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Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

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Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#31

Post by unwind »

boplicity wrote: post #9

A local dev environment that works. Doing this again, and again, and again.... ...truly sucks. After not working on a codebase for a year, or two, I usually need to set up everything again -- and often run into very stupid/pointless issues that waste an hour, and often much more, just to get to the point where I can start the actual coding process. This is pretty much why I've stopped coding. I don't have the time to…

At a previous employer, there was a basically full-time team member (contractor like me, but long-term presence so it didn't matter much) working with configuration management. It was basically his job to keep the development environment working, and kept reasonably up to date.

That was done using VM images that he owned and maintained, which was not optimal for me, but there was also documentation laying out the steps needed to create the environment so it was possible to maintain a bare-metal clone of the official environment and use that. Good times!

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#32

Post by dloreto »

boplicity wrote: post #9

A local dev environment that works. Doing this again, and again, and again.... ...truly sucks. After not working on a codebase for a year, or two, I usually need to set up everything again -- and often run into very stupid/pointless issues that waste an hour, and often much more, just to get to the point where I can start the actual coding process. This is pretty much why I've stopped coding. I don't have the time to…

Tools like Devbox: https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox are making this way easier. Devbox is powered by nix, but it hides all of the complexity and makes it easier to use.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#34

Post by gt565k »

francisofascii wrote: post #23

A developer laptop with all the required software installed, environment variables set, ready to go.

that varies per developer preference and per development environment, hence why it can't be generalized

it's custom to every user and every development environment

It can probably be configured by someone in your company as a docker image you can run, but usually that's only necessary for large teams where IT is provisioning development laptops and there's a lot of consistency and common dependencies, even then I don't see it being worth the effort as those preferences would still vary across team roles and projects.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#35

Post by alanbernstein »

A photo deduplication tool. For some reason I always resort to writing small, scenario-specific python scripts. A couple of reasons I can recall:

- 3 or more input directories which have specific roles like "main archive, prioritize", "temp folder, remove from here first"

- multiple levels of equivalence test, including file name, exif tags, checksum, perhaps perceptual hash (e.g. for flagging downscaled images to be deleted)

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#36

Post by probably_wrong »

My parent's computers.

In the ancient times known as "the 90s" you could find PC technicians who would run anti-malware, dig into the register, and overall tune your computer while leaving everything more-or-less as it was.

Those technicians are long gone, replaced by people who make easy money by wiping your computer clean and putting your old files in a folder called "Backup".

I'd gladly pay someone to do it right, but I just can't find anyone. So whenever I visit my parents I know there will be a parade of slow devices waiting for me to tune them.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#37

Post by cactacea »

probably_wrong wrote: post #36

My parent's computers. In the ancient times known as "the 90s" you could find PC technicians who would run anti-malware, dig into the register, and overall tune your computer while leaving everything more-or-less as it was. Those technicians are long gone, replaced by people who make easy money by wiping your computer clean and putting your old files in a folder called "Backup". I'd gladly pay someone to do it right,…

Yup, and then rootkits happened. Better safe than sorry.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#39

Post by Kinrany »

asim wrote: post #28

The programmable web. A singular gateway to a programmatic way in which you not only consume data but also services. It doesn't exist. We have a very fragmented ecosystem of http based services mixed with html, APIs and everything requires an account or credit card. I'd kill for one way to access everything in a programmatic way through one gateway. Tried to approach this in numerous ways and continually failed. Edit…

Decentralized standards for authn, authz and payments are a prerequisite.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#40

Post by slingnow »

dmak wrote: post #22
kinggencha wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how easy self-hosting those are, but any paid-for and/or online offering by a third party is useless. This should have been clear long ago, but the LastPass breach should have made it obvious.

To each it's own, but 1Password security design looks pretty solid. Here is their white paper: https://1passwordstatic.com/files/security/1password-white-p...

You're right. I'm sure their security design is 100% bulletproof and none of my sensitive data will ever be leaked. And even if it were somehow possible for it to be leaked, I'm also sure the company would be completely forthcoming as quickly as possible.
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