Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

A great thing about being a developer is you can make apps to your liking. If it's simple and doesn't take a year to build, why not make your own?

My wife and I have been traveling extensively in the recent months, and I've got increasingly frustrated with the clunky and ugly currency converters. All I want from it is just type in the number and see the result instantly. I don't wanna be tapping input fields to gain focus, and I don't wanna be selecting stuff all the time, I just want a minimum number of taps to get the result. Would also be nice if it wasn't sore for my eyes.

So, since it's a pretty damn simple type of app, and us being a designer/developer couple, we rolled our own: https://www.billyconverter.com

And then besides happily using something that fits your needs, it's also pretty cool to see it being used by other people around the world.

What apps have you built yourself just out of a need to get something that fits your needs exactly? Why? Did you publish them on Android or Apple stores?

A long time ago I built an app to monitor online retailers for items that were hard to find in-stock. It would send me text alerts so I could buy them before they went out of stock again. I made it into a business for a while, then the retailers caught on and stopped paying commissions on a those items.

I’ve also built code generators for myself.

I built an application for myself called meditations: https://github.com/ioddly/meditations

It's actually...a todo application, but focused on habit formation and creating a positive feedback loop around a few consistent habits or projects.

I wrote it for myself because there was nothing quite like it that I was aware of. I use it on a daily basis; I also learned a lot of frontend development by having to maintain and use a real, interactive application.

> it's also pretty cool to see it being used by other people around the world.

It is cool! I've gotten one or two reports of people using it, despite the fact that I've taken almost no effort to make it easy to use, and it feels good.

I haven't published it on any stores because it's a self-hosted application -- you can keep all your data (encrypted if you want). I actually thought there would be no market for anything like it but over the years I've learned of a few that are making a decent revenue.

Bottom line, it's fun and rewarding to work on.

I wrote a Greasemonkey script that creates page previews for Wikipedia, so I could cover more ground understanding terms and articles. This was about a year before Wikipedia's official page preview feature was made live.

I've built something similar just the other day. But the purpose is to find items on sale below a price point.