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

I got married a few years back. We built a wedding website for people to get details on our wedding and to RSVP. It was pretty standard (think we just used Squarespace) except we included tracking pixels for the largest ad networks (Google, Facebook, etc) throughout the site. We then bid on impressions from anyone whose browser had triggered the pixel.

We bid something absurdly high, like $1,000/CPM (i.e., $1,000 per thousand ad impressions). As a result, we were always the highest bidder for those impressions of people who’d visited our wedding website. Because of how ad network bidding works, where you generally pay what the second highest bidder bids, and because we only invited around 200 people to our wedding, we didn’t end up spending much at all. Think all in it ended up costing around $100. But for our guests, our wedding followed them wherever they went online.

If you hadn’t RSVPed yet, we showed banners encouraging you to RSVP. Once you had, we previewed some of what we had planned. And then, for a week afterward, we ran ads thanking people for coming. We set the entire thing up in an afternoon and then it just ran automatically over the next few months. I was stunned when I checked in on it after the wedding how little it had cost.

Ad retargeting is super creepy, and it was scary to see how granular I could make the targeting for very little money. But, in this case, I think it may be one of the few times people really loved being followed around the Internet by an ad.

Nearly everyone commented on how fun it was. Friends would send us screenshots of our ads next to articles they were reading. And many of our privacy conscious friends with ad blockers actually turned them off temporarily when they heard about it so they could get retargeted by our wedding.

I think letting me do the algorithm and looking at the results was her loving way of getting me out of the way.

https://jalwyndar.neocities.org/

Wrote a Sudoku solver for my wife, and a Cryptoquote puzzle solver for her as well, for when she gets stuck.

Wrote an election list manager for a municipal candidate I supported.

A program to choose the position of strips of tongue-and-groove hardwood flooring, so that the cracks would not be adjacent. Had to measure every piece. Just so I would not have to listen to my wife remark "What a shame those two pieces are so close" for the next ten years. Named the program "Birch", from the wood. Ran ten minutes on a 286.