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

I haven been working on my own version of docker-compose that can also work with podman. But the draw for me here isn’t that i wanted to replace docker-compose, or even use podman specifically, but rather that I wanted to have a one stop shop for generating conteinerized projects using my most used languages and frameworks without having to have any tool chains installed locally, and as a bonus point have a wrapper to be able to issue commands inside those containers without having to use the full docker-compose incantations or having to shell into the running containers.

It’s not a full replacement, and I wouldn’t use this in production. It is more meant to help lower the friction for starting new learning projects.

Right now I can do things like `wizard new rails -d postgresql MY_PROJECT` or `wizard rust test` or `wizard start`

It is mostly cli for now but I’ve started working on a nice TUI for it as well.

No good reason for this other than not wanting to depend on environment managers, tool chain managers, or a combination of different tools.

I don’t use docker-compose for almost anything now, but projects generated with my tool are fully docker-compose compatible as I also create a docker-compose file when creating a new project with my tool. It’s been a really fun learning exercise and I learned a LOT about docker and the docker api in the process

Darn yes. I built a web based RSS Feed Reader that can also subscribe to e-mail newsletter. It is really just a stream. No nagging, if there are unread messages. Categorisation and search are only second class citizens.

I found that everything else will overwelm me time and time again.

I really wanted to publish it for others to use. Without any serious subscription or payments, maybe patreon.

The "problem" is, that I'm based in germany and you can't just have a website, that integrates other peoples content without having a good lawyer, I guess.

Plus it would be a really good idea to block any scripts that feed creators put in their stuff to f*ck with other peoples systems. But you're not allowed to change feed content, or at least that might be a concern. Not to speak of if people subscribe to illegal stuff and you show it on your site (even only to them), maybe?

Too much uncertainty, so I'm nearly sure I will stay to be the only citizen in this neighbourhood.

I wrote a desktop, text-only personal knowledge organizer that I use and rely on every day, primarily for my own use, hoping to make broadly useful someday but...we'll see. AGPL, scala, postgresql; hoping to move to rust/sqlite in future. Would love if others could find benefit from it, but not currently aware of any. http://onemodel.org

Since you asked nicely:

Abstract Painting, Arrows, Battleships, Booty Island, Busy Seas, Castle Bailey, Castle Patrol, Chocolate, Clouds, Consecutives, Crosstown Traffic, Desert Dunes, Digital Battle Ships, Disconnect Four, Farmer, Fence Sentinels, FenceLits, Fillomino, Flower Beds, Free Planks, Fussy Waiter, Futoshiki, Half-Dominoes, Hedgehog, Hidden Clouds, Holiday Island, Inbetween Sumscrapers, Kakurasu, Kakuro, Knightoku, Kropki, Landscaper, Landscapes, Light Battle Ships, Magnets, Mine Ships, Mixed Tatamis, More Or Less, Neighbours, Nonogram, Noughts And Crosses, Number Crossing, Number Crosswords, Number Path, Odds Are Even, Orchards, Over Under, Paint the Nurikabe, Parks, Planks, Ponds And Flowerbeds, Power Grid, Ripple Effect, Robot Crosswords, Robot Fences, Sheep And Wolves, Skydoku, Skyscrapers, SlitherLink, Snail, Snake, Snake-omino, Square 100, Straight And Turn, Sudoku, Sumscrapers, Tatami, Tenner Grid, Tetromino Pegs, The Odd Brick, Trebuchet, Unblock Me (aka Rush Hour), Unreliable Hints, Vexed, Wish Sandwich, Zen Gardens, Zen Landscaper

Most of them are puzzles found in the following iOS apps:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/100-logic-games-time-killers/i...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/100-logic-games-more-puzzles/i...

I agree that keeping a cookbook of stuff pasted from the internet without knowing the fundamentals is an anti-pattern.

For me (and probably for GP), my cookbook is stuff that took me more than a few minutes of tinkering or reading manpages to figure out, and it’s stuff that I use maybe once every couple weeks — not often enough to memorize, and annoying if I have to figure it out again.