I wrote a web app that moved paper-based funding submission and grant management online. A second client wanted the same thing, so I wrote it again with newer tech. When the third client asked for the same thing I spent eighteen months creating a customisable framework, which is in use for increasing numbers of clients.
Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?
71–80 of 95 posts
Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would note that while Nix is very well designed, and may be incredibly useful in untrusted dev environments, it should not be used to compile anything that touches production. Nix got where it is so quickly by mostly ignoring basic supply chain integrity like author package signing. It is always one compromised Github account or single dev workstation away from a massive supply chain attack. Nix, NPM, Brew, Pip, et…
As someone who knows nothing about package signing and security, are you saying that Nix is about as secure as NPM?
Correct, and that is not a good thing.
Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?
#73Auth Code.
The only I have used before was django auth (great), but never get anything like that in other langs. I'm in Rust know and is my biggest desire...
Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?
#74A local dev environment that works. Doing this again, and again, and again.... ...truly sucks. After not working on a codebase for a year, or two, I usually need to set up everything again -- and often run into very stupid/pointless issues that waste an hour, and often much more, just to get to the point where I can start the actual coding process. This is pretty much why I've stopped coding. I don't have the time to…
I have my whole Linux desktop machine, two laptops and a few servers fully codified now in Ansible.
Everything is in there. Every library and piece of software, every config and preference. User creation (minus any sensitive data). Everything.
Made a bootstrap script I run on a fresh install, and then I can push the ansible config onto it from a raspberrypi ansible server on my LAN.
Wanted a different file system in december. Wiped the system, changed filesystems, resetup. Took less than 1 hour.
Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?
#75Deployment pipelines, CI/CD, (dev)ops. It's my biggest pet peeve ever that every company I have ever been to has written highly customised CI/CD/(dev)ops tooling that I had to fight with or adapt at some point. I don not understand why anything beyond heroku/dokku complexity is ever needed. The needs for teams to manage infrastructure is lunacy in this day and age.
Speaking of Dokku, I remember stumbling upon it a decade or so ago and dismissing it as a toy project that was unlikely to go anywhere. Fast forward to the present, after noticing that the project is still going strong I did a deep dive in it and got really impressed. I think I will be moving my personal projects from the unmaintained Ansible mess I created to Dokku.
With Dokku I can have a new dockerized webservice online behind https in All while not knowing a lot about devops at all.
Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?
#76Deployment pipelines, CI/CD, (dev)ops. It's my biggest pet peeve ever that every company I have ever been to has written highly customised CI/CD/(dev)ops tooling that I had to fight with or adapt at some point. I don not understand why anything beyond heroku/dokku complexity is ever needed. The needs for teams to manage infrastructure is lunacy in this day and age.
I really don't understand what has happened in the last few years in this space. At my company we went from stable but boring Jenkins to this Github/K8S hell. Everything is broke all the time. Literally every single day. It blows my mind. We are at the point that people have forgotten that things used to just work . It's like back in the day Windows98 users know you have to reboot the PC once in awhile. Because they…
I believe it‘s a conspiracy where sysadmins wanted to create their personal next generation job security.
Countless inane layers of overengineering no one can reason about anymore.
Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?
#77A password manager for teams of people that isn't dumb. It's surprisingly hard to find. I contributed to one open source that a co-worker started, and I made my own in my own time. So I've almost made it twice.
What's wrong with 1Password or Bitwarden?
I haven't tried Bitwarden. A friend uses it and says it's fine for his personal use at least.
But when I say teams I mean it needs to be designed in a way that it can easily reflect a CMDB architecture, with a tree of objects, API and LDAP auth. Technical details aside, the goal is of course to integrate it with other systems.
On top of that, not all UIs are simple enough to be used by the entire organization either, but as long as it separates backend and frontend that can always be fixed.
Honestly my current plan, and this would be the 3rd time I build something like this, is to make a simplified frontend for Hashicorp Vault.
Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying you would pay a service to host it all for you? or are you saying you want to just send all they physical documents to someone to scan and upload for you?
No, not to host paperless-ng for me. I also don't mean send them physical documents. I'll be scanning the documents myself of course. I mean a hosted service that I can use from my desktop or phone to upload documents quickly. It should also provide integration with my email with the ability to add rules regarding certain email senders and converting email content to PDF where possible (for the cases where the sender…
Can you list features? This sounds like a good/quick microsaas idea, maybe we can team up on it. Any idea if others would pay for something like this? Am I right thinking the features are:
- Ability to upload docs (perhaps w/ multiple integrations, drive, dropbox, etc. - Imap connection to only temporarily read/store email to check the sender or content (possibly using some ai as well?) to then convert specific mails to pdf, etc, and configure further rules on what to do w/ these upload somewhere, email them to someone, run through zapier? - Would the ability to transcribe or describe what's in messages be valuable? I've worked on something like that to basically tag emails for marketing messages when 90% of the emails were an image/ad of a competitor.
Any other features that could be fast/easy but make this reach a wider audience 'need'?
Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?
#79A local dev environment that works. Doing this again, and again, and again.... ...truly sucks. After not working on a codebase for a year, or two, I usually need to set up everything again -- and often run into very stupid/pointless issues that waste an hour, and often much more, just to get to the point where I can start the actual coding process. This is pretty much why I've stopped coding. I don't have the time to…
Isn't this what Microsoft is trying to solve with dev containers? https://containers.dev/
Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?
#80Auth Code. The only I have used before was django auth (great), but never get anything like that in other langs. I'm in Rust know and is my biggest desire...
I kind of agree. Even now there are tons of third-parties dealing with the authentication for you, you will still have to write code to actually integrate with them and hook this up to whatever your user data is. I have written a few authentication layers now, and while I feel there are added benefits with third-parties, the amount of code I have to write is similar and strongly customised to the vendor offering the authentication solution.
Then there is also the problem you are facing and that is tooling not being language-agnostic across the board and you will have to re-implement similar patterns when changing the backend language or framework.