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

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

#212
You kids with your fancy websites. Our 36th anniversary is this week. My first "love" program was a Windows 3.1 application based on the cute banter we had. Hand-drawn icon! Writing text to the Windows Device Context!

In the 90's we got a dachshund, and I made a "dachshund head bouncing around the screen" app for the PalmPilot.

More recently, I made her an Alexa skill that tells you the weather at the track where this week's NASCAR race is being held, and a program that texts us when her favorite needle magnets come up on Etsy.

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

#213
My wife and I created a game as a save the date for our wedding, with 8-bit avatars of ourselves that guests could play to "save the date". A number of guests played it multiple times in an attempt to be on the high scores board - we even gave out prizes to the top three scores!

We got a lot of feedback that other people would want to be able to have a similar game, so we rebuilt a customizable version where people can create their own avatars, dialogue, and other game aspects. Obviously this is a rough year for save the dates, but we're still pretty pleased with how it has turned out so far.

https://www.pleasesavethedate.com

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

#214
post #84

Somehow on dating apps my most successful profile line has been “Message me if you want to learn an interesting fact about toast.” This led to me “researching” a lot of facts about toast and getting deeper and deeper into the bit. Long story short I now run toastfacts.com. I only have about 7 facts on there right now, but I “discovered” some more good facts last night which I plan to add to the site when I get home.

Since toast is discussed on HN: I remember this video [0] nicely explaining some nice engineering of an interesting toaster.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y

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

#215
Mine isn't a love story, but a treasure hunt: https://i.imgur.com/OH1Fotf.png

Stop reading here if you want to try your hand at it yourself!

...spoiler follows...

Several years back I met someone at a conference who made an impression. She had good technical chops and a refreshing sense of humility. We spoke on many topics, including trepidation over a big life decision she faced. Out of encouragement, and perhaps an eye to eventual recruitment, I spent that evening creating this little challenge for her.

It started with a QR code linking to a snippet of source that draws an old IBM punch card onto the screen. To decode it, she had to learn a bit about 70's technology and the IBM 80 column format.

A couple days later, I got back a short program of her own that correctly decoded the characters and ended with the comment:

    // TODO: discover all of your secrets
which I expect reflected a cheerful indignance she felt upon discovering her efforts so far only revealed a bock of ciphertext.

Her code had clarity and elegance, and included ASCII art of a punch card which I first thought was documentation but actually served as a sort of Rosetta stone constant used to derive character mappings.

Watermarks on the punch card hinted toward the encryption algorithm used in the Enigma machine, and by the end of the day she'd cracked the code. It decrypted to a short but heartfelt message of inspiration. She loved the puzzle and I had a blast creating it.

And before you ask... yes, she was cute, but I was already spoken for (and IIRC I think so was she).

Thanks for asking such a poignant question, it's great reading all the other beautiful stories your submission has evoked.

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

#216
I asked my ex-girlfriend in highschool if she would be my girlfriend through a C program.

It was a simple multi-step y/n prompt questions, with if/else conditional switches.

At the time, we were both trying out this CS50 course and C was the first part of it.

She said yes by sending me back a similar script and we dated for a while.

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

#217

https://an-ocean-apart.vercel.app I used to be in a long-distance relationship. Like many lovers who were apart, we had lots and lots of phone calls. I made a visualization of them, and gave to her as a gift on Chinese Valentine's Day. The name "an ocean apart" came from the Julie Delpy song [0] from Before Sunset. Oh I was young and romantic. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohiVnAyRDAA

This is really well done! Good job :)

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

#218
I've built quite a few things for love over the years, including a blood sugar prediction app for my partner, a digital mix tape, and a silly not so me and my partner could give each other brownie points.

Here's a small summary: https://hrishioa.github.io/my-home-cooked-meals/

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

#219

During my junior year of high school, there was a girl in my calculus class that I wanted to ask out to our homecoming. Time was running short and I had no idea how I would ask her. Then, while sitting in class, inspiration struck. I started coding frantically on my TI-84. When the school day ended, I spent several hours in my room refining my program. The next day, at the end of calculus, I asked this girl if I coul…

I did something similar on my HP28S, writing such a question on top of a programmatically generated bitmap background, made of some hearts pattern (boolean pixel art, really).

She declined since she was interested by one of my classmate, which I already knew, btw.

Tech does not solve every problem, but I was proud of the result anyway!

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems more like hate-coding...

No, not at all. Maybe just a playful stomp. Here's the explanation of how it all went down - https://bit.ly/31vAPes

That was a great read - thanks for sharing!
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