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

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61–70 of 484 posts

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

#62
Oh man. Do i have a list for you! I am very self-conscious of publishing my work. So over the years i have made many software games and utilities that will never be published. My wife thinks i am being silly and i shoud publish it. Anyway, here goes....

MP3Renamer(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?

#63
I have a lot of examples but a funny one that comes to mind is: in the early 2000s when IM clients were all the rage, I wrote a VB6 application to go through my MSN Messenger logs and rank my friends by how much I talk to them. Kind of like a MySpace top 10 prior to MySpace.

I 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?

#64
Over the past two years I've been working on tooling that allows me to delink programs back into object files. What started out as a bunch of Jython scripts is nowadays a full-blown Ghidra extension that can export working object files from a program selection in two mouse clicks. I'm using it as part of a video game decompilation project, but it also enables a whole bunch of other use cases I've documented on my blog.

It'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?

#65
My day job is all about doing presentations, so I obviously wrote my own slide software. It is a pure expression of my workflow, my requirements, and my idiosyncrasies and the way all of the above changed over ~10 years. It is a great performance booster if you can basically brain dump your thoughts straight into slides, and if you can just implement breaking changes (or choose to keep supporting an objectively bad feature for all eternity). I don't need to care about any other users, or the bus factor.

The 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.

[0] https://code.movie/

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

#68
Just silly stuff as my development abilities let me do - the most "significative" one is a remote control to, ahem, control my TV from my pc (to save some batteries from it and some peace of mind so I don't need to look for the remote control every time) - as a KDE Plasmoid w/ QML and some Javascript via IRCC-IP. It broke in the KDE5->KDE6 transition but I'll fix it, try to improve it and share it when I have some spare time.

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

#69
I once ripped the corner of my windows install code sticker. I was missing the last 2 characters. I wrote a script in SikuliX to bruteforce the remaining 2 characters. It took about 4 hours to run but in the end, I got the full valid code.

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

#70
A recipe scraper and rehosting website that nobody cares about but me, a slack/mumble/link checker/duper and chat logger, a bunch of arduino/espressif stuff to manage and control little projects like a home gardening, a suite of database synchronization, troubleshooting, and monitoring tools.
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