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

My most used tool I have is a note taking web app that automatically saves markdown files to S3. The most important feature I added was a little button that would automatically make a note for the current day, and put it in the daily notes folder, all sorted and organized. I also have full text search which is very helpful for finding old notes.

I also use an RSS reader I made. Instead of just showing you the text of the page like a standard RSS reader, it proxies the web page so you can read the article directly from the website, but with the added benefit that since it's a proxy, I can control all the HTML, CSS, and Javascript on that page.

Another daily one I use is a random background music playlist for Spotify that is auto generated daily. Using the Spotify API you can find random music, then find random instrumental music from that random music. I use this to discover new songs to listen to while working.

Basically, making your own software is fun. Making production software is much less fun. I don't need to worry about a million things when I make my own software. Sure, I make $0, but if I spent months making, for example, my notes app production ready, and tried marketing it, I'm guessing I'd still be sitting at $0.

Rough guess would be that I spent 50 hours actually working on the software.

There's a handful of raspberry pis involved. I wrote everything in elixir and used https://nerves-project.org. The dashboard is written with phoenix live view. One of the raspberry pis is the "brain" and basically runs the dashboard and controls devices. The devices are all in an elixir cluster. I also run timescale db for some basic history of metrics.

Once I start a grow I don't use it that much actively, but it passively runs all the time. I check in every few days or week to make sure nutrients are looking good.

I've grown strawberries, lettuce, jalapenos, and cayenne peppers.

Basically I enter the transactions and it shows a dashboard of my contribution rooms, how much is left, how much I have already contributed, etc.

Nothing fancy, but it just just a Remix frontend with MantineUI backed by an SQLite db inside Dropbox. Took me about 6 hours, and I only made it after I botched some changes I made into the Google Sheet that broke a bunch of formulas.

I thought about making it into a public app, but it is so tuned to what I want that it is probably not really that valuable to others.

I use it every time I save. Used to be weekly but lately monthly.