Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

I haven't done a ton to it. Mainly I have my fork because I got the features I needed when mine diverged from the mainline back in late '05 and I never cared to keep porting my changes forward.

Initially the changes were for handling enclosures. The developer had no interest in supporting them. I wanted to use tt-rss as a podcatcher. That necessitated adding some database schema (tracking enclosure URLs) and UI (a "request download" button in the entry list and entry detail panes for those podcasts where I only download selected episodes, a "download all enclosures" checkbox in the preferences UI for podcasts where I want every episode downloaded).

I also added schema for multiple users to sharing the same database. It was basically per-user preferences and read/unread flags. My grand intention was to add "social" features and eventually a suggestion algorithm. The developer's reaction re: "social" features was, basically, "Why?". (I see that the project has since gained multi-user support...)

I never did much with my multi-user schema. I never even switched my production copy over to it. Amusingly, I've ended up running three separate instances support my blog reading, podcatcher, and TV computer (Youtube feeds). If I'd finished the multi-user work I could be using that instead.

That was the end of my interaction w/ the developer.

In later years I added virtual feeds for the podcatcher and tt-rss itself to report errors downloading or parsing feeds.

Edit: I'd heard about the developer being uncivil. He never was to me, but the reputation is apparently justified: https://community.tt-rss.org/t/how-to-contribute-code-via-pu...

I reviewed hardware back in the day and was tired of all the repetitive tasks necessary to measure the performance of CPUs, GPUs and storage devices. So I wrote a benchmark automation tool, that did the work for me.

CINEBENCH and the likes where easy, but I also automated games without using their integrated benchmark. I needed a scripting language to load settings, go through the game's menu and load a save game. To avoid any kind of load from the automation, it offloaded the input data to an Arduino-based USB device, that simulated the benchmark run with previously recorded input. It worked pretty well, but small latency issues could of course result in small variations of the run. And bouncing into NPCs was generally a bad idea.

Here is a video of the system in action that completely automated a custom CS:GO run with additional streaming load as it would occur when streaming PC gaming: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZpSPyd9f4cg

I get asked once in a while if the software can be downloaded or bought, but I am not going to do it. Writing software for yourself has the neat advantage that you never need to deploy it, upload it, write a change log, answer questions or fix bugs at any given time. It is just about solving the task at hand and nothing else.

Would love to see how this works, or at least hear about how you're able to pull this off!

I've been carefully keeping double-entry-accounts of my personal finances in GNUCash, but I don't have anything hooked up to my accounts file. I was originally hoping that GNUCash would have some way of letting me sum up a certain combination of accounts to calculate i.e. "how much float I have currently," but even that doesn't seem to exist... so my first order of business is probably that sort of simple custom repoting. But would love to make use of the data and create some more actionable reports!

This hits close to home. I have something similar, except it's not as featureful and it's ridiculously purpose-built for me. E.g. I have one page in this app for generating PDFs of a very specific type that I need. I have another page that parses CSVs from my bank. These aren't tools I use regularly, I just need them occasionally, but they're all in one repo in one project.

There are of course apps that do each of these, but when you start integrating them together, with their different ways of doing auth, different kinds of APIs, etc. things get so complicated. I worked in a company that integrated with some third parties and those integrations were easily 50% of the workload for the dev team and maybe 90% of the workload for support. There is so much effort being wasted on having different systems for different things.

I feel like there's an idea out there that will solve all this for open source--maybe involving stitched GraphQL APIs, OIDC+JWT for auth, etc. Something kind of like Sandstorm[1] except with Sandstorm the different apps weren't necessarily built with Sandstorm in mind. In this system there would be a centralized identity management system like Keycloak that manages concepts like users, roles and apps, and everything else delegates auth to that centralized system.

[1] https://sandstorm.io/

I work in live production and have made tons of little apps to make my life easier.

A lot of them are little web apps with basic buttons calling http endpoints on gear /apps or doing basic OSC commands etc.

People usually use something like a streamdeck for this but I find being able to throw up a slider or something in there so much easier.

And many times it might even be single use for a specific event and a lot of time I'm just throwing up a single html page with no styling and a script tag so it really takes a minute or two.