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

I wonder if some explanatory texts, alongside usability improvements could help you get more users. I can’t tell if your website is useful since I know anything about DNA sequencing - but from a UX perspective there is room for some improvements.

I find most Continuous Delivery tools/services overkill most of the time, so I wrote (and heavily use, even in enterprise setups) my own tool „SimpleCD“, which is just a single Bash script, but is extremely powerful and flexible: https://github.com/manuelkiessling/simplecd

I've settled into a stack that I like for building web apps with Node/Express on the back-end and Vue on the front-end. However, I still ended up re-implementing common things every time, like build automation, my Docker setup, user authentication, payments, all that basic stuff.

So instead of writing all that custom each time, I wrote a SaaS starter kit to build from, and decided to polish it up and also release it as a full-fledged product:

Nodewood: https://nodewood.com/

It's helped me to be more rigorous when building out features (if it's going to go into a framework that others are going to use, it needs to be well thought-out, tested, etc), and is there as a stepping stone for future businesses I want to work on. It's been really satisfying to build out for the past couple years, and I'm closing in on completing the last few features and adding sufficient polish so that I can take it out of beta.

A curious question. Aside from my day job, this seems like a thing I do all day. :-)

I'm not sure what the motivation for your question is. Do you feel like everything's been invented and built already, and it's just a matter of (at most) plugging the things together?

I find myself constantly thinking "this should exist". I don't have time to make them all exist.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/arping

Nothing like it existed at the time, and I wanted to send ARP requests as easily as sending ICMP ping.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/simple-tpm-pk11

I wanted to use a TPM chip for SSH client keys, and couldn't find anything like it.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/tlssh

I wanted to explore what it would be like to have SSH, but with identities not based on providing username, but an x509 cert. (and TPM chip protecting the key) Also became a fun learning experience about terminals.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/cmdg

I wanted to use GMail from a fast cli that used the native gmail API.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/rslurp

I wanted to download concurrently and according to patterns. Ok, so honestly this one probably exists somewhere in a form that I would like, but I couldn't find it.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/sim

I wanted multi-party authorization for sudo, and couldn't find one.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/monotonic_clock

People kept using gettimeofday, so this is part of my compaign against it. (see https://blog.habets.se/2010/09/gettimeofday-should-never-be-...)

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/gtping

I worked in mobile core networks, and wanted a "ping" that used the GTP protocol since that won't be firewalled.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/ind

I wanted my bash scripts to have automatic indentation, while not sacrificing buffering latency and such.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/tlscheck

I wanted a simple tool to audit my TLS certificates for expiry.

https://github.com/google/huproxy

I was travelling to China on vacation and wanted a VPN out that would be unlikely to be blocked by the great firewall. Ok, so there are many VPN-like tools for getting through the GFW. Maybe it was just an excuse for me to write it. Honestly ssh -D would have likely worked just fine. It's being used by the keymaster project now though, so maybe it did something right: https://github.com/Cloud-Foundations/keymaster/blob/master/d...

https://github.com/google/tcpauth

I wanted to lock down SSH to anyone who doesn't have a secret key (and portknocking is usually ridiculous). Why not use TCP MD5 for it? https://github.com/google/tcpauth (MD5 is actually safe to use in this mode. It's not broken for all use cases) No firewall needed, and the TCP port is simply not open for anyone without the key.

That's what I can think of right now, after filtering the less interesting ones.

Interesting. What do you think about such an approach to (micro)blogging for a broad, tech-layperson audience: https://mro.name/o/2021-03-30-142424-prototypefund10-068.pdf