Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

Not me, but a coworker learned how to program for the Gameboy and wrote a game that proposed, showing an animated ring and popping the question.

Sadly, I think the relationship fell apart, but it was a pretty clever way to propose, and it shows a lot of dedication.

I created https://pokemoncries.com because my girlfriend said she was really good at this as a child and I thought she would like it. She LOVED it. I polished it a bit more after this and posted it on reddit. I was amazed by the reactions/usages. People did “Pokémon cry challenges” on YouTube and it was quite viral in the Pokémon community. It has still good metrics and I updated it with the last generation. I just like that people have fun with it, I don’t think much more will come out of it.

I also created https://anagrams.io with her/for her, but that was mostly because she was so excited about it.

For our wedding, I asked my now wife and a few friends and relatives to fill a “guests’ distance matrix”, where 0 equaled superclose friends and 5 complete strangers, and from a random initial layout, it bruteforced random swaps between guests untill reaching minimum distance configurations. It was a pretty dumb algorithm, but it took into consideration table capacity, party size and closedness of tables.

Of course, the wife rejected most of the outcomes, but it did decide some of the tables, spitted out interesting sittings and it helped us doing the global layout.

At the end, the overall feeling was that everyone was close to their loved ones. The energy was fantastic and everybody had a great time.

My girlfriend complained that I ignored her texts on the messenger app LINE which is popular in Japan where we live. So I wrote a LINE chatbot that would respond to her texts with lots of interest "I'm so glad you messaged me, please tell me more!"

I dated someone whose father had a small business that made home goods products (e.g. specialty laundry detergent, waterproofer, etc). He was a smart but challenging guy. Definitely the sort of father who didn’t think any guy was good enough for his daughter. Remember the first time she took me home to meet her parents in South Carolina for Thanksgiving he was, literally, cleaning his gun on the front porch.

He primarily sold his products through big box retailers like Walmart and was getting squeezed on margins. I suggested he should sell direct through a website. He scoffed at the idea.

On the long drive back to Chicago my girlfriend brought it back up and asked if I could help put her dad’s business online. This was 2001 so there weren’t really any easy options to create what he needed. Ended up spending nights and weekends for the next month building a whole shopping cart, storefront, and payment gateway. Remember learning just what a pain getting SSL setup correctly was at the time — which was part of the inspiration for Cloudflare making it free and easy many years later.

Gave the site to him for Christmas. He spent the whole day playing with it and then bragging to his friends he was now in “e-commerce.” Girlfriend was very happy. We continued to date for another 4 years until her medical career took her East and starting a company took me West. Still friends to this day.

I think her dad’s company may still using a lot of my old code. (Which, to be honest giving my coding skills, is a bit terrifying.) Ecommerce has become a big part of their distribution. And I still buy and use his detergent, which is terrific for cleaning performance fabrics like Gortex and washing sheets if your skin is sensitive to perfumes or dyes.