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

The most interesting tech I've build for myself is boring: a writing tool I use every day for journaling: https://enso.sonnet.io

With that out of the way here's some more ridiculous stuff:

In 2016, I made a browser based AR party game where you'd fight kittens falling from the sky by dancing with vegetables in your hands (CMYK was easier to track using the webcam). I have some photos here: https://goo.gl/photos/g6Dp8GLDbuuhT1TRA

From a technical PoV it was exciting (running AR, in a browser, in pre Pokemon GO, pre WASM times!)

I also made a simple photography lighting tool, replacing professional lights with computer/tablet/phone screens (facade.photo). I put it in an old wardrobe bought in a thrift store on Brick Lane and during my startup launch. Results: https://goo.gl/photos/RZ3fCRcScYSGr7aG6

Ah, I also made an AI-powered voice assistant in 2014. The tagline was HTML5-powered voice assistant, as AI wasn't really _the_ buzzword then, but _HTML5_... oh yeah.

Enso looks really nice, as does Sit and your about pages.

enso is cool!

Enso website looks beautiful, what tools did you use to build it?

Next.js for the product page and regular react for the app. My personal website was built using eleventy. I enjoy writing plain html and css but I try to be pragmatic when things get a bit complex.

I can't believe people like you exist. Just a handful of amazing projects

Both Enso and Sit are really nicely done. I think it would be interesting to add a wordcount "goal" with Enso - set it before you begin and have it notify you when you reach the wordcount for that day. Maybe even re-use the chime from Sit, heck maybe even say ok you reached your writing goal (either time or word count) time to "sit" for a few minutes and then back to it.

You might have a typo on the Ensō homepage.

>Ensō works perfectly fine even without internet connecton.

hah, editing to say that I really liked it. I'm stress a lot about how I phrase things and am very conscious about how concise am I when when I'm writing for an audience.

Ha. I made The Most Dangerous Writing App for that very purpose (sold it a few years ago after it became an unlikely success), I love finding other peoples home made writing tools! Thanks for sharing Enso!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Writing_A...

fixed, thank you sacred satan

> hah, editing to say that I really liked it. I'm stress a lot about how I phrase things and am very conscious about how concise am I when when I'm writing for an audience.

Same here. My fluency has improved quite a bit since I started writing daily, but things get much harder when I have to share my work. I'm trying to be more comfortable with sharing things when they're not perfect. Sit was an exercise in that. I wrote about it here: https://sonnet.io/posts/sit/

Thank you so much for making it, when I started getting into the habit of digital journal, it had helped me a lot to not fix grammar and to not cringe at the things I've just written down.

Haha, a few years ago I created a Chrome extension called "Writer's Block" that would delete everything in the textarea if the user pressed backspace/delete. I used it a lot myself for a while and it got me into the habit of writing without premature editing. I never got around to actually releasing it.