
Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share? - throwaway3189
Hi Hacker News,
Few months ago I met someone that shook my world a little. Things were a little crazy and happened over 3 different continents in a very short time. It was wonderful, and it was greyscale. It was grandiose, and it was so desperately poor. It didn&#x27;t work out.<p>In the beginning of our relationship, just when I was about to leave the country for a few months, I made them a website. A small one, with some notes and songs and interpretations. I&#x27;m not a painter and I&#x27;m not a musician. Coding was my go-to tool when I wanted to tell them stuff.<p>Recently, love wilted but the website stayed [0]. I thought, all those things that we&#x27;re doing because of love, aren&#x27;t they great? Aren&#x27;t they a beautiful expression of us being humans? Perhaps stupid, senseless, silly - but loving humans. I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m not the first one to create something digital, online, out of love. I wished there was this exhibition where people could go and feel some warmth, and be reminded of the different ways love looks like.<p>Did you ever code something for love? Or any other digital form of creation? It would be great if people could share things they&#x27;ve done, and also, if they feel comfortable, I&#x27;d be happy to know if they want to get a subdomain at *.thingslovemademedo.com [1] and have their content there. I&#x27;m obviously not asking for any copyright permissions, just playing with the thought of creating this anonymous archive of all-things-love. And before someone asks, no, there will never be any ads or analytics there, and I have no plans on monetizing this...<p>[0] chelsea.thingslovemademedo.com
[1] thingslovemademedo.com
======
ashton314
During my junior year of high school, there was a girl in my calculus class
that I wanted to ask out to our homecoming. Time was running short and I had
no idea how I would ask her.

Then, while sitting in class, inspiration struck.

I started coding frantically on my TI-84. When the school day ended, I spent
several hours in my room refining my program.

The next day, at the end of calculus, I asked this girl if I could see her
calculator. (I was well known for creating games and other useful programs on
TI's, so this wasn't that far out.) She handed me her calculator. I
transferred the program I had written, set it up, and handed it to her. "Press
ENTER", I said, and then scurried out the door.

The program apologized for the strange manner of my asking her out to a dance,
then presented a menu saying "will you come to homecoming with me?" If she
pressed "No", it would go to a new menu that begged, "please?" If she pressed
"yes," it would confirm one more time with a cheerful "really?" Finally, if
all was successful it would thank her for agreeing to come with me.

The next day, at the beginning of class, she walked up to where I was sitting,
put her calculator down on my desk, and said "Press ENTER".

She had rewritten the program so that it would a.) tell me that she would come
with me, and b.) didn't walk through the same series of menus. She wasn't a
programmer by any means, but had managed to figure it out.

Nothing came from that other than just a good friendship. She married one of
my friends, and I married a girl I met that summer. The four of us have hung
out once or twice to play games, all just as good friends.

~~~
lazybreather
Whoa! I have to say, I love these kinds of stories. No happy ending or sad
ending. It's just a simple, plain and interesting story. Worth sharing and
worth reading/watching.

------
eastdakota
I dated someone whose father had a small business that made home goods
products (e.g. specialty laundry detergent, waterproofer, etc). He was a smart
but challenging guy. Definitely the sort of father who didn’t think any guy
was good enough for his daughter. Remember the first time she took me home to
meet her parents in South Carolina for Thanksgiving he was, literally,
cleaning his gun on the front porch.

He primarily sold his products through big box retailers like Walmart and was
getting squeezed on margins. I suggested he should sell direct through a
website. He scoffed at the idea.

On the long drive back to Chicago my girlfriend brought it back up and asked
if I could help put her dad’s business online. This was 2001 so there weren’t
really any easy options to create what he needed. Ended up spending nights and
weekends for the next month building a whole shopping cart, storefront, and
payment gateway. Remember learning just what a pain getting SSL setup
correctly was at the time — which was part of the inspiration for Cloudflare
making it free and easy many years later.

Gave the site to him for Christmas. He spent the whole day playing with it and
then bragging to his friends he was now in “e-commerce.” Girlfriend was very
happy. We continued to date for another 4 years until her medical career took
her East and starting a company took me West. Still friends to this day.

I think her dad’s company may still using a lot of my old code. (Which, to be
honest giving my coding skills, is a bit terrifying.) Ecommerce has become a
big part of their distribution. And I still buy and use his detergent, which
is terrific for cleaning performance fabrics like Gortex and washing sheets if
your skin is sensitive to perfumes or dyes.

~~~
eastdakota
One more that’s fun, though maybe doesn’t really count as “programming.”

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.

~~~
brianswichkow
So... a friend just sent me this as I'm known as "the guy who pranked his
roommate with Facebook ads [1]." I'm also getting married on 11/11\. This is
absolutely brilliant. My partner and I [2] thank you for this. PM me, we'd
love to invite you and your partner to our (digital) wedding.

[1] [http://ghostinfluence.com/prank](http://ghostinfluence.com/prank)

[2] [http://partnersinpresence.com](http://partnersinpresence.com)

~~~
lukevp
I would love to see the CEO of CloudFlare come to your wedding. Your prank
article was a nice read and I had a good laugh.

------
citeguised
I made a game for our wedding-website. The player has to control her and me
simultaneously. It's pretty short, though. I did everything myself, graphics,
music, gameplay.

[https://10-5.de/game/](https://10-5.de/game/)

A funny anecdote: Some years ago, a person asked me if it would be ok to
modify the game for the wedding for his friend. They wanted to play it at
their wedding as a joke. At first I didn't know what to say, but then he told
me he already downloaded it and modified all the animation-spritesheets by
hand, to match the look of the couple. He must have spent hours on this. I
thought that was so cute that I gladly allowed him to do whatever he wanted
with this. I even offered him to re-export the animations, but he already was
done by then.

~~~
freedomben
That game is really good! I'm not a gamer but I really enjoyed it. Took me a
minute to figure it out but then I had fun.

Is the source open?

~~~
diggan
The source is open
([https://10-5.de/game/c2runtime.js](https://10-5.de/game/c2runtime.js), seems
to be built with the framework "Construct" so you'd have to find the actual
game logic in there) but it doesn't seem to be open source so don't go copy-
paste it willynilly.

~~~
TomGullen
It’s great seeing our game engine pop up in posts like this!

~~~
citeguised
Thanks for making it!

In case somebody is wondering: The game was made with Scirra's "Construct 2",
which is a great 2D game-maker. You can immediately try it (the current
version 3) in the browser on [https://www.construct.net/en/make-games/free-
trial](https://www.construct.net/en/make-games/free-trial)

I'm a hobbyist, and usually use Construct, Phaser or vanilla JS.

I have put the source-file on
[https://github.com/niorad/Ninio](https://github.com/niorad/Ninio), you'll
need Construct 2 or 3 to open it, though (paid version I think).

Tom, please allow me to say thanks for your work! As front-end-dev, I'm
stunned by having C3 in the browser. I would highly enjoy reading about its
software-architecture and approaches one day, especially since it's not based
on any of the big front-end-frameworks.

~~~
TomGullen
You might enjoy Ashley's blog posts, he does dive into some of the design
decisions: [https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys-
blog-2](https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys-blog-2)

------
adrianh
In 2001, I was dating a girl long-distance. We'd emailed each other so often
(and cellphones weren't really a thing yet) that I decided to make a web-based
app for messaging ourselves.

It was a bespoke messaging system, essentially a forum that could only ever
have exactly two users. The killer feature was the ability to see whether the
other person had read the message you sent.

Plus, the page would auto-refresh and put "NEW" in the page's title, so it was
really easy to see whether there were new messages. (I seem to recall the web-
based email clients of the day hadn't yet started doing this, so it felt like
I had stumbled on some huge innovation.)

My girlfriend loved it, and we became engaged later that year. Not that I'm
necessarily implying causation here.

Over the years, I rewrote the system from scratch to evolve with my web
development skills. It began in Perl. About a year later, I rewrote it in PHP.

Then, circa 2005, I rewrote it in Python/Django. It was one of the very first
Django apps, as I did the conversion before Django was even open-sourced (I'm
one of the original developers).

The system is still humming along today, with its main purpose at this point
being a fun archive of all of our correspondence from the early days.

------
MrDresden
When my gf and I met she had recently started her Phd in environmental
sustainability science and was specifically looking into the fishing quota
system in Iceland with mathematical modeling in mind.

The catch, haul and other related data is available on the relevant government
agency's webpage down to ship granularity level through a rather nice web
interface. It however contains vast amounts of data, and there is no way to
get the data in bulk form (even asking the agency resulted in a 'No this is
sensitive data that we can't share in bulk form' answer).

So I was rather shocked when I heard her say that she had started copying the
data by hand. Knowing that it would take her ages, and would probably never be
possible for her to do, I wrote a small python scraper & data transforming
tool and set about scraping couple of GiBs of data into a normalized sqlite
database, which I then gave her to use with her R code.

We have been together ever since (4+ years).

------
monkeycantype
Ok this is not really what you asked, but it such an odd story, I think I
should share it. 20 years ago I had a job at a company where the general
manager hired a 'business consultant' who seemed to actually be a highly
entrepreneurial sex worker, who after having sex with him in his office,
(during business hours + it was a small office, less than 20 people ) she
presented him with an invoice for $30,000 for 'business services'

Shortly after her last visit to our office, she contacted me offering me an
extraordinarily well paid developer job.

She arranged a meeting in the dining room of the Hilton hotel, in which she
had rather bizarrely covered a table with papers, and about a dozen blinged
out mobile phones. After about an hour of semi-nonsensical rambling about
'innovation' and veiled threats and grand out of control promises, describing
a dynamic life in which we would be travelling the world, living in 'luxury
hotels' constantly moving hunting the next opportunity - she asked if I wanted
to 'meet the team' and 'they're all upstairs'. Curious to see what the hell
this madness was all about, I followed her upstairs to her hotel room,
(bracing myself, in case I needed to fight to keep my kidneys) and sure
enough, in a very small studio apartment style hotel room, with the bed pushed
to the back of the room, six developers, who barely acknowledged my presence,
were crammed around a trestle table, on hefty beige desktop pcs with clunky
low res cathode ray monitors. At least on the monitors facing me, they were
dragging and dropping visual basic controls.

She then made it clear that if selected to join her 'elite team' that a
substantial part of my salary would be paid in sexual services.

Curiosity satisfied, I got the hell out of there, but I've always wondered
what the hell was the story of those six men? Any of those six men, are you
here? what the hell were you doing?

~~~
giza182
Haha wow. Got a good chuckle out of this

------
simonbw
Somehow on dating apps my most successful profile line has been “Message me if
you want to learn an interesting fact about toast.”

This led to me “researching” a lot of facts about toast and getting deeper and
deeper into the bit. Long story short I now run toastfacts.com.

I only have about 7 facts on there right now, but I “discovered” some more
good facts last night which I plan to add to the site when I get home.

~~~
schoen
One of these is not quite right:

> The word “toast” comes from the Latin word “tost” meaning “toast”.

That's a Middle English word. You can trace its etymology further back to
Latin

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tostus#Latin](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tostus#Latin)

but it won't be just "tost" in Latin.

~~~
simonbw
There's a reason I put "researching" and "discovered" in quotes ;) That toast
fact is exactly as correct as it's supposed to be.

~~~
kazinator
_voster clunis tostus est_

------
matthewfcarlson
When I proposed to my now wife, I built a reverse geocache box. It had a one
way mirror on the top and button on the top. It showed you how far you were
and what direction you needed to move towards. It took us to various locations
where we had gone on notable dates. Once we got to a particularly scenic hill
side, it unlocked and the ring was inside with some roommates hiding in the
bushes with a DSLR.

There was just one minor hiccup, I taught my roommates some rudimentary C and
gave them a list of GPS coordinates they could pick from. The idea was that I
wouldn't even know where we were going. However, they made a mistake and
skipped an index in the array, leaving it as zeroed out data. We pressed the
button and it listed the next location as 3000 miles away to the East.
Luckily, I somehow had the foresight to install a reed switch in one of the
corners. I grabbed a magnet from the car and skipped that landmark, breathing
a sight of relief.

I have lots of good memories of drawing and sketching a secret project I
titled RGCP (reverse geocache proposal) on the floor of my crappy apartment
while she looked over my shoulder, trying to figure out what I was working on.

From a technical standpoint, it was a Teensy2.1 with a GPS serial module a SPI
LED screen, and a servo for the latch.

[https://hackaday.io/project/9449-reverse-geocache-
proposal](https://hackaday.io/project/9449-reverse-geocache-proposal)

~~~
ergwwrt
my girl would think the button is a bomb...which it is in a sense

~~~
matthewfcarlson
Yeah- I remember when I first gave it to her with no explanation, she was
quite confused. One of the key features is that you were allowed a limited
number of presses (I think only 40 or so). She wasted five or six pressed
before I stepped in a gave a few pointers.

------
hardeeparty
My gf at the time and I were looking to move to NYC for school. Apartment
hunting isn't super fun - especially in a place neither of us were super
familiar with that also happened to be NYC. AND we were going to attend
separate campuses.

So naturally I wrote a script that scraped Craigslist for listings (1) in our
budget, (2) calculated our individual commute times, (3) filtered the results
so that commutes were under an hour or something and (4) posted the listings
to a Slack channel with all the info I could scrape. It was working perfectly
until she dumped me several days later.

------
TN1ck
I created [https://pokemoncries.com](https://pokemoncries.com) because my
girlfriend said she was really good at this as a child and I thought she would
like it. She LOVED it. I polished it a bit more after this and posted it on
reddit. I was amazed by the reactions/usages. People did “Pokémon cry
challenges” on YouTube and it was quite viral in the Pokémon community. It has
still good metrics and I updated it with the last generation. I just like that
people have fun with it, I don’t think much more will come out of it.

I also created [https://anagrams.io](https://anagrams.io) with her/for her,
but that was mostly because she was so excited about it.

~~~
Minor49er
I just tried Pokemon Cries with my girlfriend and quizzed her on Gen 2. She
got 10/10 right

------
kthejoker2
They are thankfully no longer in existence, but I actually cut most of my mid
90s web dev chops building tribute pages to my girlfriends, replete with image
carousels, autoplaying songs, marquees ...

Their chief effect was to make me indirectly desirable to a lot of other girls
because they wanted their own vanity URL ..

It was a strange and glorious time.

~~~
theironlily
This is essentially instagram

------
DoofusOfDeath
Every day that I do programming for a living, it's coding for love.

Not sappy honeymoon-period love (eros), but the long-term-commitment version
of love that requires sacrificing my personal preferences in exchange for
providing for my wife's and children's material needs (storge / agape).

Obviously I'm not unique in my willingness to do this. But looking back on my
own life, the honeymoon-period love is bush-league.

------
scott113341
Robocalls are super annoying, but kind of an amazing way to ask someone out on
a date (not first date - followups where you know they'll say "yes").

Twilio has this thing called "Twilio Studio" [1] that is essentially a UI that
can be used to make these fairly easily. I've asked things like cuisine and
alcohol preferences, what time is best for them, and even done more creative
things like SMS a scammy link for them to send details in order to collect
their "grand prize" (the date).

Also, for the same person, I built an online game for her to play with her
students, tailored for speech-language pathology. She works in a public school
and was having a really hard time adapting curriculum to an online format (due
to COVID). She and her co-workers loved it, and since then, we've made a
lading page, more games, and thinking about turning it into a business! [2]

[1] [https://www.twilio.com/studio](https://www.twilio.com/studio) [2]
[https://slpgames.com](https://slpgames.com)

------
thom
One of the first programs I wrote on the Amstrad was a random number driven
matchmaking program that would pair up boys and girls in my primary school
class. I guess that was more titillation than love though.

I created a web based adventure in about 1998 for a girl’s birthday (featuring
the A-Team, the cast of Friends, Peter Stringfellow, Alf from Home and Away,
and many other celebrities whose photos I could find easily). I don’t have a
backup, archive.org only had it partially and it was full of absolute filth so
I wouldn’t really want to resurrect it.

In 2011 my wife (different woman, despite the excellence of the above) and I
were struggling for baby names so I made a Mac app that used Bayesian stats to
find out what kind of sounds and spellings you liked. I later polished it up
and released it on the Mac App Store to some small but satisfying number of
sales.

My son (named via the simpler algorithm of my wife deciding on her favourite
name) is now 9 and I write code for/with him. Yesterday we wrote an app to
show random arithmetic problems for him to practice on, in GAMBAS which is
excellent for kids learning to code.

My dad wrote programming books in the 80s and we grew up around computers and
learned to code quite young. I guess if anything I’d struggle to separate
programming from love even if I tried.

------
dudeinjapan
My girlfriend complained that I ignored her texts on the messenger app LINE
which is popular in Japan where we live. So I wrote a LINE chatbot that would
respond to her texts with lots of interest "I'm so glad you messaged me,
please tell me more!"

~~~
randycupertino
:D This is one of my favorites in the entire thread.

------
Ameo
I set up my VPS to ping the router of my long-distance girlfriend every second
24/7; it made me feel nice to know I was flipping bits in her router's memory
every second and having some tiny impact on the space she was living in
despite being hundreds of miles away.

I also encoded a love note into the Bitcoin blockchain but I prefer not to
dwell on that one.

Oh and for a while I added a HTTP header to all responses from my websites
professing my love.

And I'm just now remembering the secret chat command I added to my chatbot
that would tell her good night + I love you but only to her username.

This is all coming back to me after seeing this post, lol.

------
kirillzubovsky
At one point in the distant past, when a girlfriend broke up with me, I knew
that she was still occasionally reading my blog. I made sure that all traffic
from her ip and geolocation was getting Rickrolled. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
faitswulff
This seems more like hate-coding...

~~~
kirillzubovsky
No, not at all. Maybe just a playful stomp. Here's the explanation of how it
all went down - [https://bit.ly/31vAPes](https://bit.ly/31vAPes)

~~~
duggable
That was a great read - thanks for sharing!

------
narush
I learned web dev + svg animation last year to write a bunch of dramatic
essays processing my breakup - at the end of a 5 year relationship. I sent it
to my ex, and it was cathartic for the both us.

I didn’t know the best way to deploy it, so ended up using Google Domains + a
Google cloud Linux node server. It was terrible and went down all the time.

It should hypothetically be at [https://breakup.live](https://breakup.live) \-
but it’s currently down (and has been for god knows how long). Not sure what
the metaphor means but I guess that’s what moving on is all about!

------
Ozzie_osman
I downloaded my WhatsApp chat history with my then long-distance fiancee (now
my wife), and created a bunch of graphs and analysis. Everything from word
clouds to regression to anomalies (eg when she visited or I visited, chat
frequency dropped dramatically, etc).

~~~
sakawa
Wow, did you get something insightful from that?

Also, would like to say how you made all that?

~~~
Ozzie_osman
Pretty much a Python notebook. Well one thing I remember was usage of the word
"love". After we said it in real-life, there was a huge spike in usage in the
chat. But the interesting thing is that even before we said it directly (eg "I
love you" ), there was a build up of indirect usage (like "I love spending
time with you").

~~~
tejado
Would be great if you pubslish your notebooks :))

------
dzolob
For our wedding, I asked my now wife and a few friends and relatives to fill a
“guests’ distance matrix”, where 0 equaled superclose friends and 5 complete
strangers, and from a random initial layout, it bruteforced random swaps
between guests untill reaching minimum distance configurations. It was a
pretty dumb algorithm, but it took into consideration table capacity, party
size and closedness of tables.

Of course, the wife rejected most of the outcomes, but it did decide some of
the tables, spitted out interesting sittings and it helped us doing the global
layout.

At the end, the overall feeling was that everyone was close to their loved
ones. The energy was fantastic and everybody had a great time.

~~~
randycupertino
Organizing the seating arrangements at our wedding was such a pain. I remember
we suggested doing "self seating" where everyone could just eat wherever they
chose, and it was like I suggested inviting Satan himself to host the
ceremony. My mom and Aunts shot that down SO FAST.

~~~
andrewem
We did self-seating, and it worked out great. Many of the tables were exactly
what we would've chosen, like "spouse's work friends", but it also let us
avoid sticky situations like "number of aunts and uncles don't easily divide
by the size of the tables". We wound up with great hybrids like "several
cousins but also one aunt and uncle".

Later I learned that decades earlier two brothers had stopped speaking forever
over a misinterpretation of the searing arrangement at a family event - it was
meant to be a table of "close family", but the attendee assigned there thought
it was "the kids' table".

~~~
netsharc
But IMO sitting with everyone you already know is boring, one of the
interesting thing about weddings is meeting new people...

------
laudable-logic
For someone with whom I was quite smitten, I had come up with a plan to take
screenshots of the most romantic and intimate messages from the onset of our
relationship contained in our WhatsApp convo and have them turned into a
physical flip-book of sorts as my first Valentine's Day gift to her...

Approximately 3 months before VD, our relationship concluded. And then a week
before VD, back on... like a house on fire. With nary enough time to execute
the original plan, I pivoted the idea somewhat. I opted to export the 'best'
few weeks from the WhatsApp convo, then proceeded to stand up a quick MVC site
with the exported data presented as if it were a messaging app, complete with
the very same images we each used for avatars at that time. Hosted the site
off my lappy, and when she arrived for VD dinner, a link was sent to her
phone, seemingly out of nowhere. She clicked it, and was greeted with this
view, and the title "Budding Love" pinned as a header while she scrolled,
smiled, and swelled with tears...

She was a techie chick, but didn't know how to code. She ended up confessing
the best part was when I took her through and explained the purpose of all the
code that I wrote for this gift I made. She even called me out for committing
a sin or two (i.e. code dupe, embedded-SQL-in-C#, etc.) that I would often
bitch to her about seeing at work :)

------
GnarfGnarf
Wrote code to solve a Ladybug puzzle for my little daughter.

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.

------
infofarmer
My first ever coding experience was on a Casio fx-6800G, a low-res graphic
calculator with a limited Basic and a whopping 400-character user-programmable
memory.

Had a hopeless crush in middle school. Once spent hours painstakingly coding a
slowly-rendered pixel-perfect heart to show her. I think she thought it was
some built-in picture function, said “oh cute”, and lost interest the next
moment :-)

------
jedberg
My wife was a teacher for a long time. She was technologically advanced, so
she used _spreadsheets_ to track all her grades. Apparently this wasn't a
thing most people did.

She was required by the district to do report cards in this very crappy Mac
app, which then synced with a central server when you were done. The Mac app
had no import utility nor any keyboard navigation, so I had to help her
manually transfer the grades from the spreadsheets to the grading program, and
each kid required about 90 mouse clicks (times 32 kids).

After the first time, I decided I was going to figure out a better way.

I ended up reverse-engineering the save file format, which was sort-of-but-
not-really XML. I wrote a python program that could take CSV exports from her
spreadsheet and recreate the save files for the app, so I would run that, load
the app up, and then just spot check a few of the grades.

The first time I did the grades that way it took twice as long as just
manually entering it, but after that, doing report cards was a breeze.

------
dzink
In 2005, boyfriend (now hubby) and I were driving to spend the holidays with
his family. Lots of siblings, and spouses, no kids, and everyone was buying
gifts for eachother. The wishlist sites at the time were rudimentary - I
remember wishing we could filter to unreserved items, and gift partial amounts
towards bigger gifts, instead of trying to filter to trinkets on a budget. At
the time I told myself, surely Amazon would do this soon enough and being
pestered by the problem every giving occasion. Fast forward 10 years later,
and nobody had done anything about it still. Wishlists were done by retailers
in a way that benefits retailers and not even the least bit the wisher. On one
occasion, my husband’s wishlist link on a major online retailer was showing
feminine products ?!?! It turned out that the retailer had decided to default
everyone’s wishlists to a “recommended products” list with high margin
trinkets from that retailer. To top it off our baby registry was showing off
on google results. Look it up now - google a retail brand and your first name
and see how many people’s registries you will be able to see - many with their
address showing up too (especially for baby registries).

So I’d had enough and decided to build
[https://www.dreamlist.com](https://www.dreamlist.com) for our baby shower and
beyond. Now I’m adding all kinds of features for families and features for
love, and partial contributions to larger gifts, and collaborative shopping.
The sky is the limit. Competitors become stores and pummel you with ads, but
I’m thinking of doing SAAS for Love instead - from personal memories
preservation for loved ones to personal CRM, etc. The more my kids grow the
more value I see in this kind of differentiation - having a product of a
different caliber ready for them to use when they become of age, without
advertising and the manipulative crud that comes with it. Ping me if you are
interested in this space or have ideas.

------
Yen
When my partner and I were dating, there was a long period where we were long
distance, as they were in China teaching English. I can recall 3 projects that
came out of this time

I helped set them up with an SSH tunnel, and appropriate browser settings, for
bypassing the Great Firewall.

I wanted to teach them how to play Magic: The Gathering, and MTGO at the time
did not seem like a good option. I built a very basic 2-player game which
allowed for specifying a decklist as a set of image URLs, and had the basic
motion primitives of shuffling a deck, drawing, tapping cards, and such.

One particularly nice UI thing it had, which I wish I'd see more often, is
that it showed you each others cursor positions in real time, so you could
virtually "point" as part of discussion or communication. [The source for this
has likely been lost to the bitrot of time, but it might be buried somewhere
in a backup]

Finally, we liked to watch TV shows or movies together. This was initially
done as "download the same file, get on VOIP, and count-down to start", but
this was fiddly, especially if someone had to pause or rewind. I built a very
simple utility to synchronize playback of the file between two VLC instances.
It looks like this is actually my oldest github repo!
[https://github.com/YenTheFirst/VLCSync](https://github.com/YenTheFirst/VLCSync)

More than a decade later, they're no longer in China and thus don't need to
bypass the firewall, and we lost interest in M:tG, but we married, and the
video synchronization problem became remarkably simpler. :)

------
scott31
I made my gf a desktop application in Electron, but she left me for the QT dev
she told me not to worry about

~~~
fouc
Hope you learned to avoid Electron apps :grimacing:

------
audiodude
I've tried to make a Valentine's Day website for my wife every year. This
first one, with animations, was when she was playing Words With Friends alot.
It actually got some attention on Reddit when she posted it:
[http://abbymudd.islovedby.travisbriggs.com/](http://abbymudd.islovedby.travisbriggs.com/)

This one was kind of thrown together:
[https://abbymudd.isverybeautiful.travisbriggs.com/](https://abbymudd.isverybeautiful.travisbriggs.com/)

Also, as part of our bedtime routine, I write my wife a love letter email
every day. They're pretty short, usually around 5-8 sentences. Well for Love
Letter #400 (we celebrate certain numbers) I plugged all the previous letters
into the GPT-2 small model (74 I think?) and came up with a fine-tuned model
to generate automatic love letters.

I know that sounds cheesy and contrived, but she loved it. She thinks the
computer letters are hilarious and remarks that some of them, I could send to
her, and she wouldn't even notice the difference.

(Not going to link the GPT-2 website because it's a bit intimate).

------
cosmojg
[https://aslmath.cosmo.red/](https://aslmath.cosmo.red/)

My ex was a math major before switching gears to become a sign language
interpreter. She was disappointed by the quality of math-related ASL resources
and had this idea for an ASL math dictionary, so I built it for her. Fun fact,
despite the interactivity, it doesn't use any JavaScript!

The source code is hosted over here:
[https://github.com/cosmojg/aslmath](https://github.com/cosmojg/aslmath)

------
joshuawithers
There was a girl I liked years ago, maybe 15 years ago, and I bought her a
domain name that was her name, with hosting for a website and her own email
name@name.com

She had no idea what this meant and did not care about it at all, and nothing
romantic ensued.

The domain expired and is held by one of those spam exchanges now.

Love finds a way, even if that way is to an ad exchange.

------
de6u99er
I was working on a secure messenger app because I had an affair and she was
afraid he'd find out if we messaged each other.

Idea was that every message was encrypted with a specific password before it
was shared via a server infrastructure. The message once attempted to decrypt
with with the password would destroy itself after a successful or unsuccessful
decryption attempt.

I had a working web prototype using JSCrypt for the cryptography part when the
affair ended. Didn't continue with the project.

Worth noting that this was years before E2E encrypted messengers became
mainstream.

------
wheybags
I made a text adventure that you play in your file browser. The lines of
dialogue are filenames, and the movement / dialogue options are done by
switching folder (using synlinks on unices, and shortcuts on windows).

For each permutation of variables, there is a copy of the whole world. So, for
example, you are in the folder x2y3key0, and you select the "pick up key"
option, it will be a symlink to the x2y3key1 room, and there will then be a
copy of the entire dungeon, but with key set to 1. It's surprising how much
you can do, I even managed to have a combat encounter with "HP" for the player
and enemy. The limiting factor is the sheer number of folders you have to
make, it explodes fast when you add variables. I ended up with somewhere
around 40k iirc. Originally made it as a birthday present for my girlfriend at
the time, but I've been working on cleaning it up (and removing personal
parts) for a public version. Planned to post it on HN when I'm done.

Edit: I also made a treasure trail that involved typing encryption keys hidden
in the world into a little c program (xor encryption :D). The pièce de
résistance was when it eventually spat out an android app that would scan wifi
networks for a known ssid, to verify she was in a specific location before
revealing the next password. The ssid was "KFC" lol. Because I knew it was
guaranteed to be available.

------
TheAwesomeMango
The girl that I’m into stays up like 6 hours after I do (not in different
timezones, her sleep schedule’s just very screwed up), but this meant that I
wouldn’t be able to talk to her as much as I wanted to. I tried turning up the
volume of my phone and did everything I could on native iOS to figure out a
way to wake myself up whenever she’d text me on one of many different apps,
but none of it ever really worked. I don’t really have any real coding
experience, so it took me like half a day to figure out how to hack together
an app that would call my phone whenever a notification with one of her
usernames would pop up. For the most part, I’m still able to sleep well and
get stuff done, but I’m not sacrificing being able to talk with her to do it!

------
asadawadia
I wrote a daemon that triggers every morning at 8am. It goes and fetches a
positive quote, or affirmation, or advice and sends it as a text to the both
of us.

Both of us wake up to the same positive thought every day.

Today's was:

Positive thought for today: Whenever we are afraid, it's because we don't know
enough. If we understood enough, we would never be afraid

------
Lambdanaut
When I was a cheezy cheese-filled chedderlord, I wrote a simple genetic
algorithm that would evolve to spell a love message to my fiance. It was fun
to watch as it got closer and closer to the goal.

[https://gist.github.com/Lambdanaut/1649116](https://gist.github.com/Lambdanaut/1649116)

------
blintz
Made a game for my first boyfriend for our 1 year anniversary. It was a
knockoff off this great game “Candy Crushes Saga” (note the spelling, it’s not
the famous mobile game from King). Tells a funny (and LGBT-related) story and
the puzzles are challenging. [https://pierrecorbinais.com/2017/05/25/candy-
crushes-saga/](https://pierrecorbinais.com/2017/05/25/candy-crushes-saga/)

------
wcerfgba
My partner and I met on a full moon, and we like to observe our lunar
anniversaries. I made a small website to track the moon phase and how many
full moons since we met :)

[https://jalwyndar.neocities.org/](https://jalwyndar.neocities.org/)

------
d--b
Did a RPG for my wife’s birthday. It’s only 30 minutes from start to end but
full of personal references, so it was a good laugh. She’s not a gamer at all,
but she used to play zelda on her nes when she was a kid.

~~~
ta17711771
Wow, that's super cool. Did you write about it?

Thanks for sharing.

------
tialaramex
Not me, but someone I know well.

There's a primitive 2D limited actions per day (I think these were a thing
once?) web game built in the later era of Temple Ov Thee Lemur (if that name
means nothing to you that's fine, if you laughed at the pun that's also fine)
[http://cities.totl.net/](http://cities.totl.net/) \-- there is also an HTTPS
version but er, wow, TLS 1.0 and ancient insecure ciphersuites, I think you
may just as well use the plain HTTP site in terms of functional security,
maybe one of us will fix it some day. I am pretty sure it's all one terrifying
Perl hairball so fixing it might be unexpectedly tricky.

Big parts of Cities are just archaic memes, but one of the main things going
on there is that Chris, who built almost all of it, and is named 'King Chris
in the game (it's short for Fucking Chris) was courting a woman who now lives
with him and she played that game a _lot_ when it was first built. So e.g. she
abused the hell out of an addictive in-game amphetamine analogue, to get more
actions per day, and he added a mechanism to somewhat undo the dibilatating
effects of that, for her.

In the past few months her/their cat died and I believe Cities now has a late-
game cat quest in memorial to that cat although it's possible that the
subsequent arrival of new kittens in the house added a distraction which means
that work wasn't actually completed, I don't play any more so I don't know.

------
vegannet
I’ve made quite a few things _for love_! From websites that tried to quantify
the love through stats (number of messages exchanges, seconds together, things
we enjoyed) to text-based adventure games that were just reference after
reference to ourselves and our relationship. Unfortunately because they were
so personal I cannot share them as I don’t have the consent of the others
involved, however I would say that from my experience, code is a fine form of
expression of love and everybody who feels inspired should do it.

------
christiansakai
There was a girl that I liked. I'd been asking her out for a few times, and in
unconventional, or as some of my friends say, creepy ways. Lol.

I bought a domain name, <hernamehere>willyougooutwith.me and put it behind a
tinyurl link. On her birthday I gave a gift to her with a piece of paper of
that tinyurl.

If she visits that url, there will be a 3D envelope that she can click. If she
clicks that 3D envelope, a 3 page letter will come out, with her photo on the
first page that I stalk from Facebook (yeah I know I'm creepy lol), and then
on the second page a sentence or two asking if she's willing to go out with
me, and a list of restaurants. On the third page a form in which if she fills
it out I will get a text message saying that she fills the form out.

Obviously she didn't fill the form lol, but I asked her several days later
whether she saw the website, and she said yes.

My friends whom I told my attempt were all like "are you crazy? that's creepy
as hell, no way she's going to respond", but hey, I just learned how to code
(this was 7 years ago), and making the website was fun, so I went along with
it.

Now that I think about it, it was indeed creepy. And it didn't help that I was
just a FOB that didn't know how to be savvy around people. If I were to do it
again now, maybe I'll do it differently lol.

After that one, I did a few other attempts, but in the end she was never
interested in me at all. I am now happily married with another person.

~~~
quickthrower2
FOB?

~~~
ladberg
Fresh-off-the-boat, a (often derogatory) term for people who have just
emigrated to the US.

------
Wubdidu
For the proposal to my now wife I built a small tablet web application that
copied the Game Of Life board game that we frequently played. I put her Mii of
Tomodashis Life from various screenshots in as her character, sneakily stolen
from her 3DS screenshots. She had to roll (rigged) dices to advance the game
and each stop was an actual big life event (like us moving together, getting
her degree, finishing her state exam, ...). The last stop was the cliché "Will
you marry me?".

It was fun and infuriating to build it. In the end it only worked on her
tablet, nowhere else, because I had scaling and coordinate issues, but quickly
ran out of time. It was neat though! Her character had different facial
expressions (depending on the screenshots I could find) and it really felt
like an actual board game on a tablet, although obviously scripted.

She said she really didn't expect what would happen at the last stop, which
still confuses me - I thought it was so obvious that it was rigged and where
it would go! Really happy how it turned out for her.

As an homage, we put even more images of Tomodashis Life on the wedding
invitations (you can marry another Mii in the game, which incidentally was me
in her game - and her in mine, not that we used those screenshots). A friend
of mine, working for Nintendo and on the game, forwarded the PDF of the
invitation to the makers of the game and they even sent a message back. Just
all in all an awesome little thing born out of such a simple idea.

While I'd love to, I don't want to share it because of a lot of personal
information and the mentioned issues it has on "unsupported hardware".

------
jraph
I haven't really coded for love, but (partly) _by_ love.

At different points in time:

\- I have developed things that I imagined them using

\- I have developed things they would see (but were not the only target. e.g.
a website, or a tool that would be used by the team we were both part of)

\- I have developed things as part of an activity they were also part of (e.g.
a tool used in the same association)

Each time, it provides very powerful motivation to make things right, easy to
use, beautiful, or straight up keep on working on things.

In any case, the code was not specifically targeted for these people.

This also can works for friends, family and other people you love, even if
it's not Love. For instance, my last project was meant to watch series with my
sister while we were at a different location [1]. I don't recommend using it
though, I've since discovered [2], which probably does a better job for this
and works in the same way.

Try to imagine people you love using your stuff while you are building them.
It helps motivate getting things right and to keep going, at least for me. But
it worked and allowed us to have good laughs.

\- [1] [https://framagit.org/raphj/mpris-
sync](https://framagit.org/raphj/mpris-sync)

\- [2] [https://syncplay.pl/](https://syncplay.pl/)

------
ellimilial
Not exactly for the same intensity of the feeling but the first coherent
script I wrote was to impress girl I liked in junior high.

It was hand delivered on a beautiful red floppy, printed out some ascii art
and made noise. Who could resist? (spoiler: she somehow managed to).

------
29athrowaway
The debian Linux distro was named after "deb" (Debra) and "ian" (Ian).

Ian Murdoch is the creator of Debian and his ex girlfriend/wife's name is
Debra.

~~~
abiogenesis
He _was_ the creator of Debian. He passed away in 2015.

------
gorgoiler
_Charlotte, my dear, let me not die...

— Charlie_

 _Define ‘love’ Charlie. Love is not a toilet, get me?...

— Charlotte_

[http://www.ioccc.org/1990/westley.c](http://www.ioccc.org/1990/westley.c)

She loves you not. Thirty years on and this still gets me.

~~~
arexxbifs
20 years ago or so, I stumbled across a few poems written as perl code. They
struck me as very clever at the time, but I haven't been able to find them
again.

------
abriosi
Yes I did.

You can see the result here,

[https://thiseyedoesnotexist.com/story/](https://thiseyedoesnotexist.com/story/)

~~~
bartvk
Very good writeup, my compliments.

~~~
abriosi
Thank you. I have spent around a week coding it.

It took 1 month for 2x 1080 GTX to train it.

------
revx
For an anniversary I built a (password-protected) site which showed a search
box. When my wife searched for terms related to her, it would bring up
pictures, stories, poems, etc. I'd had a bunch of friends secretly submit
their own media so that there was a bunch of content! It took me probably a
year to put everything together and come up with all the terms, but she loved
it!

------
sharpemt
I did this as part of my wedding proposal.

I wrote up a simple web app that accepted two different secrets to "login"
(one for each person). Once logged in, you were presented with a photo and
asked for a comment (first thing that comes to mind or a reaction).

If only one comment was submitted, it would tell you to remind your partner to
leave a comment. Once both parties submitted a comment, the photo displayed
with both comments and a countdown to the next photo. The countdown varied
from 12-48 hours randomly - to give me time to figure out when to actually
propose. This ran for several weeks total.

It was fun to see our comments - sometimes they would nearly match. Or reveal
something we didn't remember about a historical date/event we shared.

I eventually used the site to pop the question, and then made the whole thing
into a photo book, including a word cloud built from each of our comments. Was
really fun to see each of our most common words.

It was an incredibly simple, fun project using flask/sqlite on an ec2
instance.

------
intenscia
I created an extremely simple wedding website for our day
[https://github.com/intenscia/Wedding](https://github.com/intenscia/Wedding)

~~~
etimberg
Thank you for opensourcing this. I took some inspiration when I built the
website for my own wedding

------
indigochill
Gosh, most of my side projects these days are for love.

1\. Making a lite data analytics platform to help out a very close friend
analyze some campaigns for an NPO she works for.

2\. An interactive chord visualizer that visualizes triads in 3 dimensions
(she's an amateur artist and intrigued by the visual side, I'm a musician and
intrigued by mappings between sound and sight)

She's engaged to someone else now, but I still think the NPO thing is maybe a
legitimately good business idea that I just need to shop around to gauge the
wider demand.

The chord visualizer's also still neat. It's also a test-bed for a larger-
scale ambition of mine of developing a platform for non-programmers to create
interactive educational visualizations (in the vein of Nicky Case's articles,
but with an emphasis on zero-code). That one's getting built for hate. Hate of
the way our education system is held back for commercial gain.

------
kcon
I developed a VR experience as part of my proposal to my now-wife:
[https://kevintechnology.com/2018/05/03/vr-
proposal.html](https://kevintechnology.com/2018/05/03/vr-proposal.html)

------
mherrmann
I wanted to take my gf out to dinner to a notoriously overbooked restaurant. I
wrote a script that monitored their web site for be reservation slots, and
voila within 5 minutes of them making them available I was able to book one
for our first year anniversary :-)

------
mibollma
I once coded my smart speaker so you could ask it who the most beautiful woman
is and it would answer with the name of my then girlfriend, now wife.

~~~
kubanczyk
Mirror mirror on the wall?...

------
take_a_breath
I took all my moms hand-written recipes and made dithechef.com after she died.
Never added any features.

[1] [http://www.dithechef.com/](http://www.dithechef.com/)

~~~
dole
I’m going to make the Reuben Dip and will be back for more. You really should
at least add some quick CSS, color and friendlier fonts, would’ve impressed
her more. Get some use out of the domain!

------
throwy555
I made a simple, single-page site with some ASCII art [0]. But because the
page is entirely stored in the URL it will exist as long as one of us keeps
the link [1]. It wasn't overly difficult, but she appreciated the gesture!

[0]: [https://git.io/JJ1Ta](https://git.io/JJ1Ta)

[1]:
[https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages](https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages)

------
sanj
This maybe considered the opposite: live preventing coding.

I designed a matching algorithm for a dating website - okcupid - just before
dating my (now) wife.

I met with their CTO and convinced him it’d work over lunch at Mary Chung’s.
He gave me the keys to the source so I could start the implementation.

Unfortunately, for OKC, I met my wife with a manual implementation of the
algorithm. And thereby lost all time and inclination to continue.

(For those that care, it was a naive TF-IDF approach. )

------
cheez
> Things were a little crazy and happened over 3 different continents in a
> very short time.

These are generally indications of an underlying mental issue. Be on the
lookout for it:

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzv7xx/heres-why-
narcissi...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzv7xx/heres-why-narcissists-
tend-to-come-on-too-strong-early-in-relationships)

~~~
justforyou
That's an incredible leap given those details.

Occams razor would suggest young love.

~~~
cheez
Good to be aware, in any case. Multiple continents is the signal.

------
probinso
I spent weekends and evenings on call with my dad helping him learn to program
and discussing IR/NLP so that being could develop tools to better organize
texts about clinical trials so that he could be better support for my mom's
multiple myeloma diagnosis. He ended up developing a lot of visualisations and
customized search tools.

shared because relevant, but don't really want it hosted

------
ljm
I was adopted at birth, and the start of my career as a programmer revolved
around helping build websites and services for clinical psychologists and
adopted children, as well as maintaining the forums and other channels where
clinical psychologists talked about, well, all the things you talk about on
forums. I made a custom CMS using CakePHP and did my damnedest to link it up
with the forum. Back then I had barely a year of experience doing programming
but somehow I made it all work while I was on sick leave for depression.

I kept that up for a fair few years until I got burned out with handling a
full time job and going home to do more of it. However, looking back and
looking at where things are now...well, some of it remains:
[https://clinpsy.org.uk/](https://clinpsy.org.uk/)

That's my first legit project (amongst a couple) and I wish I had that fervour
and desire to do the same again. The community around that was fantastic and
it was pivotal in my decision to find my independence.

------
orta
About decade ago a girl I knew moved off to Australia for a year, as her iPad
was her main communication device, I made a just-for-her iPad app with Spotify
playlists I could edit from my computer.
[https://orta.io/Mixtapes/](https://orta.io/Mixtapes/)

She's now my wife.

(and you don't have permission to put this on that site)

------
moultano
I wrote some code to find good names for our kids. We were looking for Hindi
names easy to pronounce in English so I wrote a roughly phonetic character
based language model. I trained the language model based off names from US
census data, and scraped a bunch of baby name websites for Hindi baby names.
We picked both our kids' names using the list.

------
rkagerer
Mine isn't a love story, but a treasure hunt:
[https://i.imgur.com/OH1Fotf.png](https://i.imgur.com/OH1Fotf.png)

Stop reading here if you want to try your hand at it yourself!

 _...spoiler follows..._

Several years back I met someone at a conference who made an impression. She
had good technical chops and a refreshing sense of humility. We spoke on many
topics, including trepidation over a big life decision she faced. Out of
encouragement, and perhaps an eye to eventual recruitment, I spent that
evening creating this little challenge for her.

It started with a QR code linking to a snippet of source that draws an old IBM
punch card onto the screen. To decode it, she had to learn a bit about 70's
technology and the IBM 80 column format.

A couple days later, I got back a short program of her own that correctly
decoded the characters and ended with the comment:

    
    
        // TODO: discover all of your secrets
    

which I expect reflected a cheerful indignance she felt upon discovering her
efforts so far only revealed a bock of ciphertext.

Her code had clarity and elegance, and included ASCII art of a punch card
which I first thought was documentation but actually served as a sort of
Rosetta stone constant used to derive character mappings.

Watermarks on the punch card hinted toward the encryption algorithm used in
the Enigma machine, and by the end of the day she'd cracked the code. It
decrypted to a short but heartfelt message of inspiration. She loved the
puzzle and I had a blast creating it.

And before you ask... yes, she was cute, but I was already spoken for (and
IIRC I think so was she).

Thanks for asking such a poignant question, it's great reading all the other
beautiful stories your submission has evoked.

------
Sodaware
Back in 2004 I made a Pocket PC app for my girlfriend; it was an interactive
map that showed how to get from the bus stop to my university. She was
visiting from abroad and didn't know the area, but wanted to come visit me
after my lectures. It had photos of the important junctions and landmarks that
could be enlarged by tapping on the map.

She did not get lost.

------
sleepydog
This is not mine, but you reminded me of the story of the author of Higher
Order Perl, who made a program to generate quilt designs to impress his
girlfriend.

[https://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/notes.html#sl-2](https://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/notes.html#sl-2)

------
neogodless
I used a pinch of code to propose to my wife.

First, I had friends and family of my (then) girlfriend send me videos
describing what makes her awesome.

Next, I generated a dozen or so 6 character alphanumeric codes, and had Zazzle
print them out for me.

Third, I built a web site that made it foolproof to type in codes and then
play the videos. It had a huge textbox, and it turned lowercase into
uppercase, and only accepted valid characters. It played the videos full
screen. A few seconds before video ends, it has an overly with a hint for a
scavenger hunt.

On the morning of the proposal,I made her breakfast in bed, gave her a gift
and an envelope with the (very short) URL and the first code. After she
watched the video and saw the hint, we got ready and I drove her to the
location. Then gave her another envelope!

And so it went, until we arrived at our favorite waterfall hike, and at the
foot of a waterfall, I handed her my camera and while she was distracted, got
the ring out and got on one knee.

------
jpgreens
I made a webapp with a button on it. When first visiting the site the user was
prompted with "What's your name". The second prompt was "Who are you thinking
of". Next, a link appeared that the user would share with the person they were
thinking of. When cliking the button, nothing would happen unless the other
party also clicked within a certain timeframe. The idea was to see wether if A
thought about B, would B also be thinking about A. I built it in the beginning
of my relationship with a very special girl, and we have used it a lot since
then. We also used to the watch Netflix shows at the same time, clicking the
button to mark the moment when to press play. Later I also enabled realtime
drawing on the webapp, with each person having a different color. It all
worked with a simple jquery frontend and a nodejs websocket server.

------
devenblake
I'm not a good C programmer by any means. I'm in high school and still
learning and most of my knowledge is straight from K&R. That being said, I
made this short program for someone I care about:

view-
source:[https://archive.org/download/aurora_20200721/aurora.c](https://archive.org/download/aurora_20200721/aurora.c)

Here it is without the ASCII art:

view-
source:[https://ia801401.us.archive.org/32/items/aurora_20200721/pre...](https://ia801401.us.archive.org/32/items/aurora_20200721/preobfuscated-
aurora.c)

Both compile with a quick `cc aurora.c`. It prints random ASCII to fill up the
terminal (I use it at 80x24), and at some point it adds my friend's name
(aurora) and highlights it.

She said it was cute.

~~~
lancebeet
Cute. If I'm not mistaken there is a roughly 1% probability that it won't
reach 11 instances of ! in which case it won't print your friend's name. Is
that intentional? Otherwise maybe you could generate a random position for the
aurora string before you run the loop and check for that instead of using the
variable a.

~~~
devenblake
Yeah, I think that actually happened in practice too. Fortunately she doesn't
know how to compile C code anyway so I was the one providing the screenshot ;)

------
CSDude
I made a pink heart with an FPGA for my girlfriend who had a VGA/VHDL
assignment. Having only limited knowledge as a CS 2nd year student, I wrote
hundreds of ifs to generate it but at least I generated those ifs by Java,
wasting a lot of computing units (or something?). She liked it though.

------
katsume3
Interesting you say this, because I've seen many side projects on Github that
have 'Made with love' in the footer. This typically means the project was
_crafted_ lovingly and with care (Something that can be absent when software
is rushed out the door at break-neck speed)

------
adroitboss
When I was in High school I was crushing on a girl who was really into video
games. Old fashioned Zelda video games to be exact. Myself, knowing absolutely
zero about game programming took it upon myself to create a 2d game for her in
the 3 weeks before Valentine's day. So I crammed all the c# game tutorials I
could possibly find until I made a top down game where I character collected
hearts that spawned randomly on the screen. It turned out pretty crappy to be
honest. It flickered because I didn't have rendering correct and the character
teleported because I didn't fully understand smoothing motion using the game
time delta. But it got me started on a path which lead me to today. She really
liked the game, but in the end we weren't meant to be.

------
BerislavLopac
Literally my first reaction was "what a great thread, I have to share this on
Hacker News!" :D

------
K0balt
I love that she's a subdomain. Very pragmatic, and pretty bold to step out on
that limb from the getgo. I mean, it's not like every relationship has to last
forever, but that's the digital equivelant of buying lingerie for your "next"
girlfriend lol

------
Kelamir
I'm currently writing a simple program in Lisp for gamification of reading
books: we have to pay with work done in pomodoros to earn the right to loan
one. Making it for me and a friend of mine.

It's my first programming project, and it motivates to know my friend needs it
too.

------
jeiben
My wife and I created a game as a save the date for our wedding, with 8-bit
avatars of ourselves that guests could play to "save the date". A number of
guests played it multiple times in an attempt to be on the high scores board -
we even gave out prizes to the top three scores!

We got a lot of feedback that other people would want to be able to have a
similar game, so we rebuilt a customizable version where people can create
their own avatars, dialogue, and other game aspects. Obviously this is a rough
year for save the dates, but we're still pretty pleased with how it has turned
out so far.

[https://www.pleasesavethedate.com](https://www.pleasesavethedate.com)

------
patrickdavey
My partner works in education and was trying to launch a new programme, IT
were super slow and refusing to update a banner on a page (Moodle site).

I quickly tested that JavaScript would be executed on the parts of the page
she could control, so, I just used a simple script to replace the banner.

Somewhat unfortunately, my test to see if scripts were executed was to make an
alert popup with "[name] is damn sexy" and a colleague of hers happened to be
refreshing the page at the same time ;) (this was at 8pm when most people were
home)

It was totally fine, banner was replaced, colleague laughed and I relearned
the lesson to test things out in non visible ways (and with safe language).

------
noir_lord
In college (uk meaning not US), smart attractive girl on the course, she could
just not get her head around the programming part at all so I taught her
enough to pass (and in truth more than half the code in her final project was
mine but typed by her) and in spending time together we realised we where
attracted to each other.

We dated for a while, was a lot of fun.

We could either pick the set project or any other project that would
demonstrate what they didn't specify was the language (assuming people would
use the one taught in class) so I did a VT100 emulator in Object Pascal and
she did the set assignment in the taught language (sadly VB6).

------
fbi-director
As a 14 year old, learning to code and having written some small programs, I
got word that the woman (27) I thought I was in love with, was getting
married. It was just a crush but at that hormone filled age, my mind was a
mess (almost as bad as it is now! )

It's common to play games and have other activities at wedding parties here.
So I spent about a week developing Get The Picture software, to be used at the
wedding.

Man I was so nervous it would crash or something, but it all went fine.

I remember the weird kiddo feeling that if I could have some influence over
what happened at their wedding, my crush wouldn't have _really_ been lost. Oh
the cringe...

------
sgloutnikov
In the name of love, I used to send this girl a song every day so that when
she woke up there would be a song from me which she could listen to in the
morning. My idea being that it was a small romantic gesture showing her I
thought of her every day. At the time, it was a long distance thing/attempt
which ended up not working out later in person, but I had put together a
simple website which listed the songs [0].

[0]
[https://sgloutnikov.github.io/Radina/](https://sgloutnikov.github.io/Radina/)

------
scottcheng
[https://an-ocean-apart.vercel.app](https://an-ocean-apart.vercel.app)

I used to be in a long-distance relationship. Like many lovers who were apart,
we had lots and lots of phone calls. I made a visualization of them, and gave
to her as a gift on Chinese Valentine's Day.

The name "an ocean apart" came from the Julie Delpy song [0] from Before
Sunset. Oh I was young and romantic.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohiVnAyRDAA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohiVnAyRDAA)

~~~
neilparikh
This is really well done! Good job :)

------
ralphc
You kids with your fancy websites. Our 36th anniversary is this week. My first
"love" program was a Windows 3.1 application based on the cute banter we had.
Hand-drawn icon! Writing text to the Windows Device Context!

In the 90's we got a dachshund, and I made a "dachshund head bouncing around
the screen" app for the PalmPilot.

More recently, I made her an Alexa skill that tells you the weather at the
track where this week's NASCAR race is being held, and a program that texts us
when her favorite needle magnets come up on Etsy.

------
mfeldheim
Absolutely. Had a blog only she would read. Added a new inspiring quote, a
song or a picture every evening and even added a comment section to capture
her reaction. It’s no longer online sadly

------
helpmepropose
I’m a quirky person and wanted to propose to my girlfriend in an
unconventional way. I’m also a coder with a long history of making weird
websites for good causes. So I turned my proposal into a gamified art
piece/website: [https://helpmepropose.live](https://helpmepropose.live)

It hasn’t gotten as much traction as I’d hoped, but I still had fun making it
and spending way too much time on that pixel art that perhaps no one will ever
see...

------
kroltan
Not out of that kind of love, but one of the first games I made, when I was
about 11, was a "birthday party simulator" for my elder sister who was sick at
the time.

It was a very simple game as you can imagine, and I have since lost the
project files, however. I think it was made in Game Maker 7. I do not recall
the exact mechanics but it had various birthday activities like filling and
popping balloons, eating cake, and talking to people (not much in terms of
dialogue though!)

------
rnotaro
I've made this quick&cute webpage[0] with my ex SO's favorite Pokemon years
ago.

The audio[1] is not autoplaying anymore except on Edge / IE.

[0]
[https://rickynotaro.com/ma/eeveeGood.html](https://rickynotaro.com/ma/eeveeGood.html)
[1]
[https://rickynotaro.com/ma/ma/eevee/pokemon.mp3](https://rickynotaro.com/ma/ma/eevee/pokemon.mp3)

------
thefrog
I have a website that I once coded for love. I don't want to share details
because of my identity, but I loved a distant woman. We had strong affection
for each other but at the time the romance wouldn't work for many reasons. The
website mirrored something she worked on (similar to a fashion blog, but not
that subject - again, identity) and I made this one in a few hours and sent it
to her. She loved it.

Three years later, we're together - and couldn't be happier.

------
AIX2ESXI
Haha, I go beautiful mind on occasion. As a system administrator, I see the
entire world as systems. Everything I do is for attainment of a higher state;
smooth, functional, beautiful and no wasted energy. From Unix server design,
the flow of home office and way I hone my body. " want a perfect body, want a
perfect soul. Want you to notice... " It' my swan song to humanity. Mostly
love, with a tinge of hate at times...

------
city41
I made this to celebrate my wife and I getting engaged (almost a decade ago)
[https://city41.github.io/L7/](https://city41.github.io/L7/)

It is designed to go with John Butler Trio's "Funky Tonight", so here is a
video of it
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpcn84pc7-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpcn84pc7-8)

------
belden
Naming our first child was tricky. My wife and I had a final list of 5 names,
any of which would work as a first-middle combination. She’d randomly toss out
two: “Washington Stewart? Kennedy Frakes?”

After a few minutes of that I just wrote the loop to give us all possible
combinations; and from there we selected the name.

It took 2 minutes tops, and I’d have forgotten about this except she still
talks about how I wrote a program to name our child.

------
axegon_
Long long ago in a galaxy far far away... Yes. She was practically obsessed
with puzzles that transition into the real world. Correct me if I'm wrong but
iirc, these days they are known as warp(or larp, can't remember) games. So I
built one secretly, which picked up at the time. Something like 120 people
registered(all those dozens of Stephen King novels came in handy when I had to
make it a bit more sinister). There was just one problem - as someone who
started writing programs when he was 10 and was magnitudes more obsessed with
programming than she was with those games, I over-engineered the crap out of
it and no one managed to solve the cryptographic/steganographic puzzles. Tl;dr
epic fail at it's finest.

------
hrishios
I've built quite a few things for love over the years, including a blood sugar
prediction app for my partner, a digital mix tape, and a silly not so me and
my partner could give each other brownie points.

Here's a small summary: [https://hrishioa.github.io/my-home-cooked-
meals/](https://hrishioa.github.io/my-home-cooked-meals/)

------
jstarry
My wife is incredibly good at MineSweeper so I made her a clone for
Valentine's a few years ago:
[http://valenmines.herokuapp.com/](http://valenmines.herokuapp.com/)

I used the project as an opportunity to learn ReactJS. I thought she would
enjoy the twist of the layout being heart shaped instead of rectangular but I
think she's a purist ;)

------
Spoom
My first present to my wife was a Sudoku generator (written in PHP) that she
could use at work, since other entertainment websites were blocked.

------
goloroden
I built a love story „movie“ using the Office assistants from a C# program.

Later that year we got married, and we still are - 14 years later

~~~
jimktrains2
Liar! C# isn't anywhere near 14 years old! It came out when I was in
highschool! From the wiki:

> It was developed around 2000 by Microsoft as part of its .NET initiative and
> later approved as an international standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) in 2002 and
> ISO (ISO/IEC 23270) in 2003.

Wait....2000 was 20 years ago. F. I'm getting old.

(I realize this feels pointless, but I honestly had to double-check the date
it came out because I didn't want to accept I've been out of high school for
16 years.)

------
nojvek
Not sure if this counts, had a crush on a girl, did her maths and physics
homework for her so she could spend more time at dance practice.

Never quite hung out but liked the attention she gave me. In hindsight felt
like she used me but meh, can’t deny it felt good to get those complements
from someone who was way out of my league.

------
erikrothoff
I made a clone of bubble shooter for my girlfriend (at the time). It was a
christmas present from me to her. It was a great learning experience and she
loved it! [https://github.com/erkie/KM-Bubble-
Shooter](https://github.com/erkie/KM-Bubble-Shooter)

------
klyrs
I've named projects after people I loved. Those named after unrequited crushes
are still cherished... all else is regret. It's never the person's name.
Sometimes a name will match their initials, maybe there's a subtle double-
entendre that references something I admire about the person.

------
mgr86
A year out from our wedding date I sent my wife a link to a website I made
her. It was small, but it explained that each day it would contain a new
reason why I loved her. Early in our relationship my wife gave me a print out
with 365 reasons why she loves me. So I took my inspiration from that list.

------
kyawzazaw
I asked my ex-girlfriend in highschool if she would be my girlfriend through a
C program.

It was a simple multi-step y/n prompt questions, with if/else conditional
switches.

At the time, we were both trying out this CS50 course and C was the first part
of it.

She said yes by sending me back a similar script and we dated for a while.

------
Dragony
This is something I made as entertainment for my significant other:
[https://wasd.ch/keyboard/](https://wasd.ch/keyboard/)

I had some spare time and decided to code something small that would be a fun
timewaster with some inside jokes.

------
twic
I wrote an animated Valentine's Day card in the form of a Java applet for a
girlfriend at university. It was extremely basic - soppy romantic phrases in
various shades of pink drifting slowly round the screen and bouncing off the
edges. She liked it, as far as I remember.

------
m0ngr31
For my last wedding anniversary, I wrote a "Choose your own adventure"
Telegram bot for my wife. She got prompts that had vague hints about different
activites we would then do. And depending on what she picked other options
would appear later. It was a big hit.

------
errantspark
I knew I would spend some time without an internet device and beyond reliable
communication. I wrote us a private chat website that was something like 2kb
so that I could load it up on stranger's phones over 2G and still get messages
from, and out to my partner.

------
coding_for_lov
For some reason, my girlfriend has a lot of random and anonymous people
emailing her / texting her.

One person became extremely egregious. So I put a tracking pixel in one of her
responses to him, collected his IP address, and threatened to go to the
police.

------
psychomugs
Made my high school girlfriend a motorized cat picture as a graduation gift.
It was a picture of Pusheen eating a tassel; I swapped the tassel out for a
real tassel and wired a servo with an ATTiny to make Pusheen “eat” it with a
press of a button.

------
dehrmann
Not me, but a coworker learned how to program for the Gameboy and wrote a game
that proposed, showing an animated ring and popping the question.

Sadly, I think the relationship fell apart, but it was a pretty clever way to
propose, and it shows a lot of dedication.

------
cmclaughlin
My girlfriend who is now my wire really liked the TV show American Idol. So I
jailbroke my iPhone and wrote a robodialer so she could vote hundreds of times
without touching her phone (which, for context, was a Nokia flip phone)

------
soneca
I made a countdown to the hour of our ceremony in our wedding website.
Unexpectedly, but predictably, after the ceremony the countdown become a
_”count up”_ counting the days, hours, minutes, and seconds that we are
married.

------
kevincox
My girlfriend was moving away, but we enjoyed playing Azul so I made a web
version. We did play a number of times but now it is mostly idle.

[https://tiles.kevincox.ca](https://tiles.kevincox.ca)

------
tasogare
I once made a very small page generating a random number of sheeps emoji, for
my ex-gf to count them. This is because she said to me she wanted to count the
sheep sometimes before sleeping. She enjoyed the attention.

------
sandGorgon
[https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/806/wanda-the-
fish/](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/806/wanda-the-fish/)

------
ramshanker
[https://ramshanker.in/love/propose.html](https://ramshanker.in/love/propose.html)

Built 2016 :) Google App Engine Free Quota. Lats see how long it continues.

------
seiferteric
Haha yes, when I was learning D3D and c++ in the early 2000's I made a
rotating colorful cube with my girlfriend's name on the sides... for some
reason. I don't think I have the code anymore.

------
brutus1213
I did something a long time back when handheld GPS receivers were just coming
out. Did a long walk in the shape of a heart. Was surprised it turned out as
well as it did. Don't have it online anymore.

------
dariosalvi78
Ok it's not coding but I modded a PC. That was in the early 2000, when the PC
modding fashion started, there was no ready-made solution and components were
not easy to find in my city, it was all DIY.

------
unwoundmouse
[https://twitter.com/lil_morgy/status/1291871226936221697](https://twitter.com/lil_morgy/status/1291871226936221697)

------
petarb
I made a website for my wife, girlfriend at the time, asking her to to marry
me. The domain was hannahwillyoumarry.me

It had a picture of our favorite beach spot we frequented along with the
question.

------
ctgvcevwr
Not my own, but years ago I learned Dovecot exists because Timo's significant
other at the time was a mail administrator who found their existing IMAP
daemon insufferable.

------
HorizonXP
I wrote Instacart’s first Android app and used the money to buy my now-wife an
engagement ring, fly to Rome, and surprise her on the last day of her Europe
trip.

------
swiley
I've written lots of small things. Some of them maybe used love as an excuse
to explore some interesting idea.

For valentines day once I wrote a stupid little hack in javascript where some
hearts bounce around the screen and leave trails. I sent it to a bunch of
girls including one that I _really_ liked.

I have this penpall in Germany, at one point we were really close and would
talk all the time. Before bed we would always send eachother long strings of
something (it was Sl[eE]*p for a while, then when emojis became popular it was
the sheep emoji) so I made her a little clock with sheep around it.

I probably was sexting more than I should. I used to not keep a pin on my
phone (it's so inconvenient and on android you don't even need a lock screen)
so to keep the kids at church from going through everything I wrote a little
web page that lets you encrypt images along with a text note and generate a
data: URI that has a tiny (homebrew! yikes!) RC4 implementation to decrypt
them. The whole thing was entirely client side and kind of nifty IMO. I think
I got one person to use it once. I ended up finding some ugly bugs in the
application (not that it mattered, it's RC4 heh) for example the original
version always included an image (it would be a black png that was always the
same size if you didn't add one yourself.) So if someone sends a text note
with no image and then sends an image using the same password you could
decrypt the first few hundred bytes of the secret image without knowing the
password.

There was a girl in college I was dating and I made her a display hack in GLSL
that draws a 3d flower using the cosin rose. It was rendered by relating the
fragment brightness to the distance of a bunch of points in orthographically
projected 3d space. The whole thing unfolded from a single bright blob and as
time went on the points would move across each other making this pulsating
pattern that got more and more intense until the whole thing shrank back into
the single bright point. I added some code to the viewer that would check the
phone's accelerometer/gyroscope so when you moved the phone around the flower
would move too which give it this pretty intense VR feel.

At another point in college I was dating this other girl, it seemed like we
would be apart for a while and she didn't like video games so I wrote a chess
program that would let us play over text by sending moves in algebraic
notation (you could also play it on the same computer, it would even check
argv[0] for "cgi" and give you a web interface.) I thought I had written
something pretty minimalist and was all proud of myself until I found the 4k
chess program for z80.

------
erulabs
My wedding website was fun to build! [https://andi-and-
seandon.com](https://andi-and-seandon.com)

------
tomek_zemla
Yes, here... [http://www.pixelbox.com/love](http://www.pixelbox.com/love)

------
peteforde
I helped my love learn to code.

It's been one of the most gratifying, intimate and occasionally frustrating
things I've ever done.

------
aey
I wrote a Makefile that applied a bunch of imagemagick filters to thousands of
photos. Married with two kids now :)

------
bkayranci
I found a stored xss vulnerability on school website and I wrote a payload
that only she can see. :)

------
greggman3
Do wedding sites count? It seem like lots of people make wedding websites now-
a-days.

------
mettamage
Nope, but the first date did involve that I would teach her JavaScript in a
bar.

------
lloeki
Recently, my fiancée is into Christmas a lot, so I set out to build an advent
calendar.

She likes jigsaw so I printed a photo of us from back when we met on a
generated multiple-of-24 piece jigsaw pattern to cut.

But that was a bit too simple. She enjoyed playing Human Resource Machine
which was the closest she ever got to programming.

So on the back, I printed IOCCC-style Ruby code shaped in the form of a
Christmas tree. With the pieces cut out and jumbled, you’d have no idea what
the code would look like without solving the front side.

Once solved, when typed and run, it would reveal an URL to a XKCD-style
drawing I made for the occasion.

It was tough to make code not too short nor too long, not too complex nor
obvious, and able to survive the jigsaw cutting! Anyway, she enjoyed it
through and through.

A quick extra en passant, a bash one liner I quickly banged out some years
ago:
[https://github.com/lloeki/toolbelt/blob/master/hearts](https://github.com/lloeki/toolbelt/blob/master/hearts)

------
hyfgfh
I did a lot of homework trying to score a few points! I didn't though

------
muzani
I was in a long distance relationship for about 4 years.

I bumped into this on xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/99/](https://xkcd.com/99/) and
it gave me an idea.

I told my gf then that I made a little program for her. It printed out the
little plaintext heart and then copied "i love you" into the clipboard.

She was impressed enough by the heart and I told her in chat to press CTRL+V.
A friend of hers walked into her dorm at the time. Her friend was non-tech and
really impressed with the gimmick, and that made my gf even prouder of it.

We married a few years later. My daughter has been doing zoom classes since
corona. My wife used her laptop for this (which still uses Win XP) and we
found the old program, which still runs fine.

------
throwaway3189
i made
[https://chelsea.thingslovemademedo.com](https://chelsea.thingslovemademedo.com)

------
agumonkey
made a myspace template, does that count ? oh and a patch for a space agency
too (agency which refuses to hire me, how pretty)

------
unlivingthing
I like your version of Chelsea #2

------
quickthrower2
It’s like Randall from xkcd made a website while being in love. Awesome!

