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Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

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Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#1
Hi Hacker News, Few months ago I met someone that shook my world a little. Things were a little crazy and happened over 3 different continents in a very short time. It was wonderful, and it was greyscale. It was grandiose, and it was so desperately poor. It didn't work out.

In the beginning of our relationship, just when I was about to leave the country for a few months, I made them a website. A small one, with some notes and songs and interpretations. I'm not a painter and I'm not a musician. Coding was my go-to tool when I wanted to tell them stuff.

Recently, love wilted but the website stayed [0]. I thought, all those things that we're doing because of love, aren't they great? Aren't they a beautiful expression of us being humans? Perhaps stupid, senseless, silly - but loving humans. I'm sure I'm not the first one to create something digital, online, out of love. I wished there was this exhibition where people could go and feel some warmth, and be reminded of the different ways love looks like.

Did you ever code something for love? Or any other digital form of creation? It would be great if people could share things they've done, and also, if they feel comfortable, I'd be happy to know if they want to get a subdomain at *.thingslovemademedo.com [1] and have their content there. I'm obviously not asking for any copyright permissions, just playing with the thought of creating this anonymous archive of all-things-love. And before someone asks, no, there will never be any ads or analytics there, and I have no plans on monetizing this...

[0] chelsea.thingslovemademedo.com [1] thingslovemademedo.com

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#2
I made a simple, single-page site with some ASCII art [0]. But because the page is entirely stored in the URL it will exist as long as one of us keeps the link [1]. It wasn't overly difficult, but she appreciated the gesture!

[0]: https://git.io/JJ1Ta

[1]: https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#3
I downloaded my WhatsApp chat history with my then long-distance fiancee (now my wife), and created a bunch of graphs and analysis. Everything from word clouds to regression to anomalies (eg when she visited or I visited, chat frequency dropped dramatically, etc).

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#6
I’ve made quite a few things _for love_! From websites that tried to quantify the love through stats (number of messages exchanges, seconds together, things we enjoyed) to text-based adventure games that were just reference after reference to ourselves and our relationship. Unfortunately because they were so personal I cannot share them as I don’t have the consent of the others involved, however I would say that from my experience, code is a fine form of expression of love and everybody who feels inspired should do it.

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#7
They are thankfully no longer in existence, but I actually cut most of my mid 90s web dev chops building tribute pages to my girlfriends, replete with image carousels, autoplaying songs, marquees ...

Their chief effect was to make me indirectly desirable to a lot of other girls because they wanted their own vanity URL ..

It was a strange and glorious time.

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#8
I have a website that I once coded for love. I don't want to share details because of my identity, but I loved a distant woman. We had strong affection for each other but at the time the romance wouldn't work for many reasons. The website mirrored something she worked on (similar to a fashion blog, but not that subject - again, identity) and I made this one in a few hours and sent it to her. She loved it.

Three years later, we're together - and couldn't be happier.

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#10
post #9

Did a RPG for my wife’s birthday. It’s only 30 minutes from start to end but full of personal references, so it was a good laugh. She’s not a gamer at all, but she used to play zelda on her nes when she was a kid.

Wow, that's super cool. Did you write about it?

Thanks for sharing.

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