Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use? • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by eslav » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 10:11 PM UTC

Certainly. Wound need to think a bit for a complete list, but two fun ones come to mind:

Wrote an iOS app to help my kids learn to sing harmony (called it HarmonMe)

Wrote a translator from English to phonetic symbols to help teach an ESL class

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

#192

Post by POiNTx » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

Clockify polybar integration. Clockify is a time tracker tool. Polybar is a UI bar for window managers like i3 or bspwm. I also have a version that works on wayland and interacts with Waybar but I haven't gotten around to cleaning it up and publishing it.

I click on it when I start working and click when I stop working.

https://github.com/woutdp/polybar-clockify

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

#193

Post by tedyoung » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

I created "Kid Money Manager", a tool to help manage my son's virtual account. He wasn't old enough to open his own bank account when I started, but we needed some way to track his "earnings" (returning bottles for their deposits or gifts from grandparents) and spending. It has both a Web UI and access via SMS text messages. We mainly use the text messaging—entering transactions at the store, etc.— since I didn't want to write a dedicated phone app for such a simple interaction.

Created it from scratch, live coding it on my (https://JitterTed.Stream) Twitch channel (and some videos on my YouTube channel at https://JitterTed.TV). Written using TDD in Java + Spring Boot, deployed on Heroku and open-source at https://github.com/tedyoung/kid-bank.

I also recently wrote "Format Hero" (https://formathero.dev), because I could never remember which letters to use in Java's DateTimeFormatter. Was also a good demonstration of Hexagonal Architecture and, of course, I live coded it, TDDing all the way. Source is at https://github.com/jitterted/format-hero. Still some work to do on that one, but filled my immediate need.

[edit: added proper links for Stream/YouTube]

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

#194

Post by flobosg » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 10:16 PM UTC

swores wrote: post #150

flobosg wrote: post #143

To name a few: * A script that emails me every day a list of new articles published by a selection of academic journals. Using an RSS reader for this turned out to be too messy. * A script that generates Spotify playlists based on my liked songs, optionally according to some criteria. The playlists can be sorted according to specific song features (higher to lower energy, for example). * A zettelkasten engine, includ…

I'd be curious to see the first script, if it's shareable?

Sure! It is very rudimentary and some values are still hardcoded, but I could do bit of clean-up and then upload it.

EDIT: Here it is – https://github.com/flobosg/journalert

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

#195

Post by robotburrito » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 10:17 PM UTC

I wrote a ridiculously hard version of the NYTime's Spelling Bee game because I didn't want to pay for it. It's not very good lol.

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

#196

Post by mavci » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 10:17 PM UTC

Hacker News is part of my daily life. I try to follow the top stories every day when I have the opportunity. In order not to miss important stories on my busy days, I prepared a notification service. It was a very simple, ~40-line PHP script that sends me notifications for stories with over 200 points. I have been using this service for 7 months and I no longer worry about missing important stories.

Finally, I made this service available to everyone so that it can be useful to others. I have also obtained the necessary permissions from the HN moderators to share such a service with you. So, I hope you will not miss important stories from this awesome platform with the help of this service.

https://hnn.avci.me

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

#197

Post by roscrl » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

phoehne wrote: post #91

I wrote a set of python scripts to pull down economic and stock market data. It pulls down several different data sets mostly from the Fred API service at the Federal Reserve. Using Jinja templates and Matplotlib for graphs, it builds a set of latex files and spits out a PDF that I can review. That way I don't have to look at 4 or 5 different sites to get the overall market picture I want. Essentially my own newslett…

it is healthy! i did something similar with https://econicles.com

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

#198

Post by nyolfen » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

snide wrote: post #24

My entire linux Desktop feels this way! It's my favorite part of working in a barebones Linux distro like Arch. I've got to build everything from the ground up. Need a screenshot program? OK... let's pull in Flameshot. Where's it going to host that image? Well, let's create a watch folder and shuttle everything off to a GCP static bucket. Window manager? I3... heh, let's build a bunch of scripts. Vim? Well... man, th…

https://i.imgur.com/CVpc7nD.mp4

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

#199

Post by AussieWog93 » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

visox wrote: post #183

Yes couple. Did some crawler for sports betting sites to find bet arbitrage, was fun

That's amazing. Did you actually turn a profit?

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

#200

Post by eddywebs » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 10:22 PM UTC

Yes ! A simple todo list that remembers the state no signup required >> https://eddywebs.com/todo

Best software comes from ones own need.