Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

I wrote a program to help me archive my google mail. You can query it like a database (group by senders, subjects, etc.) and perform the archive operation.

Useful for when the inbox gets to 1k unread messages.

I wrote hbr (handbrake runner) [0]. It takes a global config, a per-file config, and individual outfile sections then calls HandBrakeCLI to encode video. I use it to encode movies/series from optical media.

Additionally there is hbscan.py to generate a list of potential outfiles from handbrake's --scan argument. One day I'd like to integrate it with hbr (in C) using peg/leg [1]. Currently using pyparsing.

This is still a lot of manual work, but it saves doing it twice. When you find a mistake in an encode there's a log with the file, and it's easy to go back and modify the keyfile and re-encode it.

[0] https://github.com/epakai/hbr

[1] https://www.piumarta.com/software/peg/ (not mine)

I always bookmark these idea mining threads, has anyone ever made use of them?

My though, because I haven't, is that if you want to essentially work on someone else's idea then go be an employee, otherwise the first actually passionate person will steal the show as soon as they show up.

I missed an emoji picker for Linux. I couldn't find anything that was not integrated into Gnome/KDE or maintained. So I set out to write one myself, just a simple Python script with rofi. I uploaded it to Github, because maybe someone else also wanted that. That was several years ago, and now [rofimoji] can do all UTF-8 characters (and custom ones), works on Wayland and is packaged for some distros. I'm so happy how my tiny project turned out and how many people helped with PRs and issues.

[rofimoji]: https://github.com/fdw/rofimoji

Professionally, I (and the whole team) lost track of our deployed artifacts, as we're not on a release schedule but also not really on continuous deployment. Mainly, we released when someone noticed that a release has been running stably on staging for a while. We also needed a way to ensure our configurations were correct and to track API versions. So I started hacking together a small React app (new for me at the time) to collect and display all that information. It had a good welcome in our team, and so a colleague and I improved it a lot, added an actual backend and, for example, integrated it into our CI so that you can now see which commits happened since the last deployment and deploy through it, with just two clicks. We also automated a lot of our previously manual checks for larger deployments. It's become the main tool for that stuff, even for our not-so-technical PO.

I built a kanban board with two goals:

1. Dark mode by default

2. Dead simple

I am looking to make a couple of WPF projects over the next couple of years and wanted to track them but found all the online Kanban tools missed the mark by miles in one way or another: in particular, they were all far, far too complicated.

So I built my own: https://allthetasks.com

It's not long up and missing a bunch but it works and scratches my itch :)

Edit: Oh, almost forgot. It was also to use some of the stuff I don't get to use in my day job... we tend to just build something and ship it as fast as possible (development speed, not application speed) so I wanted to make something as small as possible and fast as possible too!