Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 458 posts

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#331

Post by greenyouse »

compacct27 wrote: post #169
greenyouse wrote: post #80

I wanted frontend debugging in prod so I've been halfway through building a source map injection browser extension for a while. The problem is that source map comments don't work well when the same artifact is deployed across prod and multiple staging environments. For each env at work we have different asset paths which need to be generated. Each server already serves up its source maps behind a firewall (for other…

Oh hey, I’ve been thinking of doing this too. Do you have a repo or anything? I took frontend bugging in a new direction for me as well—decided to add the file name as a prop to every element on the page (in dev only, just takes adding a Babel loader for it). Helps with unfamiliar areas

I guess I deleted the repo by accident when I was cleaning my computer out last year. Here's a very bad version of the repo that basically doesn't do anything. I'll leave it up for a week though if you want to fork it and roll with it. :D https://github.com/greenyouse/sourcemapper

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#332

Post by C-x_C-f »

tasuki wrote: post #215
philovivero wrote: post #74

I wrote an in-terminal histogram tool[0] because... that's when/where I always need histograms. [0] https://github.com/wizzat/distribution

This is the best thing since sliced bread, but it doesn't work for me on a recent Ubuntu. Tried with both Python 2 and 3. Compare: $ sudo du -sb /etc/* | sort | uniq | sort -rn | head -10 2897355 /etc/brltty 436966 /etc/java-11-openjdk 402728 /etc/ssl 251196 /etc/apparmor.d 244732 /etc/ImageMagick-6 219185 /etc/X11 170093 /etc/fonts 144084 /etc/java-8-openjdk 131407 /etc/init.d 117524 /etc/systemd With: $ sudo du -sb…

For the indentation, have you tried using the option -g (--graph)? That does the trick for me

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#333

Post by busyant »

sentinel wrote: post #260

http://www.micktagger.app I have a lot of Spotify playlists and I wanted an Alfred like tool to quickly add songs to my Spotify playlists, mostly using my keyboard. There was none out there that I was happy with, so I built it myself. Fast forward to today, I've added a few more features I wanted for myself - auto removal of songs I skip often, auto like of songs I listen 100% and a smart playlist feature that gather…

cute name

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#334

Post by HKH2 »

smoldesu wrote: post #158

I wrote qlip [0], a stupid-simple shell utility written in 5 lines of Rust that prints your clipboard as a QR code to stdout. I used it as a clipboard sharing utility before KDE Connect fixed their universal clipboard feature. It should compile for any platform that supports Rust, and you can install it to your system in a few seconds using `cargo install`. [0] https://github.com/toasterrepairman/qlip

That's useful for sharing links etc. with others without sharing phone numbers. Thanks.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#335

Post by ammar_x »

nethunters wrote: post #308
ammar_x wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) Great. Good luck with adding new dictionaries and thank you for your efforts. By the way, have you seen the work of Taha Zerrouki. He has produced many open source tools to deal with Arabic language [1]. Thought you might be interested. [1]: https://github.com/linuxscout?tab=repositories

جزاكم الله My website was originally a Flask web app which used his Arabic number converter, Arabic stemmer, Arabic normaliser and other modules. But in order to use offline as a PWA I end up porting these to JavaScript. I will release the source code once tested properly and porting is completed. Also just going through your blog, enjoying the summary of Abul Hasan Ali Nadwis book. Keep up the good work! Edit: Also…

Yes I'm interested in that and would like to know when you release the source code.

And I'm glad you visited my blog and liked that post :)

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#336

Post by brad0 »

HKH2 wrote: post #119

I have an unorthodox system of things which is all quite interdependent. I prefer to just adjust things as I go. I know I'm reinventing the wheel at times, but I would rather a more personal UX than a UX for the lowest common denominator. I have a variable loader that I can use in scripts/programs so that I don't have to hardcode filepaths and so I can change settings quickly. Variables can refer to other variables,…

> I have a sort of data representation in which I can note how things/concepts are linked, and also express doubt, references, references to references and so on, to allow expressive representations of thoughts including incompleteness or ambiguity.

Could you tell us more about this?

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#337

Post by oriettaxx »

I wrote several tools for myself, the longer really still useful are:

* a voip callback daemon I trigger with Telegram: with a "call Tom" message to its Telegram Bot, the daemon call my phone and call Tom, and connect us together. I use it save phone costs (daemon chooses the best voip account depending on both the country I am calling and receiving calls), especially while anchoring where internet is too slow for direct voip calls.

* a small bash script for wireguard (quickly switch to a vpn profile)

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#338

Post by devinmcafee »

culopatin wrote: post #212
devinmcafee wrote: post #31

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 rewrit…

I’m on the same boat. I’m building a library website for biologists after seeing my girlfriend’s struggles. I have never built anything like this before, or anything at all really. I decided to use Spring boot because I want to boost my resume and my company hires Java devs. But I’m thinking I should’ve used something more trendy lol. I’m basically at the point of designing the REST API and I’ll have to go through th…

I would work on the project every Sundays for a few hours: sometimes just 1 hour, sometimes as much as 6. After a few Sundays I had a local dev environment running on my computer to be able to track workouts in. At that point I started using my app: I would write my workouts in my phone and then when I got home from the gym enter them into the app running on localhost. After a few weeks of doing that I got fed up and decided I wanted to be able to enter my workouts from the gym via my phone directly, so I spent the next Sunday (or maybe 2 or 3, hard to remember) to learn how to deploy with Heroku. I did a pgdump of my local environment and used that to seed the "production" database running in heroku.

I think one thing which kept me motivated and engaged in the project was that I focused on getting as much value from my efforts ASAP, like a one person agile startup with a single customer (myself). Everything I added had to add some value immediately. I focused on the database modeling and REST APIs and didn't even worry about what the app looked like. When I first began using the app it was a simple multipage web application with basic HTML forms built in Django with no css (literally white background with blue text links and black text). Being able to actually use the app drove me to want to improve it and add new features.

For example: A feature which I wanted, which no app at the time had, was to be able to find my personal records by varying sets and reps. I wanted to answer questions like: What are the most pullups I've ever done in a single set? What's the most weight I've deadlifted for 4 sets of 2 reps? What is the heaviest weight I have ever back squatted for 8 reps? I had the data, I just had to build it into my app. So the first feature I added after being able to create workouts was the ability to look up previous bests. Every time I would workout I would look up my previous best in the app and try to beat it. Being able to track and set new personal records in the gym kept me motivated in my workouts, it was pretty thrilling seeing my project actually pay off for me personally.

An elongating hallway is a good analogy. Every time I found out there was a new thing I had to learn I would be stressed out and overwhelmed, coming up against a hard edge of my knowledge. I would then read a few articles and do some googling, and next thing I knew I was successfully doing the things which originally stressed me out! In my previous comment I mentioned that doing this project increased my confidence as an engineer, which I think was caused by repeatedly bumping up against my limits and then surpassing them.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#339

Post by Anaminus »

Program that interfaces AutoHotKey and youtube-dl so that I can easily play or download things with shortcuts. Haven't played a youtube video from the actual website in years (don't tell anyone).

Program that lets me keep track of the last time I did something (brush teeth, exercise, vacuum the floors, etc), which motivates me to do these things more regularly.

Program to convert between various units of bits, mostly so that I could do a calculation regarding download speeds.

Program to run programs without a shell, so that I could run certain commands on startup (it was faster to implement than to find an existing solution) [1].

Library to dump various useful information out of a Pokemon ROM, so that I could play the game more efficiently [2].

Playing card library, so that I could simulate certain solitaire games and figure out the chances of winning [3].

Program to quickly parse and generate markdown files from source code comments, existing solutions being too complex or not working quite the way I wanted [4]. This one ended up being a real winner, because it let me stop worrying about presentation and get back to writing code/documentation.

There's this sort of multi-tool I've been working on for game development on Roblox (very niche) [5]. A high-level overview is that it uses scripting to streamline certain workflows that would otherwise be tedious, such as parsing proprietary file formats, interacting with web APIs, or assembling a project into a final product. It's a winner because it lets me make even more tools for myself.

[1]: https://github.com/Anaminus/nosh

[2]: https://github.com/Anaminus/pkm

[3]: https://github.com/Anaminus/cards

[4]: https://github.com/Anaminus/qdoc

[5]: https://github.com/Anaminus/rbxmk

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#340

Post by mikub »

roveo wrote: post #322
mikub wrote: post #37

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 lin…

Nice! It could probably benefit from passing the file as an argument: import sys file = sys.argv[1] instead of call to input() You could probably do: if len(sys.argv) > 1: file = sys.argv[1] else: file = input(...)

Oh wow, that's a nice improvement. Thank you.
Post reply on HN