Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
61–70 of 484 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#62MP3Renamer(2002) - The age of music piracy is still rife and i have downloaded my share from napster, university file shares, etc. However, most filenames are horrendous and not clean. So, my first utility was a java program that would analyse file names based on common garbled patterns and rename it into [Artist] - [Songname].mp3. It worked surprisingly well for 90% of the use cases,
CombatLogAnalyzer(2008) - Me and my wife are in the throes of World of Warcraft arena which is a competetive dueling system. We only play 2v2 and we both suck at it. So, i enabled combatlogs in WoW and then wrote a parser, analyser and visualizer for every arena game and that shows which spells were used, where did damage come up, highest contributer of damage and this was by each playable class. By the end, we learnt what was killing us and the statistics showed our strengths and weaknesses. Suffering high latency and poor skills we managed to crawl from 800 rating to 1800 rating! We just couldnt go beyond that! (I was the crutch). This was done in .NET WinForms and i really learnt how to use linq.
Space Commander (2019) - My daughter is almost 4 years old and i think she is ready for computer games. I decide to learn MonoGame and i make a Space Commander clone. It is a HIT!
HappyMrsChicken (2019) - From my smash hit game above, i make a clone of HappyMrsChicken except this is in a forest where you have corn that the chicken has to eat and there is competetion from a mysterious goblin creature who also goes after the corn. Who will win?? Turns out, i cheated and gave the chicken a boost. My daughter won a lot!!
OptionsTrading (2020) - It is covid and i am locked in a quarantine facility for 28 days. Like a lot of retail noobs, we are getting into trading stocks and options. I decide IBKR interface sucks and I can do better. While spending those 28 days in isolation from family, i learn react to write a frontend and python to write a backend that displays all our trades, statistics, UIs, loss calculators, PnL, etc. My wife and I use this to date but i am too chicken-shit to publish it.
My personal favourites are: CombatLogAnalyser, OptionsTrading and HappyMrsChicken in that order
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#63I spent a decent amount of time tweaking the UI, improving performance, adding filters, providing different file output formats, etc. Never shared it with anyone.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#64It's not that it is meant for my use only (any capable reverse-engineer familiar with Ghidra should be able to pick it up and use it) nor that it will never see the light of the day (it's open-source). However, it is such an esoteric capability and outright heresy according to computer sciences that I'm having a hard time just finding people who can wrap their heads around the concept, let alone people who would actually want to use this. Simply put, it's so far out there that I don't even know where or how I could even advertise it in the first place, which makes it de facto for my own use only.
A couple of people did end up reaching out to me in the last couple of weeks about it, so it might be on the cusp of sprouting a very tiny user base. Still, I've made it for my own use and until very recently I've never expected anybody else would use it.
If someone wants to check out the dark magic: https://github.com/boricj/ghidra-delinker-extension (disclaimer: might give nightmares to linker developers).
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#65The only part of that software that ever became public was the animated syntax highlighter[0], but I don't believe any other part would help anyone else accomplish anything.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#66It's a media player that sits in the console.