Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself? • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by robotmay » Sun, May 16, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

I built a really weirdly specific caching helper for Rails: https://gitlab.com/robotmay/chunky_cache

By default Rails issues a cache network request per call with the built-in view fragment cache helpers. It does allow multi-fetching in some situations but not when you have multiple cache calls in the same view.

I had the idea bumping around for years but finally mangled it into working and I'm oddly proud of how weird the solution is.

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

#22

Post by forgotmypw17 » Sun, May 16, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

I built a framework for making static and semi-static websites, because I was dissatisfied with the state of accessibility and compatibility on the Web.

Out of the box, it builds something compatible with most browsers made since 1995, with and without JS, CSS, Unicode, and optionally supporting dynamic elements like commenting and private-key-backed user accounts.

It's nowhere near 0.1 yet, but I'm enjoying building it publicly.

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

#23

Post by batch12 » Sun, May 16, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

I also built a browser plugin to remove twitter nanny nags and a censorship-resistant link sharing service for myself.

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

#24

Post by StavrosK » Sun, May 16, 2021, 3:51 PM UTC

Most recently, I wrote this Docker deployment tool because I was tired of having to either set up a Kubernetes cluster or manually log into my home server to update stuff:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

It allows you to run Docker Compose containers from a simple git repo (no Docker registry), and to specify all the Compose apps you want to run in a straightforward YAML file. It'll take care of automatically pulling/restarting/deleting everything for you.

I love it.

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

#25

Post by an_opabinia » Sun, May 16, 2021, 3:51 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #7

I built Aper ( https://aper.dev/ ) becomes I wanted to write a multiplayer game ( https://redwords.paulbutler.org ) for my family to play remotely and realized that what I wanted could be generalized as a state machine that is synchronized across clients. By generalizing it, I could use the same synchronization infrastructure to power other games and simple apps.

This is pretty cool. In my experience, the biggest pain point is that game clients are written in netstandard2 C# in Unity, while servers are written in not that. So bridging that gap pays huge dividends.

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

#26

Post by ausbah » Sun, May 16, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

I wrote arXivist, a CLI for searching, storing, and recommending papers from preprint sites like arXiv. Haven't worked on it in a while due to school, but it fills a previously unmet space.

https://github.com/njhofmann/arXivist

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

#27

Post by cagataygurturk » Sun, May 16, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

I was so sick of creating and deleting temporary Route53 Health Checks to measure the latency of my API endpoints from different parts of the world, I ended up creating a CLI tool doing that for me

https://github.com/cagataygurturk/global-load-test

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

#28

Post by jlipps » Sun, May 16, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

I found myself frustrated with Node’s child_process library. Some great primitives but a lot of boilerplate to do simple tasks like return a Promise when a subprocess is known to have started. So I built teen_process as a wrapper with a nicer async interface, helpful defaults, and all around cleaner ways of doing subprocess management with Node. https://github.com/appium/node-teen_process

(NB: once the project was determined to be useful we moved it to the Appium org and it has seen lots of contributions from others, not just me)

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

#29

Post by winrid » Sun, May 16, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

A forked version of browserify-middleware which uses more than one thread: https://www.npmjs.com/package/browserify-middleware-concurre...

Solves a common problem in the enterprise world - you have a big monolith UI stack with multiple apps, and starting it in dev mode gets slower over time. Lots of companies just allow you to start one of the individual apps, or they start splitting up the stack. This speeds up starting the stack for a developer, since all the apps get "browserified" on their own thread.

all the other stuff is in my bio :)

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

#30

Post by mondoshawan » Sun, May 16, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

I built a widget set for small monochrome LCDs called "bitwidgets" as part of my g13d rewrite because nothing came close to what I wanted in terms of features and simplicity. I use it to give the G13 applets their UI on the LCD screen. Its built on top of Pillow, and I'm planning on extracting it from the g13 repo as a separate library.

https://github.com/jtgans/g13