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Ask HN: What's the stack for your "home-cooked meal" apps?

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Ask HN: What's the stack for your "home-cooked meal" apps?

#1

Post by joshspankit »

Inspired by the insightful conversations at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877423 , I noticed that people don’t usually share the code for their “home-cooked meal” apps (for lots of good reasons) but I think we can just as much value by sharing the stack so that others can “cook their own meals”.

I’ll go first:

I have a personal photo/video app that uses B2 for storage and Vultr to host a VM (free egresss). It’s main goal is to keep archival copies that can be viewed, verified, and shared and so the server code is very lightweight: user permissions, API endpoints for thumbnails (eg /pictures/utgGhj/400x400/image.jpg), add/edit/delete endpoints, and a notification system.

The app is distributed by manually installing it (future plans to distribute via TestFlight and whatever the Android equivalent is).

The app itself is very simple: Flutter, login screen, list views that can be sorted (default to newest), and a screen for viewing an item. Share links and comments are stored in Firebase (mostly for the offline sync convenience).

Someone could probably make it in a couple weeks if they have a little backend+mobile experience.

What apps do you “cook at home”?

Re: Ask HN: What's the stack for your "home-cooked meal" apps?

#2

Post by Raed667 »

I have a few I made for my convenience and the people around me. My stack is usually: Supabase + Next.js + Vercel free tier.

Years ago, it used to be PHP + MySQL on my own VPS but that got annoying with security updates and syncing the repositories with the application server.

Re: Ask HN: What's the stack for your "home-cooked meal" apps?

#3

Post by nicbou »

I love that philosophy. I read Robin's article a while ago and it really stuck.

My stack gets smaller every year. I love Django + Postgres, but a Python script + SQLite is often better. I just have less time for maintenance and I like things that just work with minimal dependencies.

In the front-end I love VueJS. I'm still at Vue 2 mostly because I have lots of projects to upgrade and don't see any reason to do so.

Everything is dockerised because I love reproducible builds.

Recently, I've started using Caddy instead of Nginx. I don't have to fuss with SSL anymore and I love it. The config syntax is saner, but I still struggle to configure it. At least with Nginx I have a lot of recipes from old projects.

My home-cooked apps are...

- My movie server, dubbed "Nickflix" by friends. I've dramatically simplified the code last week.

- My GPS logging server for the Owntracks app, also getting simplified today.

- My timeline thing, which shows my photos, GPS tracks, diary and other things on a timeline.

- My online recipes, which are just markdown compiled by the static site generator I created for my business.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects

Re: Ask HN: What's the stack for your "home-cooked meal" apps?

#4

Post by paeselhz »

Recently I've felt overwhelmed by the amount of ads in a simple solitaire game (from many distributors). So I've spent some time learning Unity and built my own Solitaire Game to play during my commute, with no required internet connection, and no loading screen, just like the old days of Solitaire in Windows 98. I'm still pending on adding some features to make the game more complete, but it has been a joyride to learn a new stack while building something completely personal.

Other than that I've built some tools just for the sake of exploring some hypothesis that I had, but all of those always felt like work. The game development was something that truly felt like "cooking at home".

Re: Ask HN: What's the stack for your "home-cooked meal" apps?

#6

Post by philip1209 »

I have an internal app for my company (https://workshop.contraption.co). It's a Rails app, with basic Devise login. I can add people to the system, and scope which of the systems they have access to.

I put everything that's not business critical in it. Some examples:

* A "Scoreboard" growth chart of my MRR. It syncs with Stripe's API periodically. I add some friends and peers to it so they can see my progress. When I hit pre-programmed MRR milestones, it triggers a celebration announcement.

* An RSS->Sendy tool. My company blog is hosted in Jekyll and has an RSS feed. I send email newsletters for the blog through a Sendy installation. Sendy doesn't have good email templates, so this little system applies a template to RSS feed items and creates a draft in Sendy so I can send it.

* A mini internal CRM / search engine, which an intern was helping me manage for a bit.

* Some cron jobs that send email reminders to me, such as sending electricity bills to my accountant for a home office reimbursement.

I highly recommend companies have a full-featured "toy" app separate from customer data. Customer apps have a lot of red tape to protect data and uptime. But, we underestimate how long it takes to set up an environment or pick a stack when we have ideas - even for things like "cron job that sends emails" - so a small app stack helps encourage creativity and useful little scripts with minimal effort.

Re: Ask HN: What's the stack for your "home-cooked meal" apps?

#7

Post by JohnFen »

About 1/3 of the applications I use regularly are ones I've written myself, from the trivial to one that are very large and complex.

My favorite one, though, was a simple alarm clock app I wrote (back when I used alarm clocks). It had the one thing I wanted from alarm clocks that nobody provided: every time you hit the snooze button, it snoozes for half the time you got the last time you hit the snooze. When the snooze period drops below 1 minute, the snooze button stopped working entirely.

Re: Ask HN: What's the stack for your "home-cooked meal" apps?

#8

Post by oliwary »

I tend to make web apps, since deployment is so easy and seamless, and its super easy to pass links around.

The stack is usually: Vue.js for frontend hosted on cloudflare pages, flask on backend hosted on hetzner via docker. Simple to set up and manage and been very reliable.

Re: Ask HN: What's the stack for your "home-cooked meal" apps?

#9

Post by kassner »

I literally made one to scratch my itch with home cooked meals: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/09/21/what-to-cook-launch...

Honestly, I don’t have “a stack”, if I’m trying to learn a new thing I’ll use that to build a new project, or if I don’t I’ll default to the most suitable option.

i.e.: What to Cook? was built in Java because I needed a refresher, otherwise I’d likely use PHP/Symfony because I could finish it quickly. If the project is non-web/fullstack, I’d default to Go. If im building something that will use React, I’d default to NodeJS+Express.

If you’re curious, i have a few write ups in the projects section of my blog

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