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Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
21–30 of 484 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#22I wrote myself a debug tool at 2007. It's a piece of GUI "to borrow". A Windows app that catches Windows messages addressed to it and shows things in its own windows. It can show numbers you give it, give numbers back, count calls, and measure time. So it's a kind of debugger/profiler/GUI.
I open sourced it 8 years ago but it was not the original intention. I wrote it for myself. https://github.com/akalenuk/16counters
I wrote it in MASM32. It's therefore a tiny .exe file of about 7 KB. I spent maybe a few hours initially, but I've been adding features one-by-one for several years. I use it a few times a month.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#23I built an OAuth proxy (only Auth0 currently works) hosted on Cloudflare workers. I'm a big fan of the self-hosted OAuth Proxy [1], but some projects don't lend themselves to hosting a container, sometimes you just want to set up a simple app on Heroku, Fly, Workers, etc. and have an auth proxy sit in front of it.
My solution also manages SSL via Cloudflare and integrates with Stripe for simple fixed-price subscription billing models. The idea here is to be able to iterate on product ideas quickly without spending a day each time figuring out authentication and billing.
I did set up a marketing site at the time so that others could use it, but I don't have any users, and I'm happy to maintain it just for my own projects (half a dozen now).
It took me 2-3 weeks to make so on net I have probably not saved much time, but it really helps reduce the friction of launching things which I think is valuable.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#24Yes. Several.
- My blog, which has lots of weird pages for stats, time jumps, old games/tools/utilities. - Flight tracker app. - Home control app (because HA was a pain to keep updated). - Wood working tool helper for my dad.
And more. It's liberating.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#25Lots of outdoor gear brands are now selling repaired or refurbished used gear and clothing. Since used gear is pretty eclectic in selection it’s hard to find what you want by browsing at a random time.
I built a pretty simple web app that tracks a bunch of vendors and emails me when items matching my filters come in stock!
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#26My spouse is a teacher. The science department at the school uses a relatively complicated grading mechanism called conjunctive standards based grading, which used to require a lot of spreadsheet magic to work. I wrote a gradebook app (firebase, angular) that handles the grade entry (not grading), conversion of assessment data into grade reports for students, plus charting and stuff so you can see student or course aggregate progress over time.
I originally thought more people might use it, but I have basically 6 teachers.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#27I have a bunch of single-purpose Google Docs extensions that I use every day at work. For example one sets permissions on Docs based on groupings of users that I have set up (HR only, Finance only, Leadership Team only, Just me).
I think it took me like an hour to make and I use it several times a week.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#28I created my own translation app using llama3-80b, I call it "expat translator": I live outside of my home country and always struggled with using translators like Google Translate because they don't tell you if the way you're writing something feels natural in the other language. It gives me some pretty good results and I also instruct it to give me rewrites for informal and professional use, so I don't sound weird…
As a sort-of-expat myself, I can definitely relate to this struggle. Out of curiosity: does the language you're translating to have a non-latin script? I've found that llama often struggles with those.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#29I made my own webmail client in 2001. The killer feature was a Heart button that one-click opened a new mail addressed to my then-girlfriend-now-wife. I've never seen that feature replicated then or now. And since it was hard-coded to my girlfriend, it was clearly (hopefully!) not broadly applicable.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#30While not exactly software per-se, I created a system of multiple text files to manage todos, long term goals, and various reminders (eg, IOUs, deadlines, etc). This was inspired initially by Jeff Huang’s blog post [1] but then grew to a complex collection of different files. A problem I ran into was building an interface for displaying and editing these text files (each file has a different width and for some files I want to have different heights when editing them). Ultimately I settled on multiple vim tabs in a terminal window. Been using this for close to five years now and I couldn’t be happier with it. However, at this point the system of files (and the terminal “user interface”) is completely customized to my life and would likely never fit someone else’s requirements.