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Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

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Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#31

Post by neilsimp1 »

I have a music streaming app (https://audiostreamer.org/) running from a machine at home that I like to listen to at work.

Verizon FIOS loves changing my home IP address randomly, especially whenever we lose power at home, which is unfortunately common. Since I can't know my IP in that case without being at home, I built a super small web app that I call Waypoint.

Essentially, every morning my PC pings the server running Waypoint. The app stores my IP address. If the IP ever changes and I'm not at home, all I need to do is go there to get the new one. (Yes, the website is password protected).

All-in-all, it took probably less than 30 minutes from start to finish to get this setup working, and it solved a minor problem in my life.

Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#32

Post by pigpen34 »

I built CronAlarm (https://www.cronalarm.com) to solve a problem I was having at my primary job. I had several dozen cron jobs / scheduled tasks that ran at various times of the day, multiple times of the day, and across a range of servers. It became a little unwieldy to adequately monitor and I too often didn't know anything was wrong until somebody complained. So I built an internal tool to centralize the results of the jobs and to send me alerts when a problem was detected.

There are other cron monitoring tools out there, but at the time I didn't realize that. I didn't even look for one before building my own, actually. After stumbling across another option online one day, I thought to myself that if somebody was willing to pay for such a service, why not put my own out there? I thought mine was/is different enough from the others that it may be a compelling alternative to existing solutions. Thus, CronAlarm was born.

Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#33

Post by marssaxman »

timojaask wrote: post #25
marssaxman wrote: post #24

I've been working on a tool for analyzing my DJ track library, with the goal of doing a little semi-supervised learning to help organize my crates, remind me about music that might be getting lost in the shuffle, and - eventually, if all goes well - automatically scan beatport, soundcloud, etc for new tracks and notify me about music that might fit into my library. It doesn't actually do anything useful yet, but even…

That sounds like a great idea. I used to have a decent vinyl collection, and would often forget about some of the good ones I have after not playing them for a while. There isn't any info on the github page. Could you describe a bit how exactly does it organize the music?

There's no info yet partly because I've been trying a variety of approaches, and I'm not sure yet which approach will work out best. The core of the tool is a scanner which extracts an audio feature vector for each track in your library. Armed with this feature matrix, we can apply clustering algorithms - the most successful so far has been a Gaussian mixture model. I'm currently working on a system which will hopefully improve accuracy by bootstrapping a feature selection model, using metadata tags as an initial ground truth for music similarity, thereby allowing us to reduce the actual number of features which need to be compared.

I started out imagining that this tool would continuously update the contents of my crates, but now I think I want it to be more of a manual process. I'm imagining it as an analysis and reporting tool more than an organizer; I'll ask it to identify the outliers in a given crate, or ask for suggested additions, then choose how to arrange things myself. This way, I can use the manually-curated organization of my library as additional training data for the similarity model.

Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#34

Post by timojaask »

neilsimp1 wrote: post #31

I have a music streaming app ( https://audiostreamer.org/ ) running from a machine at home that I like to listen to at work. Verizon FIOS loves changing my home IP address randomly, especially whenever we lose power at home, which is unfortunately common. Since I can't know my IP in that case without being at home, I built a super small web app that I call Waypoint. Essentially, every morning my PC pings the server r…

Nice one. I used to have a large mp3 collection (now replaced by Spotify) and would have loved to use audiostreamer and Waypoint to get to it while at work.

Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#35

Post by howlett »

I built https://www.remotepassword.com because I didn't want to hardcode passwords in my scripts and wanted a way to disable them remotely (ie my raspberry pi has been stolen and I don't want them to mount my backup truecrypt containers).

It works fine and gave me some peace of mind!

Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#36

Post by pattle »

I built [https://scinder.io](https://scinder.io) as a way to analyse my running and cycling data to see how well I was training and if I'm on track to achieve the goals I've set myself. I've found that a lot of the services I'd used previously didn't give me the depth of analysis that I needed to be able to make decisions about my training schedule.

For a long time the project just sat on my PC but I'm now trying to try to turn it into a paid service as I think some of the features I've added are pretty cool and I've not seen them anywhere else.

Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#37

Post by shanecleveland »

As "the computer guy" at my office, I was tasked with printing a football pick 'em pool sheet each week of the NFL season (no way we could get everyone to use an app). Built something that fit our needs and assumed others would use it, as well: http://footballpickempool.net

Another fun one that I love sharing with people: http://donetemperature.com. I love to grill, and I am a stickler for doneness of the meat, for both safety and preference. I found myself always relying on a web search each time, and the top results are all for random food blogs, and the info I needed was always buried somewhere in a massive recipe post.

Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#38

Post by busymichael »

I built https://dndemail.com because I wanted do not disturb functionality for my email. I like to only check email 2x a day, but I would find that my workflows would often require me to visit my email (to look up an old email or send a new email). I would get distracted by new emails in my inbox.

DNDEmail keeps my inbox empty -- my new messages are only delivered on the 2x day schedule. It helps me stay focused even when I have to go into my email.

On the weekends, I keep my email off entirely.

It is also in the chrome webstore: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/do-not-disturb-for...

Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#40

Post by ioddly »

timojaask wrote: post #30
ioddly wrote: post #5

I built an application for myself called meditations: https://github.com/ioddly/meditations It's actually...a todo application, but focused on habit formation and creating a positive feedback loop around a few consistent habits or projects. I wrote it for myself because there was nothing quite like it that I was aware of. I use it on a daily basis; I also learned a lot of frontend development by having to maintain an…

I really like the idea of being able to track your overall progress. I use trello for all my tasks, but it always stays on the granular task level and it's sometimes difficult to see the bigger picture. Maybe you can explore this concept a bit more and work on a polished product?

Meditations actually was originally a Trello board. I built out a frontend that gave made it easier for me to see statistics and manipulate the individual cards (e.g. just click on one to cycle through labels). Eventually it became evident that it needed its own backend, so it's been through a couple large iterations since then.

I don't see it becoming a SAAS-type product, but I would like to make it easy to download and use at some point in the future. I like working on it, but I can only really get into major things when I have time between client projects.

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