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Waylon Walker
Waylon Walker

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What's your favorite piece of software that you built for yourself?

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mr_destructive profile image
Meet Rajesh Gor

I won't say the best but it just works for me. I created Crossposter script initially in Bash, which allowed posting articles to devto, codenewbie and medium.
Recently I created the Python version of it which works for most of the platforms but their APIs keeps changing a few time so I need to keep checking every now and then.

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waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker

Love it, I need to look into this. I have my cross posting to dev down as good as I have ever had it, but it still requires me to copy and paste the post over.

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Jonas Brømsø

I made a small application to check the contents of a repository/directory for, specific files, versions of files etc to make sure I remember important stuff like licenses, code of conduct, basic tool configuration and so on… and to keep things up to date. First working version is in Perl, considering porting to go…

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Waylon Walker

Super cool, it's so easy to forget the small stuff. Does it look for language specific files? like package.json or setup.py?

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jonasbn profile image
Jonas Brømsø

Well the goal is to cover what cannot be handled by Dependabot and Renovate. I am trying to flesh out a specification, while I am working on the prototype/pilot in Perl. I have more ideas than there are hours in the day, but it is slowly progressing.

I made a note with basic comparison on what is covered by Dependabot and Renovate. I want to aim for all that small stuff, which falls between the cracks like .editorconfig etc.

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thefluxapex profile image
Ian Pride

My BlackHosts program. Not because of the code, but because what it's for and the community it's part of. While not perfect by any means, we aim to resist and defend against intrusive and exploitative tracking and advertising.

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waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker

Is this kind of like pihole?

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thefluxapex profile image
Ian Pride • Edited

It's a command line tool to install or update the hosts file directly from one of the best hosts consolidators (Steven Black at GitHub) on the internet. Not 100% sure if it's used with PiHole (though I think I've heard it can), but these hosts from Steven Black can be used on any machine with a hosts file and I know various VPN applications do and can use them. My tool is specifically for actual desktop/laptop computers for Windows, Linux, and MacOs, although using it in Windows can be somewhat difficult for users not familiar with how Windows works (have to make sure SVCHOST doesn't have the file locked and after usage if the hosts file isn't compressed it can halt network traffic until Svc is done parsing a large hosts file; a Windows issue, not mine). Works perfectly in Linux a Mac though.
BlackHosts Screen Shot

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geraldew profile image
geraldew

Well "favourite" is tricky as I have a large application that I wrote which I'm not at liberty to talk about.

But in my private capacity I do have a small tool that I made for myself - Foldatry - for automated cleanups of replicated files. It was a conjunction of having a need and that I felt like trying out writing in Python.

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waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker

That is so cool. I love side projects built to scratch an itch. You even have a gui for it, thats wild.

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ladam0203 profile image
Ádám Lőrincz

My father is a self-employed carpenter who has his own inventory in his backyard where he stores mostly wood that he receives from the companies that hire him. He has to keep track of how many items come, is used, taken back etc. He did this in excel which was true pain and there were no logs, so if errors were made it could not be tracked back. This Excel was only accessible on his laptop, so he couldn't access it in his workshop.

Some years ago for christmas I set up an application for him in C# where he could keep track of his items with logging included and even a webpage that syncs with the desktop app so he can access it from his phone wherever he is.

It is not a big or well written project, but it definitely works and it makes his life a lot more convenient. This was my first project I have delivered to a "client" and soon I plan to rewrite it with extra features!

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waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker

Some of my favorite things I have written for myself are far from polished. I imaging doing something like this for someone you care about makes it just that much better.

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ekeijl profile image
Edwin

An in-house planning poker app (that Agile thing for estimating stories during a sprint planning) that uses websockets. Team members can join a room, pick a card value (0-1/2-1-3-5-8-13-20-100-?) and the host can flip the cards.

We needed some kind of app for this since work is now mostly remote and all the available apps were pretty mediocre. It's not integrated with the issue tracker to fill in the estimation value, but it works well enough for now.

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pinotattari profile image
Riccardo Bernardini

Well... I have few pieces of software that I especially like and that proved quite useful to me too.

Eugen

This is a "generator of European project proposals." Starting from a compact and non-redundant project description (a basic text file) generates (in LaTeX) all the WP descriptions, deliverable list, milestones, GANTT, number of person month per partner and per WP, and so on...

Instead of updating the project in many places at every little change, I just changed the description and regenerated all the files.

It saved me an humongous amount of time...

I presented this at FOSDEM 2020

Template expander

This is still work in progress, although I already used it to generate a web page for my course of didactic laboratory. I began working on this because I wanted (and still I want) to use it in eugen, to replace the hard wired LaTeX generator.

It is a library implementing a template expander, like the ones used to generate HTML pages "on the fly," something that sometimes is done in PHP.

Its syntax take inspiration mostly from Ruby and Ada, with just a bit from PHP. Differently from PHP, the data used to build the result are presented as builtin variables defined by the code that uses the library.

As I said, it is still work in progress, but I like the fact that it allows me to do some processing at the template level, without aiming to be a full general-purpose language (as PHP). The syntax is maybe a bit too verbose, for someone taste, but I like it this way.

If I succeed in bringing it to a "publishable" state, I am planning to present it to the next FOSDEM, in the Ada Dev room (If the FOSDEM will be in presence, if the Ada Dev room will be part of it and if my proposal will get accepted, of course...)

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waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker

I love these projects built to scratch your own itch.

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Dhravya

I really love using Pyre makes my life soo easy.

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codewithcaen profile image
CodeWithCaen

Right now, the software I'm currently working on, HydePHP which creates websites super fast using Markdown, but also allows you to use most Laravel features like Blade templating.

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Bhupesh Varshney 👾

Lately it's been ugit
But most of the time i found myself using custom shell/python scripts that i use almost daily github.com/Bhupesh-V/.Varshney/tre...

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tinkermakar profile image
Makar

On it now -- building a lightweight Plex-like web video player
github.com/makar2/last

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waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker

oh, cool, what makes it different than the plex video player?

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Makar

It's does just one thing -- website playing files from a folder via web. Then it saves your progress to resume from any device later. It's not much, but that's the only thing I need at the moment.