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

The billing data is pulled from an external vendor's portal. The contact data is pulled from our internal CRM. Both sets of data are then cleaned up and merged with PowerQuery, and then VBA is used to send emails out to clients.

I probably spent in the range of 3-4 hours getting a working version going and ~20 hours optimizing during downtime at work. I genuinely find it enjoyable to work on—there is something immensely satisfying about automating rote work away.

I use this once per month (a billing cycle). It will probably never see the light of day for anyone else, at least in its current state, because I work in a low-tech, nonprofit environment and using this kind of tool would be daunting for my co-workers (for reference, mail merging is sometimes intimidating at my workplace).

I published it on pypi/github out of habit, but it's primarily about scratching my itch and I doubt anybody except me will really use it. There's some interest in doing this type of thing with org mode but it all centers around LISP and emacs (neither of which I like).

First one: cloud services are expensive and come with a lot of overhead. However I do enjoy the idea of lambda/cloud functions a lot but I didn't want to rely on cloud services for them, especially since I have a ton of hardware to self-host stuff. So I built a service which piggybacks on DIND where I could add templates for such lambdas for a few languages(just rust and python cause that's mostly what I use) where I can allocate some resources and build tiny containers. In order to avoid wasting resources, they are all off by default but through the magic of what I build(management and something like a reverse proxy + container management for DIND), I can call an endpoint, which will check if there is a container to handle the requests and proxies the request and response to and from it or it will spin up the container, do the same and shut it down after a pre-defined amount of time. You could argue that I could have achieved the same with minikube or k3s but this has proven to use a lot more resources compared to a single rust binary I can run on anything x86 with docker on it. The downsides are that I can't distribute it across multiple servers so it only runs locally. But that fits my needs perfectly. There might be some people that would be interested in it but I never got to open sourcing it so I'm the only user. I've been planning to open source it "next week" for the past 2 years or so.

Second one: I love data. Specifically unstructured, raw data and I've been collecting a ton of articles from the internet over the past 2 years or so. The ingestion involves a pipeline that automatically processes them and extracts data/makes them a lot less unstructured: events, locations, timestamps, what has happened where and all that jazz. It's a long list of ml models, data transformations, validations, 3 llm's fighting each-other and a bunch of other stuff. Kinda feels like a child to me so I don't want to open source it. I know that I could hypothetically convert it into a product and make some money off it but my past entrepreneurial experiences have been very unsuccessful, I have limited time and lack motivation. So at the moment I'm simply enjoying the data getting spit out on a grafana dashboard such as this [1].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/fAoQghk.png

Right now, it's ASP.NET/.NET 8 on the backend and still plain jQuery on the frontend.

I display RSS feeds, US National Weather Service data, and comics in it. I also have it send some things to friends and family as emails periodically.

Hangfire works on the backend to actually fetch new data at appropriate intervals.

I occasionally have to modify something and manually push a new build because something remote changes but it feels fairly stable right now (knock on wood).

I want to redo it to use ASP.NET AssemblyParts and work towards essentially giving each little box its own DLL as a sort-of-plugin-system so that I feel more comfortable adding more types of boxes (stocks, different weather data, etc) and maybe one day can open-source it. (I'd like to so I can point prospective employers at it and say "see, i can actually write reasonable real world code.")

I assume that most things I build will only be used by me and a small group of users, and sometimes will also eventually be used by others. I generally only build tools that I use every day. For example:

- iCloud/Dropbox alternative macOS, iOS, and web app

- task management GTD macOS, iOS, and web app

- photos api for digital photo frames

- media management

Mostly built using go for backends and SwiftUI for macOS and iOS frontends.