- I have a disability and require daily personal care so I made a system for recruiting and hiring caregivers. (https://blakewatson.com/journal/a-home-cooked-app-for-hiring...)
- I need to track those caregivers' hours so I can make sure timesheets are accurate, and I wanted to do it with minimal effort. So I created a plain text syntax readable by a web app I created that takes that syntax and outputs exactly what should go on the timesheets.
- Sometimes the government agency that runs the program doesn't send me enough timesheets, so I created a "forgery" of their timesheets in CSS where all of the values are interchangeable via JavaScript. Now I can print any timesheet for any one of my caregivers for any time period on demand.
- I made my own web-based bookmarking tool to replace my Pinboard account. It automatically sends every bookmark to the Wayback Machine. (I wrote about that one and a couple of others https://blakewatson.com/journal/the-joys-of-home-cooked-apps...)
- Sadly I'm no longer able to use this one because of decreasing strength, but I once created a custom mobile-based keyboard for typing on my Mac. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pre6EQGIuKY
- I wanted to be able to share my plain text notes so I made a CLI for selectively publishing notes to the web.
Really most everything I make outside of my day job is for me/family initially, but a lot of it I end up publishing. For example my main side project is A Fine Start (https://afinestart.me/). It actually started as an assistive technology just for me—typing is difficult so I wanted a new tab page with just clickable text links. I used it for a while myself before eventually turning it into a browser extension and service for other people.