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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?

#551

I created intercooler.js in 2013 so I could do AJAX in HTML: https://intercoolerjs.org Last year I removed the jquery dependency and cleaned it up based on a lot of lessons that I learned, renaming it to hmtx: https://htmx.org Same idea: extends/complete HTML as a hypertext so you can build more advanced UI within the original hypermedia web model, with a cleaner implementation. Part of that cleanup involved me pulli…

looks like you invented HTML-over-the-wire before it was cool :)

in fairness I created intercooler based on pjax and turbolinks, because I wanted to do everything in HTML without magic

and jquery has had load for a long time too: https://api.jquery.com/load/

so I can't claim to be the inventor of the approach

just the perfecter :)

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

#553
Years back I built IPython Memory Usage[0] which shows how much RAM and time was used per cell in Jupyter Notebooks (and originally the IPython shell). This is very useful for diagnosing why some Pandas and NumPy operations use a lot of RAM [1] which can also point at slow-downs, so you can compare different approaches to find more efficient solutions rather than randomly trying stuff until something no longer breaks.

0: https://github.com/ianozsvald/ipython_memory_usage

1: https://github.com/ianozsvald/ipython_memory_usage/blob/mast...

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

#554

Dbmate: https://github.com/amacneil/dbmate I found most database migration tools tried to be too smart (I'm not a fan of automatic migrations), were too tightly integrated with specific languages or frameworks, or didn't support basic developer workflow pleasantries such as dropping and recreating the database. I created a simple single binary migration tool that runs migrations (sql files), and keeps track of applie…

I found that I wanted something really specific, and built a tool in Go that lets you write, modify and use plpgsql functions as if they were regular source code files rather than database objects. You can write them as Go packages, import those packages into other Go projects, and write tests - without maintaining migration files for anything other than the tables. Combined with IDEA’s plpgsql language support it’s…

can you give more details, i am generating golang and js functions corresponding to plpgsql functions in somewhat hacky way. I am curious to know what approach have you taken, is it something similar to this project https://github.com/gchaincl/dotsql

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

#555

I made https://CampAlert.live , a notification service for last minute camp site cancellations. It sends you an email and text message when we find a free spot of your choosing. Currently, it supports only Canadian campsites in BC, AB and National Parks. I've looked into previous tools but their services were all too expensive. They also didn't have the granularity I wanted in the options you could choose for campsit…

would be great if you had parks in Washington state.

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

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encourage you to publish some of the things you’ve worked on. One way to reduce some of the concerns you mentioned would be to publish it using one or more anonymous accounts. So long as your readmes have reasonable keywords, someone may just stumble on your project. If they don’t like it well it still won’t be attributed to you and you don’t even have to respond. Either way, the practice of releasing and dealing w…

Thank you, I have thought about this before and might do so in the future. At work I routinely make things which I know are used by millions of people and I've never had a problem with that. In fact, I'm quite proud of my work. And I've long since gotten over worrying about others reading my code. I'm also a big proponent of code reviews. But the code being public still feels really scary, even though there's so much…

You’re welcome. Those are good points and indicate this is likely a trick of personal psychology.

I felt the same way and it prevented me from releasing in the past.

There are a variety of ways to overcome this, but the absolute best is to just release something and find how little sneering happens.

In time you’ll realize that the gatekeeping and holier than thou view toward code can only be expressed by those who release even more.

If they hope to stay in the game, those who do will do provide feedback on your code do so with positivity.

Leaders know it takes teams of talented individuals capable of action to get stuff done. And they know abuse is anti ethical to recruiting talent.

So if it was someone you might want to impress judging your code unworthy, they’ll either offer constructive criticism or say nothing at all.

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

#557

Last year I built Recut[0], a native Mac app that helps speed up video editing by automating the rough-cut process. It finds silence, gaps, and pauses and removes them, creating a cut list that you can import into editors like ScreenFlow, Final Cut, Premiere and Resolve. Here’s the Show HN [1] from a couple months ago. I built it because I was making screencasts and cutting out silence + mistakes was 90% of my editin…

This is awesome - love the landing page too. Great job!

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

#558
I built a PHP library[0] for Amazon's new Selling Partner API, because none of the existing libraries were feature-complete enough for the projects I was working on. To my surprise, it's actually picked up some steam -- ~400 installs (and lots of email/GitHub questions :) so far!

It's really fun having a tool that I created get some use.. I've benefitted a ton from the OSS community, so it's nice to be able to have that relationship go the other way, even in a small way. Plus, I've learned a lot about Swagger/OpenAPI, and the many quirks of Amazon's seller-facing software.

[0] https://github.com/jlevers/selling-partner-api

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

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, I hear you on the risks of depending on 3rd-party libraries where you can't get your changes merged. It's nice to be able to roll your own in that case. On the cron case, what are your thoughts on the email notifications? In what ways are the useful or useless? I'm not an expert in this stuff. And I really like the look of uback. I have the kind of sense (and pride) that maybe this thread I posted is going to b…

> On the cron case, what are your thoughts on the email notifications? In what ways are the useful or useless? I'm not an expert in this stuff. I really dislike it. It’s probably the biggest pain point in cron IMO. 1. At the age of DKIM, DMARC and SPF, setting up a working MSA on every server that runs cron can be a real pain. Not always, it depends on the exact situation, but it can be. 2. The biggest issue is that…

For 2, see chronic[0] (part of moreutils[1]). It runs a command, muting stdout and stderr unless the command exits with a non-zero status.

[0]: https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/moreutils/chronic.1.en.ht...

[1]: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

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

#560
I built a website that makes it easy to find comedy nights to perform at in London: https://apuchitnis.github.io/open-mic-nights

It's been out for a week and got ~ 400 users so far :)

Before, I would have to use a google sheet with the same information. I'd first make a copy, because you weren't allowed to edit the original spreadsheet, add filters for the columns I wanted, find out where the comedy night was, only select it if it was convenient, and finally sign up.

This was too slow for me - I'd be spending an hour a week managing where I was performing, opening dozens of Chrome tabs, and getting frustrated when travelling hrs to a venue on the other side of London. So I built the site to make my life easier!

Source: https://github.com/apuchitnis/open-mic-nights More details: https://twitter.com/apuchitnis/status/1391122602920382469

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