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

One of the first programs I wrote on the Amstrad was a random number driven matchmaking program that would pair up boys and girls in my primary school class. I guess that was more titillation than love though.

I created a web based adventure in about 1998 for a girl’s birthday (featuring the A-Team, the cast of Friends, Peter Stringfellow, Alf from Home and Away, and many other celebrities whose photos I could find easily). I don’t have a backup, archive.org only had it partially and it was full of absolute filth so I wouldn’t really want to resurrect it.

In 2011 my wife (different woman, despite the excellence of the above) and I were struggling for baby names so I made a Mac app that used Bayesian stats to find out what kind of sounds and spellings you liked. I later polished it up and released it on the Mac App Store to some small but satisfying number of sales.

My son (named via the simpler algorithm of my wife deciding on her favourite name) is now 9 and I write code for/with him. Yesterday we wrote an app to show random arithmetic problems for him to practice on, in GAMBAS which is excellent for kids learning to code.

My dad wrote programming books in the 80s and we grew up around computers and learned to code quite young. I guess if anything I’d struggle to separate programming from love even if I tried.

For an anniversary I built a (password-protected) site which showed a search box. When my wife searched for terms related to her, it would bring up pictures, stories, poems, etc. I'd had a bunch of friends secretly submit their own media so that there was a bunch of content! It took me probably a year to put everything together and come up with all the terms, but she loved it!

Organizing the seating arrangements at our wedding was such a pain. I remember we suggested doing "self seating" where everyone could just eat wherever they chose, and it was like I suggested inviting Satan himself to host the ceremony. My mom and Aunts shot that down SO FAST.

I was adopted at birth, and the start of my career as a programmer revolved around helping build websites and services for clinical psychologists and adopted children, as well as maintaining the forums and other channels where clinical psychologists talked about, well, all the things you talk about on forums. I made a custom CMS using CakePHP and did my damnedest to link it up with the forum. Back then I had barely a year of experience doing programming but somehow I made it all work while I was on sick leave for depression.

I kept that up for a fair few years until I got burned out with handling a full time job and going home to do more of it. However, looking back and looking at where things are now...well, some of it remains: https://clinpsy.org.uk/

That's my first legit project (amongst a couple) and I wish I had that fervour and desire to do the same again. The community around that was fantastic and it was pivotal in my decision to find my independence.

Naming our first child was tricky. My wife and I had a final list of 5 names, any of which would work as a first-middle combination. She’d randomly toss out two: “Washington Stewart? Kennedy Frakes?”

After a few minutes of that I just wrote the loop to give us all possible combinations; and from there we selected the name.

It took 2 minutes tops, and I’d have forgotten about this except she still talks about how I wrote a program to name our child.