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Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?
83 points by jventura on Nov 13, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 172 comments
Hi HN, since my kid was born (almost 16 months ago) I haven't had much time to learn new things, which is something I have always enjoyed. Similarly to many people, I learn a lot by doing some kind of project (big or small). But since my time is rather constrained, it would like to do some "scratch my itch" kind of project, something that may be useful enough to keep using it.

I though of asking you, people at HN, what kind of "scratch your own itch" projects have you done or are doing?

I'd like to do something computer related (to learn some Golang), but I'm curious about non-computer projects as well.




You asked for it:

https://htmx.org

https://hyperscript.org

I hated angular when it first came out and couldn't believe what insanity people were willing to put up with, so long as it came from google. (e.g. GWT) I created https://intercoolerjs.org out of frustration with that, and the lack of progress in HTML/hypermedia in general, so I could build a web application I was working on (https://leaddyno.com, since sold).

When covid hit I took a look back at intercooler and decided that it was really two things: HTML++ and a scripting language, so I split it up into htmx, focused just on the hypermedia angle, and hyperscript, the scripting language I wanted for the web (derived from HyperTalk, and old scripting language from HyperCard on the mac).

I now use them both professionally (email me if you want to use them too.)


Super superficial (?), but the "press and hold" example on https://hyperscript.org/ has a bug (feature? :) in that if you move away the pointer while pressing, then let go, it keeps cycling, and won't stop even if you go back and press and let go again. It will stop if you press outside the button and let go inside, so apparently the actions stack. (On Firefox Linux.)


"Nitpicky" I think is the word you are looking for


I found it interesting behavior and it might be important in the larger picture, thus I'm not sure it's superficial, that's why I put the question mark there. Of course I don't mean that this should take away from the appreciation of the language. I'd have made a bug ticket instead if it weren't just much simpler to mention here, also this way I'm not implying that I'm a user and waiting for a resolution.


good find

the code should be updated to:

  <button _="on pointerdown
               repeat until event stopCycling
                 set rand to Math.random() * 255
                 transition *background-color to `hsl($rand 100% 90%)` over 250ms
               end
             on pointerup or mouseleave 
               trigger stopCycling">
      Click And Hold Me
  </button>
to capture both the pointerup and mouseleave events (seems like some browsers trigger the pointerup event even if the mouse/pointer has left the element)

unfortunately right now the `repeat until event` form doesn't take multiple events, so we have to kick out to another event handler to capture both. I'll try to fix that in the next release.


I love HTMX! It allows me to build interactive SSR websites without knowing JavaScript. Very well designed, thank you!


Enjoyed your grug brain site immensely the other day!


I love htmx, nice to see you here. I haven’t used it in anything real important but it’s a real breath of fresh air.


Thank you. HTMX is a breath of fresh air.


My current one is https://limnology.co/ , organizing the top 70k educational youtubers in 20 languages. Youtube's channel discovery is pretty bad, and I wanted an easy way to find new channels about the topics I'm interested in. Still a work in progress as the problem turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.


Nice catalog! YouTube channel discovery is terrible even for people already subscribed to channels. Simply clicking on English -> Photography brought me back to a few people I subscribe to but haven't checked out in over a year. They literally never surface in my recommendations even though I'm subbed.


Really good stuff over there! However please make the distinction over European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. It was a bummer to me trying to go through “Portuguese” that are not European.


We're building Double (https://doubleapp.xyz) as something that fixes a need of our own.

We observed that doing activities in the presence of others overcomes HUGE hurdles in motivation (called body doubling in ADHD communities, but also known as social facilitation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation). It's an incredibly interesting effect and something we are excited to share with others as we build it out and discover new ways to tap into the phenomenon.


Yes sir, I’ve observed this effect first hand -> it’s monumental how focused and dedicated I can be simply because another person is close by either watching, or helping with whatever I’m working on.

I hate the fact that I can’t really achieve that baseline when I’m doing something by myself though, which is my preference usually when I’m working.


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).


why would i need this ? not meaning to sound rude, haven't used containers so much and this is curiousity. Can't you just shh into the server and do git pull & restart what ever your app is?


This is super cool - definitely something that hits a need of my own too. Thanks for sharing this!


Love it! It replicates exactly what I setup on my VPS for all my projects.


This is pretty cool, thanks for sharing!


My next project! Thanks for this!


A few years ago I discovered Anki (a spaced repetition app) for helping me learn Japanese. I immediately recognized the power of spaced repetition, but really did not like using Anki (it's pretty clunky and requires a lot of configuration to work right). I started building my own alternative, Mochi [0], which I wanted to kind of be a cross between Anki and Notion. I'm pretty happy with where it's at now and I've been using it almost daily ever since.

[0] https://mochi.cards/


I'm very glad I read this comment! I've recently started learning French and I'd threw together a simple flashcard app to practice what I'd learned.

But without spaced repetition and the ability to categorise it's not that useful, and I quickly realised that I would end up spending more time coding than learning French if I continued!

I've been trying out Mochi for the last few days and so far I'm very impressed. It's easy to use and looks great. I'm tempted by some of the pro features like speech/translation so I think I'll sign up.

One thing I'm curious about — I've read that writing is a particularly effective way to hammer home what you're trying to remember. When learning a language in particular, I feel it's very useful to write out words to practice spelling etc.

I wonder what your take is on this and if this is a feature of Mochi? I know there's a drawing mode for practicing Kanji etc. but that's somewhat different to a "typing mode" for the want of a better word. Or is it better to incorporate writing practice in a different way?

Anyway, great work and thanks!


Hey sorry I just saw your comment. I think writing could be an effective way to reinforce learning (I am planning to add a text input component in the near future). but for languages I am much more bullish on listening / speaking. In other words, the first side of the card should prompt you to speak whatever word you're testing, and the next side(s) will actually have a recording of a native speaker speaking that word, either in isolation or in a sentence.


I'm a paid subscriber. Thanks so much for making this!

I've used Anki extensively in the past but had the same issues with it's clunkiness with edits and tagging, etc.

Mochi is a serious killer app for me, since I use it daily to remember everything that's important to me.


Any chance you publish the source code?

This is exactly what I’ve been looking for and couldn’t find anything and was going to just build myself. I’ve been exporting from Notion to Anki and it’s been a pain.

My worry is that the developer will shut down and I’ll lose all my cards.

Edit: beautiful iPhone app, laying in bed playing with it


> Any chance you publish the source code?

Unlikely as they're trying to make money off it.


How does it save the data locally? Sqlite?


Same thing for me, trying to learn Vietnamese - Anki does not cut it, so I am writing my own.


As someone who struggled with their weight their entire life, and who found that all the existing apps triggered black and white thinking, I made a calorie tracking app called Clean Slate. It is designed to be as simple as possible, to treat every day as a new day, to encourage self-compassion, and so on. It was really fun to make and I still use it!

https://cleanslate.sh/


really nice. Looks like you learned a lot while making this?


Yup! I consider it my journeyman project, so to speak. Definitely elevated my front end game for sure :)


Here's two of mine:

A while back, I wrote a command-line dice rolling program[1] that handles a bunch of esoteric dice notation syntax, both because I was getting into a D&D game with friends, and because I wanted to practice writing a non-trivial parser. (My D&D group pressured me into buying real dice anyway after I rolled five consecutive 1s in a single session.)

My current keyboard is an Ultimate Hacking Keyboard, which I like very much, but the one thing I miss from a more traditional layout is the nav cluster (arrow keys, plus the 6 keys above them). Of course these are accessible via the Mod layer on the UHK, but when I need to do something like Control+Shift+Right to select text, adding Mod into that as well becomes a bit much, so I'd prefer to have dedicated keys for these. So, I recently ordered a keyboard kit that is just the 10 nav cluster keys, and my next small project is to assemble it.

[1]: https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/roll


To be fair dice do operate differently than simple random number generation. They're also more satisfying to use that numbers on a screen.


> My D&D group pressured me into buying real dice anyway after I rolled five consecutive 1s in a single session.

Ha ha, Luddites.


See also this commit: https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/roll/commit/726f0510179...

Commit message:

> Use random.SystemRandom as random source

> Now all dice rolls are cryptographically secure against criticism for being ostensibly non-random.


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 great technique to get a feel for a domain without getting biased by one's pre-conceived notions. I thought that would be awesome for books, to literally "not judge them by their cover".

3) Search engine for pre-owned Teslas. Quickly see what's good value based on age/mileage per price, as well as being able to see how long I'll have to wait, on average, to get a particular set of features for a particular price (based on historical market data).

Plus several others.


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).


I trained my own models, actually. Also tried many of the vector search engines out there. But ended up with a custom solution using hnswlib and SQLite to get subsecond speed with millions of documents.


About (1): May I request you to throw some light? Is your reference that the keywords are not synonymized to find equivalents within documents? Help?


It’s not just about synonyms. It’s about context. A passage can talk about exactly the topic I’m researching, even though none of the words match. On the other hand, a passage may have ask the right words in it, but in a completely different context.


It's worth doing! A few projects I've done:

I once needed a database of EV charging locations, but at the time(2011) there were no open databases, so I built https://openchargemap.org, that now serves millions of API queries per month for other apps and services

For another project, I recently wanted to control my guitar amp (a Positive Grid Spark) from my computer instead of using a mobile app, so I built https://soundshed.com which is both a bluetooth web app and an electron app you can install. It now has a few thousand users :)

And finally, another time I had some SSL certificates I needed to manage for another project (for the above mentioned https://openchargemap.org), so I built a GUI to manage and renew certificates on Windows. It's now a commercial app with hundreds of thousands of users and it's my full time job: https://certifytheweb.com

So yeah, worth doing!


After my servers and projects have been raided by some fellow Russian cyberthreats and some idiots from 4/8 chan that were persuaded to "the cause", I've come to realize that the state of cyber security and automated cyber defense solutions is basically a charade and utterly useless.

All major players in the field oversell their own solutions, and nothing of them works. It's always forensics, and too late to actually defend your computers. Every platform and XDR/SOAR solution is made for manual human interactions, for the sake of overworked 24/7 analyst teams sifting through millions of log entries per day.

The signal/noise ratio is just too damn low to be effective.

That's why I decided it's time to disrupt the market with a self-maintaining and self-defending system. After what happened to me ~a year ago, I pivoted from my peer to peer Browser network idea to a peer to peer Cyber Defense+Intelligence system.

Turns out it's a big itch for a lot of customers, too.


How effective has this approach been so far?


What is a peer to peer Browser network?


A Browser that is able to share its resources, downloaded websites and offline cached assets, and to efficiently use local peers to save bandwidth.

In case you're interested: https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth


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


My ADHD has a massive impact on my ability to organize and sustain a directed academic project. So, I wrote a program to integrate the various tasks involved and to keep a complete record my progress. Having any part of the project available with a few clicks, I am now able to follow inspirations and to easily return to the current task at a later time. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/epiphany-workflow-ii/id1508000...

As it was a huge job, it was going to take years to write, and there was no pressure to get the job finished immediately. I could just work on it as much as was convenient.


I'm the author and maintainer of `cheat`, which started life (and continues life) as a "scratch your own itch" project:

https://github.com/cheat/cheat

I wrote it because I often forgot the shell commands that I needed to use on a daily basis, and realized that I wasted a lot of time Googling the same thing over and over.


thank you, stumbled into your project repo months ago, and found it really useful. Sidenote: Maybe I'll add Windows installation instructions to your documentation


Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad you're finding it useful :)

A documentation PR for Windows would be welcome. I've been meaning to reorganize and improve the documentation for months now, but it keeps getting line-jumped by other priorities.


I recently wrote a multithreaded web server and MVC framework in C from scratch using clang blocks and a request-based memory arena [0] and now I’d like to expand the endeavor into a custom compiled-to-bytecode DSL with web server and SQLite runtime.

The goal is to limit the environmental impact of serving web applications. Ideally memory usage should be less than a couple of MB for an idling server, a Docker container less than 100MB in size, and CPUs efficiently converting request paths into SQLite opcode and JSON responses.

[0] https://github.com/williamcotton/express-c


This is on a significantly smaller scale than most of the comments here, but I was exhausted of having to go through endless essays on smoothies before actually arriving at the recipe/ingredients - so when the lockdown first hit, I spent a few days working on https://choosemysmoothie.com. I don't (and didn't at the time) know how to web scrape, so I manually scoured tons of websites to manually write down ingredients and recipes. It was fun to do, specially since it's been on the back of my mind for a long long time.


My scratch was actually kid related. I couldn’t find a simple, quick and ad-free tool for my daughter to learn reading. Hence, I created https://czytanko.org/ to practice with her a few minutes per day (Polish lang only).


Cool. I built something similar. For reading letters. And later syllables. Helped my kid read and write two years before school.


My wife wanted some different ways to track stats for her runs/walks. Stuff that was not available or tedious to pull up in the default apps. I wanted to learn SwiftUI. Made an app to implement the things she wanted. Some of her friends made feature requests, so I added them. More people asked for it, so I put it on the App Store. It is on track to make 10s of dollars this year, hehe!

https://807software.com/runalyzer/index.html


https://github.com/micouy/kn - `cd` alternative like `z` but based on comparing abbreviations against paths with https://crates.io/crates/powierza-coefficient, not on frecency. I've completely replaced `cd` for over a year. A while ago nushell reimplemented this functionality using my Powierża coefficient.


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


"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."

This sounds wild. Is it an extension that just works automatically? Or?


Well, it has several parts. There’s a little Firefox extension which collects the text from each page as it’s opened; that sends it off to a webserver running on localhost, which stores the text in an SQLite database. I then made a minimal graphical frontend with Qt to let me search the database easily. Nothing especially fancy, but very useful nevertheless.


I'm writing my own app for practicing the piano.

The goal is to make practicing fun, while also making steady progress.

I'm not a good player at all, and I've struggled with practice for years. But I have no problems playing (practicing) difficult video games, that require a lot of repetition (think Celeste).

I think I've identified two major reasons why I never enjoyed it:

1. Classical music notation (sheet music) is just awful. It goes against most modern principles of easy-to-grasp information design. So I've come up with my own notation that is much easier to read and can be generated from musicxml files.

2. Practicing takes too much decision making and discipline. If you want to make progress, you have to constantly remind yourself to practice the parts that you're not good at yet - this is a surprising amount of mental overhead and requires lots of discipline. So the app I wrote listens to you play via MIDI and keeps track of which segments of a piece you're already good at, and automatically gives you those you still need to practice more - zero decision making required. You just play whatever the app gives you and after a few weeks/months you're suddenly able to play the whole piece.

The app is no where near ready to be shown, but I'm confident at this point that the concept will work.

I've been planning a longer write up on this for a while, if you're interested in reading more about it, please let me know, that would be very motivating :)


I'm a beginner, learning with a teacher and practicing for 1 hour a day. Although I find myself pretty comfortable with discipline, I find what you’re saying (if true) refreshing.

I’d be happy to help/or provide feedback if that can be helpful! Yuvalaizenman@gmail.com


Awesome, thanks for letting me know, this is a good signal! It's too early for feedback but I'm planning on writing an article about the design/philosophy behind the app. I'll let you know once it's up.


this year I learned astrophotography and then I learned deck building/carpentry as I needed a deck to raise the telescoped above the fence line. https://www.astrobin.com/users/bhouston/ if you automate you astrophotography rigs via things like ASIAIR or Nina you can control it all remotely from inside.

Also wrote a behavior graph library like Unreal Engines blueprints, intended to be used by say no code Threejs projects, and it works well: https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph


I was tired of "backups inside backups inside directories with yet more backups" I accumulated over the ages.

Stuff as old as:

   /home/pub/oldbackups/hddConner800MB1998/olddos/...
Yet I like to try to keep everything personal. I've got nearly all my emails. Since the nineties. I still have my DOS source code files.

Same for the more recent stuff.

This is saved in many places.

Yet at times I like to organize some of that mess. There are files I definitely don't give a crap about anymore: files/directories from that old Windows driver for that long gone laptop.

So I wrote my own system which allows me to "tag" files and directories based on their cryptographic hash (I'm using Blake3 for it's very fast). I can, for example, tag a file "for deletion". No matter what, when file with blake3 hash 0c340c79... is found, it can be deleted.

I'm also not happy with hash-based content addressing systems I found so far, so every file that's never ever going to be modified again got part of its hash appended to its filename. So I can also verify that the file isn't corrupted.

And it works as a file deduplication system too.

It's not a big "scratch my own itch" as I'm reusing lots of stuff that already exists but it's lots of fun and works fine.

It's very satisfying.

No more: "but I already deleted that, why do I need to delete it again!?".

Instead I launch my berzerker (that's how I named it) and it goes berzerk.


Do you mind sharing some of the tools you are using?


I made an online sailing navigation simulator (https://8bitbyte.ca/sailnavsim/). Originally it was just to "scratch a few itches" at the time, but I've found I keep coming back from time to time to make more changes and add little things here and there whenever I have some ideas: dealing with interesting data sets (geographical, meteorological), different programming languages (I've added some Go and Rust since originally starting), computer performance experiments, and so on. And being able to participate in virtual sailing races with others has also been a nice bonus that I never anticipated when first starting this project.

Some light technical details and links to much of the project's code can be found here: https://8bitbyte.ca/sailnavsim/code.html


It's a classic story. I tried to organize my notes/data/knowledge using existing apps, but none of them fit my needs, so I built an app which does fit my needs: https://github.com/zadam/trilium/


A photo sharing website for high-trust groups. Only the album creator needs an account, then they can share a hard-to-guess link with the group members allowing them to upload photos. Anyone with the link can upload and download. Before this the best solution my groups had found was a shared Google Drive folder.

A band rehearsal recording management website. Uses much of the same code as the previous. Suggests the canonical names for songs based on the file names. Songs can be searched by name, date, or tag (any arbitrary value). This replaces a shared google drive folder with subfolders by recording date (great to find the most recent run through a of songs, bad to find the best run through of any given song)


Right now: kcctl [1], a command-line client for Kafka Connect. Using the REST API just became to unwieldy when demoing Debezium. Quite a while ago, MapStruct [2], a code generator for type-safe mapper classes for converting POJOs (Java object) between object hierarchies which are similar but not quite the same. It was born after realizing that significant time in an enterprise application I was working on back in the day was spent executing reflection-based mapping code.

[1] https://github.com/kcctl/kcctl [2] https://mapstruct.org/


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. Each task is a text file.

One that I am currently planning is an ActivityPub client. Like Mastodon but way way leaner. For now, I am basically playing with ActivityPub requests on the command line. Later, I will add a Python web interface on top of it.


> 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?


Yes a bit. With a focus on browsing/editing databases.


that sounds great!


Sounds great. Did you release it?


No, it's just for my own usage.


https://gifmemes.io

Started as a side project to help me make gif memes, turned it into a bachelor's thesis project and made over 2.5k USD in watermark removal purchases.


I jumped into the Common Lisp rabbit hole and enjoying it. I've completed Touretzky book on CL. I'm now reading Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming.

I know enough to start some project which would help in learning the language but haven't pulled the trigger yet. Nothing like stumbling around trying to figure out how to get something to work in a new language to get a deeper understanding.

It's quite an interesting language; completely different from Python, JS and Java that I use.

A side benefit is I've learned emacs well enough to be productive enough to use as a daily text editor.


I wanted to learn how databases work internally, like how they store and retrieve data, build indexes, etc.

I built an educational KV store to teach someone to write a database from scratch. I have set up this project in TDD fashion with the tests. So, you start with simple functions, pass the tests, and the difficulty level goes up. There are hints if you get stuck. When all the tests pass, you would have written a persistent key-value store in the end.

link: https://github.com/avinassh/py-caskdb


My SO got 4 thermoses for Christmas one year, so I decided to build a simple wishlist service[0] to prevent it happening again. Launched it 6 years ago, and since then it's been used by friends, family and myself for all Christmas and birthdays - so I consider it a huge success. In addition to already being a success for me personally, it's growing organically, and last year really picked up the pace when I reached 1k users. Now it's at just over 7k, which is surreal.

[0] https://wishy.gift/


My mother refuses to uses computers/smart phones but loves seeing pictures I take. I built PostcardMailer.us to quickly send her/other relatives/friends postcard photos.

I got a bunch of weird Tor signups so I turned off new sign ups. But a handful of family and friends have accounts and we send each other postcards.

It is the most embarrassingly bad Rails codebase I can claim, but it has Just Worked for 4 years. I did a complete rewrite with “best practice” React and learned Golang for the backend. And never launched it because the Rails site works fine.


Is it a private website, postcardmailer.us ? I am always interested in looking at online to print systems for curiosity. The website is not opening.


Sorry, I forgot that the naked domain isn't set up -- try http://www.postcardmailer.us

Happy to create an account for you if you're interested in using it, email in profile. The printing/delivery portion is powered by Directmailers.com


My current side project (neighborhud.app) is an iPhone 6 in every room displaying a HUD (heads up display) of recurring things i need to do in that area, inventory, events, and requests. Iphone 6's are fairly advanced devices that are only ~$35 on ebay. This allows for recycling of tech that would otherwise become trash, because it just renders a webpage that's been added to the home screen (so it looks like an app). This bypasses any app store requirements so as long as it can keep running safari it's still of use. I just leave them plugged in with low screen brightness.

For "inventory", it's just a custom state machine that can be scheduled in the past or future. And requests are things an area needs - which can be associated with an inventory item, or free text. This lets me pull up all requests when I'm at the store and see the kitchen needs apples, and the bathroom needs soap, etc.

Right now, I have a HUD for my front door (to remind me of things before i leave) a HUD for my phone/car (when I'm out) and then one for my kitchen, bathroom and hallway. I have the one in my kitchen magnetically on my fridge, so i can pull it off and take picture of food I'm adding. Will probably add one for my office next.

The difficult thing for me has been being the user more than being the builder and just focusing on the real MVP and then picking at it over time.

Working on cleaning it up and then maybe allowing others to give it a go - i feel like there could be some value in connecting people with spaces.


I'm building https://cubetrek.com It's intended to be running/hiking/skiing/mountaineering analytics app focused on mountaineous terrain (think Strava but for activities in the mountains).

Just got finished on the 3D visualization of GPS tracks, now working on the user accounts to store/compare/visualize/share past activities.

It's definitely "scratch your own itch", as I'm building it to suit my exact needs.


A non-insignificant part of my job involves saving Gmail messages and their associated attachments to specific folders in Google Drive. I wrote a Google Apps plug-in that makes this a single-click activity. It used to take ~20-30 seconds per email to properly save the email as a PDF as well as the attachments. All resulting files have to follow a specific naming convention. I use this tool several times a day and it really brings me joy each time I click the button and save some time.


Can you share the script? Sounds like a cool and helpful time-saver.


I've got two things of that kind right now and they both worked for learning new things. Neither is properly functional, but here goes.

One is 'automation of repetitive conversations'. It is actually another iteration over the problem and can be seen on https://discu.space/. I don't think I can do better presentation in text than in the video on homepage. I just beg anyone interested to hit me via profile instead of registering yet, as everything might explode for now.

It got me cool experience with making web extension as well as horrible experience of trying to get it through google webstore.

Another one is using sounds to maintain focus in changing contexts. There are SO MANY white noise etc. generators (and they are good), but none has low latency feedback mechanism to say 'more intense'/'less intense' beyond 'lower/higher volume'. So you can't for example overload yourself to start doing something and then slightly lower noise when you get to a hard part of w/e you're doing. Enter lacking a proper readme https://github.com/Nowado/NoiseGenerator.

As much as tkinter is a pain to use, it's my first project done with so much copilot. I don't think there are 100 characters in a row in this project that I wrote by hand. Also that operating system doesn't like when unknown Python code demands full access to keyboard.


I have a linux PC that acts as a NAS/media player attached to the TV in the living room.

I wrote a java-based "shortcut" program that runs on both the NAS and my Windows desktop PC.

This is so when I'm ssh'd to the NAS, I can just run a command to open any folder on the NAS in my Windows PC, and vice versa.

Basically both ends open a network socket listening for commands to execute on either side.

I can also enqueue music stored on the NAS in Foobar2k on my Windows PC, or play videos in VLC.

So in the ssh window to the NAS, I just type, "locate -i *michael*jackson* | onlymusic | sc enqueue", and that will enqueue all Michael Jackson music on the server in Foobar2k on my Windows desktop. On the windows end, if there is more than one file then it creates a temporary m3u (or was it m3u8?) playlist and enqueues that, instead of sending a thousand separate enqueue requests.

"onlymusic" is a simple tool I made to filter to only files ending in flac, mp3, wav, etc. I have "onlyvideos" as well.

It's the exact same program running at both ends, but it detects which PC it's running on by what OS is there, because it has to convert the paths to the files between both PCs.

I also set up right-click shortcuts that go the other way - they will open a new tmux window in the ssh session on the NAS in a particular folder.

It's probably all horribly insecure and took me much longer to create than the time actually saved by using it...

But it serves my purposes, and I learnt a lot by setting it up.


I've had a few side projects that all served the purpose of letting me work on something interesting that I wished existed.

1. Making a SaaS out of open-source text search for searching source code because github text search was/is so bad. I went further with this any anything else, but even when I had payments and automatic processing of account activation and self-serve config, I didn't feel like putting any more effort into marketing/sales.

2. https://hackerer.news view (in Vue) for HN that doesn't mix new items with yesterday's popular items, and separates popular topics (e.g. twittter) from interesting niche ones.

3. Java library for bottom-up SQL query composition with type safety rather than left-to-right like Rails'.

4. And related to that a Collections like library that uniformly handles multi-, async-, error-, values. The pair of these was to make all queries handle the many case by default so there's never any N+1 inefficient queries written.

There was another few attempts at indexing old and new movies and shows to help discover things I'd like to watch. It used IMDB + OMDB data as well as other sources for newly available title listings. [Netflix used to work when they used star ratings and had a deeper catalog or recommending titles that weren't just popular even if I'd already watched them.] I was planning on connecting the listing to legal ways of watching them on various streaming sites as the fragmentation is the most frustrating thing. It was (at the time) not at all easy to find how to deep link to many of these and I stopped developing it.


my own usb powered back scratcher inspired by Kramer from Seinfeld, my back-scratcher does the "8" in various patterns until it covers the whole back area.


https://slowsocial.us/

I made it as an experimental social network after frustration with Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, etc for not providing ample space for people to be heard and feel heard. It got a lot of attention hear on HN, but unfortunately I haven't had much time to iterate on it after launching it, but I'm still really happy to have done it.


Simple things like:

Spodcast, a Spofify->RSS bridge [1], made it because I listen to netcasts while working outside out of network reach (forest and field work).

Reader, a native-look epub/pdf/cb[rz] reader for Nextcloud [2], made it when my daughter was issued an iPad at school on which she was not allowed to install any "apps" while I thought the thing was tailor-made for reading books. The iPad was returned years ago but I recently updated Reader to make it run again.

...and a host of small tools which I make just when I need them, dumping them to GH for all to peruse, e.g.:

ZMapi, a Zoneminder CLI tool [3], made it when I installed a video surveillance system in the new barn which uses Chinese cameras which I do not want to be able to access the 'net directly.

bs, a Bookstack API CLI tool [4], made it when I needed to upload a large number of conference videos to a Bookstack site.

...etc

I don't have much time for these side things since I'm mostly busy on and around the farm but every now and then the weather is a good excuse to keep me inside...

[1] https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast

[2] https://github.com/Yetangitu/files_reader

[3] https://github.com/Yetangitu/zmapi

[4] https://github.com/Yetangitu/bs


Two things, plus their combination:

1. Productivity system. I’m trying out different methods of todo lists. When I start a new method I think I’ve finally found the right one, but I end up not sticking with it and starting over with a new approach after a while. My current system is something I started yesterday after coalescing a few different ideas from the last week or so. I have a list of categories in a text file (on my phone) ordered by priority such that at any time I can start at the top of the list and think if there’s anything I should do in that category. If so, I work on that. The order is determined by what would be best to do in SUPPORT of things further down the list. That way you can stay on top of things without waiting until they are urgent, and it seems to align my actions with my overall goals better.

2. Hardware/software. I’ve noticed that software at every layer of the stack is written and changed/updated based on the desires of the creator of that software, not you. This might sound crazy, but if you really want to have control of your software you should write it yourself. Ever since I ran across Forth (jonesforth in particular) and realized you could create your entire software environment (drivers, OS, editor/compiler/debugger, application) from scratch because lets you start with nothing and quickly move up the layers of abstraction focusing only on what us needed for your particular application. (See also: http://collapseos.org/forth.html and https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth/blob/master/jonesfort... )

The combination of 1+2 would be building a device with a hardware keyboard, simple display, and a microcontroller where I could have a todo list. (I could potentially just use an old PC with a BIOS as well to start with.) I could have it let me have reminders that I could snooze for a desired amount of time for instance, or have recur at specific times until dismissed (daily checklists). If I didn’t want the screen to go into sleep mode, or the OS to force me to update, reboot, or do anything at all that I didn’t want it to (like have unwanted notifications or ads or algorithmically driven distractions or security holes from the network/Internet), it wouldn’t. It would have zero dependencies.


https://juniordoctors.co.uk/

I work as a doctor in the UK and decided to make this site due to a huge asymmetry of information when selecting medical jobs in the UK. In the UK postgraduate medical training is long (10+ years is standard). During this time recruitment is generally done nationally. Everyone does the same interview (for their given programme, e.g cardiology) +/- exam and is given a score. This score is used to rank applicants from 1 to N, and applicants in turn rank jobs from 1 to N. The highest ranked applicant gets their first choice job, the second highest ranked applicant gets their first choice (unless it’s the same as the top ranking candidate, in this case they get their second ranked job). This cascades down until all the jobs are filled. As this is a national process people often end up in jobs far from where they know. Unfortunately only the bare minimal information is given for each job, often just the name of the hospital and even this can be subject to change (they can move you to another hospital in the same rough area with minimal notice). Doctors are also very much temporary workers at a given hospital and are treated as such. It’s normal to only be at a hospital for 6-12 months. This makes doctors prone to poor conditions and harder to raise concerns. This along with a asymmetric power dynamic (if you raise a fuss in a small speciality the consultants in that specialty may make it harder for you to find a job once you complete training) can perpetuate a bullying culture and general poor work conditions for junior doctors. As such I created this website for doctors to write anonymous reviews for their posts.

It’s a bit janky in places and the jobs feature is broken while I update it. Regardless it’s now widely used and is hopefully helping people who are now going through the same struggles I did (my training is now complete).


I needed a no-fuzz, lightweight Continuous Delivery setup, and wrote https://github.com/manuelkiessling/simplecd.

It’s a single bash script.

To this day, I use to deploy all my projects, including my work projects, no matter what tech stack I use, with great success.


I created https://titanotes.com, an online tool/service to encrypt and store text data using a set of keys known only to the sender. The sender then shares the message URL and keys with the intended recipient via a different channel. Messages are stored for 72hrs before being automatically deleted. No client-side information (browser fingerprints, IP address, user-agents etc) is collected. So far, it has processed just over 2k messages in 3 months.

Why did I create it? I suddenly had a lot of time after leaving an exhausting corporate role. Is it perfect? No. A couple of things could be done better/differently.

The future? Knowing that text-only data is limiting, I'm working on: -encrypting attachments - images, PDFs etc. -customizable retention periods

Yes, I know there are existing products serving the same purpose but hey, why not?


I created a Chrome extension to add a keyboard shortcut that moves your current tab to a new window:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-to-windowpopup...


My washing machine stopped beeping when it was finished. I realised I could program an ESP32 with an accelerometer which detects when the washing machine was on, then wait a bit before waking up and sending a notification to my phone.

I wrote up my process here but since then I've made some improvements so that logic for the trigger for detecting when the machine is on actually happens on the accelerometer itself. I also rewrote the code for the ESP32 in micropython which has been a lot easier to manage than C.

https://www.instructables.com/Washing-Machine-Notification-S...

The whole process taught me a ton about programming micro-processors, the I2C protocol and even using a logic analyser to debug issues at the line logic level.


the blynk api push notification link is broken, did you install some app in your phone?


My latest version uses a Telegram bot but a better solution would probably be to use Pushover or the newly released Ntfy.sh

https://pushover.net/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33517944


Not a computer related, but I write a blog (in lithuanian language), because writing articles helps me to remember stuff I learned :) Somehow putting down thoughts to small articles does magic to my brain :)

(There's an extra bonus as that same blog helped me to find few clients for work too, haha.)


At 2020, we had a pain point in Viet Nam because health official requires to do contact tracing when people went to events, churches, schools so we scratched our own itches and developed QR Code Attendance addon https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/qr_code_attenda.... After that, we provide our addon in G Suite marketplace and a lot of customers used our addon for contact tracing, for example take temperature, name, health status of attendees and give data to health official.


Funnily enough when I was enjoying my own paternity leave I figured I'd take up something new, and ultimately chose between:

* hardware stuff.

* mobile stuff.

I figured I could start playing with hardware, or I could look at mobile application development. I realized quite quickly that app-development was too close to coding so I chose "harware".

I bought a bunch of arduinos, and later switched to esp8266s, along with sensors and stuff. I had fun building a few projects - such as an LCD to show tram departure times outside my door, and wireless temperature/humidity sensors to let me know when my sauna was hot enough to be useful.

These days I've gone back to coding for fun, and I'm doing what everybody else _here_ does; experimenting with a toy lisp!


Encrypted backup to AWS Glacier Deep Archive ($1/TB/month)

https://github.com/mrichtarsky/glacier_deep_archive_backup

And for ErgodoxEZ:

Compress your keymap so you can add more features without hitting the limit

https://github.com/mrichtarsky/ergodox-compress-keymap

Generate Heatmap from your keypresses so you can see whether your layout is optimal

https://github.com/mrichtarsky/ergodox-heatmap


For me it was getting into microcontrollers and (microcontroller based) electronics.

Tinkering with IOT projects using an ESP32 is engaging because they offer both, a variety of high level connectivity features ( wifi, ble) and direct integration with sensors or other Hardware.

Modern ones can even be developed in Rust and are not as constrained hadrwarewise as earlier generations.

I recently got back into developing some small "just for me" games with Godot and also got a surprising amount of enjoyment out of trying out Blenders procedural geometry and material node systems.

In my day job I am doing resty cloudy things so my free time gets used die something else.


Currently re-implementing the Focus Sessions feature of the built in Windows clock app. I had been using the Windows version as a quick way to track time spent on a learning goal but found it buggy and lacking some features I wanted (like a pause button!) so I'm rewriting it as an Electron app. It's giving me a chance to write some plain JS for once and I've set a challenge of importing as few front-end libraries as possible (so far only react and immer). I'm excited that I have it at the point where I can dogfood it for tracking the time I spend on developing it.


I wrote a music synth library called Scott's MusicBox. The source is on github:

https://github.com/OhioVR/MusicBox

I tried to emulate orchestral sounds using an abandoned sample collection using it with some success but no one really liked it.

I also had problems with our point of sale at work which I tried to improve with a picture book with bar codes over the items. That helped me scan items without upc labels. Hit and miss but I'm going to have to sell my printer so that project is also dead.


I've been working on a platform to help teams deal with their deadletter queues. It's very much a scratch my own itch project as it's solving a problem that I've faced while at my day job.


I'm building https://linklonk.com - a news aggregator that prioritizes content from sources (RSS and other user channels) that you upvoted before.

The server part is written in Golang (sqlc, pgx, gorilla/mux) and I think server development is a great fit to learn Golang.

I want to expand the idea of personalized ranking ("others also liked") from content feed to group decision making. Basically, let a group member delegate their vote to other members that voted like them in the past.


I'm about to start a small microcontroller/radio project using low-cost low-power LoRa - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa - radio devices, to settle my curiosity on LoRa and how well it performs (i.e. its reach) in a city environment. Nothing advanced, just a few LoRa transceivers bridged to computer using a USB-capable microcontroller, hosted with me and some friends to send short text messages to one another.


In time (20 years) I have accumulated huge amounts of duplicate files, old projects, (sometimes multiple zipped copies and git repositories of the same projects), photos, downloads i should have deleted long ago (like Ubuntu 12.04 ISO, VS installers) mixed with lots of garbage.. I need an app that would hash all this content (>2TB) and index it by hash and help me sort it out and delete the junk. I'm building the hashing and the indexing with golang+SQLite. Then maybe a small .net windows forms app with a treeview


I build a quick and dirty blazor app to help me doing RSI prevention exercises https://rsistretching.netlify.app/ than I published it also as an android app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.mauriziopz....


I have a crackpot theory that two languages are related, so I'm writing a program to try to reconstruct root words that derive from a common language - using test-driven development.


Which two languages?


Too crackpot to mention unless I find something.


Amazon has been really hit or miss for me lately, so I wanted to find other sites that sell high quality stuff and don’t have fake reviews or counterfeits. I looked for somewhere that had a list of them but couldn’t find much. So I’ve started a small collection of the ones I know and like. https://zochre.com

In the past I’ve built more complicated products to scratch itches (mostly PM related). This one is kinda fun cause it’s so stupidly simple.


When I click on what presents itself as a link to a vendor's web site, it turns out to be a self-link, simply reloading the current page from zochre.com.


A made guitar chord-melody arrangement generator that uses jazz leadsheets (melody + chord symbols) as input: https://chordmelody.io/

I always thought the process was tedious but systematic enough to automate, and to some extent I think I was right. Here’s a video of one of the arrangements: https://youtu.be/F3h_yQOM_Jg


Your "dream a little dream of me" MusicXML link on the instructions returns a 404.


Oof. Thank you, should be fixed now.


My village is divided in four zones, every year they prepare a parade for the village festival and the best one win a prize. The classification is made by a selected jury made by theater director, actors, writers, etc. Every year people that attend the parade complained about the winner being not the best one according to the common taste. So I wrote a web app to permit vote by SMS (nothing fancy). It was a great project to learn web development and Go for backend.


May I ask which village? sounds very interesting


It's a small village in Tuscany, not far from Florence called Carmignano. The village is divided in 4 district, each one identified by a color (yellow, green, white and blue). During the festival, at the end of September, there is the parade and then a donkey race around the central square. Look for "Festa di San Michele Carmignano" on Youtube so see some videos.


    Puzzle solvers: Cryptoquote, Sudoku, Wordle.
    Display a chart that combines MyNetDiary and Fitbit logs.
    Correlate 1M bride & groom birth signs.
    Create election database from phone book.
    Battleship program (hard rules)
    Chart GQ EMF-390 EMR (electro-magnetic radiation) detection logs.
    Log oil furnace thermostat cycles (uses parallel & joystick ports).
    Convert county grave database to HTML pages for Website


any correlation found with the birth signs ?


Yes, a statistician I hired calculated a "p" of zero. A "p" less than 0.05 is considered significant.

I am not trying to prove Astrology. As a matter of fact, I am trying to prove that Astrology is bunk. However, the results are intriguing.


> Yes, a statistician I hired calculated a "p" of zero

A lower p-value is generally better for the hypothesis, but a zero means you probably need a better statistician.

Just like a higher value for annual profit is generally better for your business, but if the accountant you hired says its ∞, you probably need a better accountant.


I didn't appreciate developing Azure Pipelines in YAML so I've created a library that lets you use C# instead.

Aside the apparent advantages of the strong typed environment, I was able to bake in many more features that make your life easier. Code reuse is also super easy.

https://github.com/sharpliner/sharpliner


I got about a decade of scattered print debugging tools that I’m packaging into a tool.

I prefer debuggers and imaged based REPL environments, but that doesn’t mean I get to work in them. Always fall back on print debugging and loggers at some point, so I’ve built a lot of helpers in various language that help this sort of thing: introspection of variables and source code, time stamps and traceable uuids and tools for easy viewing.


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


I needed an online card sort tool for another hobby project, and I just couldn't find one that fit my needs, so I built https://github.com/indigane/cardsort

One requirement I had if I were to build it myself was that it would be maintenance-free and still work years after I have forgotten about it, so having a server was a no-go.


Most recently I hacked together a cat feeder that dispenses food from a hopper by weight. It's built into a nightstand and controlled only with a web interface hosted on an ESP32.

Almost all the parts were lying around (motor+gearbox from a broken neck massager, a small pocket scale, a broken servo), so it leant itself to getting things done 15 minute busts of activity without having to order and wait for alot of parts.


I am at a loss of things to do at the moment, The most recent for me is Indexing PoC CVE's posted to Github.

https://github.com/tg12/PoC_CVEs

I want to build a TrueNAS box at home and migrate to that as test.

I really want to write lots more Python code though! I love writing trading algorithms and Data science, data analyst projects.


> https://github.com/tg12/PoC_CVEs

This is brilliant and very helpful ! Keep going !


https://simplePDF.eu

For individuals it’s a free PDF editor tailored to form filling.

For organizations, a single line of code turns any PDFs into a web-form while keeping the look and feel of the PDF.

As to why I’m scratching my own itch:

Filling PDFs form when dealing with my country of origin has been painful every time, I wanted to make it more seamless both for me and for them


I've been using https://tools.pdf24.org/en/ for a while now, pretty good offering there.


Currently learning more about programmatic seo, and found that there wasn't a good way to share that resources I found, so I'm building a tool that will anyone to build sites like:

https://pseo.ai/

I'm interested in the rise of learning communities and sharing resources the community finds is central part of that.


I wanted to discover random locations, parks and cafes around my current location so I built this: https://randomlocation.xyz

p.s. there's a help file at https://randomlocation.xyz/help.txt


I created gpxif [1] to update time and location data on image files from my camera.

With this tool I can keep the camera in UTC and use gpx data from Garmin or OwnTracks to tag photos with the correct location and offset time.

- [1] https://github.com/charlieegan3/gpxif


https://webreducer.dev - an event-sourced firebase alternative. You get an endpoint that let's you keep state through a reducer function. Change your reducer function and replay all requests to get a new state. Websockets and http endpoints for clients to connect with


I think a music player might be a good one. I have my older music on computers at home or stored in cloud storage (not media services). I could imagine putting together a web app, mobile app, or both to be fun and interesting. Maybe fork an existing opensource project so that you get full control of expressing your preferences.


I work for Enterprise-like app development and get tired of all the dance working with data.

So logically I start doing a relational language on the side: https://tablam.org

Also, is the thing that I use to learn Rust, that has make the endeavor to be more practical than it sound!


We built an alternative Web UI for GCP because the default one is insufferable at times, especially when you have thousands of resources scattered across workspaces/projects, again due GCP’s problems of lacking more granular details on service costs such that you have to isolate resources to the project level.


I love doing these. Some recent projects (before I started recording video):

Minimalist CSS “Framework” https://neat.joeldare.com

Personal Digital Brain https://github.com/codazoda/nolific

The Raspberry Pi in my Bedroom https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...

In January I’ll start to publish “live coding” style videos of some of the projects I work on. I guess it’s the cumulation of my toy projects. I’m recording them as a way to encourage myself to create even more. Most are very simple. Many are “reinventing the wheel”. But, I love the work.

In the first two video’s I write a simple binary in Go (a language I’m not very familiar with) then run it as a command over ssh.

In the third I write a command line tool to generate random character strings.

Each video will have a companion GitHub repo.

The channel is completely empty at the moment. I’ll publish my introduction the first week of November and then publish videos weekly starting on January 1st. I’ve already created the first couple video’s and I’m editing the third now.

It will start out really rocky as I learn techniques for recording video and audio and improve my process.

My (blank) YouTube Channel https://youtube.com/codazoda


When selling software I found myself manually editing a demo recording into a "highlight reel" to use as follow up.

This led to me building https://DemoTime.com to automatically turn every demo into a highlight reel follow up video.


A Bluetooth dongle for my Fully standing desk and an accompanying MacOS app to replace the default wired remote for height adjusting. The original remote was pretty large, with a thick cable and I never found a good place to put it where I wouldn’t accidentally bump into it with my chair.


For me, I had to keep copying a text file of terminal output off a machine I didn’t have keys or SSH agent forwarding on, but I did have a scp binary.

I made https://scpbin.com — a fun little hack, for a very niche usecase :)


Hi I am new to programing and was thinking of writing a P2P messaging app, i know java and php and have written a website's backend of a project we made in our college. What all technologies do I need to learn to make something like that. Thank you for reading.


Itch?

A better interface to current search engines.

Itchy, so extremely itchy.

Implicit (or easier explicit) `AND`. Standarded option flags. Excellent (that’s the dream at least) option autocomplete.

Scratching away.

---

...also, using the existing excellent python tools to keep my iPod shuffles running with music and podcasts (auto delete and trim when played).


I got tired of of doing the same setup and deployment work every time I started a new Django project, so I made Djangogoboot.

https://github.com/apreche/djangogoboot


https://github.com/fcoury/oxide even though not 100% there yet, got tired of telling customers they needed a MongoDB instance just for my apps :-)


Reading apps for my kid. For instance an app that displays a syllable, the kid guesses the sound, and then it plays the sound and the kid clicks a green button if it guessed core or a red one if it did not. Works with spaced repetition.


I built my own word processor software because word & google docs is way too heavy to my own standards..

https://github.com/altilunium/md


A little startpage/bookmark solution to go on my home server, listing the services that run on it...

https://github.com/daledavies/jump


During the pandemic I built an online version of Rummikub so I could play with family. It embedded video calls and the game playing on one screen. We still just use it as we are all on different continents.


Pretty much all of my Emacs packages are scratching my own itch. Most of them are at codeberg:

https://codeberg.org/acdw


I'm working on a simplified bookkeeping system for my own use as a contractor. Seen a cool way of making a product with it once it's featureful enough. Started as an invoice system.


I'm building https://teaminal.com out of my frustration spending 4+ hours a week in agile meetings.


A river of news RSS reader: https://github.com/jeena/feedthemonkey


I wanted a simpler way to send myself email notifications from CLI - https://batsign.me


DevOps tools https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak


This year: I built a site to republish mug shots for my county. The county site was really bad.

I built a CLI script to check the weather in some ways that I care about. I would use Alexa, but she can't answer questions like "when is the next rain forecasted?" I want rain/freeze alerts eventually. Basically just to help me plan to have things winterized and put up.

I'm building an app that I will use personally, but that I can also make a SaaS. It's sort of like a time-tracker, but for professionals in a specific industry. It helps them track time but also other metrics. I'm sorry to be vague, but I think I have an advantage with the stealth at this point.

In the past:

I built a program to help buy things from Amazon's return section.

I built a program to monitor the "free" section of craigslist.

I built a program to determine the bad poker players and sit at their tables.

I built a program that enables all the above programs to send alerts to my phone.

(I built dozens, maybe hundreds, of other programs, some smaller, some larger, over the last 20 years. I have a wasteland of old git repos and shell scripts.)

Non-computer: I have 40 acres with a small homestead on it, and so there's a bajillion projects. Most recently I built a ladder to access loft areas in a building, with wood.

I installed and just had to maintain an underground dog fence. If I don't, the dogs run off sometimes, and I want to keep them safe at home. The peace of mind I get from this is probably worth 4-5 hours a week, but it's only cost me about 10 hours in 7 years. It wouldn't have cost me really any time, except the road grader keeps breaking my wire.

I restored a Singer model 128 treadle sewing machine that I intend to build a tipi with. I don't need a tipi, but I want to experience one.

I built a deer fly trap. It didn't go well, so I need to build v2. But I am driven by an intense hatred for deer flies, so I will persevere.

I built a tool that wraps wire tightly around things as a way to secure them. I use it mostly to secure tool handles from splitting, but I keep finding new spots to use it.

In my experience, if you decide "I will build what I need when it makes sense," you start evaluating all of your ecosystem. I usually focus on what sucks, and make it way better. That's an easy way.

It's much harder to imagine what you would like to have, or like to be doing. If you do that, start small and see how it goes.


I made thinktype[1] to write down my thoughts.

[1]: https://thinktype.app/


https://github.com/Udokah/veecam


I like it. Curated list of stores.

Just fyi while the text in the links to the stores are correct, the actual links go back to your site.


After over a decade of professional experience using bash, in 2013 I've started developing Next Generation Shell. I'm still on it. Probably not the size of project that you were looking for :)

tldr: better programming language (syntax, error handling, data structures - full blown but still domain specific programming language), better interactive mode (at least that's what I think).


in the same situation, i bought 3d printer and learned fusion 360. its the best because requires only little logical brain unlike programming and u can play with ur kid while the print is printing


My email forwarding[1] is the one I most proud of. As every engineer, I had a bunch of side projects with many domains, anytime it comes up I have to do the dance of setting up email.

I tried use some existing email forwarding service but always something come up. I decided to roll my own and eventually start a SaaS.

The second ons is my newsletter[2], it runs on my custom static site generator. It use mailchimp to store user data since I don't want to deal with GDPR etc. But all the actual email handling is using my own custom code.

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[1]: https://mailwip.com

[2]: https://betterdev.link


This is great - just signed up :)


Kid related backstory: during the pandemic I started recording videos, telling the stories of Trump, the pandemic and other family stories. The idea is that my kids will watch them when they are 25 and see me while I'm young, telling them about current events. (kids are currently 5 & 8)

I'm building a web app to make this easier and also sharing with my parents to record & save the stories from their life.




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