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

Thanks for making it!

In case somebody is wondering: The game was made with Scirra's "Construct 2", which is a great 2D game-maker. You can immediately try it (the current version 3) in the browser on https://www.construct.net/en/make-games/free-trial

I'm a hobbyist, and usually use Construct, Phaser or vanilla JS.

I have put the source-file on https://github.com/niorad/Ninio, you'll need Construct 2 or 3 to open it, though (paid version I think).

Tom, please allow me to say thanks for your work! As front-end-dev, I'm stunned by having C3 in the browser. I would highly enjoy reading about its software-architecture and approaches one day, especially since it's not based on any of the big front-end-frameworks.

Not exactly for the same intensity of the feeling but the first coherent script I wrote was to impress girl I liked in junior high.

It was hand delivered on a beautiful red floppy, printed out some ascii art and made noise. Who could resist? (spoiler: she somehow managed to).

Great! I have done a similar quiz for pokemon routes, maybe I should polish and release it.

My partner works in education and was trying to launch a new programme, IT were super slow and refusing to update a banner on a page (Moodle site).

I quickly tested that JavaScript would be executed on the parts of the page she could control, so, I just used a simple script to replace the banner.

Somewhat unfortunately, my test to see if scripts were executed was to make an alert popup with "[name] is damn sexy" and a colleague of hers happened to be refreshing the page at the same time ;) (this was at 8pm when most people were home)

It was totally fine, banner was replaced, colleague laughed and I relearned the lesson to test things out in non visible ways (and with safe language).

In 2001, I was dating a girl long-distance. We'd emailed each other so often (and cellphones weren't really a thing yet) that I decided to make a web-based app for messaging ourselves.

It was a bespoke messaging system, essentially a forum that could only ever have exactly two users. The killer feature was the ability to see whether the other person had read the message you sent.

Plus, the page would auto-refresh and put "NEW" in the page's title, so it was really easy to see whether there were new messages. (I seem to recall the web-based email clients of the day hadn't yet started doing this, so it felt like I had stumbled on some huge innovation.)

My girlfriend loved it, and we became engaged later that year. Not that I'm necessarily implying causation here.

Over the years, I rewrote the system from scratch to evolve with my web development skills. It began in Perl. About a year later, I rewrote it in PHP.

Then, circa 2005, I rewrote it in Python/Django. It was one of the very first Django apps, as I did the conversion before Django was even open-sourced (I'm one of the original developers).

The system is still humming along today, with its main purpose at this point being a fun archive of all of our correspondence from the early days.