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

1901 points l2silver | 1 comments | 27 Apr 23 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.329s | 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.
1. ScottWRobinson ◴[28 Apr 23 14:38 UTC] No.35741793[source]▶
I made a "bot" server for myself, which is really just a server and app framework to host a bunch of scripts. The framework handles:

- Running bots periodically - Receives webhooks - Handles OAuth - Provides a shared DB - Posts updates to and receives commands from Slack

It's not very innovative, but super helpful. I love that I can deploy a new script so easily and already have all the tools I need so I can just focus in the logic. A few bots I have running:

- I run a site with thousands of articles, so one bot checks 10-15 articles per day for spelling mistakes, broken links, broken images, poor formatting, etc. Tasks to fix these are then posted to Notion. - Monitor Hacker News and Reddit for mentions of the sites/apps that I run so I can respond. - Sync calendars between apps without having to make them public - Gather financials and reports from various sources for bookkeeping - Monitor all of the servers we run and sync their status to Notion

Probably at least half of the automations could work on something like Zapier, but this is more fun and I get a lot more control over them.