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

I wrote Instacart’s first Android app and used the money to buy my now-wife an engagement ring, fly to Rome, and surprise her on the last day of her Europe trip.

My wedding website was fun to build! https://andi-and-seandon.com

I made a website for my wife, girlfriend at the time, asking her to to marry me. The domain was hannahwillyoumarry.me

It had a picture of our favorite beach spot we frequented along with the question.

Ok this is not really what you asked, but it such an odd story, I think I should share it. 20 years ago I had a job at a company where the general manager hired a 'business consultant' who seemed to actually be a highly entrepreneurial sex worker, who after having sex with him in his office, (during business hours + it was a small office, less than 20 people ) she presented him with an invoice for $30,000 for 'business services'

Shortly after her last visit to our office, she contacted me offering me an extraordinarily well paid developer job.

She arranged a meeting in the dining room of the Hilton hotel, in which she had rather bizarrely covered a table with papers, and about a dozen blinged out mobile phones. After about an hour of semi-nonsensical rambling about 'innovation' and veiled threats and grand out of control promises, describing a dynamic life in which we would be travelling the world, living in 'luxury hotels' constantly moving hunting the next opportunity - she asked if I wanted to 'meet the team' and 'they're all upstairs'. Curious to see what the hell this madness was all about, I followed her upstairs to her hotel room, (bracing myself, in case I needed to fight to keep my kidneys) and sure enough, in a very small studio apartment style hotel room, with the bed pushed to the back of the room, six developers, who barely acknowledged my presence, were crammed around a trestle table, on hefty beige desktop pcs with clunky low res cathode ray monitors. At least on the monitors facing me, they were dragging and dropping visual basic controls.

She then made it clear that if selected to join her 'elite team' that a substantial part of my salary would be paid in sexual services.

Curiosity satisfied, I got the hell out of there, but I've always wondered what the hell was the story of those six men? Any of those six men, are you here? what the hell were you doing?

Not me, but someone I know well.

There's a primitive 2D limited actions per day (I think these were a thing once?) web game built in the later era of Temple Ov Thee Lemur (if that name means nothing to you that's fine, if you laughed at the pun that's also fine) http://cities.totl.net/ -- there is also an HTTPS version but er, wow, TLS 1.0 and ancient insecure ciphersuites, I think you may just as well use the plain HTTP site in terms of functional security, maybe one of us will fix it some day. I am pretty sure it's all one terrifying Perl hairball so fixing it might be unexpectedly tricky.

Big parts of Cities are just archaic memes, but one of the main things going on there is that Chris, who built almost all of it, and is named 'King Chris in the game (it's short for Fucking Chris) was courting a woman who now lives with him and she played that game a lot when it was first built. So e.g. she abused the hell out of an addictive in-game amphetamine analogue, to get more actions per day, and he added a mechanism to somewhat undo the dibilatating effects of that, for her.

In the past few months her/their cat died and I believe Cities now has a late-game cat quest in memorial to that cat although it's possible that the subsequent arrival of new kittens in the house added a distraction which means that work wasn't actually completed, I don't play any more so I don't know.