I'm curious to know what kind of tools, scripts, automation, libraries, etc. you all have built to help boost the productivity of your team(s).
Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#2At a company of 10,000, it's important to know the 100 people you'll be working closest to. I built a "memory" game as a webapp which matched the faces of 4 people on your team to a single name and a list of self-assigned skills. You click on a photo to match a name to a face, and once you guess right a new set loads. You can randomly click through your whole team and learn a lot about them in just 15 minutes or so.
The whole thing was built with read-only SQL scripts, Flask, and some JQuery.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#3Back at my old job, people would have trouble knowing what to do when on-call.
I built a slack app that would keep track of my team's pages and what people did to respond to them. As new pages were triggered, the bot would show the on-call person what previous people had done to resolve the page.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#4I built a code generator package in Kotlin which generates codes for Kotlin, Swift, Web (JS), and React-Native (TypeScript). Basically, you provide your class definition in a DSL style (Similar to TOML) and it will generate the implementation and interfaces of the bridge for different technologies.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#5I built a hacked up experimentation framework for clientside flags, that boosted my teams speed and confidence quite a bit. Hacked up because it didnt use existing serverside mechanism for a bunch of reasons.
Used the same experimentation framework for automated javascript binary releases, so at some point i could release 5 times a week, with no issues. Now i left the team, people took that on and continuing like tic toc.
Showed them how to use powerdrill (data drilling, analysis tool), and taught them metrics. It is surpising how little people care what their work is really about eventually, and bringing them data driven mindset gave even more productivity boost.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#6I built a code generator package in Kotlin which generates codes for Kotlin, Swift, Web (JS), and React-Native (TypeScript). Basically, you provide your class definition in a DSL style (Similar to TOML) and it will generate the implementation and interfaces of the bridge for different technologies.
This is great! We're working on code generation from class definitions right now.
Any good resources worth looking at?
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#7I built a code generator package in Kotlin which generates codes for Kotlin, Swift, Web (JS), and React-Native (TypeScript). Basically, you provide your class definition in a DSL style (Similar to TOML) and it will generate the implementation and interfaces of the bridge for different technologies.
This is great! We're working on code generation from class definitions right now. Any good resources worth looking at?
I started by checking how you can write HTML using Kotlin DSL. Here is the source code https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.html
Now, I have to generate different languages once the DSL is finalized. To achieve this I use Flask framework architecture. There we have routes with HTML templates. Here each generator has its own templates.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#8In my previous organization, we dealt with a legacy enterprise software product which had accumulated a massive bug history over multiple years and sub-products. All being tracked by an in-house bug tracking product.
Lots of issues we used to see being reported were either already fixed or had been config issues. In order to (somewhat) quickly find existing fixes/comments for issues that we get reported, I built a search tool (webapp) which scraped the bugs and comments in those bugs in order to find any relevant information around your query and listed them in order of matching probability.
Was a pretty cool learning experience to build that out. I had deployed it on a personal remote VM that devs were granted, have no idea if people are still using it.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#9At my current job, I saw a lab technician work manually with Excel sheets entering sample IDs and then using a website where he'd copy/paste the sample ID into to get a bar code, and then print it out to stick on the box.
I wrote a Python script that uses openpyxl module to read His Excel docs, and report lab module to generate bar codes in a PDF document with appropriate spacers so that he can simply print it out, and stick them in boxes.
He is happy and so am I that I could save his time. It only took me 20 mins to write this script.
Re: Ask HN: What useful internal tools or libraries have you built in your company?
#10At my last job we had to do builds constantly and put it on hardware, which was annoying because builds took 15 minutes and putting it on the hardware took another 10. Couldn't solve the latter because it wasn't in our domain, but the first half I managed to "multithread" a build using a really hacky batch script compliation method, with a make file calling the compiler in a new command window for each file that needed to be compiled, with some checks for "needs to be compiled" or "wasn't changed". An extra script at the end of the process made sure that all the compiler instances finished before continuing with the next step. All of that work got it down to 2 minutes, or in small change cases, about 30 seconds. And another part of that was integrating some configuration data with existing files, which was simple as writing up a bunch of excel macros to do the copy/pasting and file output. It was hooked up to a shared folder on the network so the other team could just do their part, and then my part was entirely automated. In fact, the team testing things could do everything by themselves without any input from me at that point and only needed me to answer certain questions.
Yes, it's really hacky and the whole thing is entirely silly and could have been solved by using more proper tools (i.e. not a defunct make software without wildcard support for input files or Excel for configuration), but I was VERY pleased when I got it working.