Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

I'm building https://linklonk.com - a news aggregator that prioritizes content from sources (RSS and other user channels) that you upvoted before.

The server part is written in Golang (sqlc, pgx, gorilla/mux) and I think server development is a great fit to learn Golang.

I want to expand the idea of personalized ranking ("others also liked") from content feed to group decision making. Basically, let a group member delegate their vote to other members that voted like them in the past.

My village is divided in four zones, every year they prepare a parade for the village festival and the best one win a prize. The classification is made by a selected jury made by theater director, actors, writers, etc. Every year people that attend the parade complained about the winner being not the best one according to the common taste. So I wrote a web app to permit vote by SMS (nothing fancy). It was a great project to learn web development and Go for backend.

This year: I built a site to republish mug shots for my county. The county site was really bad.

I built a CLI script to check the weather in some ways that I care about. I would use Alexa, but she can't answer questions like "when is the next rain forecasted?" I want rain/freeze alerts eventually. Basically just to help me plan to have things winterized and put up.

I'm building an app that I will use personally, but that I can also make a SaaS. It's sort of like a time-tracker, but for professionals in a specific industry. It helps them track time but also other metrics. I'm sorry to be vague, but I think I have an advantage with the stealth at this point.

In the past:

I built a program to help buy things from Amazon's return section.

I built a program to monitor the "free" section of craigslist.

I built a program to determine the bad poker players and sit at their tables.

I built a program that enables all the above programs to send alerts to my phone.

(I built dozens, maybe hundreds, of other programs, some smaller, some larger, over the last 20 years. I have a wasteland of old git repos and shell scripts.)

Non-computer: I have 40 acres with a small homestead on it, and so there's a bajillion projects. Most recently I built a ladder to access loft areas in a building, with wood.

I installed and just had to maintain an underground dog fence. If I don't, the dogs run off sometimes, and I want to keep them safe at home. The peace of mind I get from this is probably worth 4-5 hours a week, but it's only cost me about 10 hours in 7 years. It wouldn't have cost me really any time, except the road grader keeps breaking my wire.

I restored a Singer model 128 treadle sewing machine that I intend to build a tipi with. I don't need a tipi, but I want to experience one.

I built a deer fly trap. It didn't go well, so I need to build v2. But I am driven by an intense hatred for deer flies, so I will persevere.

I built a tool that wraps wire tightly around things as a way to secure them. I use it mostly to secure tool handles from splitting, but I keep finding new spots to use it.

In my experience, if you decide "I will build what I need when it makes sense," you start evaluating all of your ecosystem. I usually focus on what sucks, and make it way better. That's an easy way.

It's much harder to imagine what you would like to have, or like to be doing. If you do that, start small and see how it goes.

When I click on what presents itself as a link to a vendor's web site, it turns out to be a self-link, simply reloading the current page from zochre.com.

As someone who struggled with their weight their entire life, and who found that all the existing apps triggered black and white thinking, I made a calorie tracking app called Clean Slate. It is designed to be as simple as possible, to treat every day as a new day, to encourage self-compassion, and so on. It was really fun to make and I still use it!

https://cleanslate.sh/