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Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

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Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#91

Post by shawnaxsom »

I've been working on a todo app built on todo.txt. It's a fork of another app, Todour, which I've heavily enhanced. It's a work in progress, it is ugly but very functional.

https://github.com/shawnaxsom/inizio

Being an engineering manager, a good todo system is a must. I need to be able to write to it quickly in an organized manner. I need it to filter quickly, being able to tell it "Show me all of my highest priority tasks that don't have anything to do with person XYZ who is out-of-office, hide learning tasks".

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#92

Post by instance »

I was annoyed by the seemingly over-engineered tools for screen tracking, so I wrote one myself in ~50 LOC, which simply uses ffmpeg to create a screenshot every X seconds in a very low resolution:

https://github.com/instance01/mac-screenshot-tracker

It's super hackable and gets the job done.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#93

Post by c0l0 »

I have several networking devices around the country with OpenWrt on them (for example, at my mom's house). They serve different needs, with different selections of packages installed, and are not of the same hardware, so keeping them up to date proved a hassle eventually. I chose to wrap some primitive Python around OpenWrt's excellent ImageBuilder that helps me keep a declarative build configuration around in an INI-style file, and (most of the time, when point releases are released) only dial up a single version number variable to rebuild all images in parallel. The flashing afterwards I haven't automated, but that might be too much of a footgun anyway.

If you feel like taking a look, here's the source: https://johannes.truschnigg.info/code/openwrt_autobuild/

---

While I was responsible for running the internal CAs at $prevjob, I wanted to give (human) users a convenient and secure means to generate and submit CSRs. I implemented a browser-based CSR generator based on the great work if https://pkijs.org - a demo variant of this internal portal is online at https://johannes.truschnigg.info/csr/ and might actually be of use to someone else :)

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Several years ago also at $prevjob, I was looking for a reliable way to do PostgreSQL WAL archiving without the clunky shellscripts floating around in documentation and on Wikis, and implemented a little C program to do that job. While today you're probably using something like wal-g or other advanced tools that consume the WAL for replication and DR purposes, you may still want to have a program that does one thing, and one thing well, and that is making sure WAL segments get copied from location A to location B, without much overhead, period.

That would be it: https://johannes.truschnigg.info/code/pg_archive_wal_segment...

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#94

Post by montenegrohugo »

I'm super forgetful - so i made a simple website [1] to remind myself of stuff. It's useful! I plan to open source it soon too

The other thing I've built for myself is a tool to find domain names [2] (all the obvious ones are taken). It uses a ML model in the background that I trained to generate suggestions, scores them on a few metrics and calls the whois api to check if they're available. I also want to put this one online, for fun & profit.

Hope you like these little projects!

[1] https://www.remindy.me

[2] https://www.namehunt.dev

Edit: ah, i actually found the remindy.me domain name with the ml model, thought it was cute and that's how the website was born

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#95

Post by ekzy »

dahjkol wrote: post #63

My IT guys at work somehow keep disabling the show hidden files and folders feature in windows 10. So I wrote a program that checks every 5minutes and turns it back on lol

Your script could send your IT guys an email too, that might eventually fix the source of the problem…

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#96

Post by shadycuz »

https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/jenkins-std-lib A Jenkins shared library with a couple cool things like running GitHub Actions on Jenkins.

https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/cloud-radar Unit and Functional testing of AWS Cloudformation templates. The unit testing part allows you to test locally without needing AWS creds.

https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/sebs Stateful Elastic Block Storage was created so that you could make sure that a AWS ec2 instance always had the same EBS volume mounted to it. Really handy for a Ec2 instance in an ASG with a count of 1.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#97

Post by hentrep »

mrjivraj wrote: post #69

Not sure whether this meets your "definition of a tool" but I started tracking my investments publicly a couple of years ago here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tBrZEMFK9XNWxiqOxE8o... The GoogleFinance Function has been a great way to help me "visualize progress" in a very different way compared to default visualizations provided by stock brokers I have also tried to keep track of analytics more manually bu…

This is really neat. Love how you’ve segmented separate portfolios based on risk/investment hypotheses. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#98

Post by eyelidlessness »

I had a major bike accident, shoulder dislocation that took weeks to recover and broken pinky.

I couldn’t type with my left hand, but I couldn’t afford not to work. I looked into one-handed keyboards, found a variety of half-keyboards that mirrored the other half while holding the spacebar. These are patented, and I also couldn’t afford them.

Being patented, I was also unable to find software offering the same. So I learned enough Objective C to build it for myself. It was a hacky, crashy mess but I never intended it to be production quality… so I also built a monitoring app to relaunch it when it crashed.

It wasn’t anything special but it got me through that recovery!

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#100

Post by d1str0 »

At my company we used to pass around a single wildcard cert for our corporate domain. All servers, including many internal servers, all had the same long lived cert.

I made a tool to make it easy for us to deploy Let’s Encrypt certs for internal only servers that would normally not be able to do an http challenge against LE.

https://github.com/Imageware/TLSential

One of the projects im most proud of. :)

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