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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?

#451

Post by noufalibrahim »

A few.

1. https://github.com/hamon-in/invoice - A command line invoicing system. I wrote this to handle invoicing for my freelancing and later my company. I wanted to build something similar to ledger-cli for invoices and use a single sqlite db for all things including config

2. https://github.com/nibrahim/Calligraphic-Rulings - I use this to generate rulings for my calligraphy practise and wrapped it up as a tiny web app. http://calligraffiti.in/rulings. The logs suggest that a lot of serious calligraphers use it for their day to day work.

3. https://github.com/nibrahim/Hyde - I wrote this to manage my blogs which were on Jekyll/Octopress

4. https://github.com/nibrahim/showkeys - I wrote this to allow display of keys on the screen while recording technical screencasts. I was recording a series on Emacs at the time

5. https://github.com/nibrahim/IOS-config-mode - I wrote this while working for Cisco to make editing of IOS config files easier for me. (abandoned)

6. https://github.com/nibrahim/tomobi - Something to convert websites into kindle files for reading offline (abandoned)

There were a few others that never saw the light of day but these were the ones I wrote and still use/used. There are also several smaller shell scripts, makefiles, elisp snippets etc.

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

#452

Post by danbmil99 »

tharkun__ wrote: post #345
LeoPanthera wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always say this but... I'm not sure I agree. I think people confuse "hard" with "powerful". With the exception of cropping I can do all of the above from memory. Maybe I just use ffmpeg a lot.

I think this is it. Repetition. You could threaten to kill me and I wouldn't be able to user ffmpeg from memory. I just don't have to use it often enough. So I created a script w/ the settings I usually want to encode certain things that I need to encode semi-often. It definitely doesn't make it easier to remember ffmpeg command line options because I don't have to use them. kubectl and our home grown command line to…

I thought everyone just searches for their exact needed pattern on SO

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

#453

Post by joshdotblack »

Totally! I wrote a HIIT timer app using ionic to track workouts :) I only released it to the app store so I could get it onto my iPhone/iPad without having to mess around with provisioning profiles every 30 days: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/biig-hiit/id1598826065

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

#455

Post by krackers »

joshstrange wrote: post #25

I have a couple but the first that comes to mind is a tiny little mac app I wrote that "jumps" my mouse between monitors. I use it because I have 2 monitors in vertical orientation, one in horizontal between them, and another smaller monitor above the center monitor. Here is some ascii art of it: +----------------+ | | +------------+ | | +------------+ | ! | | ! !| | ! | | ! | | ! !| | ! | | ! | +----------------+ |…

Would you be willing to share the source for this one? Or at least how it works (i.e. what apis were used)

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

#456

Post by mnorris »

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #344
gotaquestion wrote: post #258

Huh, I've never been asked that. Yes, for over 30 years. I could never list them all. Nearly every thought I have becomes a program. I've written x86 asm game hacks (DOS era), 2D tile games (80's), Windows MIDI composers, game frame languages, ray-tracing renderers, OpenGL visualization, PID controllers, camera controllers, video controllers, circuit simulators, flight controllers, so so so many games, scripts for an…

I wish I could shift my thinking to do this. I've been a web developer for 17 years and love programming. But any time I've tried to build my own projects or products, it's usually a revamp of an existing product or game, and I quickly lose interest. I lack the ability to see everyday "issues" that could be resolved with programming. But if someone asks me to solve an issue with a program, I could probably come up wi…

>>> I quickly lose interest

Working on self-directed projects didn't come naturally to me either and I had to learn how to get over this motivation issue.

It's taken me 10 years of working on side projects to finally be able to figure out which things I will actually finish vs. which ones I just like the idea of and will invariably give up on. It's some combination of what do I think is useful to myself or others, what can I turn into a small prototype in a short amount of time, and what can I actually accomplish in a short time [1].

Accountability was important for me to launch three side projects in the last year. I declared to my friends on New Years that I was going to make and launch a game that I had designed within that year. I kind of entangled my desire to finish projects with my desire to follow through with what I commit to.

I didn't actually finish it in that year, I finished it in January of this year, but I tried! I set it down a lot and ended up getting stuck multiple times. Probably because of that pesky day-job and regular life. My friend asked me if I had launched, and that caused me to put in a final weeklong sprint and launch it. If I knew how close I was to finishing I would have finished it months earlier. I ended up simplifying a lot of code in the first few days of that last sprint and all of a sudden finishing seemed possible.

Because I devoted myself to launching that one game, I have since been creating more and more things and launching them or getting them to a stage where they're generally useful.

In my case, having the confidence from finishing one project made it easier to start newer projects because I knew whether I could finish them based on my past success.

>>> I lack the ability to see everyday "issues" that could be resolved with programming.

Almost every idea that I have could initially be conceptualized as a revamp of an existing product or game, but I'm super excited about them because they're my revamp that I'll gain a skill from and will help me to work on more complicated things later.

I take notes whenever I have an idea and will expand on ideas that I'm still interested in later. I basically use the snowflake method, creating more elaborate detail about the ideas I'm most interested in. Sometimes they evolve a lot after expanding on them too.

Honestly 99% of my ideas are terrible, so I trained myself to try to write down every idea that I have and then later on when I'm itching to start a new project I can decide whether it's a project that I will actually finish vs. ones I just like the idea of.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1425/

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

#457

Post by secretsatan »

All the time, and hack other our software to do my own things. I do it a lot on my iPhone, I now work full time on an app that started as a hobby project and got moved forward to be a major focus of the company and I'm still trying out mad things with it.

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

#458

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

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…

I also had tons of these scripts. Since then I found one ScriptKit which might be interesting to you. https://www.scriptkit.com/

I have since ported over most of my common ones to this.

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

#459

Post by magicconch »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #297
edpenz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A secure-but-readable password generator I love pronounceable passwords, but there's research indicating that such generators typically produce lower than expected entropy. Do you mind sharing what algorithm you use?

Look at diceware.com for a good way to do that. You can calculate the entropy without "research". I use a simple python script for the purpose, filtering out the words < 7 chars long from /usr/share/dict/words instead of bothering with the official diceware list. Example output: "snored-Hoff-virtue-tab-eroded-Perl's" with estimated 87 bits of entropy. If you write the phrase on a piece of paper and refer to the paper…

Also take a look at the EFF’s wordlists [1] as an alternative to the Diceware list. Quoting from their blog post, here are some issues with the Diceware list that they have resolved: - It contains many rare words such as buret, novo, vacuo

- It contains unusual proper names such as della, ervin, eaton, moran

- It contains a few strange letter sequences such as aaaa, ll, nbis

- It contains some words with punctuation such as ain't, don't, he'll

- It contains individual letters and non-word bigrams like tl, wq, zf

- It contains numbers and variants such as 46, 99 and 99th

- It contains many vulgar words

- Diceware passwords need spaces to be correctly decoded, e.g. in and put are in the list as well as input

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-p...

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

#460

Post by minimaul »

Absolutely tons - my personal gitlab instance has 152 projects in it. I can't imagine not doing this - it makes my life a ton easier. It means I have little tools that work just the way I want, and usually takes less time that trying to wrangle someone else's into working.

The things that I use (or used to use) a fair bit though:

- a whole set of tooling to take my FLAC/ALAC music collection and transcode it to 256k AAC for my phone (including generating an iTunes library XML file I can just import into Music.app)

- tools to automatically scrape content from various websites and alert me / automatically download things

- a client for SchedulesDirect to feed into tvheadend

- various little game-related tools (often to edit data files)

- a slideshow app

- a Formula1 news aggregator

- tools to pair with RTL-SDR to scrape the readings from my neighbours' temperature sensors

- a simple webui to libvirt

- a game boy emulator (this was really fun!)

- a transparent tls proxy to evade geoblocking - uses the SNI hostname from ClientHello to push traffic to different VPN endpoints so I can watch things like F1TV live from the UK

- tools to scrape the DSL stats from my modems when I used to have DSL for diagnosing faults

I also write a ton of small scripts for work use - eg:

- a tool to allow me to pick ECS containers from a list for aws ecs execute-command

- wrappers around the AWS API to generate and update launch templates

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