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

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

#151
post #49

https://github.com/jhspetersson/fselect A tiny tool I wrote to search within file piles (mostly unsorted downloads, torrents, and such). I could never remember `find` options, and more advanced queries are a pain. Now one can use some kind of SQL flavor to get the job done.

Looks awesome! SQL seems like a much nicer interface for this kind of thing over a pile of command line flags.

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

#153
I wrote a Python library for model based systems engineering, because existing tools (e.g. Simulink) don't coexist nicely with mainstream version control systems, and don't generally have such a nice interface for system level meta-programming and design optimisation.

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

#154
I used to maintain a sprawling spreadsheet to manage my retirement investments. I would use it to compute the trades I'd need to do to rebalance (so I can stay on-target with my desired asset allocation).

I ended up making https://github.com/cjjeakle/rebalance-calc to do the same thing, but with a slicker user experience. I use it quarterly, so it definitely fits the bill for my use case, and I occasionally show the tool to friends to help explain what rebalancing is and how to do it.

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

#155
post #105

I have a shell script (technically PHP) that uses the clipboard to retrieve json, parses it and converts it into a correctly formatted php array then puts it back on the clipboard. Fantastic for writing unit tests where you want to quickly freeze API responses and such. There is more it could do but it's hands down the best RoI in terms of dev time I've had in a while.

How do you parse the text?

Really simply, I grab the json from the copy buffer, use `json_decode` then `var_export` and then use some horrible regex stuff to reformat that into a modern short array syntax.

So it looks like `json_to_array.sh --assign --clip` (if no clip just echoes the resulting PHP to stdout)

https://kopy.io/aLpar (its not good code, it's an itch scratcher) - only works on Linux (it's all I use but would be trivial to make it work on a Mac I think).

PHP makes a really good shell scripting language since it's a full blown language with a massive API and can 'talk' to the shell quite simply.

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

#157
I made a chrome extension that lets me close tabs that I want to read later & delivers them to my inbox every monday - https://closetab.email

I also made my blog sync with my google docs - https://hexo.press

I knew both of those would be helpful for others as well, so I made a service out of each of them and open sourced the code - https://github.com/joelewis

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

#158
I created a CLI tool which is kind of like tar, except it only saves the attributes and (optionally) hashes of files, and it uses a text-based one attribute per line format. You can finely configure exactly which attributes to save (eg. just execute permissions, or just modified time, etc.) and it can write the attributes back to the filesystem.

It's useful for various sysadmin-related tasks, like checksumming an entire directory tree, finding the file(s) that are different between two directory trees, or tracking file attributes in git. Since it's text-based, it's really easy to process using sed/grep (the file format is specifically designed to be regex-friendly).

GitHub: https://github.com/parkerhoyes/stat-archiver

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

#160
I've written some pretty low-level OpenGL bindings in Rust, because the existing solutions are either too high level or over the top complexity wise.

At the time I only had experience with the OpenGL C api and didn't want to learn a totally different Rust abstraction or mix C/C++ libraries into a pure Rust project.

https://github.com/DomWilliams0/name-needed/tree/develop/ren...

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