Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

I built a weightlifting workout tracker. I did this because at the time I wrote it (2014) none of the current tools fit my use cases due to the fact that I compete in the sport of Olympic weightlifting and this was still pretty rare back then. I also wanted to be in control of my data and be able to run analysis on it as I saw fit.

I began by writing a django app deployed via heroku. I then decided I wanted to rewrite it in ruby on rails because I had never worked with rails in my career and was already working on django professionally. I then wrote a react/redux SPA frontend, not for any other reason than to practice and learn those libraries. Finally, I decided to buy a VPS and manage deployments myself because I wanted to learn some basic devops stuff myself.

Building and maintaining this project I got first hand experience on building a web application from scratch, designing UX and product requirements, maintaining my own infrastructure (Linux server hardening, supporting SSL, managing my own domain, etc) and got experience in languages I didn't work in professionally. Also I got a few friends to begin using my app and immediately found where my poor UX choices were, which was pretty enlightening.

I think the experience really boosted my confidence as an engineer. I had to learn a whole bunch of new skills and become my own one person startup. In the end it helped me appreciate all that goes into building a software product and highly recommend the experience. I still track my workouts using the app and now have 7 years of data.

I needed some calipers that were large enough for a human head. Fairly expensive online, especially for a one use item. So I reviewed some classic manual types and designed my own 3D model and printed them out for cents vs lots of dollars.

I built this web best practices checker (e.g. looks for broken links, missing titles, bad cache settings, insecure forms) that checks multiple pages at a time:

https://www.checkbot.io

I built it to scratch my own itch while doing web development work and spun it into a paid product.

I am currently learning SQL/Python, I often just wanted to know the headers and how many rows are in a CSV file, so I just wrote a small Python script for it.

  import csv
  import readline

  readline.set_completer_delims(' \t\n=')
  readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")

  def csvOpen(file):

      with open(file, "r", newline='', encoding='utf-8-sig')  as csvfile:
          reader = csv.reader(csvfile)
          i = next(reader)
          dRows = sum(1 for line in reader)
          print(f"You have {dRows} rows in the CSV file:\n" f"Your headers are:\n {i}")

  file = input("Please enter the filename to show the CSV   headers: ")

  csvOpen(file)

I also have an alias for it in my .bash_aliases.

  alias sqhead='python /home/user/Coding/Py-Code/sqlHead.py'

I bundled together a small collection of sysadmin/scripting-tools here:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

Those are probably amongst the things that I use most often which are non-standard.