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Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#471

Post by blihp »

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #344
gotaquestion wrote: post #258

Huh, I've never been asked that. Yes, for over 30 years. I could never list them all. Nearly every thought I have becomes a program. I've written x86 asm game hacks (DOS era), 2D tile games (80's), Windows MIDI composers, game frame languages, ray-tracing renderers, OpenGL visualization, PID controllers, camera controllers, video controllers, circuit simulators, flight controllers, so so so many games, scripts for an…

I wish I could shift my thinking to do this. I've been a web developer for 17 years and love programming. But any time I've tried to build my own projects or products, it's usually a revamp of an existing product or game, and I quickly lose interest. I lack the ability to see everyday "issues" that could be resolved with programming. But if someone asks me to solve an issue with a program, I could probably come up wi…

You're probably going for things that are too large in terms of scope and/or scale and don't really solve any need for yourself. Think about bite-sized problems that will help you with your day to day work/hobbies and don't try to solve them in an 'enterprisey' or bullet-proof way... think the simplest thing that can possibly work. Then over time, start getting more ambitious. It doesn't matter if it only works for 2% of cases (as long as it's the 2% you care about), runs slowly, is a memory hog, crashes every 8th time you run it or any number of other things you'd never dare do for 'production' code. Assume it's a throwaway project and then be pleasantly surprised if it isn't.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#472

Post by NoboruWataya »

akpa1 wrote: post #467

Most recently, I built a piece of software to send me digests of RSS feeds at regular intervals, be it daily or weekly. It's an evolution of a little hacky Python script that I had, and I couldn't be happier with it! https://github.com/codemicro/walrss

I had my own similar script for a while. I stopped using it in favour of Tiny Tiny RSS's functionality, then stopped using that because I didn't like the look of the emails it produced. I'll have to dust off my own script, or maybe take a look at yours!

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#473

Post by kuboble »

Most recent example:

My kid loves logical puzzles like this one: https://www.smartgames.eu/uk/one-player-games/little-red-rid...

It comes with a booklet of 40 or so problems which she quickly solved so I wrote a program to generate hundreds more e.g. https://i.gyazo.com/329753a6da1feac287bea02ee04a4e1f.jpg

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#474

Post by akpa1 »

mich312 wrote: post #445

Oh yes, there are a few things that I have built for my personal use over the years. A few of them I have started publishing on the iOS Appstore. 1) The most used one: An iOS app that I use to push myself articles from RSS feeds. I can send notifications via post request to a webserver (similar to services like Pushover). On the device I can select to read later or read directly. Inside the preview of the notificatio…

Your film logbook app looks like exactly what I've been looking for for months!

... Shame I use an Android ahahaha

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#475

Post by jasfi »

I wrote a a huge tech stack in Flutter and Nim. I really wanted to use Nim, and the stack kept growing the stack as my needs grew.

Now I'm planning on releasing most of it as Open Source: https://nexusdev.tools

I really didn't plan on writing my own tech stack, because that's the last thing you typically do in a startup, especially if you're the sole founder. Nim has some basic web functionality in the form of Jester and Karax, so I went with it, despite Nim being relatively unknown compared to Python.

A big reason I went with Flutter is because I realized that the mobile market is huge and a lot of people want an app. Flutter can also be used on the web and the desktop. I'm always thinking about reusability of code. What I ended up with is a Flutter rendering engine which can be powered by the back-end in Nim. However the SDK is language agnostic, really, so I'm adding Python support too (Dart is included as it's needed on the front-end). Any desired language can be added in theory, as long as it can produce JSON and send it over a socket.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#476

Post by mavci »

oliverjhyde wrote: post #243
mavci wrote: post #196

Hacker News is part of my daily life. I try to follow the top stories every day when I have the opportunity. In order not to miss important stories on my busy days, I prepared a notification service. It was a very simple, ~40-line PHP script that sends me notifications for stories with over 200 points. I have been using this service for 7 months and I no longer worry about missing important stories. Finally, I made t…

Out of interest why not just use an RSS feed for the top posts?

Because I was already have Pushover account for mobile notifications, and started using directly without extra payment or application.

Now I checked after your question, I found this[1] good service, but do you have any suggestion about receiving mobile notifications from RSS (for iOS)?

And you can consider my personal project as an alternative.

[1] https://hnrss.github.io/

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#479

Post by wink »

Several, but not many that I actually used daily/weekly for an extended period of time.

I am not a huge fan of podcasts but I do listen to a select few. I am also weird and only listen to them on my main machine at home while doing something else.

I was a huge fan of Juice[0] but it hadn't been updated in ages and at some point its TLS parts were too old and I gave up updating it to Python 3 after a quick try. So I wrote my own Podcast library thing in C++/Qt which talks to a backend, where the data is stored.

[0]: http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/

And I wrote a soup.io clone in Clojure that I use mostly for song bookmarking via youtube (but so I can play them). Then I stripped nearly all of the soup features and now it's just a tumblelog I guess. Then after many years I rewrote it and didn't open source the rewrite.

And as you mentioned, the odd metrics/scraping/whatever job that's being run every night and where I actually look at the output several times per week, in one case it's an actual program, yeah.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#480

Post by akpa1 »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #472
akpa1 wrote: post #467

Most recently, I built a piece of software to send me digests of RSS feeds at regular intervals, be it daily or weekly. It's an evolution of a little hacky Python script that I had, and I couldn't be happier with it! https://github.com/codemicro/walrss

I had my own similar script for a while. I stopped using it in favour of Tiny Tiny RSS's functionality, then stopped using that because I didn't like the look of the emails it produced. I'll have to dust off my own script, or maybe take a look at yours!

I hope you like it! Feel free to open an issue of you have problems with it.

It should be fairly easy to change how the emails are generated too, if you're so inclined - just tweak `generateEmail` in `walrss/internal/rss/processor.go`

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