Yep, I created a time tracking tool that syncs with Freshbooks for my contract work. No one else ever used it and I never tried to market it. But it made tracking my hours 100x easier, and I learned go in the process.
Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
551–560 of 671 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#552Most of the programs I wrote were for my own needs. I've open-sourced many of them, but some are really just for me and closed-source:
- A scraper to get thousands of quiz questions from popular German TV shows and then import them into an Anki deck.
- Sync app between Foobar2000 and Plex playlists.
- A script to enter Steam giveaways for me. After winning over 1000 Steam games and DLCs, I've turned the script off (mainly due to playing more console games lately). I might do a write-up about this one someday.
- A movie management web app. It's been running for 7 years with low maintenance effort.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#553Plenty.
Of the ones I use every day:
* Parallel downloader (https://github.com/ThomasHabets/rslurp)
* Email client (https://github.com/ThomasHabets/cmdg)
* sudo replacement with phone auth: https://github.com/ThomasHabets/sim
* Custom frontend to youtube: https://github.com/ThomasHabets/yurate
* Scan-to-google-drive (https://github.com/ThomasHabets/autoscan)
* My own RSS reader (not published. It will never be end-user friendly enough to compete with other ones. But it's better for me)
And then plenty more than I use occasionally, and some I no longer use. E.g. for a while I used my own SSH replacement, in order to get TPM-backed keys (https://github.com/ThomasHabets/tlssh). Nowadays I use yubikey instead (https://blog.habets.se/2016/01/Yubikey-4-for-SSH-with-physic...).
Those are just the main ones (as in not small, and used every day), and ones that fit what I assume your criteria: ones with no expectation of users other than me. I find myself fixing problems all the time by writing code.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#554Some weeks ago I wrote a couple of bookmarklets, one of which was this: javascript:(function(){ location.href = ` https://nitter.net${location.pathname} ` })(); You can take this JavaScript snippet and save it as a clickable bookmark (hence the name bookmarklet) in you browser. I've named this "re-open in Nitter". I deleted my Twitter account a while back but sometimes I get handed a Twitter link. This snippet let's…
Nice use-case for bookmarklets! With Firefox I've started using the LibRedirect extension for that, which also covers other big sites.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#555Ignoring that I write software to analyze biological data in a lab, so everything I write is really just for me (and includes a lot of infrastructure type code like a sub-request authentication server for nginx)…
Two programs that to wrote just to make my life easier: one for viewing tab delimited data in a tabular TUI, and another for getting data from my server back to my local machine without using scp. The second one is actually quite handy. To use it, you start a daemon on your local machine. Then when you SSH to the server, it creates an SSH tunnel back to the local daemon. The tunnel is setup to use a Unix socket, so you don’t have authentication issues to worry about (just file permissions). Then to send a file back to your local computer, it’s just “rtun send remote1 {remote2…} local”. The best part though, is if you want to view a remote image, you can run “rtun view file1 {file2…}” and it will open the image locally (it transfers the file as a temp file and calls “open”, etc). When you generate a bunch of figures remotely, being able to open them locally from the remote command line is very helpful.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#556I have tonnes. Sometimes they're applications, sometimes they're libraries. Recently I've been interested in random experiments to push my exposure to ideas in strange ways. Most recently I wrote a redis module for encryption (https://github.com/chayim/redicrypt). My current project asyncronously fetches me status from various services (GitHub, Jira, Travis) so that I can track all sorts of things.
Personal use is the biggest driver of my ongoing learning.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something like cat /usr/share/dict | shuf -n 4 | tr '\n' '-' (inb4 unnecessary use of `cat`)
I use cat like this all the time. It means I can easily change whatever program I'm using to interact with the program (e.g. switching `tr` to `sed`).
You can replace "cat /usr/share/dict |" in that invokation with "</usr/share/dict" and it will be equally easy to switch between tr and sed. Yes, you can put that redirection at the start, not just at the end of a command line. Although I admit I still haven't got used to doing it.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#558I created a program that prints QR codes onto sheets of peel-and-stick labels. When someone scans the code, they are directed to a simple web app that manages food sharing with my four roommates. We noticed that we buy a lot of the same things (bananas, avocados, eggs, etc), so we implemented a system where anyone can stick a QR code onto something they want to share, and anyone else can scan it to record what they t…
I chose a different system, you can buy something for yourself or you can buy something for everyone in which case the price is shared between everyone. Is it less fair? Perhaps the unfairness does accumulate (for example, I'm the only vegetarian here, but meat still gets added to the shared budget, but in exchange I eat more non-meat than others), but it would be really inconvenient to have, say, 3 packs of cheese (you can't just take an entire pack of cheese, so it can't be shared with your system). Also I don't need any labels!
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#559Hundreds! 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…
* A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors Could you elaborate on this? I feel like this is something that could save people hours of time. I'm so incredibly sick of the various decompression flags and tools, (de)compressing something on the commandline should be as easy as it is with a GUI.
If you're using GNU tar, there are four short options to specify compression/decompression: -Z for compress, -z for gzip, -j for bzip2 and -J for xz.
Using long options, you can specify --compress, --gzip, --bzip2, --xz for the same, or even --lzip, --lzma, --lzop or --zstd for others.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#560Last week, I wrote an Add-on for GoogleSheets that scrapes a defined list of company job boards for jobs that fit my criteria, adds them to the sheet, and sends me an SMS with Twilio when a new one is added. Runs every hour, and I can be one of the first people to apply for a newly posted job without having to monitor 15 different sites manually. I also use the sheet to track the application status.