Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

I made a Rust program that, given a database of football players and projections about how they will do during the season, can be used during a fantasy football draft live to provide an indication of who the best player to draft is. I have other fantasy/sports gambling applications I’ve written to solve knapsack-type problems, choose the best team to pick in a “survivor” pool, and convert from various Vegas odds to win probabilities.

Outside of sports I have written code to download the entire Jeopardy archive to categorize most likely questions to appear to help study, and code to interact with Fitbit APIs to pull down data, code to analyze certain aspects of my full genome sequence.

I have unfinished code (and a desire to finish it) for creating algorithms to play certain board games, a tool to automatically request books and audiobooks from the library based on a Goodreads reading list (or other source of books), a tool to optimize Universal Paperclips, and several different business ideas I’d like to eventually pursue.

Creating something you find useful is a great way to get something done, and make a good tool. If you want it, chances are there are a lot of others who also want it.

I wrote a web site builder that I only use to host my indie bands' web pages. It's got a very silly backend vs the potential target market (musicians) in that it makes you write Markdown, so I don't have delusions of grandeur, but it works well for my simple hosting needs and lets my bandmates make changes without going to git.

- Oracle Cloud Free Tier[1] for a Ubuntu VPS (4 ARM cores, 24 GB RAM). Surprisingly pleasant and reliable, given who's offering and for how much ($0). It used to be on DigitalOcean, until they kept screwing up their FreeBSD support and bricked my machine twice.

- Caddy[2] web server with Let's Encrypt certificates, working as reverse proxy.

The rest is a very lazy 2010's solution:

- A Go server for HTTP (static files, uploads, maintaining server-sent-event channels). It also reads and writes events in a custom format to a local socket, for the interactive parts.

- A Python server for the widgets, communicating with the Go server.

- Source code edited manually in-place (SSH or SSHFS[3], with Git) and restarted as needed. I know, I know, awful practice. But as I'm the only user, uptime during development is not a concern.

- Startup is handled by a @reboot cronjob and a bash one liner.

- Text files for "structured storage" (RSS feed items, authenticated sessions, mapping of uploaded file names).

As horrible as it might all sound, it has survived ten years and two cloud vendors. Nowadays I might containerize it, or rewrite as one Rust server, but I think I made the right choices at the time.

8/10 given the unusual requirements.

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

[2] https://caddyserver.com/

[3] https://github.com/winfsp/sshfs-win

Quite a few, but the one that may be unique is a tool that scrapes the location data from an eBird list of rare birds sightings in my area and pops up a map for me, so I can see if any birds have been sighted near me that I don't already have on my personal birding list.

It only took about 15 minutes to throw together into a bookmarklet, so it was a really low effort, but I use it daily.

Yes. But the list is too long to put in a message here. Generally tools which do things that I needed done at the time, like convert PDF bank statements into CSV transaction files that can be ingested by a simple ledger application.

I always have a 'hacks' directory in my home directory of code that does something I need doing. Sometimes I use it again and again, sometimes its a one-off that answers a question.

I'm more curious though about the motivation of the question. What was the observation that got you to wonder about this?