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Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

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Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#21
Plugging my own tool, but I wrote a Chrome extension that checks websites for SEO, speed, and security best practices (it's a crawler so it can check 100s of pages in a few minutes):

https://www.checkbot.io/

It saved me a lot of time and caught tons of mistakes before they got to production while working on multiple websites as a contractor

For example, I was assisting a team on one sprawling dynamic website with a lot of SEO and performance issues - the site had been hacked together over the years such that editing one page would usually break groups of unrelated pages in unexpected ways. My extension helped me get on top of which pages were dependent on each other, to prioritise what was worth fixing, and to confirm improvements had been made without breaking anything.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#22
Here's a couple (albeit macOS focused) favorites of mine:

- Deliveries: macOS / iOS package tracking https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/deliveries-a-package-tracker...

- Screenotate: OCR all of your screenshots with metadata like program/webpage https://screenotate.com

- The Tagger: lightweight macOS utility to tag music / fetch metadata from discogs https://deadbeatsw.com/thetagger/

- youtube-dl: Download any video / song online https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/

It was fun thinking of these, I actually put together a blog post a while back listing my favorite software. Would love to revisit it soon: https://lukemil.es/blog/software-i-like

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#23
Hasura [https://hasura.io] Graphql API and Subscription for any Postgres DB

Keycloak [https://www.keycloak.org] OpenID Auth Server

nREPL + Cider [https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider] Clojure's Network Repl and Emacs integration for live coding Clojure

Company Mode [https://company-mode.github.io] Emacs autocomplete mode

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#26
post #19

Probably a given on Mac: iTerm2 Terminal Emulator https://www.iterm2.com/ Less of a given, still Mac: Rectangle Tiling Window Organiser https://rectangleapp.com/ For Linux I would use Xmonad to achieve the same as the two programs above.

I have been using Spectacle (https://www.spectacleapp.com/) for years wishing it had mouse driven window snapping. I even once tried to implement it myself but gave up. I just tried Rectangle by your suggestion and it is absolutely amazing. Thank you.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#27
post #22

Here's a couple (albeit macOS focused) favorites of mine: - Deliveries: macOS / iOS package tracking https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/deliveries-a-package-tracker... - Screenotate: OCR all of your screenshots with metadata like program/webpage https://screenotate.com - The Tagger: lightweight macOS utility to tag music / fetch metadata from discogs https://deadbeatsw.com/thetagger/ - youtube-dl: Download any video / s…

PS: youtube-dl is not macos-specific, there is a windows build and many linux distros like ubuntu have packages

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#28
For desktop workflows I've started a spreadsheet documenting various utilities and os defaults I've depended on across mac/win/linux: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3...

Intent was to explore if I still could be as productive doing a variety of things (general administrivia, writing, design, code) outside of MacOS. So it's organized less around a specific app but rather a workflow/concept.

Ideally I'd love to see a git-backed static website around this so people could fork/collect/share their workflows across environments visually.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#29
- Emacs (with evil mode) and org-mode. The hours gained far outweigh the hours put in (and the hours put in were fun).

- Yabai on mac for not having to think about moving windows around.

- Pomodoro (now through org-mode) for helping focus (and saving hours, in a round-about-way.)

- Removing as much advertising from my life as possible. (Ublock origin, deleting social networks when possible)

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