I built a tool to upload photos to arcgis. never saw the light of day. but I had nothing against sharing it.
Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
331–340 of 484 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#332I made a Google calendar program for the Inkpad 6color eInk display. Because of the small number of displays I doubt there is anyone else using my code and that's ok.
It's Arduino based and it turns out the iCal format has a lot more complexity than I'd guessed so there are still bugs/incorrectly shows some events but it mostly works for me. I work on it very intermittently over a few years and find it quite cathartic.
It's cool having my code hung on my wall. https://github.com/jonquark/InkyCal
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#333I wrote an application that sends GPS coordinates to a Web API that plugs into Home Assistant which I use to open and close the garage door when I come home, or leave the house. 2 independent sensors confirm the action completes and if it doesn't, it re-sends the command until it does. Another sensor detects the door from the garage going into the house being opened, which closes the garage door when it was opened from the GPS application.
The application sits on a RPi in the truck powered through the cig lighter plug. I don't know how many hours I spent on it as it was a weekend project I did when I had free time (not every weekend). I can say I got it working in about 4 months though. So however many weekends I had free from that 4 month period is about how long it took. Probably 40-60 hours though.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#334I made a compass app for when I'm driving. Shows direction, speed, and coordinates. Doesn't work of you're not moving. I love it.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#335I’ve probably made dozens of tools for myself that no one else uses, but — sort of by definition — none of them are publicly available. Who needs my orchestration app, access control UI, or Jenkins replacement? Nobody, that’s who.
But a few years ago I took a couple weeks out and polished up one my personal tools for public use, and since then it’s seen exactly one other user. So, uhh, I guess that counts? It’s called Saascast (https://saascast.io), and it builds revenue forecasts based on your Stripe subscription data. Took me probably two weeks to build, and required maybe half an hour of maintenance per month on average.
I use it every.single.day, though.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#336I created a scraper that scrapes around ~30 different property management sites for new rental listings. It then sends me new listings on telegram
It’s been useful for finding new places for myself and my friends - we can usually get tours before the properties are posted on Zillow.
Though definitely against a few privacy policies
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#337I pretty much rebuilt my bioinformatics stack from scratch in Go, and I’m pretty proud of it! It does things that no other library, even python libraries, do for synthetic biology applications. I’m pretty sure nobody else uses it, but I use it a lot for DNA design work for my company https://github.com/koeng101/dnadesign
Very cool!
I am curious if you might explain how/why this stack diverges from the upstream one (bebop/poly)? I see for example dnadesign has a version two of the seqhash algorithm that looks rather interesting.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#338I wrote a tool in Haskell that continually polls my city's (Toronto) bike share API and dumps it into a database, along with a web server component that does a bunch of on-the-fly analysis of the data and serves that up as various visualizations and stats. I got so frustrated with my city's bike share program one night and I wanted to figure out whether the problems I had been having were widespread or not. Surprisin…
Please send this to the Star, they love this sort of thing. I also think they've worked with the Open Data Meetup group in Toronto and they may be able to put you in touch with the right person.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#339My wife (mainly, my role has been system user/devops) wrote a custom angular UI on top of grocy for managing our household stock (basically any product we buy at grocery stores), there are two bluetooth barcode scanners and screens which allow you to quickly checkout a product when consumed. Since she started gardening she's also "abusing" the db with custom fields to track when she's planted vegetables, harvested them, etc...
Also over 70% of the lights / 50% of other devices in our house are smart (zigbee/wifi/ble) and are connected to home assistant (I very much recommend tradfri+xiaomi zigbee+home assistant). By now I'm sure we've spend over 200h on our "smart home/life", we love data :)
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#340Kinda lame compared to what other people post here, but this is what probably 90% of the "I just use it myself" software is IRL:
- the most "impressive" one right now, though barely realized since I've just had the idea this week, is a debug/log library that spawns child multiple processes with consoles attached (since you can allocate just one console to a process in windows) and allows for debug info stream separation and rich-ish text features like color
- i've started writing a custom "set of commands" (90% IO, tied to a specific hardware modules, no algebraic functions or anything, so not exactly a programming/scripting language) language specifically for, sort of, programming-illiterate people so that they could easily implement test algorithms without asking software devs to do it. It got nowhere bc I didn't have time to implement it
But my a high level hardware emulator I'm using to debug GUI in production-ish environment uses whatever is left of it.
- environment management software that assigns PATH and other variables. Those commonly ship with software, but I havent really seen people writing their own for general env management
- my friend couldn't get Sony Vegas to produce good chromakey results, so he cobbled together some javascript to do it
- I've built a python notebook to analyze my bike rides combining Garmin Watch (gps + HR) and OSM data (estimating speed vs power vs road conditions).
- since (last I've checked was like a year ago) cmake devs value json adherence over readability in CMakePresets, I've written some scripts that convert jsonc to json. Also, those can convert string arrays to strings and add other QoL and readability improvements
- also, since CI/CD pipeline at work uses pretty old cmake that doesn't support presets and is a ton of work to upgrade due to it being airgapped (I will not elaborate), I've written a script that converts a preset into a shell script. Not completely, just the options I use.
- i guess a lot of custom diagnostic software I've written at work, though that doesnt really count since this is what I'm actually supposed to be doing, instead of most of the above and jeneral software shenanigans