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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?

#161

Post by shayan01 »

Like many people of this community I have written multiple scripts and programs for my own use. Recently I was bored with Tinder, so I wrote a small CLI to automate the likes on Tinder. It's totally stupid and just likes everyone, but I found that it's easier to filter out uninteresting candidates afterwards instead of having to swipe manually in the app.

Another recent thing (this one is open source, search for "5hay/notionbackup"): I wanted regular backups of my Notion workspace, so wrote a little program in Go that does that. I'm doing weekly backups and pushing it to my Google Suite with rclone (encrypted).

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

#162

Post by vax425 »

testplzignore wrote: post #149
vax425 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! It’s not really bulletproof yet and could use some more features, but I’d love to get your feedback and bug reports. I’m thinking about turning it into real product… https://headlamptest.com

> Headlamp is like having a second manager on the team. I'm not sure I would use that endorsement...

Good point! Wrote that many years ago. It’s a side project I’m resurrecting.

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

#163

Post by lucasdicioccio »

I've recently written my own static-blog generator. On the one hand, I got irritated trying or figured out I would quickly hit limitations with the popular ones. On the other hand, the effort I would have spent searching for and evaluating the hundreds of existing other ones is on par with re-implementing my own.

I've written about the motivations and the architecture here: https://lucasdicioccio.github.io/how-this-blog-works.html .

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

#164

Post by vax425 »

swores wrote: post #145
vax425 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! It’s not really bulletproof yet and could use some more features, but I’d love to get your feedback and bug reports. I’m thinking about turning it into real product… https://headlamptest.com

Cool product, it's something I'd personally be interested in if free or one-off license, but as someone who just dabbles now and then (but including sometimes for business stuff) it's nowhere near worth the monthly cost for me. $50 one-off would frankly be possibly more than the value I'd get, but I'd definitely buy it in the hope it would be useful. (Appreciate, I'm not everybody and just because that's where I fit…

Thanks for the feedback!

It’s free to use for now. I’d like to bill heavy corporate users someday. Not sure what the criteria will be for that.

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

#166

Post by urbandw311er »

All the time. Most recent was a little node app to quickly create Google Meet meeting links. For example when using MacOS Calendar and wanting to schedule in a video call. There isn’t an official Google Meet API so you have to create a Google Calendar event via the API and then add the meeting to that.

This was wrapped in a MacOS Automator workflow, which in turn was wrapped by a keyboard trigger in BetterTouchTool. So now, when I hit Cmd Shift M, a Google Meeting link is created and pasted wherever my cursor happens to be!

It makes a little boing noise too when it pastes the URL which never ceases to please me.

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

#167

Post by Ocha »

I created a program to use locally for testing emails. It creates intermittent latency and errors on SMTP side and helps you catch code that cannot handle SMTP/network issues (no retry, synchronous code). Now I offer it as a hosted solution and use it myself with every project I develop. If interested project name is Mailsnag and it can be found at https://mailsnag.com/

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

#168

Post by paultannenbaum »

I have a few, but the ones I get the most use out of is a scraper that checks two very popular campground in CA right at midnight when new reservations open up, and reports back what is available. I have plans to automate the purchasing of the sites if they meet certain criteria, but alas always busy with paid work.

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

#169

Post by tessierashpool »

pdonis wrote: post #141
LeoPanthera wrote: post #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 play…

> Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? I certainly have. Interestingly, one was the same "sanity check" program for my internet connection, because of the same ISP you mention. Amazing coincidence...I don't think. :-)

I've written one too, if you count a simple shell alias for ping google.com

Comcast "service" has probably driven the creation of more trivial internet connection test programs than any college course in the world.

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

#170

Post by pklausler »

I have been editing code for the last 15 years in an editor that I wrote for myself only.

Most recently, I wrote a "wgrep" program that scans an input of 5-letter words and extracts those that could be a Wordle solution, given a guess and its result on the command line; and another program that determines the best Wordle guess from a list of remaining words (where "best" means "minimizes sum of squares of counts of words with the same outcome").

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