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Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

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Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#61

Post by _kush »

I've built a few apps which started out as tools for my own use and later polished + released for public.

- Cone: This started out as a small tool to help me identify the name of the colors of objects around me (i am a red-green colorblind). Now it's a full fledged color picker app with a Pantone license - https://cone.app

- CBVision: This is another small tool for colorblind people which shifts the problematic colors to a visible hue for easy differentiation - https://cbvisionapp.com/

- Unwind: I made this to help me with box-breathing - https://unwind.to

- LookAway: This is the latest app that I've created to help me with digital eye strain. - https://lookaway.app

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#62

Post by bvanwerkhoven »

I've created Kernel Tuner (https://github.com/KernelTuner/kernel_tuner) as a small software development tool, because I was writing a lot of CUDA and OpenCL kernels at the time. I didn't want to manually figure out what best thread block dimensions and work division among threads were on every GPU over and over again.

The tool evolved quite a bit since the first versions. I'm also using it for testing GPU code, teaching, and it has become one of the main drivers behind a lot of the research that I do.

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#64

Post by noduerme »

Some pretty giant weird stuff. Some of them were things I imagined would be startups, and built at scale over 6-12 months, but realized I was the only person who had a use for.

So like, during covid lockdown I wanted to assess cumulative risk from me going to the supermarket, or seeing my girlfriend, or each of us hanging out with meeting 1 vs. 2 vs. 3 people per day. This led to me writing a pretty insane Markov Chain engine/GUI for defining time- or repetition-based curves for expected outcomes of bespoke events (basically like: I go to a bar N times, each one gives me a probability of encountering covid around 5%, if any of those happens it triggers another event in which having a covid-positive test result goes in a parabolic curve from 0% to 100% and back over the 12 days from contact, anchored around day 5), and chaining them together with other events that would only happen if the initial conditions had been met. I credit that beast with preventing me from getting covid... but it's also basically so visually insane and complicated that just explaining to someone why they'd need it would be pointless. Yet it has an entire login system, a custom engine in PixiJS for drawing time curves, and a whole multi-threaded worker system on the back and front for comparing monte carlo versions of the chains. Me and one friend are the only users.

[edit] Also: An engine for identifying stock market patterns. It's my form of "low frequency trading" - one of the goals being to avoid wash sales. So far, averaged over last 2 years it's turned out trades about 14% over base increase/decrease on the stocks it's trading... and I set aside a fund with which I follow it religiously. It only suggests trades every month or two. I have no interest in making picks for other people, or in trying to market the software. Occasionally I give my brothers tips from it.

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#66

Post by tcmb »

Two apps that fulfill convenience functions for two niche interests of mine:

- https://ramdass-search.net - Full-text search in videos of talks by Ram Dass, aka Richard Alpert, a former Harvard professor of Psychology who became a well-known spiritual teacher in the 60s and 70s.

- https://rtfcal.de - Get the dates of amateur cycling events (Gran Fondos) as an .ics file so I can import them to my calendar. The app submits the search to the cycling association's site, parses the resulting HTML and creates an .ics file.

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#68

Post by pwitvoet »

During the pandemic I got back to an old hobby, creating Half-Life levels. I found that certain things involved a lot of repetitive work, so I started working on some automation tools.

For textures and sprites, I made WadMaker and SpriteMaker, which can convert a directory full of images (including Photoshop and Krita files) to the specific formats that HL uses: https://github.com/pwitvoet/wadmaker/

For creating levels, I made an automation tool named MESS (Macro Entity Scripting System) that can do things like covering terrain with props, simplifying level scripting and automatically applying workarounds for known bugs: https://pwitvoet.github.io/mess/

It's been very educational (and fun), learning about color, geometry and making programming languages.

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#69

Post by PreInternet01 »

A monitoring/configuration system for the various mixed Windows/Linux/MikroTik/Cisco environments I manage. It's absolutely re-inventing the wheel, but since I could just not find anything existing that really worked for me (heh!), I'm now dragging that particular millstone along as well.

It mostly connects to hosts over SSH, and uses CLI commands to gather data and make configuration changes as needed. Think things like NMVe storage health, disk space usage, Windows AD/Exchange/SQL/VSS health, Docker containers, reverse proxy mappings, Netflows hinting at BitTorrent or other data exfiltration, finding a MAC on a port, configuring VLAN access for a port/trunk, Wireguard tunnels, etc.

It's absolutely horrible, code-wise, since I tend to use this project to experiment with just about anything I think of. Current rewrite is about 2 years old, C#/.NET 5->8, UI using Tailwind and htmx, plus chartjs for the pretty pictures, although I have some custom rendering things for switch ports and traffic. Data store is SQLite, with some hacked-on time series features, and this is probably the most terrifying part of the whole mess, since I explored some really bad ideas there. But that also lead to some very good stuff for other projects, so possibly still a net win.

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