Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

I made a web app [1] to quickly create collections of keyboard shortcuts that can then be learned and trained.

I didn't like the pre-defined drills of existing shortcut learning software, so I tried hard to make it as seamless and efficient as possible to create personal collections of Keyboard shortcuts and text snippets. They can be imported from a public shortcut database or defined from scratch.

From there, you can practice your shortcut collections with the goal of memorizing them and getting faster and more accurate. It even calculates a confidence value for each keyboard shortcut in your collections based on your training performance.

I am using it myself extensively and have learned a ton of new shortcuts and have eliminated bad habits. Made a blog post (during lockdown) about my complete collection of shortcuts [2].

However, some of my first users seem to struggle with the concept of having to build their own collections. So I am learning a lot about product design and user onboarding right now. This is quite exciting for me as I am working mainly on Java Backends in my regular job.

[1] https://keycombiner.com

[2] https://tkainrad.dev/posts/a-collection-of-all-keyboard-shor...

(Note: if you feel that this is just "regular" anxiety and it can pass, my wall of text is something you can skip. Only thing that should be considered are developing coping skills! I'm just trying to be helpful.)

I'm thinking you'll reach the end of this dark tunnel here soon - but with a bit of work! The posters here have been thoughtful and there's a lot of good stuff to consider - I may be able to touch on this from another angle.

If you have the funds, I would strongly encourage you to see either a psychologist or psychiatrist. I have suffered with clinical anxiety and regular panic attacks for over a decade. Unfortunately, I was diagnosed with Bipolar 1 and Psychosis about 2 years ago, which are very rough and sometimes "team up" to make my existing anxiety/attacks worse.

Even though this "teaming up" effect has been given me more anxiety than I can handle... trying out a 1 or many medications, reading books on coping skills/etc, and putting in the effort to test out said coping skills are great for many people.

If you don't want to go this route, I would at least spend some time looking into and testing out various coping skills. You can use them as soon as things are headed in the wrong direction. This approach will also help if you have non-clinical anxiety as well.

note: not a doctor... just a "patient" and can relate :) - I think you got this!

I made an attachment for my Ender 3 3D printer that allowed me to turn it into a pen plotter and draw with ink (and other) pens. I've played around with different code to create images (photo->gcode) and made a new youtube channel for the drawings and a bit of behind the scenes of how they're made: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfqDAVieav-UOIEAlDXsovQ

Target demo are people that want to have genuine conversations in realtime about anything on their mind, with absolute ease and simplicity. Discussing news, current events, tech, nature, and science are areas I’d like to promote.

I’m aiming for it to be the “ios” of chat on the web.

Thanks to the lockdown, I've finally wrapped up the long work on a Slack plugin that helps you find the location of coworkers and meeting rooms: https://www.slashmap.com/.

I used Go on the backend (rewritten from Node) and Vue on the frontend.

How it works: first, you upload a picture of your office layout using the web UI and mark everyone's locations. Then if you send "/map @JohnDoe", the plugin will return a map with the location marked on it. It works for meeting rooms and other locations as well.

Now the plugin has dozens of users and were featured in the Slack's app directory as "New and noteworthy".

If you have any questions, feel free to ping me at contact@slashmap.com :)