Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

I've written a quick and dirty Django app to organize computer history literature (papers, manuals, books, etc). Every document includes an embedded pdf and is tagged with authors, institutions, and topics. It supports cross-references between documents. I also added a feature to mark a document as read and when it was read.

It has helped me wrap my head around certain areas of computing without getting lost in a pile of pdfs.

I created a program that I could point at any directory and it would copy all the photos to my external backup drive. It would organize them by year and month from either the metadata or the filename. It would ignore duplicates based on file size or timestamp. I had a low-resolution filter to make sure I wasn't getting thumbnails.

I had photos on all sort of old phones, old laptops, and various external drives for both me and my partner that I wanted to organize to make sure nothing is lost. This program allowed my to just run through everything and let to do all the hard work.

I have two that I use on my personal machine:

1. A minimal "docker-compose without docker" tool. That allows me to run a group of backend web services with a single command and multiplex the terminal output.

2. A browser chooser that I set as my default browser, and which pops up a UI that allows me to choose which browser (and if Chrome, which chrome profile) I want to open links in. Super handy for making sure links get opened in the browser (profile) that has the correct cookies for that account. There are other tools that do this, but they are either written in Electron (slow) or don't support chrome profiles, or don't support macs.

For agr, have you seen fastmod? https://github.com/facebookincubator/fastmod

I had access to flight information through an API that my work pays for and I rarely care exactly what day to arrive or depart. So I created an application that would dump all flights to a destination over a range of leaving and return dates. It dumped all the data into SQL database so I could filter on price, number and duration of layovers, class, etc. It was incredibly useful for really dialing into what I wanted (no layover over 3 hours, less than $X, etc). Using Google flights is painful by comparison.

Unfortunately I no longer have access to that API. The last time I flew I did this process manually and slowly discovered I should leave on a weekday and leave on a weekend for the best flight.