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

Back in 2011, my girlfriend was working at a catering company that announced shifts via a webpage and workers had to sign up for them. Other workers tended to pick them up very quickly, so it was hard to get too many shifts.

I wrote a quick web scraper to automatically accept any shift offered and email her.

For a couple weeks it was great, suddenly she had all the work she needed.

Then one day she woke up late to find a voicemail telling her she was fired.

Earlier that morning the script had detected a last minute job announced just an hour before start time and immediately accepted it, resulting in her not showing up to it. I had not accounted for the possibility they would announce a job so last minute, since it had never happened before.

Hit me at elliot@edusign.com if you have some time, I might be interested in what you are doing!

I don't remember how I got started initially, there was some investigation of the network protocol it used. It was some crusty old standard that used an odd command scheme, but I managed to divine what magic packets to send to wake it up and select an input.

I ended up rolling it all into my first and only Android app. It eventually became a full remote control for the thing, including a sleep timer that would turn it off after an hour.

It was extremely basic and horribly ugly. I never looked into automatic discovery of the device on the network, so it had a hardcoded IP address. But it worked well enough to get a free projector running.

Apart from that, every programmer has thrown together innumerable scripts and throwaway programs for one-off tasks. My most recent was a thing that takes in a Diablo 2 save, then sets the version number and recalculates the checksum. My pirated copy is a bit old and won't accept saves made with modern editors. I don't know how many scripts I've written that walk through a file system to find or change something in the contained files.

I also have a version of Klondike solitaire written in C++ with SFML. I initially wanted to build a neural network to play solitaire, but after building the game itself, I found in my research that solitaire is actually a very difficult problem and far beyond my skills.

It basically takes a couple json files for configuration, and some markdown.

[0]: https://git.sr.ht/~zacbrown/zsitegen

I spend about 30 minutes a month maintaining it on average and I recently rewrote it in Go so that I could bring it back into my /x/ monorepo.

I have iOS automations that query and post to it about once every day. Eventually it's also going to handle photo uploads so that I can yeet it a photo and get the embed code for it shoved into a buffer note on my phone.