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

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

#371

Post by Leftium »

pimlottc wrote: post #369
Leftium wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No marketing was needed. The app was specifically made just for that single event.

Not being familiar with Slidesome, I thought /that/ was the app you created. Now I see it's just a component you used. Hence my confusion. :P

Ah, I understand your confusion, now. I didn't link to the actual project because it's not active, anymore. I guess I could link to the repo: https://github.com/Leftium/PhotoDrop

Finding a service that integrated with Dropbox the way I wanted probably took more time than the actual development.

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

#373

Post by nozzlegear »

DownrightNifty wrote: post #368

To anyone in the US who said they make their own apps for their own iPhone: do you really pay Apple $99/year for that "privilege", or do you reinstall the app every 7 days (or use workarounds like AltStore non-PAL or jailbreaking) to get around this?

I pay $99/year. With the amount of money I make, it’s a really trivial sum for the convenience. Plus I could use it to add Apple OAuth to my web apps if I wanted to.

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

#374

Post by koeng »

heuermh wrote: post #337
koeng wrote: post #77

I 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.

I'll make sure to explain it a little more!

Basically, I developed a whole lot of bebop/poly, but I had some disagreements with the owner of the repo (Timothy Stiles) about direction at the later stages of development. For example, I wanted to standardize all the parsers to use a generic interface, so that they're all used in the same way, while he didn't really want to change anything. There were other features I wanted to add as well - you can see a full list in the changelog (which are the changes since diverging from upstream)

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

#375

Post by err4nt »

For a number of years, I built various To-Do (or more accurately To-Done) lists. I would use them for about a year and then just stop, and make something else. I don't currently have any to-do list solution, I'm just using pieces of paper or forgetting stuff. At one point I had:

- A single-page HTML app that saved entries in localStorage in 1 browser (like 1kb of vanilla CSS and JS, barely anything)

- A static HTML website, generated from a folder of Markdown-like raw text, with a CLI build script. Hosted on a public web server.

- A simple linux CLI command that let me check, set, and mark items as complete, build with Node and saved to a JSON on disk somewhere.

And there must have been one or two more. Nothing serious, nothing that stuck long-term, but I probably spent 1-10 hours making these, and then using them daily for a year or a year and a half.

I'm very conscious about time spent automating or building what you want, versus how much real-life time savings or experience boost does it give you. I'll likely make more of these in the future when the itch reappears and hopefully get another year's enjoyment out of whatever little thing I build.

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

#376

Post by lylejantzi3rd »

I've mostly been writing bookmarklets lately.

I wrote a bookmarklet that flattens the comments on a substack comment page and orders them by date. It makes it easier to see the most recent comments. https://bookmarkify.it/64936

I'm a member of a private social media site whose UI I dislike, so I tapped into their phoenix websocket connection and I created my own web client. It's vanilla js/html/css using template literals as html templates. It kind of reminds me of those old template systems I used in the php 4 days. Anyway, the killer features for me are regex filters on content and seeing all of the replies from the people I follow.

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

#377

Post by KomoD »

ycuser2 wrote: post #202

I made a small tool that takes a screenshot all 5 minutes and stores it in a password protected zip file, but only if something has changed on screen. Sometimes I go through the old screenshots and get nostalgic as the oldest are 10 years already. I spend so much time of my life on my computer, so why not take photos of it?

Kinda like https://timesnapper.com/

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

#378

Post by pedrosorio »

epolanski wrote: post #103
arnaudsm wrote: post #75

As a freelancer I invoice in multiple currencies, and I couldn't find a program to generate them that wasn't an overly complex $100/mo SaaS. So I build a little cli to generate my invoices. 100 loc and super simple. I miss the 70s when programming was the default way to solve problems. Excessive abstractions and proprietary software often slow us down.

My (polish) bank gives invoicing software for free and obviously you can put whatever currency you want. Bank is called millenium bank.

Millennium bank is Polish TIL

What's up with Portuguese and Poland? (Millennium, Biedronka, what else?)

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

#379

Post by wchandler »

I built a checking program in C# to mainly use as a check register and balancing tool. Doesn't do double entry accounting. Also build a simple notes program in both C# and python that can use the same data file. Also did a cheap and dirty internet radio player on an old Rasp. pi. Used one push button to cycle thru a list of internet radio feeds. Plus an led that flashed the index of the list which gave me an idea of which station I was on.

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

#380

Post by jasondigitized »

newsbinator wrote: post #142
65 wrote: post #81

Almost all of the software I make in my free time is for my own use. My most used tool I have is a note taking web app that automatically saves markdown files to S3. The most important feature I added was a little button that would automatically make a note for the current day, and put it in the daily notes folder, all sorted and organized. I also have full text search which is very helpful for finding old notes. I a…

> Using the Spotify API you can find random music, then find random instrumental music from that random music. For this, I made a Spotify playlist with 41 hours of instrumental soundtrack music that helps me focus. It's not random like yours, but with that many hours, there's enough variation if you put it on shuffle. It's mostly epic and uplifting movie scores. Or suspenseful and building up to something... none of…

Added to my Spotify. Thank you.
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