Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?

Quepid (http://quepid.com) and Splainer (http://splainer.io) both are tools I created a long time ago to work on improving search result relevance in Solr or Elasticsearch. Both are open source.

I literally started coding Quepid next to a colleague complaining about search so I could help them. It’s basically a kind of test driven approach to continually tuning and proving you’re not harming existing use cases too much. The first version that day was super hacky :) but it worked: it was a “single page server side application” ;). Just dumping a huge HTML page from flask about how our search was doing based on stakeholder feedback.

Nothing out there existed that did what I needed. Tooling around search engines for relevance just wasn’t great. In part because it wasn’t paid as much attention to ~10 years ago when I worked on creating these tools.

I wanted a static site generator[0] in the Node.js ecosystem but without React. Or, that's what I told myself- I really just wanted to build a static site generator for fun. Really enjoyed working on it and it's feature-complete enough to run my blog and a few blogs/portfolios my friends run [2]. Learned a lot about publishing and updating NPM packages.

[0]: https://github.com/MH15/neanderthal [1]: https://matthall.codes/ [2]: https://kwest.haus/

Mamba (https://mamba.black). It's a blockchain development framework. It's like Ruby on Rails but for smart contracts development.

The story goes like this....

I was writing a book called "Hands-on Blockchain for Python Developers" in 2018. At that time, the only Pythonic blockchain development framework which supported web3.py and Vyper (a smart contract language that has syntax similar to Python) was Populus. A week after my book was published, Populus was killed by its developer.

So I decided to create one to support Vyper language.

However, I need to tell you that there is another blockchain framework that supports Vyper and web3.py which is more popular than my framework. It's Brownie-eth. If this tool existed in the first place, I wouldn't create Mamba. But hey, such is life. Now I have to raise my child, Mamba. ;)

I was dissatisfied with SemVer and it turns out that most people are using it wrong. So, I created ChronVer[0] (Chronologic Versioning). There's a JS/Node plugin I made that will automatically increment your package.json version, and someone else made a Rust crate!

[0]: https://chronver.org

I built a python tool that connects to a datawarehouse or SQL scripts and produces an interactive dependency diagram as a Sankey chart, showing all objects and the data flow.

Used only on Redshift and Postgres, but it should work with other DBs with minimal changes.

The company I was working for had staging, transformation and reporting layers in their warehouses, but no nice way to illustrate the objects in documents. Support was manged offshore so the interactive diagrams helped with handover.

The redshift space is really lacking capable tools, which is why I decided to create this.