What's something you made only for yourself? \ stacker news ~devs

What's something you made only for yourself?

2689 sats \ 35 comments \ @k00b 23 Apr devs

In #513787 @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears shared an article by Robert Sloan about a chat app he built exclusively for his family. The product Sloan made could scale, but some of the simplicity and scarceness would be lost. There's something really romantic about it.

A few folks shared their own home cooked apps in that thread:

@rheedi0 built a MAC address triggered song to play for a colleague
@elvismercury DOS'd his friends phone number
@WeAreAllSatoshi made a companion app to play Clue
@Signal312 hacked Notepad++ to replace online note taking apps
I made my college girlfriend a bruise tracking app
@south_korea_ln built a task manager

What's something you made only for yourself?

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417 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 23 Apr

Unrelated, but last summer my daughter and I made a rock garden underneath one of the downspouts on our house. Now when it rains you can watch the water flow down over the rocks. Definitely a pleb water feature. Haha

We had a lot of fun doing it and it was a good workout collecting and carrying all those rocks back home.

309 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 23 Apr

LOL, I DOS'd a family member's phone as a prank as well @elvismercury

215 sats \ 1 reply \ @Satosora 23 Apr freebie

I made a notebook the other day. I actually went to an art store and bought very nice quality paper, folded each sheet and sewed them together. Will give to a friend so he can journal when he leaves for seattle. He is a big fountain pen guy, and he has told me about his frustration getting good writing paper in the notebook style he likes.

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @Satosora 23 Apr

It actually takes quite a bit of time to make one. Even with a simple binding. But he likes it, thats all that matters.

262 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford 23 Apr

Built my standing desk I use every day in my office.
Built a digital sign to let my family know when I was on a call back when I had a ton of work calls (work from home)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SatsCats 24 Apr

oooo I like the digital sign idea, but I also like seeing my family members appear as floating heads on my work calls :D

190 sats \ 2 replies \ @chaoticalHeavy 23 Apr

I made a Twitter bot to attract followers back in 2015 to replace the semi automated process I began in 2013.

30 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 23 Apr

What's your follower count at now?

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @chaoticalHeavy 23 Apr

23,317 -- the bot's been ~~turned off~~ banned since almost a year but I'm still getting a few new followers each week.

140 sats \ 1 reply \ @felipe 23 Apr

I built my own Stacker News client for Android

I still use it but pagination (load more) is currently broken... I'll fix it this week. I also need to add a territory selector

https://github.com/felipebueno/stacker_news/

https://m.stacker.news/27848

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @felipe 23 Apr

I also built a Hacker News client which was the base for the SN client. It's still working well after many years

It was removed from the Play Store a few years ago because of copyright issues. I also removed the source from GitHub because I intended to make it a paid app at some point

https://m.stacker.news/27850

222 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 23 Apr freebie

When I got into ~crypto, I started to write my own password manager with python. I called it mypass¹ and it had a tui with ncurses.

I thought it was okay to write my own password manager because I didn't intend to roll my own ~crypto. I stopped because I never used it myself because there was always something missing before I would use it.

Nowadays, I just self-host vaultwarden and am happy. The Bitwarden CLI is still horrible though.

I also tried to write my own MyFitnessPal app without bloat. When I got into the other ~crypto, I started to write my own cointracker.

Turns out I never made anything that I actually used 👀

very creative, I know ↩

221 sats \ 0 replies \ @gnilma 23 Apr

Not a software developer, but I am a carpenter and had built, for our own use, various storage boxes, shelves, and even 2 high chairs for my kids over the years. A fun one is when my older son injured his left ankle at the playground last year, I built a makeshift knee scooter out of some scrap wood and 4 all direction wheels. Both my sons are still using it as a scooter to speed around the house to this day. My daughter never even touched that thing. I guess boys will be boys.

160 sats \ 1 reply \ @Lumor 24 Apr

Made a timer app with full-screen start/stop touch area for Wim Hof breathing exercises (hitting the small circle on the built-in app was lowering the precision of my breath-hold time measurements). Got a cold after a few weeks and never really got back into it.

A few months later my iPhone 6 died. Got the suspicion that maybe my app was somehow always running in the background, wearing it out. Didn't let the Apple store guys in on my suspicion when I went to replace it. iOS was probably already killing background apps by then but I'm still not sure.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BTC_DCAGUY_SIIM 24 Apr

Nice story

Official app works create with iWatch

140 sats \ 0 replies \ @NoStranger 23 Apr

A deterministic password manager PWA
A PWA client for Miniflux (which is a cool self-hosted RSS feed reader)
A CLI habit tracker for tracking burnt calories and water drank daily
A CLI file based note taking app for work and myself
A TTS PWA for when I couldn't talk for a while after a tooth surgery
A digital version of a board game for playing with my family
A retro gaming set-up (Also wrote about it here)

140 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 23 Apr

A few years ago I started developing a bot for online poker. I managed to do the hardest part, which is recognizing the cards on the screen, and then I stopped because I didn't feel like developing the rest. Bots are forbidden...

121 sats \ 3 replies \ @bitcoinplebdev 23 Apr freebie

https://austins-game-of-life.vercel.app/

built this as soon as I had the skills to, have been obsessed with cellular automata since I was 12 for some reason https://github.com/AustinKelsay/austins-game-of-life

130 sats \ 0 replies \ @jasonb 23 Apr

I made these about a month or so ago with the skills from taking your front end course. It's fun to move around (drive around in the case of the board-game themed one) and protect the static pieces from the shooters.

https://conwaysgameoflifewithatwist.vercel.app/ https://conway-s-life.vercel.app/

The philosophical implications of Conway's game are so intriguing. I first encountered the fine tuning argument (although I don't think it's named as such in the book) in Dawkins's "Climbing Mount Improbable." Ironically, that book and his beautiful explanation of it was really instrumental in leading me to theism in my early 20s.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 23 Apr

Have you read A New Kind of Science? I read parts of it a long time ago, but Wolfram feels pretty strongly about this sort of computation being capable of explaining/predicting the universe. His interviews with Lex (4 of them now) are great too if you haven't seen them.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoinplebdev 23 Apr

Yeah I watched one of these interviews back in the day I should return to them again. I never read a new kind of science though

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @Coinsreporter 23 Apr

Haha, that reminds me of a hut I built in a tree. Exclusively for loneliness..

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 23 Apr

For being alone or inspiring loneliness?

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 23 Apr

For being alone. Some me time.

27 sats \ 0 replies \ @Hamstr 23 Apr

I baked myself a cake, then ate it all by myself.

27 sats \ 5 replies \ @kepford 23 Apr

I have to ask, what is a bruise tracking app @k00b

55 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 23 Apr

Yeah, I feel like there is an indie film lurking in this offhand remark.

55 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b OP 23 Apr

She wanted to take pictures of her bruises lol. I was churning out apps at that point and I wanted more practice so I asked her for a request and that’s what she said.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 23 Apr

Rough dating a developer I guess ;)

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @jasonb 23 Apr

So would she take pictures of a bruise as it healed and then animated them or was this just pictures of individual bruises for comparison?

I just planted a one foot tall giant sequoia at my kids' school and just had the idea that they could take pictures of it every year for hundreds of generations and make a video of something no one could naturally see in a lifetime.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 23 Apr

It was just an Instgram-like app for her to take pictures of her bruises, like a timeline of bruises as I remember it.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @emmanuelrosa 24 Apr

I've made pasta noodles from scratch.

They were damn good.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @stevo 24 Jun

I built a google apps script to keep track of my TD Ameritrade investments in a spreadsheet.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Naja 29 Apr

I once made an elecric guitar from a cigar box. For the knowledge and experience. I don't even play! offered it to a friend

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @piecover 23 Apr

Nothing but everything at the same time

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