A Windows WPF app to do a quick API request search for records (Contacts, Accounts) in Dynamics online CRM. Because got annoyed by slow Dynamics web page loading times.
Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?
71–80 of 96 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?
#721) mass-ssh utility, that knows how to deal with cisco/juniper network equipment
2) llm use utility, so I can have llm conversations by editing documents (need to update this for llama3-70b btw, it works pretty well, and it's very reproducible. Or rather I made it reproducible)
3) my website, to help my kids through their classes. Half the pages/exercises were made by the LLM utility from point 2.
4) something to check the school website and get grades and ... of my kids, to help them pass the year (they've had to change languages multiple times in the past 2 years)
5) an attempt at automating something I like to do for my kids: create stamps with 3d printing
Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?
#73https://aihelper.bot/ was a combination of testing some APIs and scratching my own itch.
Now arguably filtering Twitter isn't the apex of productivity software, but if I can get my news and out without wasting eyeball juice on trolling, that's a win :)
Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?
#74I'm building my own AI Agent/Chatbot, with enhanced multi-modal capability [1].
It's still early, and since I'm still learning Python and Gen AI/LLM in general, it's a bit difficult. But I've got too fascinated to learn experimenting on building my own AI Agent or just Chatbot, that could helps me, first to learn, secondly to help me with learning about new models capability and LLM landscape.
And I also open source it, fully on GitHub.
My mantra is learn by doing, and by doing, I also want to share with everyone in the open source community since most stacks and resources I use to built it is from GitHub.
Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?
#75Huh! I think I'll respond just for the sake of adding to the conversation: otherwise I mostly just lurk in here. I read a lot of books on my Kobo e-reader and I wanted a way to retrieve the highlights of each book (a highlight is the result of gesturing over a piece of text, locally saving it on the device). But a given sentence could flow over to the next page, or a highlight could have been poorly taken (due to the…
This is really cool! I don't have a kobo - though I've been thinking of getting one of the new color ones. This gives me another reason to consider one :-).
Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?
#76Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?
#77Yes, quite a lot (but eventually shared with other people); examples: - https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine - https://github.com/rochus-keller/FlowLine2 - https://github.com/rochus-keller/WorkTree - https://github.com/DoorScope The first one I'm still using every day and there are several hundered downloads each month.
You've got pretty impressive ideas and projects on GitHub.
I think you would get way more traction if the build instructions from hell would be eased up, and libraries would be managed with a package manager like [1] conan.
Is there a specific reason for not using a package/dependency manager in your projects? I mean, at this point, git submodules would be easier, and that's not something good to talk about because of all the --init --recursive pitfalls.
Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?
#78I wrote a command line tool for myself at work. We have a microsurgical architecture and the tool uses the project configuration of the current directory. I can quickly connect to the right db, show credentials for the db or redis or other services and quickly connect a remote debugger.
Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?
#79Yes, quite a lot (but eventually shared with other people); examples: - https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine - https://github.com/rochus-keller/FlowLine2 - https://github.com/rochus-keller/WorkTree - https://github.com/DoorScope The first one I'm still using every day and there are several hundered downloads each month.
You've got pretty impressive ideas and projects on GitHub. I think you would get way more traction if the build instructions from hell would be eased up, and libraries would be managed with a package manager like [1] conan. Is there a specific reason for not using a package/dependency manager in your projects? I mean, at this point, git submodules would be easier, and that's not something good to talk about because o…
Thanks.
Getting traction is not the primary goal ;-)
Actually CrossLine, which is the tool I still use and maintain, is pretty easy to build. When I implemented these tools, there were no package managers; and I actually don't like tools, which download an unbounded number of misterious things of any size, but prefer to be in charge myself.
And that is precisely the advantage of open source: if someone thinks that something can be done better, they can just do it.
Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?
#80Too many to count, over decades. Ranging from small scripts to full-fledged applications. Some get used weekly (if not daily) after years, some much less so, since conditions and environments change.
The one that had the most impact on my physical life: many years ago when I had RSI, even clicking the mouse button was a pain. I wrote a utility that looked at mouse movements, and when the mouse stopped and remained still for a second or two, automatically "clicked the mouse button". So I only had to move the mouse and wait a little, and clicking became automatic. It was pretty straightforward to implement on X11, my environment at the time. Later I wanted to have the functionality on Windows but never found anyone who knew programming that platform that well (I don't even know whether it's possible).