This might not be in the "spirt" of this post but your colleague might be interested in looking into Home Assistant. Don't worry, there is plenty of space for custom scripts within HA, but it might be a nice foundation for them to build on as it has energy monitoring stuff built in as well as a way to visualize it all.
Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
41–50 of 671 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#42All these exist on the command line, some are short functions in my bashrc, and some are more substantial written as discrete scripts and run via launch daemons. Not having to worry about gui or capturing each and every test case makes solutions fast and only a couple to a few dozen lines most of the time. I don't worry about awkard characters in my strings and all the esoteric regex and special cases that would need to go into a production ready script, because i simply don't use those characters in strings or do anything funky that stack overflow comments like to bring up as a potential pitfall. Makes it easy when I am my own client. plus it makes it easy getting all these programs to some new computer of whatever OS when all I need to do is pull a git repo full of these scripts to install.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#43Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#44Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#45It works pretty well w/ Linux, and also iTerm2 on macOS (if you enable mouse reporting events). It's a hot mess if you use Terminal (but no one uses Terminal, right?)
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#46I occasionally think about sprucing it up to offer for public use, but it's the kind of task that never reaches the top of the to-do list.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#47I needed to hire a Ruby on Rails engineer a few years back, and didn't have much experience with Rails. So took a weekend to scratch an itch and created a web app where I could input a URL to a YouTube video, and the app would then pull the audio from the file and add it to a podcast RSS feed so that I could listen later on my iPhone in Overcast. It was super useful for a while, and never turned it into anything more…
Sounds like NewPipe
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#48I created a program that allows me to control the max charge level of my laptop battery on linux, and persists the change through reboot. Written in rust, and I use it several times per week. I designed it for my system, but it should work on any linux system with a battery, kernel version 5.4+, and systemd.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#49I wrote a web tool that automatically syncs all my brokerage transactions from multiple brokerages (either using their APIs or web scraping). It also grabs daily closing prices of my stocks and relevant foreign exchange rates from public sources, and then presents me with a bunch of graphs that I find relevant. It does my capital gains tax calculations every year. It took me probably 6 months of hacking on it in my f…
I’m curious: Why did you choose to do this yourself rather than use something like Personal Capital?
In fact, there existed no other alternatives at the time (~2017). Especially none that did things like adjusting the cost basis of each security based on the foreign exchange rate on the day of purchase, and tracking gain/loss correctly in Canadian dollars. I also needed it to sync with my work's group RRSP provider which doesn't offer a standard API.
I don't know if this market has improved in the last 5 years, but I have a system I'm happy with now. :)