What tools have you built to scratch an itch or quell a regular annoyance? They can be anything from a full blown application to a few commands stringed together.
Thank you.
Ask HN: Tools you have built for yourself?
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have built for yourself?
#2I built a TLS certificate tool targeted towards my company usecase for internal certificates (developers, OpenVPN, internal certificates): https://github.com/linsomniac/rgca
It's big features are that the cert generation can entirely be controlled from the command line, config, or environment, or any combination of the above, and it has tooling for the situation where I have an existing cert but want to add or remove a name from it. It also has pre/post scripts so I can have it do things like add it to the Ansible repo, vault encrypt it, and commit it. Beats the 10+ year old script that didn't work with Subject Alt Names.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have built for yourself?
#3I made a CLI tool that manages my life and beeps at me to stay on-track: https://taylor.town/nowify
A lot of acquaintances have been begging me to turn this into an app, so I may give it a go later this year :)
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have built for yourself?
#4I manage multiple virtual machines, and whilst not coding, it sometimes feels that way, since you're bending a computer to your will, which is my definition of coding. Nothing more exciting than after a fresh install of Windows, and configuring the hell out of it to your liking (hardening it, de-bloating it, making it more performant, as-well as customizing it and installing choice applications to it).
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have built for yourself?
#5I built a tool to conduct agile meetings like standup, sprint planning, and retro asynchronously based on my frustrations sitting through lots of poorly-run meetings: https://www.teaminal.com
Also great if your team is distributed - no more 7am/7pm meetings with your team in India!
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have built for yourself?
#6A creativity app that can help people with their iterative creative process.
https://iterations.sprkwd.com/
Iterations is a new way to help you generate ideas.
Creative methodologies usually combine divergent thinking (applying a stimulus to generate potential outcomes) and convergent thinking (bringing facts and data together and applying logic).
Iterations help divergent thinking by giving suggestions on how to process the output. They work as a set of guitar effect pedals to your process. There is an input, a set of ambiguous instructions that can be applied to this input, and an undetermined output created by these effects.
Yes, like Oblique Strategies.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have built for yourself?
#7A UI for shell commands. It started when a project had so many helper scripts that I kept forgetting how to call them, so I made this dashboard or command-runner. https://github.com/seldomU/dasdashboard
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have built for yourself?
#8https://github.com/dlthomas/diff-kit/blob/master/src/bin/dkl...
A tool for turning diffs into location-prefixed changed lines. Allows me to feed that to grep and then put the results in my vim quick fix buffer.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have built for yourself?
#9I built an HTTP stub application in my spare time. At first, I only built it for myself but at some point open sourced it. I still have a lot of fun building it. You can find it here: https://httplaceholder.org/
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have built for yourself?
#10After being annoyed by most online json formatters out there, I decided to build a simple keyboard-driven one. One of the main things that I was looking for was to have it easily accessible, without the need to open new browser tabs or programs that I might need later like vscode so I enabled PWA for it.
When I noticed https://jsonformatter.com domain was not used I sent an email to the owner and he actually agreed to host my app since it was open source.
There are other people using it right now, but I enjoy using it every time I need to make a json more readable.