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Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

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Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#31
A/Bingo, a Rails A/B testing plugin that I wrote in a part-time week and used for a few years. The main reason I'm proud of it is Ben Kamens and company ported it to run on Google App Engine for Khan Academy, where it formed the core of their experimentation platform for a while.

http://bjk5.com/post/10171483254/abingo-split-testing-now-on...

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#32
I wrote a SAME encoder that runs in your browser: https://github.com/aaron-em/same-encoder

Hardly game-changing, to be sure. I did it for fun and to see whether it was possible at all, and as far as I know nobody actually uses it for anything. But there's something about synthesizing audio a byte at a time and playing it back in a web browser that tickles the same sense of magical possibility that I first experienced as a kid learning BASIC on an Apple IIc. Our industry's grown up a lot since then, of course, and I've grown up with it - but, every now and again, it's delightful to be reminded of what led so many of us into this line of work in the first place.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#34
Nearly every website owner I've worked with is obsessed with users getting 404s from old incoming links. First I wrote a cron to summarize apache logs and email a report, but that involved me building redirects or a cluster of cms changes. Its evolved into a super simple tool to help site owners see user 404s in near real time and setup their own redirects until our team gets around to fixing them. Super simple from a tech pov, but it's completely removed a huge set of annoying tasks from my plate.

Toying around with productizing it as https://www.404fyi.com

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#35
https://invoice-generator.com

I made this 4 years ago for those times when you just need an invoice. Today 10s of thousands of individuals and businesses use this each day to get paid. It's free to use with no login required. Instead it uses localStorage to remember data.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#36

I'm proud of many things :( * I converted a rotary phone into a cellphone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkdWQswpc8 * I wrote a personal bookmark search engine: http://historio.us/ * A site that talks to spammers so you don't have to: https://spa.mnesty.com/ * A pastebin: http://pastery.net/ * A remote-controlled GSM irrigation controller for farmers: https://gitlab.com/stavros/irrigation-controller * A button tha…

> Dead man's switch, a website to email people after you die:

Whats your thoughts and learnings on this one... it seems dark to me.. but i might be completely wrong..

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#37
post #29

Nyan Mode. https://github.com/TeMPOraL/nyan-mode I made it as a simple joke, but for some reason it rapidly gained popularity among Emacs users, and now I sometimes find it or hear about it in unexpected places. (Also I fear that on my deathbed I'll look back and realize that the most used thing I've ever made in my life was an animated cat for a text editor... sigh )

I have been using this for years and all my work colleagues always ask me "what is that nyan cat on your text editor? that must be super annoying!" and I always have to tell them I just really like it. Thank you for building this, it's awesome!

You're welcome! :).

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#38

Nyan Mode. https://github.com/TeMPOraL/nyan-mode I made it as a simple joke, but for some reason it rapidly gained popularity among Emacs users, and now I sometimes find it or hear about it in unexpected places. (Also I fear that on my deathbed I'll look back and realize that the most used thing I've ever made in my life was an animated cat for a text editor... sigh )

Found it through Spacemacs. Totally love it. Even if it were to be your most used creation, it totally deserves it.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#39

Automation to look for secret API tokens in APKs - https://android.fallible.co Its pretty basic, it reverse engineers code and scans strings.xml and AndroidManifest.xml to look for random strings and print it on the UI.

might I ask how you were able to get the APKs from the play store?

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#40
Just a fun one... a Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey script that removes a lot of the Facebook Suggestion/Trend information on the sidebar of the site when it first loads, replacing it with random pictures from /r/aww (or whichever subreddit you want to use)

https://gist.github.com/GrahamBlanshard/d7211436088e0159164a

I fear I'm going to get chewed out for my crap code on this one but I'm really not a webdev... I hacked this together after getting sick of celeb gossip links and trash ads for facebook games. I'd rather get a random pic of a cat or a supercar than irrelevant junk.

EDIT: Pic for how it looks when loaded: http://i.imgur.com/Yqc2jdY.png

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