
Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making? - shovel
I&#x27;m thinking of tiny projects along the lines of single-function tools like domainr. But also game-changing ebooks, newsletters, courses.
======
mk4p
[https://izuded.com](https://izuded.com)

(i.e., "iz u ded?")

I made this because I adopted a puppy and realized that, if I got hit by a bus
on a Friday, he could be stuck in his crate for days before anyone realized.
Morbid, but useful.

It texts you every X days and asks, "u ded?" \-- if you don't click "naw"
before X days pass, it'll notify your contacts.

It's a portfolio project to show what I've learned in the realm of
"serverless" architecture. Details about its construction here:
[https://medium.com/@marclar/iz-u-
ded-713594fd80e9](https://medium.com/@marclar/iz-u-ded-713594fd80e9)

~~~
blauditore
Google has a similar feature to give trusted people access to your data if
you've been inactive for a given amount of time (so probably dead):
[https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive](https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive)

~~~
cosmolev
Is it safe to put my 1Password's master-password into the message that is sent
in case I'm dead?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
How about the name of the book on your parents'/friend's bookshelf with your
password lists in? Or some clue to a more secure hiding place.

------
vitorbaptistaa
[https://shellshare.net](https://shellshare.net)

I have migrated my wife's (then girlfriend) computer to Linux and sometimes I
had to configure something on her computer (e.g. a printer). This ended up
generating lots of back and forth on the phone with me telling her commands to
write in the terminal, and she reading the output out loud. I wanted an easy
way to see her terminal. So shellshare was born.

Shellshare allows you to run a single command line and share your terminal
online (read-only)

    
    
        wget -qO shellshare http://get.shellshare.net && python shellshare
    

That'll give you an URL others can join and watch your terminal live. No
sessions, no recordings, and the data is deleted every day.

There aren't many users, but I use it almost every week.

~~~
cperciva
_wget -qO shellshare[http://get.shellshare.net](http://get.shellshare.net) &&
python shellshare_

Please don't tell people to do this. This is an idiom called "curl pipe sh";
you're asking people to run whatever code someone on their network decides to
send them.

As an absolute minimum, you should change that _http_ to _https_ , so that
they're merely running whatever code YOU decide to send them; but even that
doesn't quite fit with the "share your terminal (read-only)" philosophy...

~~~
ksrm
What's a better alternative?

~~~
mappum
You could use hashpipe
([https://github.com/jbenet/hashpipe](https://github.com/jbenet/hashpipe)),
from Juan Benet (the author of IPFS). It simply checks that the input to the
command matches a given hash, so you can do `curl <url> | hashpipe <hash> |
sh`, and if the output of the curl command is different than expected it won't
be passed in to `sh`.

~~~
eriknstr
Ironically the prebuilt binaries of hashpipe itself are provided without means
of verification :I

So if you are going to use hashpipe, I think you should download it in source
form, read it -- it's under 100 SLOC -- and then build it from source
yourself. This way, you do that once and then in the future provided that you
trust those sending you various scripts and binaries and the channel they used
to provide the hash, all is well and no further manual verification is needed
on your side of things ever again for any of those.

------
rsync
rsync.net.

I am very, very proud of the (very simple) platform that we've built there.
It's a basic tool that "just works" \- and just works _exactly like you 'd
expect it to_.

If I were a consumer of cloud storage, this is what I would want it to look
like.

It _pleases me so greatly_ to know that, right now, someone is doing something
like this:

    
    
      pg_dump -U postgres db | ssh user@rsync.net "dd of=db_dump"
    

... while simultaneously, someone else is doing this:

    
    
      zfs send tank/test@snap1 | ssh user@rsync.net zfs receive -s tank/test
    

It's been 15 years now since we started providing this service - almost 11
since we branded it rsync.net - and the first warrant canary is now 10 years
old. This appears to be, for now, my lifes work.

~~~
lewiscollard
I have used rsync.net at work in the past, and the service and support is the
best I have experienced in any commercial service, period. Good job.

On the other hand, we need a word about that scrolljacking on your homepage...

~~~
scosman
+1 for scrolljacking. It would randomly pick a direction independent of my
actual scroll direction.

------
0x1d
[https://instafavicon.com/](https://instafavicon.com/)

I created this favicon generator a few weeks ago to generate minimal favicons
for my side projects. I'm not good with design tools so it saves me time when
I start a new project and want a simple favicon in ICO format.

I'm proud of it because it's server-less. I generate the multi-BMP ICO file in
binary using ArrayBuffers and Typed Arrays in JavaScript. I use a <canvas>
element to create the images/design.

It's not very polished and I'm sure there are bugs, but feedback would be
appreciated!

~~~
partisan
Cool. I like the fact that the icon shows in the actual tab as a preview. I
guess what is missing is the option to select a font?

~~~
0x1d
Thanks!

I'm thinking about adding some of the Google web fonts.

~~~
zachrose
Also, there's a neat technique to make the text color either black or white
depending on what has more contrast against the background color.

[https://24ways.org/2010/calculating-color-
contrast](https://24ways.org/2010/calculating-color-contrast)

~~~
0x1d
Nice! I'm definitely going to use this. The text is barely visible on a lot of
the lighter colors right now.

------
amjith
Two years ago I created a CLI tool called pgcli
([http://pgcli.com](http://pgcli.com)). A postgres client with auto-
completion. It became ridiculously successful. I got a few requests to support
mysql. So I launched a kickstarter to write mycli
([http://mycli.net](http://mycli.net)). This also became quite successful.

There is a thriving community of core devs and a ton of users. I'm happy with
both creations and made a lot of online friends.

These projects also led me to create a standalone python library for doing
fuzzy matching. I'm quite proud of this one since the resulting code ended up
being ridiculously small but produced really good results.
[https://github.com/amjith/fuzzyfinder/](https://github.com/amjith/fuzzyfinder/)

~~~
nkantar
<3

I can't remember who turned me onto pgcli, but I've been telling everyone I
can about it for a long time now. It's wonderful.

Thank you!

~~~
amjith
Thank you for spreading the love. :)

The initial surge of users came from HN when I originally posted it at launch,
but since then most of the users were through word of mouth.

------
jmbmxer
[https://unshorten.link](https://unshorten.link)

I work in security and have a paranoia of shortened links (bit.ly, t.co). I
got frustrated with the options out there that forced me to right click every
shortened link or paste it into a site so I made this Chrome extension / web
app. It is pretty simple and keeps a list of 300+ shortened link services to
check against. If your browser ever visits one it redirects you to the site to
expand the link. It will also hit the Google Safebrowsing API to see if it is
known to be malware plus will strip out tracking cookies.

It's been fun and rewarding watching my little extension grow to global use of
over 4k users.

~~~
saamm
Does anyone know of a Firefox equivalent of this extension?

~~~
toennisforst
No, but you can use Chrome Store Foxified to install most Chrome extensions in
Firefox.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-
store-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-
foxified/)

~~~
eriknstr
That's pretty neat!

------
StavrosK
I'm proud of many things :(

* I converted a rotary phone into a cellphone: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkdWQswpc8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkdWQswpc8)

* I wrote a personal bookmark search engine: [http://historio.us/](http://historio.us/)

* A site that talks to spammers so you don't have to: [https://spa.mnesty.com/](https://spa.mnesty.com/)

* A pastebin: [http://pastery.net/](http://pastery.net/)

* A remote-controlled GSM irrigation controller for farmers: [https://gitlab.com/stavros/irrigation-controller](https://gitlab.com/stavros/irrigation-controller)

* A button that orders food when pressed: [https://www.stavros.io/posts/emergency-food-button/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/emergency-food-button/)

* A python library and cli utility for controlling YeeLight RGB LED bulbs (a cheaper and nicer version of Hue bulbs) that I wrote this weekend: [https://yeelight.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://yeelight.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

* A secure communications library for IoT devices: [http://stringphone.readthedocs.org/](http://stringphone.readthedocs.org/)

* I took some non-terrible photos and made a site for them: [http://portfolio.stavros.io/](http://portfolio.stavros.io/)

* A hardware library for the A6 GSM modem: [https://github.com/skorokithakis/A6lib](https://github.com/skorokithakis/A6lib)

* Expounder, a better way to explain things in text: [http://skorokithakis.github.io/expounder](http://skorokithakis.github.io/expounder)

* Dead man's switch, a website to email people after you die: [https://www.deadmansswitch.net/](https://www.deadmansswitch.net/)

* I can't even remember the rest.

~~~
Retr0spectrum
I like expounder, definitely haven't seen something like that before. I'd like
it if there was an option to have the expanded text highligted in some way,
just so I can keep track of everything mentally.

~~~
simplify
Having it reversible would be nice, too. Knowing the click is irreversible
gives an uneasy feeling.

------
TeMPOraL
Nyan Mode.

[https://github.com/TeMPOraL/nyan-mode](https://github.com/TeMPOraL/nyan-mode)

I made it as a simple joke, but for some reason it rapidly gained popularity
among Emacs users, and now I sometimes find it or hear about it in unexpected
places.

(Also I fear that on my deathbed I'll look back and realize that the most used
thing I've ever made in my life was an animated cat for a text editor...
_sigh_ )

~~~
munchor
I have been using this for years and all my work colleagues always ask me
"what is that nyan cat on your text editor? that must be super annoying!" and
I always have to tell them I just really like it.

Thank you for building this, it's awesome!

~~~
0xCMP
Same! But sadly when I switched to Spacemacs I haven't set it up again.

~~~
thelambentonion
[https://github.com/TheBB/spaceline/blob/master/README.org](https://github.com/TheBB/spaceline/blob/master/README.org)

Scroll down for nyan mode, if you don't mind using an external package. :)

------
jtreminio
[https://puphpet.com](https://puphpet.com)

I started working with VMs several years ago, manually setting up a Virtualbox
image. It would take around 30 minutes, and whenever I'd screw something up
I'd have to delete it and redo the whole thing. Sometimes I'd fat-finger a
command and have to start the process all over again.

Once I got tired of that I started to look into Vagrant, which recommended
using a tool like Puppet or Chef. That led me down the rabbit hole of learning
Puppet, which made me want to have a GUI to be able to easily change some
choices around without having to mess with the code itself.

So I created a simple HTML form with drop downs and buttons and released it
thinking that maybe 10 people or so would find it useful.

Almost 4,000,000 servers created later, and I'm quite happy with how it's been
received!

~~~
jspaetzel
Great tool! Made it much easier for me to get started with puppet & vagrant

------
cperciva
The simple tool I'm most proud of is spiped. If you have two systems which
need to be able to talk over TCP without worrying about evilness on the
network between them, spiped is _the_ answer.

The simple tool which has probably had the largest impact is bsdiff -- now
found used in hundreds of millions of devices -- but I'm not particularly
proud of it because it was a quick hack and horrible code written by a C
novice.

The non-simple product which I'm most proud of is Tarsnap, of course; I've
spent a decade of my life on it, and don't expect to stop any time soon.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> The simple tool which has probably had the largest impact is bsdiff -- now
> found used in hundreds of millions of devices

In your thesis, you mention an updated algorithm that produces smaller
patches. Do you have any code available that implements that algorithm?

~~~
cperciva
Some of that, and some further improvements, made their way into
[https://github.com/cperciva/bsdiff](https://github.com/cperciva/bsdiff) . But
I don't think anyone is using that new code; the company which was paying for
me to work on it decided not to continue with that project before I had a
chance to finish polishing the work.

------
augustflanagan
I built [https://cronitor.io](https://cronitor.io) after having an important
cron job fail silently for several days. When I mentioned this problem to a
friend his first response was "we just had a major issue with cron failing
silently at my work too".

We decided to hack on it together, and we've since grown Cronitor from a tool
built for our own needs into a small business with a couple hundred paying
customers.

~~~
josho
As someone about to write a cron job, what ways do you see Cron fail?

My assumption is that cron is robust and reliable, it's the job script itself
that may fail silently and need monitoring, yes?

~~~
SteveNuts
The most common failure I've seen is when people forget to use full paths in
cron.

bash instead of /bin/bash (or similar)

~~~
wagmo
There's other weirdness in cron-land too. Cron will completely ignore files
containing "." .

------
lcall
A personal knowledge organizer at [http://onemodel.org/](http://onemodel.org/)
(AGPL). Highly efficient at managing lists; like an org-mode that uses
postgres and is more efficient and flexible in some ways. I use it heavily,
daily, to manage checklists/tasks and notes on many subjects. No mobile or
mouse support currently, but about everything one needs to know is on the
screen at any given time. It's something like really fast mind maps but
(currently) keyboard-driven and handles very large amounts of interlinked
data. Data can be somewhat structured, as there is a feature that lets you
clone then modify template entities.

I see it as the beginning of a platform to change how individuals (or mankind)
manage knowledge overall. I'm now working on exploiting the internals for
collaboration (linking instances, sharing data, subscribing to each others'
data, mobile, etc).

For current org-mode or evernote users: The app has export (& finicky import)
features to convert anything to (or from) an indented plain-text outline. The
FAQs have links to a discussion of a more detailed comparison with org-mode
that seemed somewhat well-received at the time (the link is on this page which
also discusses evernote:
[http://onemodel.org/1/e-9223372036854614741.html](http://onemodel.org/1/e-9223372036854614741.html)
).

Feedback or participation are appreciated. If one has any interest at all, I
suggest signing up for the (~monthly?) announcements list at least. More
details are at the web site, including some FAQs.

------
nl5887
[https://transfer.sh](https://transfer.sh) which I built because I needed it
myself, now being used by hundred thousands of people a month and
[http://slackarchive.io](http://slackarchive.io) used by 500 slack teams.

~~~
thewisenerd
transfer.sh is easily one of the best file-sharing website I've used.

when I recommend it to others, they find it _counter-intuitive_ to use, maybe
because of them not being comfortable with the command line. now it has a
drag/drop interface, so, that's _good_ (i guess).

one "issue" that I do have with it, is that downloads aren't resumable/pause-
able or you can't see actual download progress. Is this a limitation or was it
built that way ?

thanks for making such awesome things :)

(for those reading, transfer.sh is fully open sourced here:
[https://github.com/dutchcoders/transfer.sh](https://github.com/dutchcoders/transfer.sh)
)

------
averageweather
[http://www.averageweather.io/](http://www.averageweather.io/) \- tool to make
planning for travel much easier. When you are too far out for a forecast, I
found myself taking too many clicks to get average weather data.

EDIT - Whoa. Getting lots of traffic. This site is like 3 days old and I
taught myself python and django to build it. Open to any recommendations at
jonathan at averageweather dot io

EDIT 2 - Back up... Site crash ... Google apps shutdown smtmp connections
which crashed my entire site.

~~~
edpichler
I would use it if it was in Celsius.

~~~
averageweather
Noted! Will work on that asap.

------
cromo
The simple tool I wrote that I get the most bang for my buck out of is
synesthesia[1]. I spend a lot of my time tracing things down across multiple
log files, and having to pick out the important lines visually or trying to
isolate them with custom grep incantations was wearing on me. Synesthesia
allows you to specify regexes, and it will color matches based on the value of
the match itself, meaning that it's stateless and doesn't need to keep a
dictionary of strings to colors. This makes keeping track of things like GUIDs
easy - you can just keep track of e.g. the orange one and watch it fly by
across multiple terminals. It's currently python 2 only and assumes a 256
color terminal, but it has been invaluable.

I've been toying with using the idea for forums so that it is easier to keep
track of who is replying to whom[2]. I also would like to try using it as a
layer on top of traditional syntax highlighting, perhaps as an emacs minor
mode - if those can provide colors to the buffer; I've written hardly any
elisp and don't know what capabilities are available.

[1]
[https://github.com/cromo/synesthesia](https://github.com/cromo/synesthesia)
[2] [https://imgur.com/E1N1Zsm](https://imgur.com/E1N1Zsm)

~~~
jeffbr13
Reminds me of Internet Explorer 7(?)'s coloured tab groups. I actually thought
they were quite a neat UI idea.

~~~
cromo
I don't remember how those worked. I think it automatically kept a hierarchy
of what tab parented other tabs and colored them that way. That gets kinda
strange because it's trying to represent a tree in a flat space, and I don't
think the colors reflected their heritage. Since a tab could technically be a
parent and a child, you lost tabs to one group or another.

Thankfully synesthesia is really simple - match the string, take the md5 of
it, lop off some bits and interpret that as a color. There's no additional
structure to superimpose on color selection.

------
mijustin
Last year, I launched [https://devmarketing.xyz](https://devmarketing.xyz)

I'm really proud of it for a few reasons:

1\. It was a response to an observed need. I was getting daily emails from
devs asking me about product marketing. I believed that devs who learned
marketing could be unstoppable when it comes to launching products.

2\. I created it on the side, while working full-time.

3\. In its first 3 months it did $28,433 in revenue. This allowed me to go
full-time on my own projects this January.

If you build an audience, and earn a good reputation, selling your expertise
is a good option.

~~~
Haydos585x2
Hey Justin, I enjoy reading your emails. Sometimes they're a bit too AppSumo-y
but overall (Y). I wrote out a reply to one of your questions the other day
but didn't end up sending it. I have a ton of projects that I never really
take through to completion for whatever reason. One of the reasons is
marketing. I bought a book or two of yours on sale a while ago but haven't
gotten to it yet, I'm sure it will be good though. Keep up the good work!

~~~
mijustin
Thanks! I'll work at making my emails less AppSumo-y. ;)

You should definitely send that email. I try to reply to every one I get.

(BTW - one of the things I include with M4Devs is a secret podcast RSS feed
where I read the chapters for you. Perfect if you're having a hard time
getting started)

------
jessegrosjean
[https://www.taskpaper.com](https://www.taskpaper.com)

Plain-text todo list:

1\. To create a project, type a line ending with a colon.

2\. To create a task, type a line starting with a dash followed by a space.

3\. Everything else is a note.

4\. To create a tag, type the @ symbol followed by a name.

5\. Tab to indent and create outline structure.

TaskPaper started as few days TextEdit hack in 2006. It's no longer a "tiny"
project in terms lines of code. But the original simple idea–plain text todos
with 5 formatting rules–remains the core of what TaskPaper is.

I'm very proud of that!

~~~
labjerk
I use TaskPaper throughout the day, every day. I've tried at least a dozen
task-management apps and TaskPaper is the only one that I keep coming back to.
It strikes just the right balance between simplicity and customization. I
could go on and on, but just know that I, for one, think your pride in the
project is justified ten times over!

~~~
jessegrosjean
Thanks! :)

------
callumprentice
Simple visualization of the relative size of different planets and moons I
made when my daughter was asking if the moon is bigger than the earth -
[http://callumprentice.github.io/apps/celestial_bodies/index....](http://callumprentice.github.io/apps/celestial_bodies/index.html?1=earth&2=moon)

~~~
shermanyo
wait, Earth's moon is _bigger_ than pluto? mind blown!

------
abetusk
[http://bostontraintrack.com](http://bostontraintrack.com)

Real time tracking of Boston subways, buses and commuter rails.

Made mostly in a weekend and available free and open source [1]. Though it's
simple, I think it gives a nice overview of the trains and buses. Boston has
stop prediction so in some sense it's kind of frivolous. I think the biggest
'innovation' was to integrate the "map icons" into a nicely visualized open
street map [2].

Not super popular but it's been running for around 2 years with ~20 hits per
weekday.

[1]
[https://github.com/abetusk/bostontraintrack](https://github.com/abetusk/bostontraintrack)

[2] [https://mapicons.mapsmarker.com/](https://mapicons.mapsmarker.com/)

~~~
rosstex
Busses too?! Man, I wish this were around in the Bay Area!

~~~
abetusk
This is very possible [1]. I use NextBus for the real time bus mapping even
though the MBTA offers it because I've found NextBus to be much more accurate
and stable.

I'm a little nervous because I might be violating their terms of service in
using their feed without being an official customer but it's been running for
a couple of years now without issue.

[1]
[http://webservices.nextbus.com/service/publicXMLFeed?command...](http://webservices.nextbus.com/service/publicXMLFeed?command=vehicleLocations&a=sf-
muni&t=0)

------
schindlabua
I'm not sure whether "proud" is the right adjective, but that batch file I
wrote when I was 12 or 13 which moves all images from the Desktop into a
folder called "images" has been the single most useful thing I've ever
written.

~~~
jajern
This is actually one of the few types of examples that I think fit here. Most
of the other people are just posting their side projects. When I clicked this
I was expecting some quick bash/batch/python/etc. scripts that do useful
things.

~~~
onli
One less useful thing for you:
[https://onli.github.io/izulu/](https://onli.github.io/izulu/). It is a bash
script that changes the background of your desktop according to the weather at
your locations, and can show the temperature and forecast.

Doesn't have much functional value, but it was easy to write (though over the
years it needed some care, mostly thanks to closing weather APIs) and it is a
small simple thing I use almost every day, as it is in my autostart.

~~~
rosstex
That looks sweet! Is there a Windows version?

~~~
onli
Thanks. Sorry, Windows is not supported. It is written in Bash, Windows was
not a target at that time. It might work with [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/commandline/wsl/about](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/commandline/wsl/about), but probably not since it also uses imagemagick to
paint on the images, and xml_twig_tools as well as jq to interpret the api
output. And it would need to detect that it is running on Windows to change
the desktop background with the proper command, if that is even possible.

------
franciscop
* Picnic CSS: a simple css library. I use it for both small projects from the CDN as medium projects with the SASS that I have carefully built: [http://picnicss.com/](http://picnicss.com/)

* cookies.js, a simple cookies library that uses a getter/setter style that I (and many people) like more. I'm considering taking the format and extend some other libraries like store.js. [https://github.com/franciscop/cookies.js](https://github.com/franciscop/cookies.js)

* drive-db, a tool that converts a Google spreadsheet into a small database for Node.js: [https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db](https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db)

~~~
networked
Thanks for making Picnic CSS! I picked it for small project recently and
enjoyed using it.

I'm a fan of Umbrella JS, too.

------
JangoSteve
The simplest one that I also use the most is start.sh:
[https://github.com/JangoSteve/start](https://github.com/JangoSteve/start)

I've been using it for 3 years now, but keep forgetting to tell anyone about
it. It's a simple bash script that detects what kind of project your current
directory is and runs the appropriate command to start the development server.

I created it, because I found myself constantly switching between projects of
different types, and it always took me a few moments to remember if the
current project was Rails 2 or Rails 3/4, Node, Jekyll, Rack app, etc. and
starting the development server on port 3000 was starting to take 2 or 3 tries
before getting it right.

Now, I just cd into any project and run `start`. It currently detects Foreman
projects, Rails (old and new), Jekyll (old and new), Gollum, plain Rack apps,
and Node; and it's easy to add new things as well.

~~~
vram22
Innovative idea ...

~~~
JangoSteve
Thanks!

------
mstipetic
I have some sideprojects around the internet, but so far the most useful thing
I made has been

[http://paralleltext.io](http://paralleltext.io)

A tool that helps you learn languages by reading public domain books. I should
continue working on that...

~~~
Curiositry
Very, very cool! I’m teaching myself Spanish, and I’ve been looking for
something like this for ages.

I’d be curious to know more about how it’s built, and where you found the
source texts. It it open-source?

~~~
mstipetic
Hey, thanks! I made the prototype using publicly available matched books and
and got a friend included who built a matching engine for adding new books.

The frontend is react, everything is hosted on s3. If you have any questions
lemme know!

~~~
Curiositry
Any plans to do short stories as well?

------
sushimako
[https://www.hiroapp.com](https://www.hiroapp.com) \- Note-taking reduced to
the core that just works™. Offline first, no signup needed, easily sharable
(url, sms, email) and (web)realtime sync between all devices and
collaborators.

My co-founder and I moved on to a new project a year ago, but this thing is
still buzzing along on a cheap DO box and works like a charm with basically
zero maintenance. Frontend is vanilla JS, backend in Go and the protocol is
our slight modification of differential sync[0] to (re-)synchronize all text
and metadata.

[0]
[https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/](https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/)

~~~
severine
Hey, your first link is giving me a 502 Bad Gateway error.

~~~
sushimako
Thanks for noticing, should be fixed. (there goes my "zero maintenance"-claim
:) )

~~~
severine
:) It works now, and looks great! I just tried to share a test note via SMS
(with a spanish mobile), still waiting though...

Congrats, and keep up the good work!

~~~
sushimako
Thank you! Fixed the sms quirk as well (twilio api key was missing). If you
re-invite your phone-# now, the sms should come thru.

------
josephg
[https://steam.dance/](https://steam.dance/)

I've been poking at this for 4 or 5 years now. It started as a simple
simplified air pressure simulator for teaching logic programming. But now you
can make all sorts of stuff with it, like logic gates, adders and I'm working
on a replica 4004. (Links below)

The website is awful for new users - It doesn't work on mobile, there's no
tutorial and no real documentation on how to use the editor. Instead of fixing
that I'm working on making a dedicated puzzle game built around the engine to
teach all the concepts up to and including getting players to build their own
CPUs.

The backend is powered by a FRP compiler, which I'm really happy with. You can
have huge steam powered worlds and incrementally edit parts of them, and it
does fancy incremental recompilation.

Logic gates:
[https://steam.dance/nornagon/logic](https://steam.dance/nornagon/logic)

2 full adders:
[https://steam.dance/josephg/adder](https://steam.dance/josephg/adder)

Miniaturised 8 bit ALU:
[https://steam.dance/josephg/alu](https://steam.dance/josephg/alu)

Work in progress CPU:
[https://steam.dance/josephg/4004_4](https://steam.dance/josephg/4004_4)

~~~
rosstex
This sounds amazing! I can't seem to get it running on Chrome, but I'll check
back on it!

~~~
josephg
It should work in chrome - thats what I've been developing it in. Play button
in the top left will make the simulations go.

------
rayalez
The projects I am the most proud of:

[http://rationalfiction.io](http://rationalfiction.io) \- a collection of
amazing science fiction stories.

[http://lumiverse.io](http://lumiverse.io) \- discovery platform for
educational videos.

[http://digitalverse.io/rigs/](http://digitalverse.io/rigs/) \- several rigs
that I have made, for practicing 3D animation in SideFX Houdini.

Single scripts:

[https://github.com/raymestalez/rssdigest](https://github.com/raymestalez/rssdigest)
\- sends me a daily email digest of my rss feeds.

[https://github.com/raymestalez/reddit-
scripts](https://github.com/raymestalez/reddit-scripts) \- scrapes
/r/WritingPrompts, and compiles a list of the top writers and their best
stories([http://fictionhub.io/story/top-100-writingprompts-
authors](http://fictionhub.io/story/top-100-writingprompts-authors))

[http://blog.digitalmind.io/post/ai-writes-
hpmor](http://blog.digitalmind.io/post/ai-writes-hpmor) \- ANN that generates
Harry Potter fanfiction.

~~~
prasath5s
rssdigest => Wow Thanks!

------
jaredtking
[https://invoice-generator.com](https://invoice-generator.com)

I made this 4 years ago for those times when you just need an invoice. Today
10s of thousands of individuals and businesses use this each day to get paid.
It's free to use with no login required. Instead it uses localStorage to
remember data.

~~~
scoot
Homepage says lite is free and unlimited, pricing page says it's limited to 10
invoices per month?

~~~
jaredtking
You are looking at our paid service, invoiced.com. Invoiced saves your
invoices online, and does much more, whereas invoice-generator.com only
generates PDF invoices.

------
bpierre
[https://scri.ch/](https://scri.ch/) draw => save => share (you can add .png
to the URL)

[https://gif.gg/](https://gif.gg/) photos => save => share (you can add .gif
to the URL)

I made them because they were useful for me, and I am still happily using them
almost every day, especially scri.ch: nothing beats typing scri.ch in a
browser from anywhere to quickly sketch an idea (except a napkin and a pen of
course).

It’s nice to see other people using them too! :-)

~~~
mboehm
Nice tool. What someone might should consider that you URLs are not private.
They are quite guessable and each saving leads to an "increment" in the
alphabet: [https://scri.ch/acc](https://scri.ch/acc) ->
[https://scri.ch/ace](https://scri.ch/ace)

------
TheRealPomax
"A primer on Bezier curves",
[https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo](https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo)

It started as a small explanation on the basics of Bezier curves in 2011 and
then kept growing until it's basically a full book now, hitting hacker news
every year/half year, and getting lots of thanks for having made it by a very
diverse crowd - from kids doing homework to engineers at software companies
who have a question not covered by the material (yet).

It's been a mostly low effort investment and I could have just as easily not
bothered, but just adding small bits at a slow pace parts of on the internet:
five years of improvement would not have happened if I'd simply not bothered,
and now there is an amazingly popular free resource for this material easily
findable online.

~~~
slig
Thank you for this! I've studied your material and I've able to understand an
create a nice canvas coloring app.

------
yblu
One weekend, to scratch my own long-time itch, I coded up a simple browser
extension to display GitHub repo code in tree view [1]. It now also supports
GitLab, works on Chrome/Firefox/Opera/Safari and has almost 90K users.

[1]:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/octotree/bkhaagjah...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/octotree/bkhaagjahfmjljalopjnoealnfndnagc?hl=en-
US)

~~~
joelanman
On a similar note, I started making a thumbnail view: [http://www.git-
browser.com](http://www.git-browser.com)

------
pkzip
One tool I wrote and I wish I would still have time to maintain was
"Folders2Flickr" (luckily someone forked it
[https://github.com/richq/folders2flickr](https://github.com/richq/folders2flickr)
and keeps it alive). It's basically a DropBox for pictures with Flickr being
the storage server and viewer. The tool simply synchronizes all of your
pictures which can be in a hierarchical folder structure and recreates this
folder structure on Flickr (but uses Sets/Albums instead of folders). I dont
see the stats now but for years it supplied Flickr with multiple pictures
every single second 24/7 from many users.

~~~
kleinishere
Used this just a year or so ago to upload ~decade of family photos from a
backup-less old computer and into the cloud. Thank you!

------
davexunit
I wrote a humble static site generator in Scheme that generates not only my
blog, but at least 3 other blogs and the websites for 2 GNU projects. It's no
Jekyll, but it's the first piece of software I created that is used by more
than just me.

[https://haunt.dthompson.us](https://haunt.dthompson.us)

GNU project sites:

[https://gnu.org/s/guile](https://gnu.org/s/guile)

[https://gnu.org/s/guix](https://gnu.org/s/guix)

------
networked
[https://github.com/dbohdan/sqawk](https://github.com/dbohdan/sqawk)

It parses DSV data like Awk does, runs SQL queries against it and formats the
output in one of several ways. An example I am particularly fond of is using
this tool as a poor man's libxo
([https://github.com/Juniper/libxo](https://github.com/Juniper/libxo)):

    
    
      $ ps | sqawk -output json,indent=1 'select PID,TTY,TIME,CMD from a' trim=left header=1
      [{
          "PID"  : "3947",
          "TTY"  : "pts/2",
          "TIME" : "00:00:07",
          "CMD"  : "zsh"
      },{
          "PID"  : "15951",
          "TTY"  : "pts/2",
          "TIME" : "00:00:00",
          "CMD"  : "ps"
      },{
          "PID"  : "15952",
          "TTY"  : "pts/2",
          "TIME" : "00:00:00",
          "CMD"  : "tclkit-8.6.3-mk"
      }]
    
    

I started a list of command line tools for querying, processing and converting
structured text data: [https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-
tools](https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-tools).

------
coleifer
I wrote peewee, a single file Python ORM. It's codebase is very small but it
is extremely capable.

[http://docs.peewee-orm.com](http://docs.peewee-orm.com)

~~~
ThatGeoGuy
I actually only heard of this for the first time today, and it is indeed a
fantastic ORM. The `pwiz` tool is insanely useful, and is a pretty good first
step towards porting over database models from other projects.

I'm quite impressed with how easy to use everything is, despite having used
pwiz to generate my model classes. I had to manually edit a couple of the
"related_name" fields for some foreign keys that are common between tables, as
well as import the ArrayField type from playhouse.postgres_ext, but otherwise
had a very, very easy time getting everything set up for what I wanted.

Thanks again for this, I didn't think porting my database schema over to
Python would be so easy.

------
alando46
[http://worlddev.io](http://worlddev.io)

Sms Lists is an sms craigslist for refugee camps. I made it after visiting a
couple of refugee camps and realizing that it was really hard for business
owners who made <$1/day to have any extra money left over to re-invest in
marketing their businesses. Code is here:
[https://github.com/alando46/smslists](https://github.com/alando46/smslists)

~~~
tibu
This is really a great project. Would be worth to give more details how it is
possible to reuse it. Do you think it work for homeless people too?

~~~
alando46
Thanks! I'm working on linking it up an android gateway so anyone who wants to
test / try it out only needs a local simcard and the ability to download the
gateway software to an android handset. This basically already exists
([https://telerivet.com/product/app](https://telerivet.com/product/app)), it's
just a matter of setting everything up.

------
apas
Well, I really like the simplicity of athena. [0]

athena is an elegant, minimalist, light-weight static blog generator written
in Python. It's just over 50 lines of code. athena tightly integrates with
Tufte's design and typography rules. Have a look! [1]

[0]:
[https://github.com/apas/athena/blob/master/athena.py](https://github.com/apas/athena/blob/master/athena.py)
[1]: [https://apas.github.io/athena/](https://apas.github.io/athena/)

------
kevas
At the beginning of the year, I started at a large print shop where numerous
types of projects came through our doors. There's this one client of ours
who's project would take ~13 hours to complete--and that's just in our
department which was file prepping.

I did this project by hand one or two times and then asked the manager to let
me research the possibility of automating it. After a week or so of fiddling
around, I was able to bring it down to 2h10m. Just in the past week, I was
able to bring it down to 15m and reduce the number of steps where a human is
needed.

------
forsaken
readthedocs.org -- A site that automatically builds documentation for you when
you commit to your VCS repo. It's been widely used in the Python ecosystem for
a few years now, and started off as a 48 hour hack day project.

~~~
nkantar
Having just recently listened to the Talk Python to Me (yesterday) and Import
This (today) episodes with you, thank you so much for everything. Read the
Docs is a truly amazing resource.

------
patio11
A/Bingo, a Rails A/B testing plugin that I wrote in a part-time week and used
for a few years. The main reason I'm proud of it is Ben Kamens and company
ported it to run on Google App Engine for Khan Academy, where it formed the
core of their experimentation platform for a while.

[http://bjk5.com/post/10171483254/abingo-split-testing-now-
on...](http://bjk5.com/post/10171483254/abingo-split-testing-now-on-app-
engine-built-for)

------
ThomPete
[http://www.ghostnoteapp.com](http://www.ghostnoteapp.com)

I made it because I couldn't find a developer to do a larger project I wanted
to do based on the same principle.

So I paid a developer to do this and now he is my partner and we are building
the project I wanted to do to begin with. It's quite profitable for a small
tool.

It's based on the idea of contextual note taking which basically allow you to
attach notes to all sorts of things like website, folders, files etc.

The contextual engine is part of my new project.

~~~
lavezzi
Sounds cool. Sort of what the people at Genius are attempting to do at some
point?

~~~
ThomPete
Kind of but more focused

------
weaksauce
Not sure if this warrants inclusion in this list, but I'll share it anyway.

I made a simple firefox/chrome extension for people that horde tabs as temp
bookmarks. You might find it useful to find tabs and quickly navigate to them
by clicking on the link in the list. It's free and open source. The github
page has a gif showing usage. You can also type cmd-shift-e or ctrl-shift-e to
switch to it.

Chrome Extension:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiogfkaldbfphfdkpggjemaha)

Firefox Extension: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/tabist/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/tabist/)

source code:
[https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist](https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist)

Let me know if you find it useful or have any suggestions.

~~~
lanius
Very useful. The only other feature I'd want is the option to display URLs
along with the titles.

~~~
weaksauce
That could be something I could add. Thanks for the feedback!

------
michaelbuckbee
I got tired of remembering how to format date/times as strings and made
[http://www.foragoodstrftime.com/](http://www.foragoodstrftime.com/)

~~~
0x1d
I've used this more than a handful of times. Thank you!

------
nodja
Made a python command line tool that decrypts and dumps assets from an indie
video game called awesomenauts.

I started knowing next to zero in assembly, reverse engineering and crypto.
Took me about two months -spread accross 2 years- of work and learning to do
it. The game uses a modified AES crypto, just the key expansion was modified,
probably so it can be different enough to not look like AES, but still benefit
from hardware acceleration. It's probably less secure than regular AES.

[https://github.com/Nodja/AwesomenautsFileDumper](https://github.com/Nodja/AwesomenautsFileDumper)

~~~
fooza
Can you eloborate on this? Why did you have to use assembly and how did you
decrypt it? Hiw did you find the key?

~~~
nodja
Sure. Bit of a long story. TL:DR at the end.

I wanted to dump sounds from the game, not for myself, but because I wanted a
way for people to do videos/soundbanks without having to record them from the
sytem audio, which would often contain other noises from the game. So that was
my initial motivation.

I started by doing it the brute force way, load game, dump content of ram into
a file, use a command line tool (can't recall name) that would search for
media files inside that file (using magic numbers and whatnot), and boom. I
would get a bunch of .wav files from the game. This worked, but now I had to
categorize each file one by one, since it's just a data dump all filename
information was gone.

Using an hex editor I found that the file names were also loaded into memory
(ctrl+f .wav in an hex editor proved as much). So I needed to figure which
file names pointed where, which was not an easy task looking just at hex
values. I figured: well, the game has to know somehow which names belong to
data, at least at some point, so I googled x86 reverse engineering and landed
on a wiki page that brought me to a program I used only once a long time ago,
ollydbg. Back when I was 14, (I'm 30 atm) I had followed some tutorial on how
to use ollydbg to crack tony hawks pro skater 3. I wasn't too difficult, but I
never followed up because back in the day I cared more about playing video
games than figuring out how they worked.

Ollydbg this time proved fruitless to me, I had no idea what I was looking at.
I followed some other tutorials and videos on youtube, the most helpful were
the tutorials on cheat engine but I was still stumped on how to reverse video
games, so I dropped the project, for a while.

Back then I had been recently introduced to python, which rocks btw, and one
of the books, possibly the turning point of my reverse engineering "career"
was a book called gray hat python. The book explained how debuggers worked,
what's the stack and what does it do, registers and what they're supposed to
hold, how breakpoints work, how hooking dlls works, etc. This proved the
cornerstone for me understanding what's going on.

I've come to realize I haven't explained what ollydbg is. Ollydbg is a windows
debugger used mostly by reverse engineers, with most-likely evil intents, to
read machine code. A debugger is a program that tells the operating system
"hey I'm a special program that wants to find bugs in this program so let me
peek around", so it has access to what memory the program has allocated, or
what files it has loaded, etc. It also converts the executable part of memory
into assembly instructions. So instead of you seeing "57" you see "PUSH EDI".
Basically, let's you read the assembly code of a program.

So now with my new found knowledge, I found ollydbg to be very helpful. I
first hunted down where the game doing the file loading, which was easy
because it's using windows APIs, then poked around until I found the call that
returned the decrypted data, which was also easy. Knowing this information, I
built a python script that would pretend to be a debugger, hook itself into
the game, set a breakpoint right after the function call, retrieve all
metadata and decrypted file data from registers/stack, and then resume
execution so the next file could be loaded and repeat the steps all over.

So, mission accomplished right? Nope. A major pain in the ass still remained,
this script would only dump files that the game would load, if the game didn't
load the files, they would never be decrypted, this meant I had to select
every "hero" and load every map, select every announcer, etc. Which I did for
a while, but I figured, "there must be a way to automate this". So I tried to
understand what the file loader was doing. This is where I spent the majority
of my time, just poking around at code, tracing segment of code and reading
the traces to try and figure out what was going on, etc. One key piece of
information, the game was using the AESENC instruction to decrypt stuff, so I
read some wikipedia articles on AES, got the basic grasp on how it worked, and
tried to figure out what the game was doing. Note one thing, AESENC is used to
encrypt files, however the game was doing decryption. This stumped me for a
while. I watched free lectures on encryption online, I read articles,
stackoverflow, youtube videos. None of them could explain why would you do
encryption to decrypt a file. So I figured they must be using some sort of
custom encryption, because according to wikipedia, one of the paremeters for
the XOR right before the AESENC instruction should be the key, and it didn't
work when I inputed it in online decryptors and whatnot, trying all
combinations of operation modes, etc. I was stumped, and for several months I
could not figure out how the game was doing it.

The next eureka moment was hiding in plain sight, a webpage that I had seen
several times already, but never noticed a detail. It's even bolded.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation#Cipher_Feedback_.28CFB.29)
. In CFB mode of operation, the encryption algorithm is used to decrypt the
file. A light turned on in my head and if what I thought was right i would
have solved part of the problem, so using the graph on that page I quickly
built a proof of concept to test my theory. And I was right. To explain what
my theory was and why it worked, I need to explain a bit on how AES works. I'm
strictly talking about AES-128 here to keep things simple. This comment is too
long already.

So AES-128 can be divided into two parts, first part is the key expansion. It
grabs the encryption key, and uses a special algorithm to transform it into 10
different keys. The second part is the encryption operation proper, it does 10
rounds each using one of the keys in the first step, first and last round are
different, but the others you're just grabbing the result of the previous
round and the round key, and doing an AESENC with those as parameters, the
last round will output the decrypted data.

So my theory was, they don't touch the encryption proper, but alter the key
expansion step. It I was right, I could grab the first block of the file, use
the round keys and IV I got from ollydbg, and be able to decrypt a whole file.
And like I said, I was right :) Next step: find out how the game is doing the
key expansion.

This was kind of a boring job. I worked backwards from the encryption
operation. See where the output was being generated, then replicate it in
python. Remember, this is all in assembly, and optimized by a compiler, so the
code is anything but structured and logical. After implementing a bunch of the
code, it started to look familiar, it basically was a modified version of the
regular AES key expansion. It seemed to skip some steps. The key that was fed
to that key expansion, was being generated by running a sha-1 hash on the
relative filepath of the file encryped. You can find these two functions here:
[https://github.com/Nodja/AwesomenautsFileDumper/blob/master/...](https://github.com/Nodja/AwesomenautsFileDumper/blob/master/animolite/crypto/awesomefuncs.py)

Apologies for the lack of comments and ugly code. It went through dozens of
iterations and it's based on assembly code that I don't fully understand yet.
Well I know what it does, but don't know why it was done that way.

From here on was more busywork, basically make the script read a whole game
folder and dump the contents somewhere else.

TL;DR: I didn't need to "use" assembly, I didn't write any assembly, I however
needed to understand assembly since I was reading decompiled machine code.
This allowed me to understand what the game was doing when loading files which
lead me to the encryption "key". It was not actually a key that I needed to
find, since they were using a modification of the whole AES-128 algorithm that
only needed a file name as input, instead of key and IV.

P.S. There were some white lies to shorten the whole thing. Basically just me
coming to conclusions sooner that I did, and skipping some steps (the game
used compression and their own archive format). Also apologies if I made some
typing errors, I didn't proofread my comment and sometimes I type words that
are different than the word in my head :P

~~~
marktangotango
Thanks for taking the time to write this. May I suggest editing and publishing
to medium or some other site? It's really a shame when gems like this get
buried on a site like hacker news. Imagine all the awesome stuff buried in
slashdot, reddit, usenet, etc allthese years.

------
modoc
[https://10minutemail.com](https://10minutemail.com)

I built it to learn JBoss Seam, and recently re-wrote it using DeltaSpike. I
personally use it almost every day!

~~~
Magicstatic
If you indeed did build 10minutemail.com - I applaud you. May I ask how much
you make (roughly) off of the service? It seems to be the go-to for most
temporary email services, at least that I know of.

~~~
modoc
I did indeed build it:) I find myself somewhat reticent to discuss the details
of the finances, but let's say it's a five figure amount annually.

~~~
Magicstatic
This is incredibly impressive and I just wanted to say I have used your
service 100+ times. You have saved me many spam emails, my hat is off to you.

------
sergiotapia
My Elixir/Phoenix project Magnetissimo. When KickassTorrents died, I thought I
should just build my own crawler and be done with it.

Elixir's OTP was a fantastic fit, I scrape stuff really quickly with minimal
orchestration code. There are bugs here and there, and I haven't had time to
circle back and patch a lot of the issues I noticed, but it "works".

I'm proud of it because it broke the 200 star barrier on my Github profile.
With Elixir to boot! I love this language.

[https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo](https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo)

------
YPCrumble
I built [http://pixelsview.com](http://pixelsview.com)

I run a media website and people are always asking me, what will X or Y look
like? How do I know what size I want? I send them there.

~~~
hyperenergy
You should have links to specific views. So someone could just share a url to
a specific size.

------
joshwcomeau
I'm most proud of React Flip Move ([https://github.com/joshwcomeau/react-flip-
move](https://github.com/joshwcomeau/react-flip-move)), an animation library
that does exactly one thing: animate transitions when DOM nodes change
positions (eg. list re-ordering).

I wind up using it in almost every project I work on, since just about every
app has a list of some kind, and many lists need to support being sorted,
having items added, etc.

It's a simple tool, but the internal logic is surprisingly complex. The DOM is
a tricky beast!

~~~
rileyt
Great job! this is a harder problem to solve than most people would imagine.

~~~
joshwcomeau
Thanks :)

------
Foxboron
I was annoyed last week that ii
([http://tools.suckless.org/ii/](http://tools.suckless.org/ii/)) didn't
support SSL, so i reimplemented ii inn Golang and added a few extra needed
features.

[https://github.com/Foxboron/iii](https://github.com/Foxboron/iii)

It's essentially just a file based IRC client. Using FIFO files as input, and
spitting out the loggs into an out file. I really enjoy the simplicity of the
idea and how easy it is to script. Been using it to learn goroutines and some
more go, the code isn't the best but it's fun.

Planning to create something like "wii" where you can use the same structure
but with HTTP requests. POST to send data into the FIFO file, and GET to read
the out file.

------
tomschlick
[https://zonewatcher.com](https://zonewatcher.com)

After having multiple clients change their DNS settings without warning and
then email us when shit hits the fan I knew I needed some type of warning
system.

This checks every X minutes and saves each version so you can see the revision
history for all your DNS zones across many providers.

~~~
stevekemp
Might be better to go in the reverse direction - get them to store their DNS
records under revision control and then when changes are committed/pushed they
are deployed.

I wrote something like that for Amazon's rout53, [https://dns-
api.com/](https://dns-api.com/) but it wouldn't be hard to wire up a git hook
with APIs from DNSMadeSimple, Dyne, or similar I'm sure.

(Of course if you don't host your clients DNS then it might be a fight to get
them to change. But if you do it might be worth a think..)

~~~
tomschlick
I thought about that, but some of our clients use 3rd party contractors /
internal IT to manage their DNS as well so getting those entities to use it
would be hard. Eventually that would lead to mismatched records.

The current way, I can actually monitor DNS changes to clients without them
having to change anything they are doing.

I have thought about a syncing type of feature where you'd be able to schedule
a one-time or recurring sync for a particular zone or group of zones.

~~~
stevekemp
I guess it's good you've got a solution that works then !

If you had the option the simplest way to poll for changes would be to do a
hourly/daily/weekly zone-transfer. But many DNS-hosts disable those for
security reasons.

~~~
tomschlick
Yeah thats the trouble. The big providers disable zone transfers so you have
to hope for an API. A lot of providers don't make one available. Besides the
ones I have up there, there are only 2-3 more that provide a workable API
which I'm planning on integrating soon (Dyn & Azure).

------
lavrton
I have two small kids (2 and 5) and I am travaling a lot with my family around
the world. I found out that it can be hard to find a good place to spend some
time with kids. So I build a simple tool that helps me to find such places.

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

This tool already helped me a lot.

~~~
phillc73
I really like this, thank you. I have a nearly 3 year old boy, and we have a
fairly standard set of places we take him around the small European city where
we live. Your site actually showed me a couple of new places we haven't been
before (only been in this city for about 3 years). I also really liked that
almost all the suggestions were outdoor activities or locations.

Having said that, there are also a few places on our standard list of
destinations which aren't shown on the map. How can I contribute them?

I will certainly bookmark the site for ideas when we travel too.

~~~
lavrton
Thanks for a feedback. Just log in and you will see "add place" button.

------
gnicholas
[http://www.beelinereader.com](http://www.beelinereader.com)

Helps people read more easily on-screen. Originally designed as a speed-
reading tool for lifehack types, but it turns out to also be super effective
as an assistive technology for people with dyslexia, vision impairments, and
executive function disorders.

~~~
mpatobin
This looks really great. Can it be used in chrome on android?

~~~
gnicholas
It's available on Android in Firefox (and is free). Unfortunately Chrome for
Android doesn't support extensions like on the desktop.

------
josscrowcroft
I'm most proud of making Open Exchange Rates
([https://openexchangerates.org](https://openexchangerates.org)), which grew
out of a hobby project (and a desire to create a really simple API for
something that had previously been annoyingly complex.)

The basic JSON API request and response formats are unchanged since day 0,
although we've added a few new features in response to customers' demands over
the years.

~~~
sixhobbits
I've been using this for years. Really really nice both practically (the data
is useful) and conceptually (I always use this or OpenWeatherMap to explain to
students what an API is)

------
Animats
The Obvious Password Detector, intended for use inside programs for setting
and changing passwords.[1] (Yes, this is real K&R C, pre-ANSI.)

[1]
[http://www.animats.com/source/obvious/obvious.c](http://www.animats.com/source/obvious/obvious.c)

~~~
cperciva
Wow, you're _that_ John Nagle?

------
duck
[http://hackernewsletter.com](http://hackernewsletter.com)

Started it over six years ago and have been sending it every week since. Have
about 39,000 subscribers and still see a 45% open rate. It has been a lot of
fun, and even better, I have made connections with a lot of great people.

~~~
jschulenklopper
And I just want to tell you that I really like the service. It allows me to
quickly check the most interesting posts of last week if I wasn't able to read
up on Hacker News during the week. Apparently, your selection matches my
interests quite well. (And for the other weeks, I get a nice confirmation that
indeed I've read/seen the most interesting stories :-))

------
timmaxw
I made a printed circuit board to make it easy to connect things to a 1000
watt computer power supply I had lying around. Similar adapters are available
commercially, but I couldn't find one that could manage 1000 watts.

[http://timmaxwell.org/pages/atx-
breakout/index.html](http://timmaxwell.org/pages/atx-breakout/index.html)

------
charlieegan3
I made [http://serializer.io](http://serializer.io) 18 months ago and I still
use it multiple times a day to follow tech news. It's how I found this thread.

~~~
paule89
looks somehow nice. gonna get on my list

~~~
charlieegan3
Thanks - let me know if you have any queries. The code's here if anyone's
interested:
[https://github.com/charlieegan3/serializer](https://github.com/charlieegan3/serializer)

------
ThomasRooney
I built [https://fancyjson.com](https://fancyjson.com) in a day about 5 months
ago. I've used it pretty often since. Its a fancy JSON beautifier.

It tries to compact simple objects and spaces all delimiters. It also attempts
to align array children. The idea was to produce the most compact, yet still
easily readable form of a JSON document.

I was creeped out when trying to find something like this online, because
there are many which send your JSON document to the backend instead of doing
it on the client.

~~~
dflock
Neat! just tried it with this json and it didn't do a great job:

    
    
      {
        "name": "vuejs-guide-test-1",
        "version": "0.0.1",
        "description": "My app",
        "author": "Duncan Lock <dlock@phemi.com>",
        "private": true,
        "dependencies": {
          "vue": "^2.0.5"
        },
        "devDependencies": {
          "babel-core": "^6.1.2",
          "babel-loader": "^6.1.0",
          "babel-plugin-transform-runtime": "^6.1.2",
          "babel-preset-es2015": "^6.1.2",
          "babel-preset-stage-0": "^6.1.2",
          "babel-runtime": "^6.0.0",
          "webpack": "^1.12.2",
          "webpack-dev-server": "^1.16.2"
        }
      }
    
    

this was the result:

    
    
      {
      "name": "vuejs-guide-test-1",
       "version": "0.0.1",
       "description": "My app",
       "author": "Duncan Lock ",
       "private": true,
       "dependencies": { "vue": "^2.0.5" },
       "devDependencies": 
       {
       "babel-core": "^6.1.2",
         "babel-loader": "^6.1.0",
         "babel-plugin-transform-runtime": "^6.1.2",
         "babel-preset-es2015": "^6.1.2",
         "babel-preset-stage-0": "^6.1.2",
         "babel-runtime": "^6.0.0",
         "webpack": "^1.12.2",
         "webpack-dev-server": "^1.16.2"
       }
      }

~~~
dotancohen
That's the same XSS vulnerability that I came to report. Here is a simplified
test case:

    
    
        {"name":"<b>HELLO</b>"}

------
Veen
The most useful one is an invoice generator that looks at a bunch of Markdown
files of work I've done for clients (I'm a freelance writer) and generates an
invoice from them.

It can either generate an HTML report with various stats and graphs or create
a draft invoice in Freshbooks for sending to the client. It used to take me a
couple of hours a week to invoice, and now it basically takes no time at all.

I can't really share it because it's got some hardcoded client details, but
I'm considering generalizing it into a txt2invoice utility other people can
use. It's also massively over engineered because I used it as a learning
project for Elixir. Every time I learned how to something new I tried it out
on this tool, which means it spins up lots of processes it doesn't need and
does fancy stuff with messaging, genservers and supervision trees which are
entirely unnecessary, but that's part of the fun.

------
kilian
Right now, [https://fromscratch.rocks](https://fromscratch.rocks) a smart and
simple autosaving note taking application. It's a rectangle you can type into,
and if you use it like that, that's all it is.

But if you want more, you can use note-folding, a whole bunch of text
manipulation changes and best of all, it's automatically written to disk (no
saving needed ever) in a real text file, so syncing and backup is really
simple.

~~~
nkantar
Super neat, but all the download links on the site are dead (tag name missing
'v' in 'v1.2.0'). I was gonna' submit a PR, but it doesn't seem to be managed
via a public repo.

~~~
kilian
Yeah the site's separately managed from the app. I noticed it after someone
filed an issue and fixed it straight away. Thanks :)

------
mpwoz
Jumper ([https://github.com/mpwoz/jumper](https://github.com/mpwoz/jumper))

It's a simple chrome extension to jump between top-level comments on hacker
news using the arrow keys.

I've been meaning to publish it to the extension store, but that process looks
like it'll take longer than actually writing it did :)

The reason it's my proudest "achievement" is just because it's so _useful_ to
me (solves an actual problem)

------
tedsanders
[http://www.betthebill.com/](http://www.betthebill.com/)

It's a simple website that randomly picks someone to pay for the entire bill
when eating as a group. But unlike credit card roulette, your odds of paying
are proportional to your meal's cost, so your expected value is fair.

I know it's simple, but it was my first foray into javascript and d3 and
angular. I am proud of how it turned out.

~~~
Humdeee
Lol this is awesome, and most importantly, it looks great on mobile too

------
civilian
lc, or "List Commands used in this directory". It's a bash_history that's
directory specific, because the terminal commands I type are usually
directory-specific. It is only like 10 lines of bash, and I got help with the
bash, but I'm proud of it and I use it everyday. I think my most common usage
is `lc | grep partialCommandIcCantQuiteRemember`

[https://github.com/pconerly/lc-listcommands-
bash/](https://github.com/pconerly/lc-listcommands-bash/)

------
kovacs
I strongly felt the world needed a way for close friends, family, and
coworkers to band together in order to anonymously spam someone's phone with
giphys on their birthday :-)

[http://birthdaymob.com](http://birthdaymob.com)

It's without a doubt the most enjoyable thing I've done and it came from
feeling a little loss of humanity with FB coopting birthdays.

------
javierbyte
I'm proud of a tool that I did to find the visual center of images
([http://javier.xyz/visual-center/](http://javier.xyz/visual-center/)) and one
to make random color schemes more cohesive ([http://javier.xyz/cohesive-
colors/](http://javier.xyz/cohesive-colors/)). I find those two really useful.

I'm not so proud of a tool that transforms images to pure css
([http://javier.xyz/img2css/](http://javier.xyz/img2css/)) but it's by far my
most popular tool ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
elhalyn2
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-
distractio...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-distraction-
free/jhacjhcmekhmmbgppcnndilcndgjebjf)

I made this because as tutorial youtube lover I got distracted by the youtube
"recommended" clickbaits

It simple hides all distraction videos -> simple turn off switch if you have
some spare time ;)

wanna use your own ? [https://github.com/franzherzog/youtube-distraction-
free](https://github.com/franzherzog/youtube-distraction-free)

------
eneve
FAQr - An ASCII GameFaqs reader for Android - 2k + 5 star reviews - 1k + DAU
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.faqr&hl=en](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.faqr&hl=en)
Great for retro gaming! *EDIT - Free with no ads

~~~
malnourish
This is something I never knew I needed!

~~~
eneve
Awesome! Hopefully you find it useful!

------
cogs
Crab - SQL for the filesystem.

Bash is such a pain because of all the incompatible utilities. Its much nicer
just to think about logic than to be searching for command switches and
dealing with corner cases like .. file names that contain spaces(!)

Free for personal use, $5 / month commercial

[http://etia.co.uk](http://etia.co.uk)

~~~
wkoszek
How big filesystems have you queried with it?

~~~
cogs
We've only tested on personal systems so far, just a few TB.

The theoretical limit is around 9PB, but we don't know what performance would
be like at this scale.

A one TB spinning disk drive takes about 30 mins to scan, several thousand
files per second, and query performance is very good. Most people scan project
directories on demand, and the whole disk once a week or so. SSDs are much
faster of course.

There is a restriction on the maximum number of files acted on by one query
(e.g. moved, deleted, renamed), as the exec() function caches the list of
files in memory. On macOS we're ok with tens of millions of files, but the
first Windows release, due any day now is 32bit (we're fighting compiler
issues), so the limit is around a million files.

------
gregfjohnson
[https://github.com/gregfjohnson/netnode](https://github.com/gregfjohnson/netnode)

Netnode. It is a little like a unix pipe, a little like netcat, a little like
tcpdump. But really simple.

You create a graph of communicating entities with netnode. The terminal nodes
of the graph are external data sources/sinks (user input, udp/tcp servers and
clients, shell pipes, named pipes, /dev/tty*, etc.) The internal nodes are a
mesh of instances of netnode.

It is easy to insert a little instance of netnode anywhere, and have it print
the traffic going through it.

I think it turned out really well, and I use it for everything. It feels like
"connective tissue" similar to classic Unix pipes, but for the network age.

./netnode -h

    
    
        -p/-P:  tcp client/server.
        -u/-U:  udp client/server; client does pings to notify server.
        -k:     stdin/stdout.
        -s:     filename.  works for /dev/ttyS0 etc., named pipes, regular files.
        -X:     tcp proxy; local_server:remote_host:remote_port
        -w:     raw network device interface eth0 etc.  (requires sudo.)
    
        -i      next interface is input only
        -o      next interface is output only
    
        -d:     next interface is prefaced with time/direction
        -t:     next interface shows non-printable characters in hex
        -b:     next interface prints data formatted as hex dump

------
sandbags
I am pretty proud of

[http://gosort.it/](http://gosort.it/)

My business partner and I often needed clients to sort things (features,
objectives, pains, restaurants, you name it).

Eventually we built this tool together. You can create a list, sort it, then
invite others to sort the same list and create an aggregate sorted list.
There's lots we'd like to improve but it's pretty useful right now.

Hidden behind the JS front end is a Clojure sort-api server that provides an
API to sort arbitrary data. We've no idea when that might turn out to be
useful.

------
projproj
Like others have said, I made these for myself, but they have been useful to
other people as well.

Search Wikimedia Commons: canweimage.com (300 - 600 searches a day)

Testing flexbox rules: flexbox.help

Googley Eyes Firefox addon: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/googley-eyes/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/googley-eyes/)

Can We Image got included in a listicle on Buffer's blog. flexbox.help started
getting use after I posted it as a Show HN and it got picked up by HTML
Weekly.

------
hackforfun
Obvious throwaway account but 4 years ago went to odesk.com as I had a super
simple idea to make an app. I believe spent less than 2 hours paying a
developer $50 an hour making the app. Had it up in less than a day.

Couple years later the app has made close to a million dollars with me
pocketing about 60% of that and the other 40% to the ad company.

It's one of my favorite projects because it was so simple and literally took
less than 2 hours but I was able to pretty much make a 1000x on it which to
this day is better than anything I have ever done.

~~~
grzm
_" Obvious throwaway account"_

Why use a throwaway account in this instance?

~~~
hackforfun
Mostly because the app still brings in money. Anybody with a basic
understanding of mobile coding could easily duplicate the app in 30 minutes
thus streamlining a bunch of competitors I would rather not have.

------
Curiositry
[http://algebrarules.com](http://algebrarules.com)

It’s simple, useful, and I learned a lot while I was building it. And people
use it (which is always a plus).

~~~
dicroce
Love it. You should add example problems.

~~~
Curiositry
Thanks :) That’s a good idea — each rule has real-number examples, but there’s
nothing to _solve_. It would be fun to add test problems to use the rule on.

------
evizero
[https://github.com/Evizero/UnicodePlots.jl](https://github.com/Evizero/UnicodePlots.jl)

Scientific plotting in the terminal. I didn't come up with the idea of abusing
unicode characters in such a way, just fyi.

Example:
[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Evizero/UnicodePlots.jl/ma...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Evizero/UnicodePlots.jl/master/doc/img/sin.png)

~~~
marktangotango
Thanks, this is very impressive. I didn't know about braille unicode
characters, very cool.

------
chrisanthropic
I wrote Open-Publisher: [https://github.com/chrisanthropic/Open-
Publisher](https://github.com/chrisanthropic/Open-Publisher) with a focus on
easy fiction book creation.

Markdown manuscript input with high quality epub, mobi, and print-ready PDF
output.

It's a wrapper (your choice of Rake, Bash, or Docker) combining Jekyll +
Pandoc with custom PDF LaTeX templates for print-ready (valid PDF-X1A 5x8 and
6x9) and professional epub/mobi ebooks.

------
sovok
[https://wootboard.com](https://wootboard.com)

Draw something and share it.

Like jsFiddle for drawings. In need of a rewrite and mobile support, but
pretty useful if you just want to scribble something down and share it. And I
like the borderless canvas :)

~~~
mind_heist
Ah ! This is really cool :) Do you mind if I ask what this is built on ?

~~~
sovok
Thanks. It's just plain JavaScript and some jQuery. It uses SVG so the browser
takes on some of the work you'd have to do yourself with canvas, like having
the shapes as their own element and detecting mouse events. This also makes it
easy to export as SVG (just append .svg to the URL). Server stuff and a small
backend runs on minimal PHP and MySQL, no frameworks. The data is stored in a
JSON-based format. PNGs are generated from the SVG with ImageMagick. Keyboard
shortcuts with jQuery.hotkeys.

Could be more modularized to allow touch input, multiplayer editing, use as a
library etc., thus the needed rewrite :>

The endgame for this could be something like
[https://www.figma.com](https://www.figma.com). They have collaborative
editing, use canvas to completely do their own thing for graphics and
React+Redux for the interface. Quite amazing.

------
mosselman
A tool to make JS bookmarklets:

[https://bookmarkify.it/](https://bookmarkify.it/)

I created this years ago because I wanted a quick way to create bookmarklets.
Since putting it online I have had good months in terms of visitors (1000+)
and worse (50), but I am still very happy that people keep coming to
bookmarkify to create helpful bookmarklets for themselves and others.

By now it has been around longer than 4 years, despite what the banner says.

~~~
rileyt
This is great. I've never had the time to learn how bookmarklets work, but
your tool just let me make a simple one in under a minute.

~~~
mosselman
Thanks a lot for the compliment! It is really great to hear from users. I just
created it for myself and it is humbling every time I find out that people
simply like it.

------
jetti
I don't have a link as it was an internal project but it was a simple ASP.NET
MVC app that interfaced with Yubikey (a 2 factor dongle) and Active Directory.
It would set the Yubikey password to the Active Directory for a user which
would then be used to authenticate users when they logged into the network. It
wasn't much work but saved the company about $20k, which was the cost of the
commercial version the company was looking into.

------
bndr
[https://github.com/bndr/pipreqs](https://github.com/bndr/pipreqs)

I built a utility for python programmers - pipreqs which helps to generate pip
requirements.txt file based on imports of any project

------
timooo
[https://github.com/jurgelenas/pdfify-
server](https://github.com/jurgelenas/pdfify-server)
[https://github.com/jurgelenas/node-pdfify-
client](https://github.com/jurgelenas/node-pdfify-client)

My little open source app which converts HTML to PDF.

Useful when generating PDF invoices, legal documents. I am using it in my own
projects.

------
geophile
[https://github.com/geophile/osh](https://github.com/geophile/osh)

Osh (Object SHell) is a python application giving you a set of Linux like
commands which can be composed similar to pipes. However, it is objects, not
strings, that are passed from one command to the next.

It includes typical shell stuff, listing files and processes; database access,
in which queries yield Python tuples; and distributed access, which
distributes commands to the nodes of a cluster and then combines the results.
For example, to submit a SQL query to each node of a cluster, getting a count
on each, and combining the results:

    
    
        osh @cluster [ sql "select count(*) from request where state = 'open'" ] ^ f 'node, count: count' ^ red + $
    

\- osh: Invoke the interpreter.

\- @cluster: Relay the bracketed command to each node of the cluster. The
bracketed command returns (node, count) tuples.

\- sql: Submit a sql query (on a cluster node).

\- ^: Denotes piping results from one command to the next.

\- f: For each result from the cluster, run a function on (node, count) which
returns just the count.

\- red +: Reduce using +, summing up all the counts.

\- $: Print result on the console.

------
allanrbo
[https://mailgroup.io](https://mailgroup.io) \- Free online mailing list
manager

[https://crond.net](https://crond.net) \- Free web cron

[https://ipaddr.dk](https://ipaddr.dk) \- what's my IP?

[https://ent.re](https://ent.re) \- URL shortener that generates mobile type
friendly URLs

~~~
arun057
I have been working on a version of the cron thing as well! Good to know there
are more people who know this problem exists.

------
Quatschmann
I wrote a concurrent, super fast webcrawler for my job with Go (~300 LOC) to
get data out of customer sites fast even when they have 1.5 million pages or
more.

You can basically filter everything to get a .csv file in the end with the
links for the given domain, the source for that links, link number, link
depth, timestamp, HTTP Request Codes (200, 404 etc) that fits that filter.

Filters: Number of concurrent http(s) requests, max link number, max link
depth, must include path, must include word(s), must exclude word(s), local or
global search (for links with path, local means you only search for fitting
links on that site and the found sites instead of crawling the whole homepage)
etc.

It was my first Go project and I always wanted to do multithreading and Go
made it so easy. Can't opensource the code because it's company property.

But damn is it fast if you let it run, one homepage didn't throttle me and I
got up to 96 Mb/s (on my 100 Mb/s connection) with set to 2000 connections per
second.

DDosed our office wifi a few times before I implemented a token bucket for
rate limiting (and sometimes just for fun after that :>).

~~~
jdc0589
I did something very similar a few years ago, but in c#. I didn't do real rate
limiting, just threading configuration and a configurable random sleep; but it
got the job done. It was a super fun project to work on.

I can't believe that the open source options are so still so few and far
between in this area. There are TONS of great tools for building crawlers, and
there are tons of great crawlers built for mirroring a copy of websites. But,
there are very few polished crawlers built for simply extracting metadata from
pages and getting information about a site.

~~~
Quatschmann
Yep, that's why I've build my own, the existing ones don't give out a list of
the links or are super slow. A co-worker made the first one in Python but it
was so slow that it took hours (6+ sometimes) to finish a site and I thought
"you can do that faster".

Problematic are some sites that don't use <a href="asd.com"> tags because
that's what my crawler is looking for.

C# & Elixier & Rust where the the other options I thought about and I want to
build the same crawler on these languages (relative easy to do with ~300 LOC)
to compare them for network / server / cli stuff but that has to wait till
next year.

~~~
jdc0589
the biggest headache with the c# implementation was the threading. A lot of
the out-of-the-box threading structures (pools, etc...) have limitations you
might not think about checking for; e.g. you can't set the number of threads
lower than the CPU count on the machine with some of the official .net
threadPool helpers; you can try, but it will just silently ignore you.

There is some super useful stuff too though that made it easy to write a
generic extensible crawler. My implementation ended up supporting separately
compiled plugins you could just dump in a 'plugins\' directory, which
responded to events and had full ability to manipulate the output pipeline.
Do-able in lots of languages, but c# has some formalized helpers around it
that make it super easy.

------
brennen
"Proud" might be a stretch, but some very small tools I get a lot of use-
value-for-coding-time out of and thus feel warm fuzzies about:

[https://github.com/brennen/bpb-
kit/blob/master/home/bin/phot...](https://github.com/brennen/bpb-
kit/blob/master/home/bin/photocp) \- copy photos from some common camera media
locations.

[https://github.com/brennen/bpb-
kit/blob/master/home/bin/gif-...](https://github.com/brennen/bpb-
kit/blob/master/home/bin/gif-sel) \- wrap Byzanz and Festival to record a gif
of a screen region (and tell me what it's doing so I know when to do stuff).

[https://github.com/brennen/bpb-
kit/blob/master/home/.sh_comm...](https://github.com/brennen/bpb-
kit/blob/master/home/.sh_common#L58) \- an alias for navigating directory
history.

------
jtsai1
[http://www.ogjobboard.com/](http://www.ogjobboard.com/)

After getting chew out by my last boss regarding scrapping job post off of oil
and gas industry. I created this site to practices what I have learn so far on
web scraping with c# by using selenium, phantomjs and htmlagilitypack. Its a
site where I scraped job posting from major oil companies.

~~~
wkoszek
Something doesn't work there. Using Chrome on OSX I'm getting: Server Error in
'/' Application. etc.

~~~
jtsai1
yes, you are correct. I've fix it.

------
zimbatm
[http://direnv.net/](http://direnv.net/) is a language-agnostic shell
environment switcher.

I built it years ago because I thought RVM was doing it wrong. It replaces all
the ${lang}env switchers on my machine that I still use every day. The best
thing is to see users adopting it without me doing much PR and contributing
back with useful features.

------
geuis
I created [https://jsonip.com](https://jsonip.com) about 6 years ago. Supports
several million requests a day at this point.

Also created Helium, [https://github.com/geuis/helium-
css](https://github.com/geuis/helium-css), a tool to help frontend devs clean
up old CSS.

They're relatively popular.

------
nishanth_v
[http://github.com/nishanthvijayan/CoderCalendar/](http://github.com/nishanthvijayan/CoderCalendar/)

Android app and Chrome and Firefox addons that lists live and upcoming
programming competitions on sites like Codeforces, Topcoder, Hackerrank,
Hackerearth, Codechef etc

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.corphots.c...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.corphots.coderscalendar)
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/coders-
calendar](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/coders-calendar)
/bageaffklfkikjigoclfgengklfnidll [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/coder-calenda...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/coder-calendar/)

Has 7k+ users all together :)

------
ill0gicity
I recently wrote and was able to open-source
[https://github.com/weebly/tinydns-filter](https://github.com/weebly/tinydns-
filter). I got tired of using online tools to create individual records that
tinydns-data doesn't support, so I wrote a tool to process those "custom"
records.

------
tomasandrle
Tiny Player - a music player for iPhone at [http://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-
player/](http://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player/) (free). Got tired of using
iTunes to "sync" mp3s and watching it fail. Took about 2 months' worth of
weekends and evenings, now I use it every day.

~~~
wkoszek
Really tired of iTunes too. It's tagline should be: "Making simple complex".
I'm using OPlayer Lite right now, but may try your app too.

------
hawkice
Of all the things I've made ( here [https://gen517.com](https://gen517.com))
there are a couple that stand out in hindsight:

[https://zip.gen517.com](https://zip.gen517.com)

Which is a tool so people who don't know anything about programming or fancy
excel usage can still do SQL join type things.

And this version of the classic game mastermind, which I use in conversation
to make the point that "machine learning" can be tremendously approachable --
the computer here just picks a random potentially correct guess and does very
well.

[https://countermind.gen517.com](https://countermind.gen517.com)

And this, which is massively pointless but has gotten more comments than
anything else:

[https://gen517.com/lindsey-grahams-get-away-with-ted-
cruzs-m...](https://gen517.com/lindsey-grahams-get-away-with-ted-cruzs-murder-
simulator/)

------
timpark
I have a script that gets a bunch of data and emails it to me and some co-
workers every day at 7AM. Stuff includes: high temperature/probability of
precipitation for the day, bitcoin price, iTunes/Google play sales/rating
values, number of "diff" lines in web pages, number of followers on
Facebook/Twitter/Google+. The latter isn't entirely a vanity thing... some co-
workers manage multiple social media accounts and it's nice to know if
readership is going up or down.

Part of the point was a) to aggregate everything in one report to reduce the
temptation of looking at something multiple times per day, b) to avoid
visiting multiple pages in order to find all the information, and c) to find
changes in things that I may have forgotten about since they rarely change.

I've thought about making it available for others, but it'd take a bunch of
work, and I'm not sure what the demand would be like.

~~~
dflock
Neat! IFTTT also does this - you can create whatever events and add and output
to a daily/weekly digest email, which is sent at a configurable time, if it
has any content.

~~~
timpark
Thanks. :) I've been meaning to look at IFTTT more, but you know, scratch your
own itch, etc. I'm not sure if it could do a sparkline like I do, but maybe if
you add to a Google sheet or something. (The characters in my example got
filtered out, but they look like [https://github.com/sindresorhus/sparkly-
cli](https://github.com/sindresorhus/sparkly-cli) )

eg: 12.20 (-1.60) temp

------
hnarayanan
[https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify](https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify)

Shpotify, a command-line interface to Spotify on a Mac. :)

------
kolme
I wrote obmenu[1] some time ago, a menu editor for the Openbox window manager.

I'm pretty proud of this simple tool because it eventually made its way to the
repositories of all mayor distributions: Debian[2], RedHat, Arch, you name it.

I've received many emails from users, questions, suggestions, bug reports,
people offering to translate it in their language... I'm super thankful to all
of them (unfortunately I could not answer all of them!).

It's been unmaintained for a while, but it's on my To-Do list to refactor it,
clean it up and add some missing features. It's been 10 years so I'm hopefully
a better programmer now.

[1] [http://obmenu.sourceforge.net/](http://obmenu.sourceforge.net/) [2]
[https://packages.debian.org/de/jessie/obmenu](https://packages.debian.org/de/jessie/obmenu)

------
STRML
Built [https://securesha.re/](https://securesha.re/) a few years back, it is:

Secure (browser-encrypted) dumb file storage with self-destruct. By default,
it self-destructs on first access. The server can't read your files and it
will delete them anyway after a week (or less, if you like).

It's a good way to quickly send a file to someone else and to know if it's
been accessed in the interim.

It was really just our own attempt to build something that can do very simple
secure file sharing that anyone can use, as an alternative to so many broken
practices (such as clearnet emailing sensitive docs).

It's turned into something pretty cool for a few reasons:

1\. We get emails all the time from people who love how simple it is

2\. It's a great testbed for new web technologies; I rebuilt it once using
Polymer and intend to rebuild using Elm when I have the time

3\. It's a great testbed for web crypto & webworkers.

------
TheCapn
Just a fun one... a Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey script that removes a lot of the
Facebook Suggestion/Trend information on the sidebar of the site when it first
loads, replacing it with random pictures from /r/aww (or whichever subreddit
you want to use)

[https://gist.github.com/GrahamBlanshard/d7211436088e0159164a](https://gist.github.com/GrahamBlanshard/d7211436088e0159164a)

I fear I'm going to get chewed out for my crap code on this one but I'm really
not a webdev... I hacked this together after getting sick of celeb gossip
links and trash ads for facebook games. I'd rather get a random pic of a cat
or a supercar than irrelevant junk.

EDIT: Pic for how it looks when loaded:
[http://i.imgur.com/Yqc2jdY.png](http://i.imgur.com/Yqc2jdY.png)

------
dmuth
[http://www.SeptaStats.com/](http://www.SeptaStats.com/)

Hits the API for Philadelphia's Regional Rail and displays real-time data on
the system as a whole as well as historical data on specific trains and train
stations. It's useful to tell, for example, that the evening train I normally
want to take home
([https://www.septastats.com/train/573](https://www.septastats.com/train/573))
is almost never on time, for example.

There's more I want to do, such as displaying more detailed stats and train
data (on-time percentages, for example). And hopefully get some interest from
SEPTA so they can use it to determinate the "biggest offenders" and what can
be done about them.

------
stevenkovar
My co-founder and I built a desktop app called Woot Agent when we were younger
which would tell you when woot.com had a "Woot-Off" [1] sale.

It would sound an alarm every time a new item came up for sale, with a special
sound for their highly sought after "Bag of Crap" [2].

It had over 25,000 downloads after its first Woot-Off. Sounds so bizarre in
hindsight, but a partner at Polaris Venture Partners asked to meet—he wouldn't
say how he found me, but I'm sure Woot Agent was how.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woot#Special_events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woot#Special_events)
[2] [http://www.woot.com/offers/bag-of-crap](http://www.woot.com/offers/bag-
of-crap)

------
countryqt30
Starting a Swiss-German language school in Zurich, Switzerland. Most course
materials and the world's biggest dictionary (Swiss-German) is provided online
for free.

[http://www.schweizerdeutsch-lernen.ch](http://www.schweizerdeutsch-lernen.ch)

------
welanes
Began as a simple Pomodoro timer but is gradually becoming a full task manager
- [https://lanes.io](https://lanes.io).

Less proud of making it than I am of the fact that thousands of people use it
to accomplish their goals every day, which is neat.

------
iamgopal
I made software that track pour rate of liquid glass at 1800 centigrade using
camera and control its pour rate by moving ~1 MW arc electrodes. I was in my
teens and a local company need to quick fix it. My first actual earned money.
13 years later, its still working. :D

------
stevekemp
My git-based DNS hosting site is pretty simple, in terms of code, but it is
enormously useful to be able to make changes to DNS with a simple git-push and
keep a local history:

[https://dns-api.com/](https://dns-api.com/)

In the same vain I put together a little archive for storing bookmarks under
revision control:

[https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public/](https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public/)

Finally I put together a small archive of tools which seems to be quite
popular for reasons I don't fully understand:

[https://github.com/skx/sysadmin-util](https://github.com/skx/sysadmin-util)

------
jshawl
[https://UpDog.co](https://UpDog.co) hosts websites with Dropbox. Currently
making < 1k / m

~~~
wkoszek
How did you do marketing for this? How 1st users learnt about your service?

------
colanderman
[http://www.a440.audio/](http://www.a440.audio/) (Warning: plays audio) I
wanted a dead-simple tuning fork; I saw the domain was available so I made it.
One-click access to A440 from any bookmark.

------
Kerrick
Very niche, but I'm very proud of having made this:
[http://kerrick.github.io/mtg-tools/#/playtest-
cards](http://kerrick.github.io/mtg-tools/#/playtest-cards)

It allows people to create playtest cards for a strategy card game, so people
can test out decks before purchasing cards to play with in a tournament.

I made it because my wife is a Twitch streamer, and she needed a way for the
card name to be visible even though the usual printed size is quite small. It
ends up looking like this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lCQFI9nthE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lCQFI9nthE)

------
mkj
A 3.3v power supply with a 3.5mm audio socket for bypass current measurement.
(well perhaps not _most_ proud, but it's cute)

[https://matt.ucc.asn.au/voltbox/](https://matt.ucc.asn.au/voltbox/)

------
TheRealPomax
A React library called "onclickoutside", [https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-
onclickoutside](https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-onclickoutside), for
dealing with clicks from outside a DOM node's tree.

Sounds like a simple thing to have, but when I wrote it it just didn't exist.
In half a year it's gone from one guy needing a small lib to deal with closing
a menu when you click on the page, to a library with loads of optional
functionality, fixes and improvements filed by 24 contributor, and over
fifteen thousands downloads a day.

It's probably the most successful piece of software I've written to date.

------
nvbn
thefuck - [https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck](https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck)

I just use it every day and I guess a lot of people too.

~~~
rasz_pl
Did your program show up on Hak5 2111? I saw 'fuck' in Darrens console and it
made me go WTF. Now I know what that might of been :).

------
johladam
[https://furnisearch.co/](https://furnisearch.co/)

Definitely different from the ones here since it hasn't made me loads of
money, but definitely proud of it.

The first web application I ever made, which was actually based on one of
those Ask HN threads we had 2+ years go about looking for furniture the fit a
specific size. I actually did make a few sales, shockingly.

At this point, it's pretty much dead as I've taken in other projects and
independent security consulting engagements. It was extremely useful
understanding the entire stack, and I've found it to be something I've been
able to use to build a bridge to developers.

------
okhudeira
I'm happy the following two are getting traffic:

\-
[ByteSize]([https://github.com/omar/bytesize](https://github.com/omar/bytesize))
(.NET/C#) library which is a utility class that makes byte size representation
in code easier by removing ambiguity of the value being represented. ByteSize
is to bytes what System.TimeSpan is to time.

\- [PS1 Gen]([http://omar.io/ps1gen/](http://omar.io/ps1gen/)) is a simple
bash PS1 generator and reference so you can soup up your command line. I
created this after trying to research how to create a cool PS1 string.

------
cushychicken
I wrote this script three years ago to grab screenshots from my networked
Agilent oscilloscope at work. Ten lines of Python, but I use it every day. It
saves me a ton of time moving screencaps from my scope using USB (ugh). More
importantly, it spares me the agony of trying to rename them and classify them
in a batch, hours after I took the original capture. Definitely the best junky
little tool I've ever made.

[http://cushychicken.github.io/agilent-
screencap](http://cushychicken.github.io/agilent-screencap)

I also have some unpublished ones for doing worst case setup/hold analysis in
point-to-point DRAM interfaces.

------
darshan
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.darshancom...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.darshancomputing.BatteryIndicator)

When Android was pretty new, I got the myTouch (the second public Android
device) and was surprised that there was no way to easily see the exact
battery level. I'd been a hobbyist programmer for quite some time, and it
seemed like a problem I might be able to tackle. The result was Android's
first battery indicator app, which remains by far the most-used piece of
software I've ever built, with over 8 million downloads.

------
chinchang
Hint.css -
[https://kushagragour.in/lab/hint](https://kushagragour.in/lab/hint) It
started as a side project but now is the most used CSS tooltip library on the
planet :)

------
kctess5
It's not totally unique, but I made a simple tool I call "watch" that runs
terminal commands on file save. You specify a file glob and a command and it
runs the command whenever a globed file changes. Also has a few handy flags. I
use it ever day to automate my file save->compile->run workflow. It's amazing
how much time you save by never having to up-arrow/enter a terminal after
every save. Been meaning to update it to use file hooks instead of polling but
it works.

[https://github.com/kctess5/file_watcher](https://github.com/kctess5/file_watcher)

~~~
nkantar
For a brief moment I thought you wrote the Unix utility watch. Cool project
anyway!

~~~
kctess5
Thanks! I had not seen that before but it looks nifty.

------
myinitialsaretk
Nearly every website owner I've worked with is obsessed with users getting
404s from old incoming links. First I wrote a cron to summarize apache logs
and email a report, but that involved me building redirects or a cluster of
cms changes. Its evolved into a super simple tool to help site owners see user
404s in near real time and setup their own redirects until our team gets
around to fixing them. Super simple from a tech pov, but it's completely
removed a huge set of annoying tasks from my plate.

Toying around with productizing it as
[https://www.404fyi.com](https://www.404fyi.com)

------
tscs37
[https://bitbucket.org/tscs37/lhm](https://bitbucket.org/tscs37/lhm)

it's a small "webserver" that acts as a sort of proxy between several
localhost:<port> applications and a domain name.

You need to modify your /etc/hosts file but then you can access your localhost
applications from dedicated domains.

Mostly intended for dev purposes, not really production. Like, you could use
it to test your website awesome.example.org as if it was in production on your
dev-machine while it really only runs on localhost:9999

It also copies headers, so no problems when using some custom headers either!

(Beware that it uses IPv6)

------
thecatalinstan
[https://criollo.io/](https://criollo.io/)

I built it because I wanted to able to make websites in Objective-C and I
didn't like any of the stuff that existed when I started.

I've learned a lot making it and enjoyed it. I don't know if I would start
something like this again. Reading the RFCs and implementing FastCGI and HTTP
was a lengthy and tiresome process. I enjoyed it though.

Sure, now you have a bazillion Swift server-side frameworks, but at the time
Swift didn't even exist. Call me a dinosaur, but I like ObjC and the Cocoa
stack and I think it deserves its place on the web.

------
dozzie
There are several.

* cfgen, a config files generator that is fed with config templates and parameters to fill them

* CronBuilder, to pull a repository, run building command, and save the results in another repository

* flowmon, which shows bandwith usage of different streams, each defined by BPF filter (a.k.a. "tcpdump syntax")

* sftponly, a shell for jailing in chroot accounts meant for data transfer only (for scp, sFTP, and rsync)

* xmlrpcd and its spiritual successor HarpCaller, RPC daemons for sysadmins

* logdevourer, log parsing daemon

These are just the public ones, the ones that were generic enough to be open
sourced. I have few others that are/were too specific to the environment they
were written for.

~~~
jakobjs
sftponly is really nice, needs updating and wider distribution (more packages
for more distros).

~~~
dozzie
What do you mean by "needs updating"?

And with packages, I disagree. I only use Debian (and have used Red Hat some
time ago), so it would be quite troublesome for me to provide package build
scripts for anything else. I wouldn't expect any developer to provide
packaging for the whole variety of distributions and OSes. But providing a
sane build process is enough for anybody to build a package for their OS.

------
rolodato
A few tiny projects that I feel have provided real value to people. All
resulted from scratching my own itch:

* dotenv-safe: [https://github.com/rolodato/dotenv-safe](https://github.com/rolodato/dotenv-safe)

* gitlab-letsencrypt: [https://github.com/rolodato/gitlab-letsencrypt](https://github.com/rolodato/gitlab-letsencrypt)

* Editor for Volca Keys synthesizers: [https://volcaeditor.com](https://volcaeditor.com) (work in progress)

------
tylerjwilk00
[http://countdownmaker.com/](http://countdownmaker.com/)

Create Countdown Timers to an Event in the Future and Share them with others.
Includes Timer and Progress Bar.

~~~
shovel
Brilliant. I'd love to see a way to embed the timers on a webpage.

------
ssully
This is minor, but I used the Random
Everything([https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Random%20Everything](https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Random%20Everything))
sublime package at work relatively frequently. I eventually needed to quickly
generate lists of up addresses. I used a small Python script locally for
awhile and then finally decided to just make a pull request on the Random
Everything package.

It was just cool to be able to contribute to a small package I used a lot at
the time.

------
bpicolo
The first thing I ever made and released I'm stilled very proud of. Tiny, just
a Sublime Text plugin to copy the relative path to an open file from your
project root.
[https://github.com/bpicolo/CopyRelativePath](https://github.com/bpicolo/CopyRelativePath)

Up to nearly 2k installs these days!
[https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Copy%20Relative%20Path](https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Copy%20Relative%20Path)

------
eg312
[https://github.com/alexadam/save-as-ebook](https://github.com/alexadam/save-
as-ebook) \- Save a web page/selection as an eBook

------
jdc0589
JsFormat and CaseConversion. I wrote them at a time when a lot of stuff we
were building at work wasn't really being used by a ton of people, so it was
really nice to produce something that actually got used by tens of thousands
of people.

[https://github.com/jdc0589/JsFormat](https://github.com/jdc0589/JsFormat)
[https://github.com/jdc0589/CaseConversion](https://github.com/jdc0589/CaseConversion)

------
lawrencewu
[http://hellojarvis.io/](http://hellojarvis.io/) is a Messenger bot that
reminds you to do stuff. You can phrase time in many ways, which was quite
tricky to do: "in 3 hours", "on the 25th", "tomorrow night", "next wednesday"
all work.

We currently have almost 25k users and I'm proud of the fact that people
really do find it useful. A friend recently mentioned to me that he used
Jarvis to remind him about his dentist appointment.

~~~
rileyt
this is really cool! the lack of explanation and any privacy statements makes
me somewhat nervous though. reminders can be somewhat personal.

~~~
lawrencewu
True, but one could probably come up with codewords for any really personal
reminders.

~~~
rileyt
I'm not looking for insane privacy, just some reassurance that the engineers
are at considering privacy.

------
rileyt
The things I have made that I am most proud of are:

* [https://standardresume.co/](https://standardresume.co/) \- Started because I couldn't find a resume that I liked.

* [https://amplitudeapp.com/](https://amplitudeapp.com/) \- A more advanced artist radio style playlist maker.

* [http://rediscover.rile.yt/](http://rediscover.rile.yt/) \- Automatically save Spotify discover weekly playlists.

~~~
jimminy
I was looking for a Discover Weekly saver for a while, but resorted to using
just screencapping the list, and saving the good tracks internally.

One issue with saving a Discover Weekly list to Spotify is that Discover
Weekly is generated based on the content in the user's playlists. If you add a
bunch of Discover Weekly lists that are 28/30 duds you're going to start
reinforcing the system to generate crappy lists.

I think that's why Spotify doesn't allow saving them. They do allow saving of
the topical Discover Daily, which reinforces my belief here.

Just thought I'd let you know about the possible issue with your product. Even
though I absolutely love it and would use it.

~~~
rileyt
I have heard talk of this before, it would be great to get an answer from
someone who works at Spotify. I wonder if saving the tracks in the playlist
and not creating the backup until the next week would get around that? There
is no way they are track all plays, saves, playlists, skips for every user
over all of time.

~~~
rexpop
No? Tracking all that stuff is trivial. For sure they are tracking plays, I do
not see how they couldn't just as easily track saves/skips w/ one log entry.

~~~
rileyt
Sorry, i meant that they arent talking all of that into consideration for each
weeks playlist -- im sure they are tracking it.

------
Q_the_Novice
[http://node-ping.herokuapp.com](http://node-ping.herokuapp.com) (Repo:
[https://github.com/qawemlilo/node-ping](https://github.com/qawemlilo/node-
ping)) - This is a very simple tool that monitors the availability of some of
my websites and sends me an email if one is down. Hosted on heroku on the free
tier, running for 3 years without much maintenance :)

(Edited: removed markdown elements)

------
syngrog66
_Dead By Zombie_. might have been the world's first commercial _true_ Rogue-
like. Why? Played in a terminal, looks/works like Rogue, yet I was literally
selling copies to customers and promoting it in person at game conventions.
might also have been first in Python too:
[http://synisma.neocities.org/deadbyzombie.html](http://synisma.neocities.org/deadbyzombie.html)
[https://github.com/mkramlich/Dead_By_Zombie](https://github.com/mkramlich/Dead_By_Zombie)

 _The Dread Space Pirate Richard_. a comedy ebook. 1st book on Amazon, 2nd
being written. sells copies:
[https://reddit.com/r/dspr](https://reddit.com/r/dspr)

 _Software Performance & Scalability Cheatsheet_. free download. geek out on
it. revise and expand from time to time:
[http://synisma.neocities.org/perf_scale_cheatsheet.pdf](http://synisma.neocities.org/perf_scale_cheatsheet.pdf)

lots more in the distant past. (eg. once wrote a pretty decent clone of Empire
Deluxe, but with more unit types, and for Linux. shoutout to @WalterBright!)

my next one might be Maxitize. but we'll see, its very early.

------
jim_lawless
In 1997, I wrote MailSend, a commercial command-line SMTP emailer for Windows.
It is now free to use, open-source software.

[http://www.mailsend-online.com/blog/mailsend-is-
free.html](http://www.mailsend-online.com/blog/mailsend-is-free.html)

There were (and are still) a number of other similar programs with the same
name.

It was my first experience in working with users world-wide, conversing with
them both electronically and through postal mail.

------
kingkool68
[https://dummyimage.com](https://dummyimage.com)

~~~
wkoszek
So taking your project as an example, and having Carbon Ads, how much $$$ do
you get out of them?

~~~
kingkool68
I don't pay attention to it and I can't for the life of me figure out how much
it earns monthly but there is over $800 in my account. My hunch is $10-$15 a
month or so.

I just moved it to a cheaper hosting plan so it's actually turning a minuscule
profit now.

~~~
wkoszek
Nice. I thought the Carbon Ads and Deck Ads require some minimum # of traffic,
so I guess you're hitting a lot of visitors on it?

~~~
kingkool68
About 1K pageviews a month it looks like

------
sethlesky
[https://slackpass.io](https://slackpass.io)

It's the missing invite system for Slack.

Let's anyone create invite pages that can accept payment (monthly, one-time)
for access to a Slack community.

It's been a blast to work on. Learned React, Redux, and got into Flow and
Tcombs while building it. Interest so far has lead me to realize more people
are interested in creating private/paid communities online than I had
previously expected.

------
xanderstrike
[http://xanderstrike.com/responsive/](http://xanderstrike.com/responsive/)

My responsive demo, resize the screen ;)

Also
[https://github.com/xanderstrike/whatui](https://github.com/xanderstrike/whatui),
a dirt simple what.cd web interface similar to Couchpotato or Sickbeard, but
without the terrible performance and extra features of Headphones.

~~~
dfex
heh - that's awesome :)

------
aritztg
Built [https://fsterramaker.com/](https://fsterramaker.com/) last year. It
generates scenaries for Flight Simulator X using updated orthophotos from
several sources. Another very simple tool that I use almost every day (dealing
xlsx files): [https://github.com/aritztg/svc](https://github.com/aritztg/svc)

------
accnt
[http://antigen.sharats.me](http://antigen.sharats.me)

I'm not the original creator but currently maintaining Antigen: A plugin
manager for zsh, inspired by oh-my-zsh and vundle.

Back in the days I made and found quite useful Dumpr: Command line download
tool written in bash.
[https://github.com/desyncr/dumpr](https://github.com/desyncr/dumpr)

~~~
brain5ide
The name suggests it's also inspire by pathogen :D

------
kris-s
I made a very simple CLI util that prints a timestamp and an emoji inside a
rectangle, makes separating and scrolling through repetetive terminal output
easier. I use it all the time and it's stupid and I love it.
[https://github.com/kris-s/learn/blob/master/block.go](https://github.com/kris-s/learn/blob/master/block.go)

------
k2xl
[https://github.com/k2xl/downtime_monitor](https://github.com/k2xl/downtime_monitor)
\- Simple HTTP monitoring that sends a slack message when site is down.
Configured all from a yaml [http://recap.work](http://recap.work) \- Chrome
extension that shows salary info of people when browsing linkedin profiles
[http://facepalm.bogost.com/](http://facepalm.bogost.com/) \- Silly little app
that shows a facepalm picture of Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost and his
latest cynical tweets [http://yofigame.com](http://yofigame.com) \- Mobile
word game for iOS and Android
[http://www.k2xl.com/games/boomshine/](http://www.k2xl.com/games/boomshine/)
\- Flash game I made called Boomshine (also on mobile)
[http://www.leanbelts.com](http://www.leanbelts.com) \- Six sigma
certification for really cheap
[http://k2xl.com/games/obechi/](http://k2xl.com/games/obechi/) \- Flash game I
made called Obechi (also on mobile)
[http://soundcloud.com/k2xl](http://soundcloud.com/k2xl) \- Some EDM music i
wrote [http://k2xl.com/games/psychopath/](http://k2xl.com/games/psychopath/)
\- Flash puzzle game I made called Psychopath
[http://k2xl.com](http://k2xl.com) \- Personal site with a bunch of flash
games I made a long time ago

Multiple others I can't remember off top of my head

------
oliver2213
Definitely not as awesome as some of the others I've seen posted here :), but
I made
[https://github.com/oliver2213/showerthoughtMOTD](https://github.com/oliver2213/showerthoughtMOTD)
to spice up my message of the day on servers I log into. Usually makes me
laugh and occasionally makes me contemplate things I normally wouldn't think
about.

------
charlesism
I spent way too much time on a tiny menulet that just switches Mac audio from
stereo to mono.

[http://charlesism.com/monomenulet.html](http://charlesism.com/monomenulet.html)

It's simple, but I think I think I made it nice to use. A couple minor details
I added: you can change its keyboard shortcut directly from the menubar, and
it flashes the keyboard backlight to get your attention.

------
jonbri1985
[https://github.com/jonbri/ticker-log](https://github.com/jonbri/ticker-log)

I got tired of trying to filter my dev-tools console, so I wrote a little tool
that shows log output on-screen with some interactions.

You can play with it here: [https://jonbri.github.io/ticker-
log/](https://jonbri.github.io/ticker-log/)

------
Lerc
Stackie. It's a stack machine texture generator using single character
instructions. This lets you produce textures from a very small encoding.

For example, this URL contains code for a flame texture.

[http://fingswotidun.com/stackie/?code=x1x-*5*dx4**y3*p%2By!-...](http://fingswotidun.com/stackie/?code=x1x-*5*dx4**y3*p%2By!-&palette=xy!1%2B*&seed=65)

------
BHSPitMonkey
[https://getprelude.net](https://getprelude.net)

A simple, server less, offline-capable web app for practicing reading music.
I've always been slow at sight reading, and this lets me plug in a MIDI piano
and do drills.

It was also a good catalyst project for getting to play with: React, Webpack,
Service Workers, Web MIDI, Web Audio, and the Progressive Web Application
paradigm.

------
jacalata
I built a Windows phone app for PAX that let you have the schedule and maps
offline. At the time there was an iOS and and Android app, but not even an
unofficial one for Windows. There are more apps now, and PAX has gotten more
"professional" a.k.a it has gotten harder every year to access the schedule.
This year it wanted me to log in to the Guidebook site to even see it and I
decided that was a good cue to stop providing the app so when Microsoft said
anything without an age rating would be unpublished i just let it happen (it's
less necessary now anyway since internet access at PAX has gone from none-
whatsoever to pretty decent). I had several hundred users each year, and
people emailed me suggestions and requests. Definitely the only individual
project I've ever done that had other people relying on me, and it was harder
than I thought (one year MSFT didn't approve my update with the new schedule
until after PAX, so then I built an in-app downloader that fetched the
schedule data from my server, etc).

------
varundey
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-
pagespeed-i...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-pagespeed-
insights/edbkhhpodjkbgenodomhfoldapghpddk)

Ridiculously simple chrome extension I built while learning how to build one.
Tells you the Google pagespeed insights score for the website of current tab.

------
chad-autry
Probably my largest is [https://github.com/chad-
autry/rototone](https://github.com/chad-autry/rototone) Android app for
ringtone nad notification tone play lists.

Other than that, I've gotten alot of use out of my dockerized minecraft
project [https://github.com/chad-autry/minecraft-server-
container](https://github.com/chad-autry/minecraft-server-container)

And more recently, in line with what the OP is looking for
[https://github.com/chad-autry/markdown-code-
extractor](https://github.com/chad-autry/markdown-code-extractor) is a quick
project to extract code from a markdown file(GH READ.md) and create files. I
use it to create the yaml files which I otherwise develop/comment straight in
the READ.md of [https://github.com/chad-autry/wac-bp](https://github.com/chad-
autry/wac-bp)

------
chriswarbo
[http://chriswarbo.net/git/warbo-
utilities/branches/master/sy...](http://chriswarbo.net/git/warbo-
utilities/branches/master/system/inDir) just runs a given command in a given
directory, e.g. `inDir ~/Pictures convert MyPhoto.jpg MyPhoto.png`

Really simple, yet I use it a lot, e.g. for remote mounts where Emacs can slow
down if I "cd" into it, or in loops `for DIR in submodules/*; do inDir "$DIR"
git pull --all; done`

When I used to do Web development, I found
[http://chriswarbo.net/projects/repos/chrome-duplicate-tab-
de...](http://chriswarbo.net/projects/repos/chrome-duplicate-tab-
detector.html) to be super useful. When opening a URL in Chrome, it switches
to an existing tab with that URL if there is one.

I also made a simple Chrome extension which let me navigate Drupal test output
using the left/right arrow keys. Can't find it now though :(

------
jaimefjorge
[https://www.codacy.com](https://www.codacy.com)

I've made this because all the companies that my co-founder and I met had
scripts glued together in build tools to get code metrics and static analysis.

We ended up discovering a significant amount of people and companies
interested in having a nice product constantly running code analysis and
linked to Github.

------
zem
A simple wordsearch tool for scrabble players that I wrote twice:

updawg
[[https://github.com/martindemello/updawg](https://github.com/martindemello/updawg)]
had the distinction of being the only wordsearch tool on the nokia n900.
featurewise, it was a clone of lexpert, a popular app that ran on a few other
mobile platforms. it was a vala/gtk/hildon wrapper around some open source
wordsearch code, and it all just worked. the nice thing was after i wrote i
for my own use, another scrabbler bought an n900 and was delighted to find she
could get a wordsearch app for it.

varix
[[https://github.com/martindemello/varix](https://github.com/martindemello/varix)]
is my from-scratch rewrite of the same thing in ocaml, with more powerful
searches. it's a linux TUI app so i haven't really tried to interest anyone
else in using it, but i use it all the time and i love it.

------
joeld42
I got tired of filling out timecards so I wrote a simple script to print out
my timecard for me (I still double-checked and signed it). Word got around and
I added some features to default to your hours/billing numbers from the
previous week for people other departments. It was really cool walking past
the timecard tray every week and seeing it evolve from the pile of yellow
cardstock timecards with a few folded white paper ones (printed from my
script) to eventually almost entirely printed ones. It was something that just
took me a few hours on a slow week, and probably ended up saving the company
quite a lot of time.

Now that I'm doing contracting work, I did the same thing again when I got
tired of invoicing from a spreadsheet. Not that generating an invoice is all
that hard or time consuming, it's just one of those tasks that takes me a lot
of inertia to start, so I would put it off. I'll probably clean up and post
the invoicing script on github one of these days.

------
garysieling
I built [https://www.findlectures.com](https://www.findlectures.com), which is
categorized list of lectures and speakers, inspired by the faceted search on
Newegg and Amazon, which I wish Youtube had.

It's been a fun project, because I've had to build tools to come up with a lot
of quality measures for the dataset.

~~~
tomascot
Gary, great work! You could add a bot to post links to lectures in social
networks, at least Twitter.

Like one random lecture each day, or the most "active" during the week.

~~~
garysieling
Thanks! I like the Twitter idea.

I'm working toward custom entity recognition, which would help in that area.
For instance, listing all lectures about a particular programming language,
lectures on the history of countries that no longer exist, etc.

------
palerdot
Hotcold Typing: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hotcold-
typing/gik...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hotcold-
typing/gikgnaajhiofmngkodahgpjnpgacmhlc)

Learning Touch Typing with instant visual feedbacks.

I initially made it for Mozilla Dev Derby, and now released as an Chrome App.

------
Aardappel
[http://strlen.com/treesheets/](http://strlen.com/treesheets/) It's a cross
between an outliner / spreadsheet / mind-mapper and general note taker. I've
spent significantly more hours using it than I've spent programming it, so
that's a win in my book :)

~~~
SeriousM
I used it for a while but I forgot sometimes the key scheme so it got unusable
from time to time. Anyway, it's awesome idea!

------
philmander
I've just made this interactive periodic table of elements.

It's a periodic table that you can interact with like Google maps or similar.
Zooming in progressively reveals more information about each chemical weekend
element including images, video and Wikipedia content

[http://periodictablemap.com](http://periodictablemap.com)

~~~
sigi45
Really like it :-)

Useful and great example of how to show data.

------
tylerjwilk00
[http://easydecisionmaker.com/](http://easydecisionmaker.com/)

Simple single function tool decision maker. I made this because my co-workers
and I always had trouble deciding where to go for lunch. It was kind of a joke
but then the traffic kept growing and I now consider it a huge success as a
side project.

------
kapuru
I've built [https://www.defollow.com](https://www.defollow.com)

It tracks your Twitch unfollowers. I would never recommend anybody to care
about unfollowers, but I was just always so curious to find out who unfollowed
me (and hunt him until he refollows).

I also plan to add YouTube support soon. :)

Edit: It's still a little bit in development.

------
drej
May sound trivial, but for me it's a simple charting tool.

I'm quite big on QA, but it's always been a problem for us, due to lack of
tools. We have tons (millions) of time series being churned into proprietary
files (neither of which can readily change). We've always had issues analysing
these, be it analytically or visually. Two years ago, I wrote a parser in
Python, which feeds the data into a browser interface. There, one can select
values in a few (<select multiple>) dropdowns - which denote dimensions,
compare multiple files across these dimensions, and further manipulate these
subsets of data. But the core are simple line charts from these data slices.

The whole thing is under 500 SLOC, it's blazing fast and it lets users cut
through our data in no time. It has helped streamline our verification
workflows, catch bugs, and allowed our clients to better understand the large
amounts of data we send their way.

------
ada1981
[http://AnthonyDavidAdams.com/memescope](http://AnthonyDavidAdams.com/memescope)
The Memescope is a dynamic kaleidoscope that uses images representing leading
news headlines as the source material.

[http://PlayTheLoveGame.com](http://PlayTheLoveGame.com) or
[http://amzn.to/2fSyUXX](http://amzn.to/2fSyUXX) The Love Game started as an
app here on HN, then a crowdfunded card game that ended up in Urban
Outfitters, Ritz Carlton Hotels & Amazon.

[http://AnthonyDavidAdams.com/spacejournals](http://AnthonyDavidAdams.com/spacejournals)
I took those images from NASA / JPL and created a series of 17 journals as
part of a crowdfund. They are super beautiful and really incredible as a full
set.

------
imron
Kamlock -
[https://www.imralsoftware.com/kamlock](https://www.imralsoftware.com/kamlock)

A software based keyboard and mouse lock for your computer so you can have a
small child sitting on your lap (for example during a video call) and not have
to worry about them pressing random keys.

------
hunvreus
Pipelines [1]

Me and a couple colleagues initially built devo.ps[2]. We made a lot of
mistakes (over-engineered mostly).

We ended up building its successor, Pipelines, as a lightweight Python
alternative to tools like Jenkins and it works great so far for us and many of
the teams we work with.

It doesn't solve much; we mostly use it to easily trigger Ansible playbooks
(through Slack/webhooks or a Web interface) and review failed/successful logs
of past runs. But it has a few nice features (like prompting users for values
and being easily extensible).

Also you install it with a simple `pip install pipelines`. No DB, no need for
a gazillion dependencies, just Python. Done in 2 minutes and running in 5.

1:
[https://github.com/Wiredcraft/pipelines](https://github.com/Wiredcraft/pipelines)
2: [http://devo.ps](http://devo.ps)

------
ftfish
[https://simplesharingbuttons.com/](https://simplesharingbuttons.com/)

Despite the site being free and open source, people still send me a few bucks
each month, and very nice thank-you emails. And there are at least 2-3 sites
out there that I'm personally a fan of that used it.

------
MasterScrat
My chrome extension that overlays Reddit comments when you go to XKCD.com

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd%20r/kjfdpkjdj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd%20r/kjfdpkjdjiefealdecjlgeogjbklhmgi)

Not my most impressive feat but I love it :D

------
wbradley
[http://timedelta.com/](http://timedelta.com/)

My wife and I made it so that I could quickly paste timestamps from various
log files and see the relative time between then and now. It also allows for a
pretty basic relative time entry, like "2 weeks ago", etc...

------
Thomas_9
For me it is Splitons!

Splitons is a simple Offline web application to split costs between friends
(www.splitons.com).

It has been a mobile first development using AngularJs, Bootstrap and font-
awesome.

Splitons takes advantage of AppCache, websockets and local storage to provide
the best user experience possible. There is a clear separation between the Ui
and the service thanks to a simple reusable Api.

At this moment, the application takes care of about 150 projects, users are
regularly providing feedbacks and thanks email. They really enjoyed not having
to install another application and how easy it is to share a project.

Because it is an open source project
([https://github.com/Paraintom/Splitons](https://github.com/Paraintom/Splitons)),
one user sent me a pull request that I accepted to improve the Ui some months
ago.

Please try and give me a feedback!

~~~
Thomas_9
The website : www.splitons.com

------
jdowner
I wrote a little tool for working with github gists from the command line,
[https://github.com/jdowner/gist](https://github.com/jdowner/gist). I was
pretty happy with how it turned out, and pleased that a few people have found
it useful :)

------
timvdalen
[https://followww.co/](https://followww.co/)

It shows you all HTTP redirects that a certain URL leads to, with all cookies
that are set at each of the steps.

I built it to help my online marketeer colleagues get insights in what is
hiding behind short URLs. Before building this tool, they routinely came to me
with URLs asking me to trace them. The back-end is a websocket API that
returns each step as it discovers it and the front-end is an Angular (1.x)
application. I also built a small Chrome extension[1] that adds a followww.
context menu item to all links on the web.

[1]:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/followww/dmpapbgln...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/followww/dmpapbglnlfchgbbnalpcekkfdddagdm)

------
kislayverma
[http://rulette.org](http://rulette.org)

This is a deceptively simple rule engine that I built for some side projects
but has has since been picked up for many things that the big guns would have
been overkill for. Clobbered the first version together in less than 5 days
too!

------
tymm
[https://simplepush.io](https://simplepush.io) Easiest way to send
notifications to Android from the command line.

No registration, unlimited notifications, send messages via curl.

I made it because I like simplicity and all other tools were overly
complicated (require registration and so on).

------
xojoc
[https://typed.pw](https://typed.pw) \- Simple way to write online.

~~~
wkoszek
How do you keep it out of spam?

~~~
xojoc
I want it to be spammed. I was creating another site which accepted user input
and the problem was: how do I avoid spam? I searched online and found some
simple and clever solutions. Typed is a way to test these solutions and a way
to come with new ones.

This is not the only reason typed exists obviously...

~~~
instakill
Please expand on why you want it to be spammed?

------
Brainix
Pottery. A Pythonic way to access Redis, the same way that you use Python
dicts. I use it in production, and I hope that it's useful to other people
too: [https://github.com/brainix/pottery](https://github.com/brainix/pottery)

------
Chris911
iStats -
[https://github.com/Chris911/iStats](https://github.com/Chris911/iStats)

Wanted a command line tool to show OS X stats. Browse Stack Overflow and a
bunch of forums to find that nothing existed. I believe it is now the go-to
tool for this.

------
znq
[http://bugfender.com/](http://bugfender.com/) \- A remote debugger for iOS
and Android apps.

This is one of the internal tools that we built at Mobile Jazz as we always
had the problem of being a remote team and therefore physically detached from
our clients. Many times they had problems that we couldn't reproduce on our
devices. With Bugfender we now can get access to their device's app logs and
figure out what's wrong.

From being initially just a clunky internal tool, Bugfender is now a whole
platform with a nice admin interface and many filtering and search options.
The result is great and we're having quite some success with as not only we,
but also the whole mobile developer community really loves it. And that is
what makes us proud! :-)

------
throwanem
I wrote a SAME encoder that runs in your browser: [https://github.com/aaron-
em/same-encoder](https://github.com/aaron-em/same-encoder)

Hardly game-changing, to be sure. I did it for fun and to see whether it was
possible at all, and as far as I know nobody actually uses it for anything.
But there's something about synthesizing audio a byte at a time and playing it
back in a web browser that tickles the same sense of magical possibility that
I first experienced as a kid learning BASIC on an Apple IIc. Our industry's
grown up a lot since then, of course, and I've grown up with it - but, every
now and again, it's delightful to be reminded of what led so many of us into
this line of work in the first place.

------
ryanackley
Wrote a plugin for Borland JBuilder (Java IDE from 2002).

It would auto-wrap code comments to a specified column number. It would also
auto-wrap on delete or backspace. Still miss it because I want it for existing
editors but I'm not interested in learning some random plugin API just to
rewrite it.

------
ensiferum
Usenet binary grabber: [http://www.ensisoft.com](http://www.ensisoft.com)
([http://github.com/ensisoft/newsflash-
plus](http://github.com/ensisoft/newsflash-plus))

A little history. Back in the day when I started looking into Usenet there
were no proper clients for Linux. There was pan but it had huge problems
dealing with large volume binary groups. I figured it can't be that hard and
started working on my own client which slowly evolved into the current 4th
major version. Ten years in the making already :)

The 3x series was the most successful with perhaps around 50-60k installs. In
general the field is very competitive and there are several clients for
Windows especially.

------
jonduarte
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unsubtitle-for-
net...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unsubtitle-for-
netflix/fhallfieahekmidfbaeobbdiajlmapfg/reviews?hl=en)

Unsubtitle for Netflix - Sometimes Netflix force subtitles to appear when
you're watching series. I found it really annoying and decided to create this
Chrome extension to disable it.

[http://www.vua.sh/](http://www.vua.sh/) \- Vua.sh is a simple website that
encrypts messages on the client side and stores only the encrypted message. It
generates a link that can only be used once, after clicking on the link and
reading the message it is destroyed from the database.

------
mkagenius
Automation to look for secret API tokens in APKs -
[https://android.fallible.co](https://android.fallible.co)

Its pretty basic, it reverse engineers code and scans strings.xml and
AndroidManifest.xml to look for random strings and print it on the UI.

~~~
ohstopitu
might I ask how you were able to get the APKs from the play store?

~~~
tbg
I've used this Python library [https://github.com/egirault/googleplay-
api](https://github.com/egirault/googleplay-api) but I'm not sure if it still
works

------
nicolashahn
A little tool to check the similarity of two images using PIL, it gives a %
difference as well as an diff image:

[https://github.com/nicolashahn/python-image-
diff](https://github.com/nicolashahn/python-image-diff)

Also a utility I made for myself to graph my bank transactions. For some
reason USAA doesn't have that feature on its site so I made it for myself.
Very bare right now but it does want I need it to, which is to visualize my
spending. Eventually want to be able to look at transaction names from within
the graph.

[https://github.com/nicolashahn/USAA-Transaction-
Graph](https://github.com/nicolashahn/USAA-Transaction-Graph)

------
bambax
I'm in the process of producing my first physical object and it's
exhilarating.

I learned a lot about stainless steel (303, 304, 316, 316L...), CNC machining,
stamping, polishing, etc. but what's really cool is designing something on a
computer and receive a metal object some time later that does exactly what you
hoped it would do.

(For prototyping purposes I first 3D print each design, but the plastic
version is waaay less interesting than the metal one.)

Should go on sale in 3-4 weeks; super excited.

\- - -

Some time ago I made a rich text to markdown transformation that runs
completely client side; it's available here

[http://markitdown.medusis.com](http://markitdown.medusis.com)

It would probably need a serious face-lift, but it's still used by many,
apparently.

------
alixaxel
[https://namegrep.com](https://namegrep.com)

Super-fast lookups and filtering - 50,000 within second(s), support for
regular expressions and the derivated ontologies.

People don't seem to get it though (even my co-workers struggle with basic
regexps).

------
jftuga
A simple, multi-threaded IPv4 TCP port scanner for Python 3.5

[https://github.com/jftuga/universe/blob/master/tcpscan.py](https://github.com/jftuga/universe/blob/master/tcpscan.py)

[https://github.com/jftuga/universe/blob/master/bin/tcpscan.e...](https://github.com/jftuga/universe/blob/master/bin/tcpscan.exe)

I like this because it is one stand-alone file compared to something like nmap
which has to be installed.

I have installed Python 3.5 on most of the systems I use. Otherwise, I built a
portable windows binary with PyInstaller. It can scan a LAN at about 600
ports/sec.

------
nvitas
Angular CLI Tools

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/angular-cli-
tools](https://www.npmjs.com/package/angular-cli-tools)

I started with the official Angular CLI (for Angular 2) back when it was still
using system.js and it was painfully slow on a windows machine. I realised
that 95% of what I needed the official CLI was for generating
components/modules/pipes...etc. So over a weekend a friend and I wrote our own
CLI tools that generate components and decided to use a simple webpack seed
for our projects. Been using our own CLI ever since for (m)any Angular 2
projects.

I heard that the official CLI has gotten better but I don't have a reason to
go down that route any more.

------
gamache
Fuzzyurl.

[https://github.com/gamache/fuzzyurl.js](https://github.com/gamache/fuzzyurl.js)
[https://github.com/gamache/fuzzyurl.ex](https://github.com/gamache/fuzzyurl.ex)
[https://github.com/gamache/fuzzyurl.rb](https://github.com/gamache/fuzzyurl.rb)

It's a library for parsing, constructing, and wildcard-matching of common-
style URLs. Aside from being crazy useful, the fun part is that I wrote it for
Ruby, Elixir, and JS with the same basic interface. Kind of like writing a
poem that works in three languages. :)

------
alexgandy
[https://referhub.co](https://referhub.co)

It's dramatically reduced the amount of annoying recruiter spam that I get.
I'm proud that it was initially just a test-bed for new technologies, that
actually became useful.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Very nice, pity it's extremely invasive. Now, if there was a way to protect
email privacy...

------
halisaurus
I built the Chrome extension [0] for Pesticide[1]. It toggles the Pesticide
CSS in the current tab making it easier to visualize the placement of elements
in the DOM. Useful for front end debugging.

The extensions first implementation was basically just a ternary operator! Now
it's got a little more to it, but it's still super simple.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pesticide-for-
chro...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pesticide-for-
chrome/bblbgcheenepgnnajgfpiicnbbdmmooh)

[1] [https://github.com/mrmrs/pesticide](https://github.com/mrmrs/pesticide)

------
Tobias42
[http://bearbushkas.com](http://bearbushkas.com)

I spent most of my free time the last 1.5 years to make this 4-player iPad
game together with my brother (developer) and two cousins (graphics).

Considering that it was our first Swift and SpriteKit project (my dayjob is
programming business applications in Java), I am pretty proud of the outcome.
It even got some reviews (one with a 92% rating!).

The only problem is, we completely underestimated how hard it is these days to
get downloads for an old-fashioned "pay once for the whole thing" game.
Currently we are in the process of converting it to a free to play model,
hoping that more people try it. Wish us luck!

~~~
dfex
That looks awesome - purchasing now :)

For what it's worth, I much prefer the pay once play forever model for good
games. It would seem I am in the minority though

~~~
Tobias42
I hope you have a lot of fun with it and I'm curiuos of your feedback!

As a customer I very much prefer the pay once model, too, but we really seem
to be a minority these days.

We sold about 45 copies of the game so far in almost half a year, but when we
made it free for a weekend we immediately got 200 downloads without even
advertising.

So let's see what happens with free2play. We are going to make all levels but
the first one an in-app purchase and maybe a few characters. There will be no
consumable IAPs because I hate them with a passion.

All previous buyers are going to keep the full game btw. Apple makes it
surprisingly difficult to implement that, but anything else would just not be
right.

------
brettlangdon
[https://icanhazdadjoke.com](https://icanhazdadjoke.com)

Probably not the best example of a "tool", but it does have an API and a Slack
integration. Probably one of the more favorite things I've published.

------
lifeisstillgood
Mods: please rename this title to "Oh god, what have I been doing with my life
?!"

------
gempir
Not as cool as most projects here but this is mine:
[https://github.com/gempir/relaybroker](https://github.com/gempir/relaybroker)

It is a proxy for irc bots on twitch.tv because connections can die and more
than 1 connection will make things possible like going around rate limiting.
Also joining a lot of channels at once is made easier so the user of our proxy
needs to worry less about what he is sending when, we handle that.

Made it together with 2 friends who of mine we all 3 use it everyday for our
bots. It was fun to write and learn go while doing so. I wanna improve it
everyday but I'm never sure where or what.

------
carapace
I don't have it on this machine, but I wrote a little Python/Tkinter script
that wrapped a call to GNU aspell.

Select text, activate script (by shortcut button on bar or global control key
combo), and a little window pops up with spelling suggestions.

------
devopsgal
Earlier this year AWS was running a serverless chatbot contest. We built
[http://opsidian.ai/](http://opsidian.ai/) a tool to work with AWS from Slack
and ended up as one of the finalist.

------
jankovicsandras
ImageTracer: It's a Public Domain raster image tracing and vectorizing
library, outputting SVG.

JavaScript
[https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerjs](https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerjs)
or Java
[https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerjava](https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerjava)
or "Android" Java
[https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerandroid](https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerandroid)

------
DelTaco
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.TimMendez....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.TimMendez.SpiderSwing)

I made a simple endless swing game for Android with Unity 5. It was my first
experience with Unity or C#. I needed units for college, and I was able to
have a professor oversee the project for 4 units. I'm so glad he did because I
had a ton of fun making it!

Took a quatter to make and I'm pretty proud of it even though the only users
nowadays are friends and family members who keep it installed and accidentally
open it, and a couple of Russians :)

------
FigBug
I've mad a few:

Command line tool for OSX to upload images to imgur:
[https://github.com/FigBug/imguru](https://github.com/FigBug/imguru)

Copy and paste for Windows command line:
[https://github.com/FigBug/ccopyppaste](https://github.com/FigBug/ccopyppaste)

Mac App to set Philips Hue bulbs colour temperature to match the sun:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circadian-hue-for-philips-
hu...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circadian-hue-for-philips-
hue/id1165687051?mt=12)

------
saamm
[http://puns.samueltaylor.org/](http://puns.samueltaylor.org/)

Enter a word, and this site will make up some puns for you based on that word.
I'm way more proud than I have reason to be of this.

------
Buetol
An archive of chrome extensions versions:
[https://crx.dam.io](https://crx.dam.io) (I should upload it to archive.org)

Also, this small templating library for python:
[https://github.com/mdamien/lys](https://github.com/mdamien/lys)

Also, a chrome extension that display images like firefox do, people seems to
like it: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/center-
images/dama...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/center-
images/damadkdlkdhpeeehnobhpeifjnmfkkjg)

~~~
w_t_payne
I really like lys. (I've started to use it for some small bits and pieces and
will possibly/probably continue).

~~~
Buetol
thanks, I have a lot of ideas planned to make it easier to use, especially for
django projects. Would love to get more feedback on how people use it.

------
simonmales
In 2015 I launched Bitcoin Fax.
[https://www.bitcoinfax.net/](https://www.bitcoinfax.net/)

Send a fax, pay for it with Bitcoin. That is all.

I like it (and Bitcoin) because you can transact online without signing up.

------
kazinator
A very useful, tiny project I made fairly recently is Tamarind:

[http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/tamarind/tree/README](http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/tamarind/tree/README)

Tamarind is a CGI-based web service which manages throw-away mail aliases.

You log in, and manage a list of generated aliases which instantly go into
service when created, and out of service when deleted.

It runs on a Debian setup (I use Courier IMAPD + Exim MTA).

Tamarind is written in my own programming language, TXR, without any web
framework: it includes all the code for processing requests from Apache, and
doing session management with cookies, etc.

------
instakill
Not a tool or product, but still sorta kinda. For me this year it's been
making:

[http://www.partfiction.com/courses/a-war-on-
words/](http://www.partfiction.com/courses/a-war-on-words/)

It's not the most polished-off looking thing in the world, but it gave me an
excuse to write a short fiction highlighting the importance of Black Lives
Matter. It also allowed me to experiment with Greensock to put together some
dodgy ass animations to go with the story. And it meant having to hear my own
damn voice, urg, for some of the narration.

Also I learned a ton about BLM while making this.

------
medwezys
[https://pdfcv.com](https://pdfcv.com) \- a tool for creating a CV/resume
online. It has been running for 5 years, without adding any new features and
people still find it useful.

~~~
rileyt
How are you doing LinkedIn import? We had it at
[https://standardresume.co](https://standardresume.co), but lost it when they
closed off the developer API.

------
Shadow6363
I still use [http://seductiveequations.com/2015/11/09/water-
meter.html](http://seductiveequations.com/2015/11/09/water-meter.html) rather
often to casually see how much water I've been using. Helped me to discover
when a new water timer I installed outside got stuck open. Similarly, I've
been able to see through actual data how much water my new low-flow showerhead
just saved me right after I step out of the shower. Wish I had more time to
improve it, but despite that, it's still remained quite useful.

------
RogueX
I use Flipboard for my news and RSS feeds, but really hate how Flipboard
forces every feed you add into separate "magazines." I like all of my news in
one magazine, all my tech news in another, etc. Fed up with it, I whipped up a
Django-based app that lets me create collections of feeds and then outputs
them into single RSS feeds in a Flipboard-friendly format. I can add and
remove feeds in a collection from a simple web interface and see the results
in my Flipboard app. It's not one of my most amazing creations, but it
scratches a really big annoying itch and works great.

------
joslin01
I made myself a program that downloaded & organized torrent music files; it
was customizable so that %a/%y - %d meant store underneath <artist
name>/<year> \- <album name>. It was one of first projects I ever coded, and
eventually got to point where main thread would lock up cause I was doing so
much processing on it. As anyone who does this kinda work knows, main thread
processes graphics, so when it would freeze up for 10-20 seconds I really had
no idea what was going on and started doing all this crazy stuff before
figuring out how to handle threads.

------
jimmies
My hakko soldering station doesn't automatically turn off if I leave it on.
One time I was leaving town and had to worry about my house fire for the whole
weekend. So I made an Arduino/msp430 from spare parts to do just that.

[https://gist.github.com/htruong/bed170c71983dfcc7c0968174aae...](https://gist.github.com/htruong/bed170c71983dfcc7c0968174aaed8e2)

Other than that, I also made a Apple ADB to USB converter so I can use my old
Apple Extended keyboard II with my new computer. Hard to believe newer
keyboards are worse compared to that one.

~~~
LongTermBond007
Do you have any details on the ADB convertor? I have a few old keyboards I'd
love to be able to use!

~~~
jimmies
Here:
[https://github.com/tmk/tmk_keyboard](https://github.com/tmk/tmk_keyboard)

You only need an Arduino Micro Pro (the 5V/16Mhz variant). The cheap ones on
eBay work just fine.

------
cvarjas
I made sortable NMR chemical shift data tables for impurities to improve
access to this information for chemists and students:
[http://nmrs.io/](http://nmrs.io/)

------
burgalon
BoardingBot [https://boardingbot.boorgle.com](https://boardingbot.boorgle.com)
Is a tool I made few weeks ago over 4 days. I started it as a Facebook chat
bot which sends TestFlight invitations and then realized it's also worth
turning it into a more complete tool which creates a website and invitation
request form which automatically sends TestFlight invitations. It was featured
in ProductHunt and I was generally surprised with the positive feedback. I'm
wondering if it's worth investing more time into it...

------
guptaneil
My top 2 are:

1) Sherlock, a JavaScript natural language parser for entering events that I
hacked the bulk of in a particularly productive all-nighter many years ago.
[https://github.com/neilgupta/Sherlock](https://github.com/neilgupta/Sherlock)

2) Exceptionally, a super simple Rails API exception handling library that is
tiny but has proven very useful on every project I've worked on.
[https://github.com/neilgupta/exceptionally](https://github.com/neilgupta/exceptionally)

------
peppage
[https://wanderinglunch.com/nyc](https://wanderinglunch.com/nyc) use it to
track food trucks around NYC. Very happy it taught me python, nodejs, and now
go.

------
TimLeland
Weather Extension -
[https://weather.timleland.com/](https://weather.timleland.com/)

I created a Weather extension using DarkSky.net api. I wanted a quick/accurate
way to check the weather without ads. I have a Chrome, Firefox and Opera
version. Let me know what you think!

Chrome version is most popular:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/weather/iolcbmjhmp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/weather/iolcbmjhmpdheggkocibajddahbeiglb)

------
_samihasan_
[https://github.com/samihasan/eskendereyya](https://github.com/samihasan/eskendereyya)

I developed "Eskéndereyya", a comprehensive writing system of Arabic in Latin
alphabet to help Arabic learners esp. beginners to improve their reading and
writing skills in Arabic without the immediate need to be familiar with the
Arabic script.

Please try it out and let me know what you think.

Show HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956885)

------
unforswearing
A couple bash utilities I use daily(ish)

lnks: List, Save, or Instapaper your Google Chrome links from the terminal. It
uses a small amount of Applescript, so it is OS X/MacOS only for now. I'm
working on getting around this.
[https://github.com/unforswearing/lnks](https://github.com/unforswearing/lnks)

aliaser: a tiny directory traversal/command aliasing tool.
[https://github.com/unforswearing/aliaser](https://github.com/unforswearing/aliaser)

------
mosselman
A component like jQuery plugin called Freud for jQuery.

[https://github.com/abuisman/jquery-freud](https://github.com/abuisman/jquery-
freud)

I use it so much I nearly forgot I made it myself. With Freud you can apply
'behaviours' to DOM-elements. What this does is that it enables you to work
with your DOM-elements in a more object oriented way.

What I use it most for is applying pieces of javascript on the page only when
the DOM-elements that I apply freud to are on the page. This way all you get a
lot less code in one big js file.

------
niedzielski
Bookmarklets:

• Pretty print JSON:
[https://gist.github.com/niedzielski/53c98af986955053aaabcc8a...](https://gist.github.com/niedzielski/53c98af986955053aaabcc8a19a62f39)

• Zoom in on pixel art (disable image smoothing):
[https://gist.github.com/niedzielski/63becce4640d28caaec1eaa2...](https://gist.github.com/niedzielski/63becce4640d28caaec1eaa2b9744f90)

For Chromium / Chrome. Short bookmarklets are preferable to extensions for
privacy and performance concerns.

------
corysama
[http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/marchingsource.cpp](http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/marchingsource.cpp)

I wrote back in uni some 20+ years ago. Since then I've seen it copy-pasted,
remixed, translated to different languages and integrated into little projects
hundreds of times. It's falling out of favor lately. But, there was a time
when it seemed like for each implementation of Marching Cubes, there was a
50:50 chance it was a derivative of that file.

------
Cyph0n
I wrote a course scheduler for students at my previous university. It doesn't
have that many users, but I get a "thank you" every now and then, which is
enough motivation for me to keep it updated. In any case, I automated the
entire course data update process, so I only need to run a Python script
before the start of each semester.

It's running on the Heroku free tier with a cheap domain, so it only costs me
a few cups of coffee every year.

[http://jadawil.xyz](http://jadawil.xyz) (sorry for the crappy design!)

------
robbiemitchell
Workflow automations at continually chip away at friction and speed up
everyone's work in three main ways:

\- Bringing notifications into Slack that aren't possible out of the box. This
includes some services that only send updates via email, and others that
enable webhook subscriptions, which can be parsed, filtered, augmented, and
formatted.

\- Creating Slack slash commands that let you do simple things in Slack
instead of opening another browser tab.

\- Connecting one service to another behind the scenes, assisting with data
centralization for all sorts of downstream benefits.

------
jacksonsabey
I've recently released a beta platform and API for tools for working with
links: [https://0ut.ca/](https://0ut.ca/)

There's currently a Link Shortener, UTM Campaign Builder, Parser and
Validators for 15+ RFC implementations for different URI components.

I have a lot of continuing work to do, such as better analytics, a user
system, and more tools.

I haven't got any feedback yet, I would love to hear just about anything, it
would be encouraging. Feedback about my implementations would be greatly
appreciated. Thanks!

------
zitterbewegung
I created a uuid generator in racket(then called PLT Scheme) after being told
to abstract into a library. It was downloaded thousands of times and I never
got a bug report.
[https://github.com/zitterbewegung/uuid-v4](https://github.com/zitterbewegung/uuid-v4)
[http://planet.racket-
lang.org/display.ss?package=uuid-v4.plt...](http://planet.racket-
lang.org/display.ss?package=uuid-v4.plt&owner=zitterbewegung)

------
stpe
Believe it or not, but back in 2000-2001 WAP (Wireless Application Protocol)
was "the future" of mobile internet.

I worked at a startup doing mobile games but often business people needed very
basic landing pages - so I did the point-and-click Wap Prototype Maker!
Screenshot still available here: [http://www.stefan-
pettersson.nu/site/wpm/](http://www.stefan-pettersson.nu/site/wpm/)

I remember I was happy drawing the toolbar icons, because it reminded me of
working in Deluxe Paint.

------
jotto
After making a React app for a hackathon in August, I was surprised I couldn't
paste a link on Twitter and see a URL preview, thus began
[https://www.prerender.cloud/](https://www.prerender.cloud/) \- middleware
that runs your single page app through a chromium browser to generate the HTML
markup and return it along with the original JavaScript to the client (so the
first browser paint happens quickly from the HTML, then JavaScript takes over
after it finishes parsing)

------
ericwood
[http://ericwood.org/excel2latex/](http://ericwood.org/excel2latex/)

Back when I was in school I hacked this together as a diversion from lab
reports and as a convenient tool for myself. You can drag xlsx files onto it
and it converts them to LaTeX tables (all done client-side).

Even though it has some really glaring flaws (no numerical formatting
support), it has a loyal following of grad students from around the world who
find it useful and occasionally email me to say thanks. Feels great :)

------
tomatohs
[https://screensquid.com](https://screensquid.com)

I'm pretty sure this is best quality user session recorder out there. Just
gotta work on the marketing bit :)

------
cstigler
[http://selfcontrolapp.com/](http://selfcontrolapp.com/)

SelfControl - a free Mac focus app that helps users block their own access to
distracting websites

~~~
shovel
Thanks for making this. I use it to stop myself trying to score dopamine hits
on Facebook.

------
foray1010
I built a Chrome extension called `Popup my Bookmarks`
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/popup-my-
bookmarks...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/popup-my-
bookmarks/mppflflkbbafeopeoeigkbbdjdbeifni)) to solve my pain from switching
from firefox to chrome :)

source code: [https://github.com/foray1010/Popup-my-
Bookmarks](https://github.com/foray1010/Popup-my-Bookmarks)

------
SeriousM
I made a localization extension for WPF which can take any source of data and
turns it into a switchable localization, which is not possible with stock WPF.

[https://github.com/SeriousM/WPFLocalizationExtension](https://github.com/SeriousM/WPFLocalizationExtension)

I'm pretty proud of it any many users use this extensions, from private to
commercial. It's free and open source and I never charged for it (sadly). WPF
is now dying and my work will eventually die as well...

------
ashishk
[https://knife.ai](https://knife.ai), which is an email analytics tool.

I'm proud of it because it's something I've always wanted to use and create.

------
tsumnia
Not as fancy as many of those posted by: [http://landmark-
tool.herokuapp.com/](http://landmark-tool.herokuapp.com/)

When I was researching face recognition, I absolutely hated the labeling
system that we were given, and couldn't really find anything better (mind you,
this was about 6 years ago). So I started building Landmarker. It let you plot
points, identify segments, zoom and rotate.

It never served any real purpose besides the few times I've wanted to make
vector art.

~~~
timvdalen
How does it work? What does it do?

~~~
tsumnia
The premise is to build a json file to represent "parts" of the face.

For example say I wanted to landmark a feature like the image's left eye. Here
is a GIF walking through the labeling process.
[http://i.imgur.com/63UXkUg.gifv](http://i.imgur.com/63UXkUg.gifv)

I would select "+New Shape" and enter in the name of the shape, in my example
"left-eye". This will add the shape to model and enable cross hairs as you
drag across the screen. As you click, a landmark point will get added at the
XY coordinate you click. I can add as many points to a shape and can add any
number of shapes to the model.

Once done, you can select the </> menu item and select "Export Points" to
produce something like this: { "url": "[http://landmark-
tool.herokuapp.com/img/nic_cage.jpg"](http://landmark-
tool.herokuapp.com/img/nic_cage.jpg"), "lefteye": { "0": { "x": 119, "y": 274
}, "1": { "x": 163, "y": 251 }, "2": { "x": 202, "y": 274 }, "3": { "x": 161,
"y": 289 } } }

~~~
timvdalen
Ah, cool! I couldn't figure out how to get in a mode where you can actually
place points.

This is actually pretty useful for creating stuff like image maps...

Thanks for sharing!

~~~
tsumnia
Yeah, that was sort of what I was going for when I started making it; life and
work just took over. If I ever have some time, I might add a tutorial
explaining how to add things

------
deviantfero
I made:
[http://github.com/deviantfero/wpgtk](http://github.com/deviantfero/wpgtk)

An easy to use wallpaper/config manager and themer for GNU/Linux which takes
it's colorscheme from the wallpaper and applies it to things like the
terminal, tint2, openbox, GTK2/3 and optional config files too, so the color
scheme affects all the config files specified. It's compatible with everything
that uses written config files and hex colors!

------
soulchild37
[http://upush.xyz/](http://upush.xyz/) (No longer functioning)

I did a web scrapper which auto login to my university portal to detect any
changes on news board (like lecturer post a class cancel notice), if change
detected it will send a push notification to a mobile app.

Did this app in few weeks because I got pissed by lecturer suddenly canceling
class and post the news at last minute. I shared it to my classmates and it
jumped to 2200 active users before got shut down.

------
tommynicholas
[https://blankslate.io](https://blankslate.io) \- just a blank page you can
type on and save your thoughts. I use it every day and love it!

------
ian0
A widget that displays basic context sensitive help. I work in payments and we
wanted to address user questions without polluting a simple UI and update the
content without deployments:

[[https://www.whatthefaq.io/](https://www.whatthefaq.io/)]

A small directory for finding informal household services in Jakarta. Old
service, ticking along - still proud of the mobile UI :)

[[http://www.bangarif.com/](http://www.bangarif.com/)]

------
Eun
[https://ifcfg.me](https://ifcfg.me)

I know there are a bunch of similar sites outside however I wanted something
simple with no ads but all information.

~~~
contras1970
this one's really cool, works flawlessly without javascript in my browser, and
the various CLIs are awesome!

------
minusthebrandon
[http://brandonburning.com/warmup](http://brandonburning.com/warmup)

A simple warmup calculator for my workouts. Use it multiple times a week.

[https://safe-savannah-8578.herokuapp.com](https://safe-
savannah-8578.herokuapp.com)

When Turntable.fm folded, I was sad. I wanted to learn sockets, so I built
this. It's like Turntable, but uses YouTube videos instead of actual songs.
Bugs galore, but I use it at work almost every day.

------
lunaru
Let's Encrypt certs hosted:
[https://www.clearalias.com/](https://www.clearalias.com/)

Simple story: I've been involved with a lot of SaaS in my career and unless
you're running the latest and greatest, it can be hard to host customer
websites on a plurality of custom domains. This just makes that really simple
by hosting it for you.

Disclaimer: I posted this earlier today as a Show HN, but posting here as well
in case anyone is interested.

------
andywood
Recently, this profiler for multi-threaded Unity apps. It's almost the
simplest thing that could work, but it's surprisingly effective. I've used it
almost exclusively to optimize the hell out of the multi-threaded game I'm
working on.

[https://github.com/andy-wood/multi-threaded-profiler-
unity/b...](https://github.com/andy-wood/multi-threaded-profiler-
unity/blob/master/Profiler.cs)

------
shanecleveland
[https://tasklater.com](https://tasklater.com)

Long-term reminders emailed to you. It keeps these tasks out of sight until
you need to be reminded.

------
ThePhysicist
[https://www.quantifiedcode.com](https://www.quantifiedcode.com)

It's a hosted code analysis solution for Python. It tracks code quality issues
using our own code analyzer.

We have developed an AST/flow-graph based code analyzer which allows users to
write their own code pattern queries using YAML.

BTW I have been working on an OS version for the last four months which I will
release soon, if you are interested in helping me please write:
andreas@quantifiedcode.com

~~~
wkoszek
Are you making any money on it?

------
BattyMilk
I made a mobile game in a day from concept to completion:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fraserhart...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fraserhart.spacecaver&hl=en)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/space-beer-
cave/id1080186646...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/space-beer-
cave/id1080186646?mt=8)

------
rockdiesel
[http://statenislandferryschedule.com](http://statenislandferryschedule.com)

Proud of it because it's the first basic thing I've built from, mostly, the
ground up. It's just basic HTML and uses Materialize CSS for the styling. I
hope to learn enough JavaScript soon to add a dynamic component to it which
highlights the next departure times for ease of use, so the visitor doesn't
have to scroll through every time.

------
techwizrd
[https://github.com/techwizrd/fishmarks](https://github.com/techwizrd/fishmarks)

It's a pretty simple tool that lets you bookmark and jump to directories. It's
not that complicated but I use it pretty much constantly and it gives me a
strange sense of satisfaction to have a project I can call "done". Everything
I want to add to is merely packaging enhancements so that more people can use
it.

------
roryisok
does an autohotkey script count?

    
    
        ^':: ;;; (or ^2 for US keybs)
        Send me@e.mail
        return
    

CTRL+@ symbol pastes my email address wherever the cursor is.

------
relyio
Disable Facebook's "Seen" function:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facesnoop/kebmejpc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facesnoop/kebmejpcciehlicgipgfinbgdbedeoag?hl=en)

Definitely not the one that gives me most pride from a technical standpoint,
but it is used by a thousand people every day and that's more than enough to
make me happy about that small hack.

------
k3oni
Pydash [https://github.com/k3oni/pydash](https://github.com/k3oni/pydash) \-
web-based monitoring dashboard for linux in Python and Django .

Created initially for Raspberry PI, but ported to most linux based OSs.
There's also a Django app for it [https://github.com/k3oni/pydash-django-
app](https://github.com/k3oni/pydash-django-app)

------
techstonia
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.techstonia...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.techstonia.pokerquiz)

I built PokerQuiz, which is an android app and (as the name suggests) about
poker. It generates random cards for you and opponent and you have to guess
your chances of winning. It has another "mode" too, but that's a bit too
technical.

------
espitia
I built a simple habit tracker for groups of friends to hold each other
accountable. Although it has no growth, it's been an amazing tool for my
friends and I. The app lead a big change in our lives and I am proud of that.

link: [https://itunes.apple.com/ro/app/tribes-build-habits-
friends/...](https://itunes.apple.com/ro/app/tribes-build-habits-
friends/id1110368803?mt=8)

------
sgentle
The "Can I Use?" CLI is probably the highest attention per unit of effort
project I've done: [https://github.com/sgentle/caniuse-
cmd](https://github.com/sgentle/caniuse-cmd)

I also made a firefox extension about 10 years ago that let you restart an
animated gif (there's a config option to make them only play once). I was
surprised to learn people were still using in FF 3.6.

------
introvertmac
[http://bmanish001.pythonanywhere.com](http://bmanish001.pythonanywhere.com)

I made this simple Instagram image downloader. Just copy image link of any
Instagram image and save that in Full HD and size using right click. Still
used by many for social media marketing as you can't save images from other's
profile on Instagram, only way is to screenshot which obviously reduce the
quality of the image.

------
clonq
[https://api.microfabrik.com/user](https://api.microfabrik.com/user)

One of the auto generated microservices
backend/documentation/playground/sample code all in one sweet pa(cka)ge.

I'm proud of it because it's completely scripted, I can generate/deploy any
CRUD Restful microservice in under a minute, it's Lambda powered and multi-
tenant cloud-hosted. A mouthful of buzzwords :)

------
jacobevelyn
Compute for Humanity

[https://www.computeforhumanity.org](https://www.computeforhumanity.org)

It hasn't really taken off like I had hoped, but I still stand by the idea,
and I think I really nailed the UX. For something fairly complex there's no
account to create, no configuration, no installer, just open it once and
you're done. Anything my 95-year-old grandma can use without help is a success
in my book.

~~~
ensiferum
The landing page is confusing, quickly looking at it can't really discern what
the page is about. Something about charity, by whom for whom and how? Can't
tell, already clicking the back button.

My two cents.

~~~
jacobevelyn
Thanks for the feedback! That landing page has gone through a lot of
revisions, but definitely can still be improved.

------
darrelld
[https://github.com/darrell-d/tracker](https://github.com/darrell-d/tracker)

It's a simple time tracker. No cloud BS. It just uses local storage to track
how long you've been working on any task.

I still have some features I'd like to add (like a countdown timer and
clearing individual tasks), but I'm real happy with it and I've been using it
at work to track my project time.

------
pascalxus
I've always felt that an entrepreneur's toughest job is to find just the right
prospects and leads for their new business. So, I created a tool to helps
people find highly targeted leads and prospects. You can target users based on
location, # of followers, twitter bio, and 7 other filters too. Give it shot:

[https://www.find70.com/?t=hnews](https://www.find70.com/?t=hnews)

------
jcubic
I've build [http://leash.jcubic.pl](http://leash.jcubic.pl) the shell that can
be used on shared hosting when you can't install aything. Built using my
jquery terminal [http://terminal.jcubic.pl](http://terminal.jcubic.pl) and php
if php exec functions are disabled it try to use cgi scripts written in python
or perl.

------
nferraz
st - simple statistics from the command line

[https://github.com/nferraz/st](https://github.com/nferraz/st)

~~~
makmanalp
Hey! This is great. Another thing that would be awesome would be to have a
small histogram (could be oriented in rows rather than columns)!

------
kogus
FindIt. It's a simple utility that lets you do find-in-files searches, but
with features to require that a file contain any number of terms together, and
the ability to exclude files that have an _un_ wanted term. I wrote it for
myself and every friend I shared it with ends up pinning it to their taskbar.

[https://findit.codeplex.com/](https://findit.codeplex.com/)

------
tobinharris
[http://yuml.me](http://yuml.me) diagrams as an API.

This was scratching and itch, yet get used by 1000s of people every day.

~~~
marktangotango
This interesting, any relation to yed and yworks? Are you making money from
it? Are uml diagrams the only diagram offered? I had a similar idea years ago,
web front end for dot and graphviz. Never acted on it though.

------
Immortalin
Lua Newsletter(still WIP):
[http://luadigest.immortalin.com](http://luadigest.immortalin.com)

Merlot (Rapid website builder, WIP):
[https://github.com/Immortalin/Merlot](https://github.com/Immortalin/Merlot)

Kloudtrader (Trading platform):
[http://kloudtrader.com](http://kloudtrader.com)

~~~
i336_
The signup workflow sends me to luadigest.github at the end, which doesn't
work.

Insta-subscribed though, Lua's on my todo list.

(PS. I tried to reply to your previous comment but found you'd deleted it,
thankfully found this comment via your account)

~~~
Immortalin
Thanks for the head's up. Fixed now!

~~~
i336_
Cool! I'm curious though, where does the link go now? I wasn't able to find
much else with poking around your domain.

~~~
Immortalin
It brings you back to the newsletter page. I have a bunch of projects that are
still WIP and not quite ready for their own landing pages which is why Lua
Digest uses a subdomain and also why immortalin.com does not redirect to a
home page. I have been trying to get HTTPS working on the site but
CloudFlare's requirement to transfer over DNS control is messing up a lot of
site configs so it's currently non-https for now.

~~~
i336_
Ah, cool. Very nice.

Does CloudFlare not interoperate with Let's Encrypt et al? That's not great...

(Also, did you get my email?)

~~~
Immortalin
Yup!

~~~
i336_
Good to hear :)

------
wkoszek
My projects:

\- Sensorama for iOS: it's meant to be an open-source data science platform
for obtaining data from your iPhone's sensors. And you get the JSON file with
data e-mailed to you (and I get a copy too!).

Install:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sensorama/id1159788831?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sensorama/id1159788831?mt=8)

Read code:

[https://github.com/wkoszek/sensorama-
ios](https://github.com/wkoszek/sensorama-ios) (main repo)

[https://github.com/wkoszek/sensorama-
artwork](https://github.com/wkoszek/sensorama-artwork) (artwork, scripted:
generates all JPEGs from cmd line)

I did everything myself: coding and design for it.

\- LastPass for SSH: [https://github.com/wkoszek/lastpass-
ssh](https://github.com/wkoszek/lastpass-ssh) You keep your SSH keys protected
with a cryptic pass-phrases and you store them in LastPass.

\- Asset toolbox: [https://github.com/wkoszek/asset-
toolbox](https://github.com/wkoszek/asset-toolbox) My attempt to improve the
workflow with asset on iOS. I've used that multiple times to get all the
resolutions/sizes during random moments of weakness.

\- Finite Automata Simulator written in QT/Graphviz:
[https://github.com/wkoszek/flviz](https://github.com/wkoszek/flviz)

\- Network Simulator written in C, with visualisation in Graphviz:
[https://github.com/wkoszek/kmnsim](https://github.com/wkoszek/kmnsim)

\- Other stuff from my junkyard:
[https://github.com/wkoszek](https://github.com/wkoszek) (feel free to let me
know what's the most interesting, or fiddle with GitHub stars)

My next target would be to get some paid online projects done and delivered to
users, so that I could pay my phone bill with software.

Great thread. Thanks for making it.

------
Kexoth
Universal Beat [0] - When Apple Watch came out I had an idea for showing day &
year progress 0-1000.*

Open for feedback!

* I'm aware that Swatch had this for the day only long time ago, it was called `swatch @beats`.

[0] - [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/universal-beat-different-
loo...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/universal-beat-different-
look/id1146951890?mt=8)

~~~
zokier
Decimal time is cute (albeit not very novel) and makes imho a lot of sense.
I'm secretly hoping that maybe on Mars we could end up using millisols for
timekeeping.

On the other hand dividing a year into 1000 does seem bit more of a novelty,
and not very practical. I suppose it is bit of a reminder that the year is
passing, in the sense "oh dear, this year is already 87% done"

~~~
Kexoth
I also don't think that you can orientate on dates in a decimal manner. With
dates it's easier to orientate, but you don't get the exact feeling on
progress.

So yes, same as you, when I'm seeing it from time to time I get motivated to
do more in the time remaining for the year :)

------
roider
[https://github.com/andDevW/getChromium/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/andDevW/getChromium/blob/master/README.md)

I made this because I was trying to introduce friends to Chromium for Android
and loosing most of them at 'unzip'. It makes installing the official latest
build of Chromium reasonably easy.

------
jmlr
Threw together a shell function to quickly initialise development
environments.

[https://github.com/jamesroutley/dev](https://github.com/jamesroutley/dev)

It allows you to quickly switch between different development contexts by:

\- cd'ing you to a particular directory \- opening your text editor \- setting
environment variables \- setting up VPNs \- anything else that can be scripted

------
_eht
Dealing with old archives with hundreds of thousands of user uploaded images I
needed a quick way to test for and take action on image integrity.

I wrote a PHP CLI script to test directories of images for image integrity and
log or take action on found issues. [https://github.com/e-ht/literate-
happiness](https://github.com/e-ht/literate-happiness)

------
fourseventy
[http://www.triviacompass.com/](http://www.triviacompass.com/)

Aggregation of bar trivia events in your area.

------
bpowell
[https://github.com/bpowell/brocker](https://github.com/bpowell/brocker)

The place I work at is not ready to use something like docker, so I made a
cloneish of docker for us to use. We are still in the early stages of it right
now. Brocker is a combination of docker and kubernetes. Sorry for the bad
documentation, I'm slowly adding more.

------
carleverett
[http://alaskabunch.com](http://alaskabunch.com)

A polling tool for quickly getting opinions on logo designs, product ideas,
etc. I thought other people might like it too, but 5 months after publishing
it I'm still making about 95% of the polls.

The 5,000 app users have now basically become my personal soundboard for
ideas, which I'm more than happy to pay for.

------
heliodor
My calendar Chrome extension has 300 weekly users. It shows all the months for
last year, this year, and next year fitted together into one continuous list.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/calendar-
block/adl...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/calendar-
block/adlgciholbhcgjhkgnkcppodnflfodni)

------
yumaikas
I'm not sure where it would fall, but I've been very satisfied with my blog,
[https://junglecoder.com](https://junglecoder.com). For a side project, once I
got the kinks out, it's been surprisingly low maintenance, and it holds up to
load pretty well. It's not perfect by any means, but it's been pretty handy.

------
wyldfire
* libfaultinj: a fault injection library for testing. [1]

* fuzzpy: a fuzzer for the Python interpreter itself (specifically CPython) [2]

[1]
[https://github.com/androm3da/libfaultinj](https://github.com/androm3da/libfaultinj)

[2] [https://bitbucket.org/ebadf/fuzzpy](https://bitbucket.org/ebadf/fuzzpy)

------
mrjaeger
Link with context - [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-with-
context/...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-with-
context/ghpdiolckpncfliklbmgiljggbokjban)

Mostly because I wanted to share reddit links with friends, but they didnt
make sense without the accompanying title of the post.

------
patrickdavey
I built [https://snowpool.org](https://snowpool.org) about 8 years ago. It's
used in New Zealand for carpooling to ski resorts. I'm awful at marketing
though so while there are US and Canadian resorts, it's not really used.

Still, it's nice to have a project which results in a little less carbon going
into the atmosphere :)

------
alantrum
[https://supermood.io](https://supermood.io)

I wanted to make a quick way to motivate me when I don't feel to work. Pretty
simple idea !

But what I'm the most proud is the generating of quotes. So I passed a csv and
then, the quotes are generating almost automatically (regarding the author and
keyword). Make it really simple to generate 100 quotes+.

------
rhodysurf
Buoy visualization site (WIP) that uses raw spectral energy data from NDBC
buoys

[https://buoyfinder.appspot.com/buoy/44066](https://buoyfinder.appspot.com/buoy/44066)

Bonus: I made this for my friend and I to log our surf sessions

[https://swellscore-1093.appspot.com](https://swellscore-1093.appspot.com)

------
olalonde
[https://github.com/olalonde/deisdash#deis-
dash](https://github.com/olalonde/deisdash#deis-dash)

I made this in a few days to learn React + Redux and it turns out a bunch of
people now use it and have personally thanked me for building it. It's a web
UI for Deis (an Heroku like PaaS that runs on Kubernetes).

------
marclave
Similar to domainr, but more accurate and faster!

[http://launchaco.com/](http://launchaco.com/)

------
sideproject
[https://www.hellobox.co](https://www.hellobox.co)

I've been building HelloBox for the good part of last 3 years. Certainly it
has been the longest project I've worked on without losing interest and for
that I'm quite proud, since I used to jump from a project to a project. Not
planning to stop any time soon either!

------
dudeget
I have been working on a multiplayer game as of recently

[https://puzzlequest.herokuapp.com/](https://puzzlequest.herokuapp.com/)

move with arrow keys, attack with "A"

there's a ton to work on and I've been busy with other things, so sadly the
game has taken the back seat. Hopefully I'll be able to put more time into it
next month

------
boyce
Nothing like as interesting as your other responses, I think, but I got quite
into userscripts (eg for Greasemonkey) when Facebook was trying out different
kinds of adverts, in the news feed and sidebar etc. Wrote a few little
userscripts to stop them showing up. It was nice to regularly spot something
I'd made was installed in friends' browsers.

------
hackathonguy
I built Eggshell , a BASH script manager for the Mac menu bar. I built it
because I really wanted a tool to manage the scripts that start up our dev
environment. Got tired of copy pasting them. I'm not a dev, so it took a few
days to figure out how to build. Built with Swift.

[http://eggshell.pw](http://eggshell.pw)

~~~
xcubic
What resources did you use to learn swift?

------
cellis
Create Save Prompt

[https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Create%20Save%20Prompt](https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Create%20Save%20Prompt)

Allows you to quickly save a new file to a location in Sublime Text's input
bar by pressing CMD+S, instead of opening the OS dialog which takes a lot
longer (especially on OSX).

------
samayshamdasani
I made to site to teach people how to built the projects that I've built (was
on HN two days ago) [https://enlight.ml](https://enlight.ml)

I plan to add more projects to teach people to code in this type of way. I
think the best way to learn is to actually build small apps and then altering
them to make them better.

------
7ero
[https://quantummail.io/](https://quantummail.io/)

At first I wanted to experiment with building a private email server but then
thought I might as well build it for others to use, it doesn't really work in
decentralizing much, but I thought it would be a start in moving towards
secure and private email.

------
davemackintosh
[https://github.com/Multicolour/multicolour](https://github.com/Multicolour/multicolour)

Really proud of this, saves a lot of time and people tell me they love using
it, if you want a REST API with all the features (OAuth, JWT, multiple
databases, etc) without the maintenance, it's for you

------
alanbernstein
[https://github.com/alanbernstein/treemonger](https://github.com/alanbernstein/treemonger)

A python clone of an old disk space visualizer that I used before I migrated
away from windows. Nobody else has used mine, and it's very much a work in
progress, but it works and I use it frequently.

------
consolelog
[https://github.com/mike-schultz/materialette](https://github.com/mike-
schultz/materialette) I made this color palette of material design colors that
lives on your OS menubar. I frequently use material design colors, so having
it always within reach is a nice time saver.

------
lewisjoe
[http://hnlive.tk](http://hnlive.tk)

I made this because every time I decide to post something on HN, I hang on for
a moment making my mind up on whether it's the right time to post on HN.

So, I made this live visualization, showing activity levels on HN. Now there's
this data driven decision instead of a vague hope.

------
GoToRO
On one map the road was straight, on another it was curved. That's why I made
[http://comparemaps.drona.ro/](http://comparemaps.drona.ro/) to easily compare
online maps.

It turns out that the curved road went around the hill, while the straight
road was a newer one, over the top of the hill...

------
ngzhian
Quickview for YouTube! Allows you to quickly view videos from your
subscriptions feed page without any clicks.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quickview-for-
yout...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quickview-for-
youtube/jfocolikmfgljlbblhgpkcjlpehnapkm)

------
nymeria
Good question-- I'd say Nymeria
([https://www.nymeria.io](https://www.nymeria.io)) at the moment, mostly
because it's something I took from start to finish (nothing is ever finished),
but you probably get the point.

It's easy to be proud of things you take all the way. Congrats to everyone!

------
thomasfl
I use my simple little command line tool filewatcher to autorun tests. You
supply it with file patterns and shell commands to be run when files matching
the patterns is updated, added or deleted. It's available via gem install
filewatcher. It was a great milestone when most of the code was from other
developers pull request.

------
mschenk
[http://opensharecount.com](http://opensharecount.com)

Restores the little counter next to Twitter's "tweet this" button that shows
you how often your article has been tweeted. Also available as drop-in
replacement for Twitter's old undocumented API endpoint that provided this
info.

------
thenomad
It's a very, very simple thing, and needs updating, but my filter bubble
busting Twitter bot is something I'm quite proud of.

[http://www.strangecompany.org/how-to-fight-the-filter-
bubble...](http://www.strangecompany.org/how-to-fight-the-filter-bubble-new-
twitter-app-thing/)

------
osrec
My company put this together and it seems to get some love on github:
[https://osrec.github.io/currencyFormatter.js/](https://osrec.github.io/currencyFormatter.js/)

Originally built to help an internal project but we later open sourced it.
It's great to see the stars go up!

------
bazurbat
[https://github.com/bazurbat/spawn](https://github.com/bazurbat/spawn)

A small script to ease chrooting (or docker running) into a development
environment with usual set of workarounds (toggleable) like passing virtual
filesystems, SSH/X11 env, home directory, etc.

------
philco
FinBot - a free chat bot that answers the question "what should I do with my
money" after a few questions. It'll tell you how much of your paycheck to
allocate to your emergency fund, loans, IRA, 401k, and investments.

[http://www.yourfinbot.com](http://www.yourfinbot.com)

------
nickbnf
[http://glogg.bonnefon.org/](http://glogg.bonnefon.org/) a fast log browser
born of my frustration looking for patterns and trying to understand bugs from
huge logs. It has become not-so-tiny over the years and I see it pop up in a
lot of unexpected offices.

------
secfirstmd
Umbrella App: Simple digital and physical security lessons for people who
travel, activists, aid workers and journalists:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.umbrella)

------
fishywang
I have a scripts repository on github served as a collection of years of
scratching my own itch:
[https://github.com/fishy/scripts](https://github.com/fishy/scripts)

They are mostly python and shell scripts (with one PHP), and most of them are
still useful today :)

------
adnanh
[https://github.com/adnanh/webhook](https://github.com/adnanh/webhook)

Simple, yet powerful bridge between http request and shell commands. Useful
for running build or deployment scripts, and stuff like that on incoming
webhooks. (i.e. github, bitbucket...)

------
thyselius
I combined the best saliency detection frameworks with a aperture kernel to
emulate depth of field and bokeh on iPhones with only one camera. (The app is
free with watermark
[https://appsto.re/se/c3lxfb.i](https://appsto.re/se/c3lxfb.i) )

------
bradlys
[https://github.com/bradlys/monochromatic-
panda](https://github.com/bradlys/monochromatic-panda)

Google Chrome Extension to download YouTube videos. It was growing in
popularity quite well at one point. It still works and gets notice. I use it
frequently.

------
mouldymic
A small utility to colorize diff from standart input. Uses PyGments and opens
a webpage served on localhost.

Very simple but I use it daily.

[https://gist.github.com/Antoine-
Lassauzay/7e0732b6aa272d6946...](https://gist.github.com/Antoine-
Lassauzay/7e0732b6aa272d694622)

------
bengesoff
On behalf of my friend: [https://autono.ml](https://autono.ml)

It is a wrapper over DuckDuckGo which redirects all searches without bangs to
Google. It also changes the bang operator (!) to the open square bracket ([)
because it is easier to type.

Very simple but effective time saver!

------
cantbecool
[http://youtuberanktracker.com](http://youtuberanktracker.com) It's a simple
tool to keep track of YouTube video rankings by a keyword. I found it
difficult to find a simple service that didn't cost a significant amount of
money.

~~~
chirau
Nice. Is there a way to see list of the keywords for which a video makes, say,
the top 100 results?

~~~
cantbecool
No, there's no way for me to determine that within a scope of this
application. You can essentially see that already via search analytics on
YouTube for your videos, but you have to do some digging.

------
ricardobeat
Flour: [http://ricardo.cc/cake-flour/](http://ricardo.cc/cake-flour/)

A build tool predating js modules, grunt, ES6. While it hasn't been touched
for years, I still go back to it from time to time because it's so simple to
use.

------
iamben
[http://www.responsivetester.net](http://www.responsivetester.net)

Not sure it's the project I'm most proud of, but as far as a simple tool I use
everyday, this is it.

One reload shows you the site in multiple sized iframes, so you can quickly
test breakpoints.

------
artur_makly
[http://JuicyCanvas.com](http://JuicyCanvas.com)

We enable anyone to easily create their one-of-a-kind Art, T-shirts, Lifestyle
products via "Remixing" Copyrighted works. Products are printed on-demand. No
minimums.

Think "Forking" for IRL design.

~~~
artur_makly
Example: you can create your very own $10 FUCK TRUMP T-shirt :
[http://juicycanvas.com/anonymous/gallery/products/fucktrump/...](http://juicycanvas.com/anonymous/gallery/products/fucktrump/?shared_id=84428)

use coupon: "FUCKTRUMP" to get $25 off.

------
ZachSaucier
Just Read: [https://github.com/ZachSaucier/Just-
Read](https://github.com/ZachSaucier/Just-Read)

It's a simple Chrome extension to help put just the actual web article content
into a customizable and distraction-free layout.

------
coreymaass
[https://Timerdoro.com](https://Timerdoro.com) \- A productivity timer where
you can build your own timers to work for Pomodoro, eye strain, GTD, meetings,
whatever. Averages about 50 visits/day, with half being repeat users.

------
qznc
I fixed my prediction market last weekend:
[https://github.com/qznc/prema](https://github.com/qznc/prema)

It used Mozilla Persona for authentication, which is now gone. Switched to
Github OAuth, which went surprisingly well.

------
NoCanDo
[https://www.kaputniks.org/passgen/gen.php](https://www.kaputniks.org/passgen/gen.php)

Basic, but my first dive into krypto and security. Droped it a while after.
Not that interesting. Still using this link for random pwds.

------
cameronrohani
[http://launchaco.com/](http://launchaco.com/)

I hate how long it takes me to find a name for my new projects so I made
launchaco. It's super simple but has saved me so much time when ever exploring
names for new projects.

------
teainthedark
[http://puretea.co](http://puretea.co)

Answer a quiz, discover new tea

------
mping
Observideo, annotating videos tool for social sciences students. The norm is
either excel or very costly software, this simple tool saves hours of manual
tagging. [https://observideo.com](https://observideo.com)

------
codemonkeychuck
[https://github.com/charlesdaniel/s3_uploader](https://github.com/charlesdaniel/s3_uploader)

It's supposed to be a simple S3 file uploader GUI for non-techy people...
'proud' is questionable :)

~~~
thieving_magpie
So uh... general curiosity here. How often do people bring up 'the devil went
down to georgia' to you?

~~~
codemonkeychuck
Only every other week, much less often than they talk about that proxy app of
which I shall not name.

~~~
thieving_magpie
Oh wow. I wasn't aware of it... this is cool.

------
jkaptur
[http://diff.so](http://diff.so)

It's a simple diff-as-you-type tool. I realized that I often had two strings
(test output, code samples, etc.) and wanted to compare them in as few
keystrokes as possible, from any computer.

------
hypertexthero
Not really proud as I just hacked other people's work together to make it, but
I use it often when cooking pasta :)

[https://www.simongriffee.com/pastaclock/](https://www.simongriffee.com/pastaclock/)

------
rhubarbcustard
[https://www.hearingaidknow.com/audiogram-
creator](https://www.hearingaidknow.com/audiogram-creator)

This tool allows people to record hearing test results. Gets quite a lot of
use from professionals and academics.

------
cgag
I wrote a cloc (count lines of code) competitor in rust that's pretty fast:
[https://github.com/cgag/loc](https://github.com/cgag/loc) (turns out perl is
pretty easy to beat).

------
angel_of_death
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ccfeljbgeogamkgilf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ccfeljbgeogamkgilfkibiaenpdpbldb)

A simple google chrome extension for UFC fans.

------
Mtinie
Here's my simple contribution.

A hyper specific tool, to be sure, but useful if you are trying to code sign
Qt apps on the Mac.

[https://github.com/brossi/qt-codesigner](https://github.com/brossi/qt-
codesigner)

------
xd1936
A Google Calendar-powered in/out board for our office, that replaces the
magnet and whiteboard system that we used to have.

[https://github.com/xd1936/inout2](https://github.com/xd1936/inout2)

------
EllipticCurve
[https://github.com/MauriceGit/Repeat_History](https://github.com/MauriceGit/Repeat_History)

Use it daily when working with Linux to execute old commands as alternative to
ctrl+r, AWESOME tool :)

------
paulrosenzweig
[http://datafart.com](http://datafart.com)

When I was learning Go a few years ago, I build a simple way to generate line
graphs from the command line by piping to a cURL command. A few people still
actually use it.

------
wriggler
[https://www.storeslider.com](https://www.storeslider.com)

I got bored of trawling eBay so decided to make my own tool to make it faster.
StoreSlider has been going for a few years now and has been really useful.

------
deedubaya
[https://www.hireloop.io](https://www.hireloop.io) \- Put an end to job
appliant overload, with clearer 2-way communication between you (the hiring
manager) and your applicants. No more ghosting.

~~~
wkoszek
How much are you making out of it?

------
danieldk
Perhaps not proud, but written in no-time and got quite popular:

[https://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities](https://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities)

------
par
Meta Meme [https://appsto.re/us/iwO9fb.i](https://appsto.re/us/iwO9fb.i)

Really simple but fun meme maker. It makes 'new style' memes, as opposed to
the old image macros on Reddit.

------
madrasman
[http://www.nuggetsapp.com/](http://www.nuggetsapp.com/)

It helps you remember the things you read and learn by sending you timely
email reminders based on spaced repetition (memory theory).

------
w1nter
[http://sourcecast.io/](http://sourcecast.io/)

Lets you share the content of a text file and stream changes to everyone who's
watching.

Useful for live coding demos, teaching programming, etc.

Works without installation.

------
roryisok
ok, stretching things a little, but Poe
([http://getpoe.com](http://getpoe.com)) started out as a single-function tool
- a distraction free writing app, for the windows store, back in 2012 when
there were none. It was basically just notepad with a hidden interface back
then.

Now it has word-count goals, writing timers, built in resources and custom
theme support. I'm working on a follow up with lots of incremental
improvements and new features.

I'm proud because people love it. They give it amazing reviews that I feel
like I don't deserve. People are super nice about it.

------
sugarygrind
Clips safeway digital coupon with simple bookmarklet
[https://github.com/nishnet2002/Safeway-Just-
for-u](https://github.com/nishnet2002/Safeway-Just-for-u)

------
mgunlogson
I built a cuckoo filter library in Java that nobody uses :)
[https://github.com/MGunlogson/CuckooFilter4J](https://github.com/MGunlogson/CuckooFilter4J)

------
webjac
[http://servpaid.com](http://servpaid.com)

I wanted a simple frontend for Stripe to charge whatever amount. As a web
designer and developer this is what I use to get paid, work as a charm.

~~~
wkoszek
Are you making money on it?

------
jmarbach
[https://concorde.io](https://concorde.io) \- We help you find the cheapest
flights to hundreds of destinations worldwide, ranked by cost per mile, with
just a few clicks.

------
arbuge
[https://addue.com](https://addue.com)

Online marketing tools - conversion tracking, etc. Rather unique in the way
these as are defined as "rules" which can be concatenated.

------
MereInterest
An in-terminal interface for performing polynomial fits of a small number of
data points. I use it for calibrating gamma-ray detectors, and so it has lists
of the energies of some common calibration sources.

------
voiceclonr
[http://www.voiceclonr.com](http://www.voiceclonr.com)

Text to speech engine I built a while back. It was a fun project because I got
to do some front end programming with React.

------
senko
Cookie-banner, a small, customizable JS-based cookie-info banner for complying
with EU cookie law: [http://cookiebanner.eu/](http://cookiebanner.eu/)

------
pvorb
[https://npm-stat.com](https://npm-stat.com)

It lets you look up download statistics for packages on npm. You can pick a
date range, or aggregate all downloads for an author.

------
bvrlt
Genius Scan ([http://dl.tglapp.com/genius-scan](http://dl.tglapp.com/genius-
scan)) because it helps millions of people save some time every month.

------
xem
We're a bunch of web devs out there doing "JavaScript code-golfing", for fun.
The goal is to make mini apps, or mini-games, with the smallest possible
source code.

Here are some handy apps / cool demos that we've made: (the full list is here:
[https://gist.github.com/xem/206db44adbdd09bac424](https://gist.github.com/xem/206db44adbdd09bac424))

\-
[https://github.com/xem/miniSpeechSynthesis](https://github.com/xem/miniSpeechSynthesis)
(73b+ speech synthetizer)

\-
[https://github.com/xem/miniSpeechRecognition](https://github.com/xem/miniSpeechRecognition)
(100b+ speech recognition)

\-
[https://github.com/codegolf/period1k](https://github.com/codegolf/period1k)
(1kb periodic table)

\- [https://github.com/xem/miniPi](https://github.com/xem/miniPi) (compute Pi
in ~256b!)

\-
[https://github.com/xem/MiniRegexTester](https://github.com/xem/MiniRegexTester)
(170b regex tester)

\-
[https://github.com/xem/miniBookmarklets](https://github.com/xem/miniBookmarklets)
(tiny bookmarklets)

\-
[http://xem.github.io/MiniShadertoyLite/](http://xem.github.io/MiniShadertoyLite/)
(512b shadertoy clone)

\- [http://xem.github.io/MiniShadertoy/](http://xem.github.io/MiniShadertoy/)
(1kb shadertoy clone)

\-
[http://xem.github.io/miniBeautifier/](http://xem.github.io/miniBeautifier/)
(1kb js beautifier)

\- [https://github.com/xem/miniUnicode](https://github.com/xem/miniUnicode)
(Unicode slideshows in 64b and up)

\- [https://github.com/xem/miniKeyCode](https://github.com/xem/miniKeyCode)
(JS KeyCode finder in less than 128b)

\- [http://xem.github.io/miniJSperf/](http://xem.github.io/miniJSperf/) (a
JSperf clone in less than 300b)

\- [https://github.com/xem/sheet](https://github.com/xem/sheet) (a spreadsheet
app in 221 bytes)

\- [https://github.com/xem/hex](https://github.com/xem/hex) (hexadecimal
viewer and editor in 243+ bytes)

\- [https://github.com/xem/miniURI](https://github.com/xem/miniURI) (file-to-
dataURI converter in 99 bytes)

\-
[https://github.com/xem/miniCodeEditor](https://github.com/xem/miniCodeEditor)
(HTML/CSS/JS editor in 156+ bytes)

\- [https://github.com/xem/braille-art](https://github.com/xem/braille-art)
(drawing with braille on Twitter in less than 1k)

\- [https://github.com/xem/miniMinifier](https://github.com/xem/miniMinifier)
(HTML/CSS/JS minifiers in 128+ bytes)

\- [http://js13kgames.com/entries/26-games-
in-1](http://js13kgames.com/entries/26-games-in-1) (26 games in 13kb)

~~~
wkoszek
Very nice. I'm going to star all of these. Reminds me my CPU model in 60 lines
of code:

[https://github.com/wkoszek/cpu60](https://github.com/wkoszek/cpu60)

~~~
xem
Cool! I'm also making a tiny x86 emulator :)

------
pr0x1m4
A simple electron based font/glyph viewer.

[https://github.com/Pr0x1m4/CharacterMap-
Desktop](https://github.com/Pr0x1m4/CharacterMap-Desktop)

------
alecsmart1
[http://wtsic.com](http://wtsic.com) What time should I call? - A simple tool
to help convert your client's time zone to your time zone.

------
tbrownaw
I have a thing that puts my RSS feeds into an IMAP folder. Not "emails them to
me", but actually connects as an IMAP client and stores them in a folder
that's not my inbox.

------
xxkylexx
[https://bitwarden.com](https://bitwarden.com) \- Free, open source password
manager for iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and the web.

------
therec
[http://www.madmapper.com](http://www.madmapper.com)

It's a video mapping application that started as a super simple tool, this is
why artist love it.

------
sghiassy
[http://qboconverter.com](http://qboconverter.com)

I created it because I use Quickbooks a lot and many banks don't support the
QBO file format.

Small, simple and free

------
yuvadam
I built a simple CIDR/IP range calculator as an exercise learning React, came
out very nicely I think

[http://cidr.xyz/](http://cidr.xyz/)

------
miraclepanda
I'm working on [https://appure.io](https://appure.io) \- tool to generate app
store/google play screenshots for mobile apps.

------
john_mac
[https://virwire.com](https://virwire.com)

I'm chronic news junkie and wanted a perpetual drip of viral news on my phone.
Addiction satisfied :)

------
hpoydar
[https://slashtz.com](https://slashtz.com) Natural language time zone
converter/calculator. Works with web, Slack and HipChat.

------
rompic
[http://cliq.at](http://cliq.at)

it provides the possibility to easily visualize internal informal networks.
Especially simple using mobile phones.

------
martinpllu
A ridiculously simple personal wiki:
[https://github.com/martinpllu/wik](https://github.com/martinpllu/wik)

------
everling
[http://cinetrii.com](http://cinetrii.com)

A search engine that attempts to find thematic lineage between films. Warning:
not mobile friendly.

------
stevekrouse
[http://woofjs.com](http://woofjs.com)

WoofJS is a simple JS canvas library and IDE I built for my students so they
can learn JavaScript.

------
franze
[http://lalo.li/](http://lalo.li/) (simple voice message service) - coded
mostly offline in a hut in bolivia

------
olragon
Export Font Awesome to inline image or mouse cursor

[https://beryl-seed.hyperdev.space/](https://beryl-seed.hyperdev.space/)

------
dingus
A simple timer. The colors represent an hour block of time. It’s designed for
your peripheral vision, put it on a secondary screen. Just drag or use the
keyboard.

------
rspeer
ftfy (fixes text for you): [https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-
ftfy](https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy)

Auto-detects Unicode mistakes (particularly mojibake), and if there's enough
information left to fix them, it fixes them.

Particularly useful for Web scraping and dealing with Unicode that was
incorrectly exported from Excel (which is nearly all Unicode exported from
Excel).

------
DanHulton
Simple "product", though the utility is strictly limited:
[http://www.ipaidthemost.com/](http://www.ipaidthemost.com/)

Pay more than the person before you and you get... to be the person that paid
the most. That's it. Well, you get a message on the front page along with your
name, but still.

People tend to react positively to it, though I can't for the life of me
figure out how to market it. I've tried Reddit/Facebook ads, mentioning on
relevant Subreddits and such, and nothing has really taken off. Maybe someday
I'll figure it out.

------
hackerkid
Wikifeedia - A newsfeed for Wikipedia.

[http://www.vishnuks.com/Wikifeedia/](http://www.vishnuks.com/Wikifeedia/)

------
harrisreynolds
[http://www.easele.com](http://www.easele.com)

This is something I am working on now. Simple graphic tool for adding text to
images.

------
dthakur
[https://expiryalerts.com](https://expiryalerts.com)

Notifies you (via email, slack or text), before your domain's cert expires.

------
joelanman
Recently started making [http://www.git-browser.com](http://www.git-
browser.com) \- browse repos by thumbnail.

------
burkemw3
[http://mowatly.herokuapp.com](http://mowatly.herokuapp.com)

A list of movies I want to see and streaming options for them.

------
neonbat
[https://hexlist.com/](https://hexlist.com/) which my brother and i use to
make lists of links.

------
zazpowered
[https://senzu.io/investing](https://senzu.io/investing)

A simple tool to compare different investment platforms

------
jaimebuelta
ffind
[https://github.com/jaimebuelta/ffind](https://github.com/jaimebuelta/ffind)

A very simple search tool for the command line, aiming to replace very common
cases. It's pretty minimal, but I use it every single day and love it... it
unsurprisingly 9i developed it) fits very well my daily flow (90% of the times
based in vim, at and ffind)

------
cosmolev
Shows you the page from Google's cache:
[http://fromcache.com/](http://fromcache.com/)

------
AneesAhammed
[https://getglimpses.com/](https://getglimpses.com/) A simple journal app for
Windows.

------
mbrookes
git-pull-request - CLI tool for insanely easy check out of contributor PRs
from github:

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/git-pull-
request](https://www.npmjs.com/package/git-pull-request)

Code is hacky, but hey, 350 downloads a month for something I threw together,
and have never promoted...

Proud? Not really, but thought someone here might find it useful.

------
gaz
[http://www.seeyourvisitors.com/](http://www.seeyourvisitors.com/)

------
pucinators
[http://fooltools.net](http://fooltools.net)

MP3 file cutter (still rough around the edges)

------
raivo
Baby tracking apps to scratch my own itch, so to speak: Poopendar, Boobendar,
Napendar All on the Apple App Store.

------
tuomasj
Create a invoice and print it. If you got to that site, first and only thing
you get is the invoice form.

www.tinyinvoice.net

------
Blahah
getpapers -
[https://github.com/ContentMine/getpapers](https://github.com/ContentMine/getpapers)

Command-line tool for mass-downloading scientific literature that matches a
search query. The crazy thing is that it didn't exist already.

------
endgame
msrss - Merge and scrub RSS feeds, so certain clients can consume them without
barfing. (I'm looking at you, gnus.)

[https://bitbucket.org/endgame/msrss/wiki/Home](https://bitbucket.org/endgame/msrss/wiki/Home)

------
hapiben
[http://gemfly.findings.co](http://gemfly.findings.co)

------
matttheatheist
I built a device that turns your phone into an FM receiver... For those of you
who like the radio!

www.enrad.io

------
pkstn
[https://redom.js.org](https://redom.js.org)

------
Shubham23596
Locateonspot is an simple app to find family and car you can take it up as
simple product

------
damian_n
sassifyit - [http://www.sassifyit.com/](http://www.sassifyit.com/)

Converts CSS hex colour codes in to well named Sass colour variables f.x
#fafafa -> $alabaster or #a6a6a6 -> $silver-chalice

------
jasoncchild
A suite of internal autocad automation tools for an electronics manufacturer.

------
dmritard96
simple tool: a handy json comparison tool
[https://github.com/ChannelIQ/jsoncompare](https://github.com/ChannelIQ/jsoncompare)

------
sametmax
0bin.net: encrypted pastebin, open source, written in Python.

------
roryisok
I'm bookmarking this thread =) so many useful things

------
david90
makeappicon.com

A handy icon resizer, yet it's a simple script but it's benefiting many dev
and designers now ;)

------
vram22
Well, I wouldn't say "most proud", but here are some I had fun doing:

An IBM developerWorks article: Developing a Linux command-line utility (selpg)

[http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/09/my-ibm-developerworks-
arti...](http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/09/my-ibm-developerworks-article.html)

It's a tutorial on how to write a Linux command-line utility in C. Was up on
the IBM dW site for long; now archived. Got some stars etc. Code and article
text now available via (links in) the above post on my blog. Uses as a case
study / demo, a real-life utility I wrote for a client, to print only selected
pages from a text file, specified by line number range or page range (form-
feed-delimited pages, a common industry format for line printers). It was for
a very large company with huge print jobs, so if the paper jammed in mid-job,
this utility could save them a lot of time and paper, by letting them print
only the un-printed pages. They might still be using it several years after it
was written. I had also shared it on the HP-UX mailing list, and people said
it was useful.

This post shows how to use that utility (selpg) with xtopdf (another project
of mine, for PDF generation from Python):

Print selected text pages to PDF with Python, selpg and xtopdf on Linux

[http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/10/print-selected-text-
pages-...](http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/10/print-selected-text-pages-to-pdf-
with.html)

PySiteCreator was a bit innovative and fun to do. It lets you create simple
web sites by writing them purely in Python. I designed it to impose as few
requirements or constraints on the user as I could, so that it would be more
generally useful, i.e. more like a library than a framework, though it is a
sort of framework, since it calls code you write.

Early release of PySiteCreator - v0.1

[http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2009/11/early-release-of-
pysitecre...](http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2009/11/early-release-of-
pysitecreator-v01.html)

That post describes the ways it can be used. I originally created it with the
goal of creating simple wikis using Python, but then realized that it
generalized to any web site, so changed the name from DSLWiki (a DSL for
wikis) to PySiteCreator :)

And while this one - pipe_controller - is not really a tool or product (it is
an experiment), I enjoyed seeing what I could do with it - like running a pipe
incrementally and swapping pipe components at runtime. There are few posts
describing those experiments, in reverse chronological order, starting from
this last post:

Swapping pipe components at runtime with pipe_controller:

[http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/10/swapping-pipe-
components-a...](http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/10/swapping-pipe-components-
at-runtime.html)

Edit: I'm working a few other products, some for sale, some free, so anyone
interested in checking them out, is welcome to follow me for email updates
here on Gumroad:

[https://gumroad.com/vasudevram/follow](https://gumroad.com/vasudevram/follow)

(There are a few small free utilities in early versions there now too.)

I only send out a few updates a month (if that), and only if I have a new
product or an update to an existing one to announce.

Edited for typos / re-wording.

~~~
vram22
Forgot to include this point earlier, for anyone who wants to check out
PySiteCreator - the current link for the project is here:

[https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/pysitecreator](https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/pysitecreator)

Also: s/There are few posts/There are a few posts/

It was a typo, I'm aware of the difference :)

------
tptacek
Probably nsping.

------
mystyle19
PPD courses

------
evantahler
actionherojs.com

------
rgun
provakil.com

------
brilliantcode
[http://saasful.com](http://saasful.com)

Successful. That's what I want for my SaaS developers. Whatever your core
product is, it's always going to need

\- billing integration with Stripe

\- user authentication (for your customers)

\- access control (so you can drop in support)

You can pull this off (of course!) but do you really want to deal with this
portion at all? Wouldn't you rather focus on driving traffic, writing blogs,
adding new features to your core product with the time that you would spend on
maintaining the non-product portions?

Here's how we are doing it:

\- We would be your go-to resource for all of your SaaS website issues, fixes,
CSS changes, anything related!

\- SaaS website never enters your cognitive load, we are keeping it up!

\- Send us an email at hi@saasful.com and we'll work on any request you send
us in 48 hours. This is nice because months down the road you want to quickly
change CSS

\- Never deal with hiring from freelancer.com!

This is the tool that my devs and I have been working on this quarter. Would
love some feedbacks.

edit: Care to explain the drive by downvotes? The thread is about sharing what
tools we are working on right? Or did I not do it properly? Please let me
know!

~~~
conductr
I don't downvote but, to speculate on the answer to your question, I think you
crossed the line by going into sales pitch mode

~~~
brilliantcode
My bad, I got super excited got a little carried away with the messaging. I'll
definitely keep this in mind so I don't repeat it next time. Thanks!

------
bbcbasic
[https://dealomni.com](https://dealomni.com) which helps you find deals near
you.

Proud because of what I didn't do. I was pragmatic. Avoided fancy nosql
databases and funky languages and just bashed out some JS and said stuff it
... no server side!

------
67726e
I would guess my most used project would be an HTTP header editor for
Chrome[0]. According to the developer dashboard it has close to 4,000 weekly
users and I don't think I've had to do anything to it in over a year and a
half. That so many folks would use my software is cool.

[0] - [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/header-
editor/pkok...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/header-
editor/pkokmcnklmgbepioackopoknkdlhefjl)

------
susam
[https://github.com/susam/uncap](https://github.com/susam/uncap)

Map Caps Lock key to Escape key, or any to any key, on Windows systems.

I am very happy about it because my wife (then girlfriend) was the first user
of this little tool and she still uses it everyday. She likes that this tool
is unobtrusive and it silently remaps Caps Lock to Escape which is very
convenient while using Vim.

From the download count I know that there are more people using it now but I
don't know who they are.

------
coldshower
I took Carl Jung's Association Method and turned it into a simple
psychoanalytical tool using cards. Works like a charm:
[https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/critical-
stimulus](https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/critical-stimulus)

Downloadable, printable version is here:
[https://payhip.com/b/TFIi](https://payhip.com/b/TFIi)

------
lowry
A bash script that uses only builtins to truncate your PS1 to a fraction of
the width of your terminal window.

