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Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#11

Post by mg »

nonethewiser wrote: post #9
mg wrote: post #4

I have several projects that I develop just for myself. One is a command line based database browser/editor. PhpMyAdmin for the terminal, so to say. I do all my database work inside of this editor. The terminal is just so much faster. And has many benefits like that I can use it over ssh and in containers. Another one I started recently and already use is a terminal based project planner that is completely file based…

> One is a command line based database browser/editor. PhpMyAdmin for the terminal so to say. I do all my database work inside of this editor. Isnt this just a shell? Like psql, for example?

It's not just a shell.

It is a terminal UI in which you can browse tables, go into tables, browse and edit rows in a spreadsheet like interface etc.

If there is any database out there that is commonly used to demonstrate DB software, I could record a little screencast.

So far, it supports SQLite, MariaDB and MySql.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#13

Post by rcarmo »

https://github.com/piku, for sure. I was getting tired of deploying stuff manually or juggling containers for the simplest of apps, so I sat down and wrote most of it in a couple of weekends.

I now deploy the vast majority of my personal projects with it (including container-based ones, actually).

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#14

Post by gk1 »

leobg wrote: post #3

1) Semantic search for legal documents. Found it annoying that, as a lawyer, I have to use search engines that require me to guess the keywords that might be used in the documents I'm looking for... as well as to skim through the entire documents the system found in order to judge whether or not they are relevant to my case. 2) Discovering audiobooks I'll enjoy. Someone here on HN mentioned "random sampling" as a gre…

Have you seen https://www.parrothq.com? (I’m not affiliated.)

Or you can build something using a combination of LLM models (OpenAI, Cohere, Hugging Face) and Pinecone (offers keyword-aware semantic search which is what you probably want for domain-specific content like legal… I am affiliated).

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#15

Post by bradrn »

My custom keyboard layout Conkey [0] is surely my most prominent one — I use it constantly (including for typing this very comment). I hate the way the base US layout tends to get distorted in other keyboard layouts with good support for non-ASCII characters, so Conkey had the explicit goal of retaining that basic unshifted layout. I’ve also ended up porting Conkey to Mac and Linux — and given that I’m slowly switching from Windows to Linux, at least the Linux ports have ‘scratched my own itch’ too, which is nice.

Also, I made a utility to archive the full text of every website I view and store it in a SQLite database for searching. It’s proven pretty useful when I want to find something I saw a while ago and then forgot. (I haven’t attempted to open-source it, though — it consists of three entirely separate components, two of which were a pain to set up. I must try to get it into a more usable state one of these days.)

What else… my sound change applier [1], perhaps? Not that I use it very much, because I only need it on those occasions when I want to do some conlanging, which I haven’t had much time for recently. Actually, sound change appliers strike me as being very much a ‘scratch own itch’ type of project in general… sometimes it feels like every conlanger has written their own, and no two can agree on a nice design. Everyone just has their own unique preferred way of doing things.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#16

Post by js4ever »

I had tens then hundreds of open source software instances to manage for customers (setup, security, backups, updates, migrations, ...) When I had only few tens it was easy but after the first hundred it was total hell and very time consuming.

To fix that my team and myself have created https://elest.io

We are providing fully managed open source service for a catalog of 185 open source software

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#17

Post by jaltekruse »

I submitted a game to the N64 homebrew jam this year, along with some team members I met on the discord server. It was cool dusting off some skills I had learned in an intro to graphics course from my undergrad. The game isn't complete, but we got some core elements working, animated characters, decently intuitive controls, basic collisions, extremely primitive 'AI'. There could be better docs/materials for onboarding new people to developing on the console, but we were able to piece together stuff over a couple of weeks.

https://youtu.be/6xzvZ9X-DYU

https://github.com/MrGlitchByte/TinyNightmare64

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#20

Post by hprotagonist »

mg wrote: post #11
nonethewiser wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One is a command line based database browser/editor. PhpMyAdmin for the terminal so to say. I do all my database work inside of this editor. Isnt this just a shell? Like psql, for example?

It's not just a shell. It is a terminal UI in which you can browse tables, go into tables, browse and edit rows in a spreadsheet like interface etc. If there is any database out there that is commonly used to demonstrate DB software, I could record a little screencast. So far, it supports SQLite, MariaDB and MySql.

ah, so a bit like visidata?
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