Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

I'm a big SNL nerd and have favorite sketches/memories going back over 30 years. I find it very rewatchable, but streaming services don't have full episodes, and even downloading full episodes wouldn't make it easy to find individual sketches. So I built a Plex library of over 500 individual sketches using some automation.

I used yt-dlp to download the metadata for over 6,000 videos on the SNL Youtube channel. I put it into a database, parsing out season/episode into fields where possible. Then I wrote a small Flask app to search or browse seasons/episodes, from which I could flag for download the sketches I wanted.

I really like reading books, non-fiction, fiction, business, everything. But I always tended to have good reading momentum and then life/work happened that derailed the reading habit - and I forgot about it. Took months to pick up again...

To keep reading top of mind I built a Chrome "newtab" extension to show my "Currently Reading" list, and excites me about books I've put as "to-read". It has worked wonders on my reading! And it is pretty small and polished - no tracking, no credentials, just bare-bones.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/currently-reading/...

I built a cloud for my family to use.

It leverages containers and Docker Compose, mainly for it's tooling that makes it easy to deploy. I made a tool that correctly selects the right node based on the directory I'm in using Docker Profiles. The networking is both internal and external; I share some APIs externally, like to share photos or to run video game servers, while other services are entirely privileged. It, for the most part, implements mTLS, and has both public and private DNS. I have a single ingress node in my cloud provider that is connected to my home servers via Tailscale. It's been instrumental in building out things at my house and making my life easier and cheaper.

I built a pretty simple command line application (glorified python script) years ago that sends messages into a specified matrix room, and intended for use as a basic server notification system. Only recently posted to github (because a friend asked me to share); see: https://github.com/mxuribe/howler

Like other sys admins and devs, I had used email notifications for years to notify me whenever *stuff happens* on a server (like a job ran/completed, some storage device is low, etc.). But when matrix came out several years ago, i really liked the concept, became a bit of a matrix fanboy, and built a little script to leverage - nowadays, all of - my server notifications. Again, pretty basic/not sophisticated, but it scratches my itches.

* When RSS was a thing but in my country a lot of news/content websites hadn't adopted yet, I wrote a service to quickly define scrapers that turn those sites into RSS feeds.

* In one of my former workplaces I wrote (alongside another person) a gamified shared playlist app that allowed everyone to participate in being a DJ for our company hackathon (people getting more upvotes getting more playtime, songs getting many downvoted being skipped in the middle, etc). That was a lot of fun and surprisingly a very emotionally engaging experience for everyone.