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Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#81
I combined a series of state collected freshwater bio/fisheries data into a web app that maps it out per lake. I use it for discovering and targeting specific fish species within a given area (town/county). I used it with much success during ice fishing season and have started using it for canoe trips to target bucket list species I want to catch.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#84
Yes. Typely [1]. Made it to aid in writing better articles for myself and some employees at the time. Decided to put it up there after a while and is now being used in many schools around the world. This is the only one that was made for me initially - I have a lot of other projects but they are made for aiding my businesses or to try new ideas.

[1] https://typely.com

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#85
Market Alerter - I created an app that alerts\emails you if your chosen stock meets some condition. There are many other sites that already do this. However, I wanted it to be able to expressions of one or more stocks. For example, if you want to monitor West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude price or Brent crude price, you can do it easily. If you want to monitor the crack spread (WTI - Brent), existing solutions are limited. I made this to allow monitoring of combinations of stocks\commodities.

Options Simulator - An extended family member asked me to create a small simulator to help forecast the outcome when making options trades.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#86
So, I'm building a SaaS for primarily myself at this point.

https://www.adama-platform.com/

In a few years, I intend to embrace marketing. However, now I am on the pathless path wandering. I'm writing a post about it, and I'm kind of fine if no one uses it. Sure, it would be amazing if others would see the neatness, but I'm not really in a space for responsibility yet.

Perhaps, I'm going slow on building yet another deck builder with it (as I'm looking into which components to buy versus build for the IDE aspect), but I'm basically retired.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#87
Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python.

Off the top of my head, the most used ones are:

* A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors

* A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for playing in my car

* A secure-but-readable password generator

* A system to batch compress folders full of video files. (For ripped blu-ray discs, mostly.)

* A replacement front-end for "ffmpeg", see above

* A "sanity check" program for my internet connection to see if the problem is me, or Comcast

* A front-end for "rm" that shows a progress bar when deleting thousands of files. (Deletes on ZFS are unusually slow.)

And lots more tiny things.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#88
I've done many, but I'll highlight two today.

The first is a background program to monitor my kids time on the PC. As their limit approaches it pops up a window with a timer countdown. When the countdown reaches zero, they're logged off.

The second is for resizing images. I wasn't happy with the way my image editor did it, and I wanted to do a deep dive on some algorithms so I went for it. Gained some great insight while working out all the bugs.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#89
I have written a bunch of applications but the most used application that I have written that I actually use for myself is my bookmarking application. So when I browse the Internet and I find something from the Internet I want to save, I share it with my Telegram bot that will send the link to my application via webhooks. The app will then fetch the website’s contents and save the information to the database.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#90
I made a desktop note-taking app for myself because I wasn't happy with any existing options, and it's been great: https://github.com/brundonsmith/writer

- Plaintext

- Single list of notes

- Notes are auto-titled based on the start of the content, and auto-deleted when empty

- Sorted based on recently modified

- Pick a folder on startup, and notes are loaded from/saved to the folder as plain text files (one note == one text file). I use a folder that lives on my Dropbox so I get backup and syncing

- Text is centered and finite-width when full screen, so line wrapping is natural

- All UI except your text disappears when typing, and reappears when you move your mouse

- Light/dark mode toggle

- Made with Electron, so it's cross-platform and easy to modify

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