Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?

1

Milkman

I built milkman[1], an alternative to postman because I wanted one tool to integrate with the whole web development stack. One tool that contains my SQL, rest and grpc calls to easily debug issues. Also nearly none of those kind of tools that existed supported SSE which I also use in my day to day work. [1] https://github.com/warmuuh/milkman.

#API Tools #APIs #Developer Tools 4 social mentions

2

Minimal Google Analytics Snippet

#Analytics #Web Analytics #Privacy 5 social mentions

3

intercooler.js

I created intercooler.js in 2013 so I could do AJAX in HTML: https://intercoolerjs.org Last year I removed the jquery dependency and cleaned it up based on a lot of lessons that I learned, renaming it to hmtx: https://htmx.org Same idea: extends/complete HTML as a hypertext so you can build more advanced UI within the original hypermedia web model, and cleaner implementation. Part of that cleanup involved me pulling out some functionality around events and a proto-scripting language (ic-action), and I enjoy programming languages, so I created a front end scripting language to fill that need: https://hyperscript.org It's based on HyperTalk and has a lot of domain specific features for lightweight front end scripting, kind of a jQuery or AlpineJS alternative.

#Javascript UI Libraries #JS Library #Task Management 8 social mentions

4

Hacker News

The most useful library I built is "dome()" a javascript function that would return a dom element out of an array. So that dome(["a",{href:"http://news.ycombinator.com"}]]) would return a clickable icon for example. I wrote the function in 2007 and I'm still using it today. It's a handful lines of code.

#Social Networks #Social News #Startups 498 social mentions

5

donjon.bin.sh

#Maps #Mapping And GIS #Game Engine 178 social mentions

6

yadm

I created a dotfiles management tool, yadm https://yadm.io I'm a huge fan of Git, and the Git mental model just makes sense to me. I wanted to manage my dotfiles in the same way. At the time I had tried several other solutions, mostly similar tools like homeschick and vcsh. I wanted a solution that was very portable, which both of those existing tools were. However, homeschick became a bit clunky to use because each time I wanted to do most operations I had to first "cd" into my "castle". In addition, that tool used symlinks, which doesn't work out well to manage a file that may get overwritten by a tool. Vcsh was the other main tool I tried. This tool adopts the bare repo technique, allowing files to be used instead of symlinks. The major drawback it had was that it was designed to work with multiple repos, and forces you to specify the repo with every command. Some simple aliasing helped mitigate that though. But by that time I also started writing some custom code to encrypt private data and was struggling to maintain different branches for different systems which had slight tweaks to configurations. It just became all fragmented and difficult to manage. That is what lead me to create my own tool. The important features I wanted: portability, seamless interaction with Git, alternate files for different hosts, encryption for private data. I shared it as open source back in 2015 and it has grown in popularity some. It's been improved a lot over time including contributions from others. I'm glad so many others have found it useful.

#Front End Package Manager #Package Manager #Programming 50 social mentions

7

Shynet

I built Shynet [0], a modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics tool that works without cookies or JS. I also built a17t [1], an atomic web design toolkit that makes using Tailwind CSS a bit easier from the start. [0] https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet [1] https://github.com/milesmcc/a17t.

#Analytics #Web Analytics #Privacy 8 social mentions

8

GoJS

I'm not the only developer but I made (and still make) GoJS, an interactive diagramming library for the web. https://gojs.net Most of its popularity is with large companies building their own internal tools where they need diagramming visualization capabilities (layouts, save/load, undo/redo, data binding, etc). So you won't see it too often in the wild, but under the surface it's used in every industry. I love it, and I love HTML Canvas, which I wish was more popular.

#Flowcharts #Org Charts #BPMN 10 social mentions

9

AsyncGo

I am building AsyncGo (https://asyncgo.com) which is still evolving but it is a kind of forum for businesses structured around having important conversations and documenting the decisions that come out of them. I built it to have something simple and lightweight for discussions for remote teams, as an alternative to meetings and using more heavyweight methods like issues for conversations. It is still early days but there is a free tier, if you are interested and check it out I would love feedback.

#Team Collaboration #Productivity #Enterprise Communication 4 social mentions

Https://nullboard.io/preview - a kanban https://iobureau.com/ugiffer - a screencap tool https://ccsiobench.com - a storage IO profiler https://diskovery.io - a storage stack/device explorer https://github.com/apankrat/dnswhisperer - a DNS-based adblocker Plus a bunch of commercial software, but all of these ^ are basically to scratch my own itch.

#Productivity #Apps #Business Productivity 5 social mentions

Https://nullboard.io/preview - a kanban https://iobureau.com/ugiffer - a screencap tool https://ccsiobench.com - a storage IO profiler https://diskovery.io - a storage stack/device explorer https://github.com/apankrat/dnswhisperer - a DNS-based adblocker Plus a bunch of commercial software, but all of these ^ are basically to scratch my own itch.

#Hard Drive Tools #Utilities #Web Service Automation 2 social mentions

I made a chrome extension that lets me close tabs that I want to read later & delivers them to my inbox every monday - https://closetab.email I also made my blog sync with my google docs - https://hexo.press I knew both of those would be helpful for others as well, so I made a service out of each of them and open sourced the code - https://github.com/joelewis.

#Email #Productivity #Chrome Extensions 14 social mentions

13

Webhook.site

• https://webhook.site - for testing webhooks, evolved into a SaaS for building workflows from http requests and emails • https://instadj.com - simple app for making youtube playlists, wanted a simple app for playing music at parties Both are open source.

#Developer Tools #APIs #Sales Workflow 68 social mentions

14

Every Time Zone

#Timezones #Timezone Manager #Timezone Conversion 30 social mentions

15

Flyway

Curious about the lack of comparison to https://flywaydb.org/ , which I've seen a ton of support for in the past and people seem to really enjoy.

#MySQL Tools #Development #Online Services 57 social mentions

16

CodeKeep

#Design Playground #JavaScript #Cloud Computing 2 social mentions

17

AudioMass

I built audiomass ( https://audiomass.co ). It is not a dev tool but a general productivity tool (allow people to record, edit and manipulate audio directly in the browser). I just wanted something that works as promised and respects the user (open source, 70kb total payload size, no ads, no tracking, feature complete, etc).

#Audio #Audio Recording #Audio & Music 6 social mentions

18

Recut

Last year I built Recut[0], a native Mac app that helps speed up video editing by automating the rough-cut process. It finds silence, gaps, and pauses and removes them, creating a cut list that you can import into editors like ScreenFlow, Final Cut, Premiere and Resolve. Here’s the Show HN [1] from a couple months ago. I built it because I was making screencasts and cutting out silence + mistakes was 90% of my editing time. This makes it a ton faster. There were some command-line scripts to do a similar thing but I wanted something visual with a fast feedback loop, where I could quickly preview how it would sound and tweak the parameters in real time. I didn’t know anything about video and had never built anything with Swift before so it’s been a fun way to learn a bunch of new stuff. 0: https://getrecut.com 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26317265.

#Content Creators #Video Editing #Video 29 social mentions

19

Label LIVE

#Design Tools #Office & Productivity #Mac 15 social mentions

20

Nodewood

I've settled into a stack that I like for building web apps with Node/Express on the back-end and Vue on the front-end. However, I still ended up re-implementing common things every time, like build automation, my Docker setup, user authentication, payments, all that basic stuff. So instead of writing all that custom each time, I wrote a SaaS starter kit to build from, and decided to polish it up and also release it as a full-fledged product: Nodewood: https://nodewood.com/ It's helped me to be more rigorous when building out features (if it's going to go into a framework that others are going to use, it needs to be well thought-out, tested, etc), and is there as a stepping stone for future businesses I want to work on. It's been really satisfying to build out for the past couple years, and I'm closing in on completing the last few features and adding sufficient polish so that I can take it out of beta.

#SaaS #JavaScript Framework #SaaS Website Builder 16 social mentions

21

Wormhole.app

In 2013, I started https://webtorrent.io the first torrent client that runs in a web browser. It’s open source here: https://github.com/webtorrent We’re still actively building it and we have a slick desktop app that uses the same engine for streaming. WebTorrent also powers https://wormhole.app an end-to-end encrypted file sending service that I built.

#Secure File Sharing #File Sharing #Cloud Storage 98 social mentions

22

WebTorrent

In 2013, I started https://webtorrent.io the first torrent client that runs in a web browser. It’s open source here: https://github.com/webtorrent We’re still actively building it and we have a slick desktop app that uses the same engine for streaming. WebTorrent also powers https://wormhole.app an end-to-end encrypted file sending service that I built.

#Torrents #Video Streaming #Watch Movies Online 30 social mentions

23

React Guitar

I made react-guitar, a beautiful and accessible guitar component for React: https://react-guitar.com I made it initially to make a guitar fretboard exploration tool that did not survive, but I ended up publishing it as a reusable component. I also made Creepyface, a JavaScript library to make your face look at the pointer: https://creepyface.io I originally developed this to use it in my resume, and then ended up building a site for it and a plugin system to make faces even dance.

#Music #Mac #Secure File Sharing 8 social mentions

24

Deck for Reddit

I dislike the "modern" (read: too much negative spaces) reddit UI, and built a compact desktop friendly alternative last year during the stay home: https://rdddeck.com.

#Productivity #Content Creators #Video Editing 13 social mentions

25

BULLETWEEK.app

I made an iOS app that is structured around the same idea of a Bullet Journal. Is allows me to segment my tasks by priority of today / this week / this month and later. Even on paper that’s a nice system that works pretty well to get things done. I built an Apple Watch that set a timer by adding prime numbers up to 59 minutes. That was fun to do as an experiment. I use more often the other way of setting the timer: by choosing the end time. It’s faster than the default app and when I can’t use Siri. https://bulletweek.app.

#Productivity #Personal Productivity #Family Organizer 1 social mentions

26

PostSheet

I've built a few over the years: - https://volt.fm - See, share and compare your Spotify stats - https://postsheet.com - Send emails to contacts in a Google Sheets or Airtable document - https://pikaso.me - Screenshots Twitter for sharing on Instagram And the Open Source ones:.

#Email #Email Marketing #Spreadsheets 1 social mentions

27

Pikaso

I've built a few over the years: - https://volt.fm - See, share and compare your Spotify stats - https://postsheet.com - Send emails to contacts in a Google Sheets or Airtable document - https://pikaso.me - Screenshots Twitter for sharing on Instagram And the Open Source ones:.

#Photography #Tool #Design Tools 4 social mentions

28

Annotate.tv

A video note-taking app: https://annotate.tv.

#Productivity #Chrome Extensions #Note Taking 4 social mentions

I built Accelerator Keys, a niche tool replicating Windows accelerator key shortcuts in Mac Excel [0]. I made it to scratch my own itch at first, as accelerator keys are a much more intuitive and faster way to use a shortcut intensive app like Excel. Before this, power users needed to run a full VM and use Windows Excel if they wanted to use these shortcuts. It seemed like overkill to me. Last year, I decided to take the leap and try selling my first piece of software. Here's the PH launch from a few months ago [1]. It's not easy tracking down users, but I've managed to sell a few hundred licenses so far. It has been a fruitful journey. Learned a lot while building it (e.g. About accessibility features on Macs), but making this a product also meant learning about licensing, payments, front end for the landing page, SEO and FB ads. [0]: https://acceleratorkeys.com.

#Mac #Productivity #App Launcher 2 social mentions

30

Haraka

Some stuff I've worked on recently: - kcup[0] serves a single page over HTTP/S - async-wait-for-promise[1] - a tiny npm package for waiting on a condition or timeout (README contains why the certain combination didn't already exist) - mailtrain-form-post-sidecar[2] - a little sidecar container for mailtrain that accepts form POSTs for mailing list signups - redis-bootleg-backup[3] - a tool for taking backups of small redis databases with only read access (KEYS *-based) - maille[4] - a component framework for mithriljs - postmgr[5] - a daemon for running & managing postfix, dovecot and other mail-adjacent software (haven't worked on this for 2 years, because better options like maddy[6], chasquid[7] and haraka[8] exist) Unfortunately, most of the stuff I've worked on that I've open sourced lately is instructional/pattern-related, so that doesn't really fit this mold, but in the background I've been working on what might be my biggest project yet (remains to be seen if/when I'll open source it) -- readysetsaas, a truly no-code (you provide configuration only) saas company creation kit, somewhat similar to AWS's SaaS boost thing. [0]: https://gitlab.com/mrman/async-wait-for-promise [1]: https://gitlab.com/mrman/async-wait-for-promise [2]: https://gitlab.com/mrman/mailtrain-form-post-sidecar [3]: https://gitlab.com/mrman/redis-bootleg-backup [4]: https://mrman.gitlab.io/maille/ [5]: https://gitlab.com/postmgr/postmgr [6]: https://maddy.email [7]: https://blitiri.com.ar/p/chasquid/ [8]: https://haraka.github.io/.

#Email #SMTP Server #Self-hosted Email 9 social mentions

31

Stack WM

A tiling window manager for Windows https://losttech.software/stack.html.

#Window Manager #OSX Tools #OSX Window Manager 5 social mentions

32

Mockoon

I built an open-source desktop API mocking tool three years ago: https://mockoon.com.

#API Tools #Developer Tools #APIs 26 social mentions

33

PDF Page Number

GUI to add page number to PDF: https://pdfpagenumber.com GUI to reverse PDF page number order: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reverser/id1440371872?mt=12 And most recently a ping checker on mac menu bar (so that I can know if connection problem happens during Zoom meeting while WFH) :.

#Mac #Office Suites #Secure File Sharing 1 social mentions

34

Reviewable

Starting in 2014 I built Reviewable (https://reviewable.io) because after getting used to Critique at Google I couldn't stand the workflow of GitHub's PR code reviews. Reviewable gives you interdiffs (even when rebasing), tracks what you've already reviewed, has a rich comment resolution system for multi-party reviews, and lets you know when the ball is in your court. It has also grown more customizable over the years, including plugging in snippets of custom code to, e.g., group files, determine if a file is reviewed, or determine if a review is complete. It's not open source because, frankly, it's still hard to run a business on open source -- especially without VC backing (Reviewable is bootstrapped). After all these years things are still growing nicely and while I've run the show solo for a long time I started hiring full time folks in the last year or so. (If you think you might be interested to join, ping me and let me know!).

#Code Collaboration #Git #Code Review 21 social mentions

35

Shortcut.so

I built https://shortcut.so - practice keyboard commands and shortcuts.

#Productivity #Tech #iPhone 2 social mentions