←back to thread

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

1901 points l2silver | 1 comments | 27 Apr 23 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.213s | 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. dzink ◴[28 Apr 23 20:15 UTC] No.35746522[source]▶
- I built DreamList.com originally because I was working on another startup and as a founder I didn’t want my Baby Registry showing up on search engines or my address showing up to random people who looked up my name. All the other services were using customer names as free SEO and every list was indexed by default with your address available. I built it safe and private for my own family and over time it went from side hustle to main hustle, especially as demand for privacy-respecting social and family software keeps going up.

- A family member in an elected position needed to write a schedule for 22 healthcare professionals that take shifts every month and I wrote a tool for them that allows them to make sure everyone gets sufficient time off and nobody takes too much of the weekend load. They were elected again and to a higher leadership role partly because of the scheduling tool.

- Regularly writing new stock trading, modeling, and timing software to improve my earnings from trading.

- Wrote my own tool to scrape bios, cluster and find investors in different niche areas and need to rewrite it for recruiting people with niche expertise.

- Created a social network for collaboration between nerds like me in different disciplines at top universities while I was at grad school and shut it down after it got flooded with recruiter spammers. Always thinking of ways to relaunch that.