

I also wanted to backup private photos and videos from household phones to a USB memory on a local storage server (Raspberry Pi) and then have that server automatically back everything to the public cloud but encrypted (as I don't trust public cloud providers to keep my data safe forever). I couldn't find a good solution for this, so I wrote some shell scripts that do the trick: https://github.com/ragnarlonn/savethepictures

My daughter was playing Minecraft too much, on our own server, and I created a small Python program to enforce "screen time" in Minecraft: https://github.com/ragnarlonn/mctimer

I once needed to simulate broken DHCP clients and couldn't find a good tool to do so, so I wrote "dhcptool": https://github.com/ragnarlonn/dhcptool

All of these taught me a lot, especially the later forays into full-stack development after having been pretty much clueless about frontend stuff for a long time (still clueless but at least I can create ugly UIs now).

Wrote a small shell script tracking "time since last break". (tested on Ubuntu, would like to support others) https://github.com/svandragt/break-aware