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

I built a native mac app called FileWatcher. It watches the filesystem for events like read, write, open, mount, stat, etc etc. I wanted to investigate how xcode's build system worked [1] (which relies on `stat` to determine whether or not a file needs to be recompiled) and couldn't find any tool that would do the job.

I was astonished when I couldn't find what I needed - surely this had already been solved by someone else! There are things like inotify and watchman, but they don't provide process information about the events.

I haven't figured out how to distribute it quite yet because the API it uses to collect file system events isn't allowed in apps distributed on the app store. I recently made a short video demo, though[2].

[1] https://blog.codysehl.net/2023/Understanding-the-XCode-Build... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPhMWXzoBWY

Pretty cool project!

Why don't you distribute through your own website though?

It doesn't seem like the kind of tool people that only use the App Store would be interested in :)

Thanks a lot! Yeah, my current plan is to create a small static site and put a download link up on there, but I've yet to get the certificates and signing straightened out with apple.

Not really the same but you might find this and related projects interesting: https://github.com/johnno1962/InjectionLite

These projects also watch the file system to look at build system changes