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Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

1901 points l2silver | 2 comments | 27 Apr 23 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.405s | source

Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
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samhuk ◴[28 Apr 23 08:38 UTC] No.35738939[source]▶
TL;DR: A React front-end component workshop, a simple version of Storybook.

So around 5 months ago, I needed a tool to preview front-end (React) components whilst I create them for a personal project of mine. There were two options: Storybook or Ladle.

Storybook is the tool everybody knows. I've used it before quite a lot. It's very big, full-fat, supports loads of use-cases, etc.

Ladle comes out of Uber. It's very small, lean, and doesn't support that much. After trying it out for a while, it just gives me a feeling that it is an Uber engineer's 20% project to learn some new tech.

So I realised that I wanted something kind of in the middle. Something that's a bit more customizable and full-fat than Ladle, but something simpler, less intrusive, and less "framework magic" than Storybook.

This led me to create Exhibitor (https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor) (https://demo.exhibitor.dev).

I worked on it on-and-off for a couple months, and it ended up being something that I'm quite proud of. It's not perfect, and supports only a fraction of what Storybook does, however for a tool made by 1 engineer vs the 20+ for Storybook, I'm quite happy about it!

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1. lloydatkinson ◴[28 Apr 23 08:46 UTC] No.35738975[source]▶
Very nice! This should definitely get some more attention as this space needs some serious competition as Storybook is terrible at the best of times.
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2. samhuk ◴[28 Apr 23 09:16 UTC] No.35739128[source]▶
Thanks! Personally, I have immense respect for Storybook and the engineers behind it. It supports a dizzying amount of use-cases.

Having said that, however, I think that they did go too far down some paths that I would have liked to not see it go down. I feel like them supporting so many use-cases came at a cost of usability. In addition to this, there is quite obviously too much framework-magic, causing obscure undesirable behavior.

However, it's still an awesome tool. Just a little too full-fat for some of my more simpler use-cases :)