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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: 0.239s | 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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lalunamel ◴[28 Apr 23 13:45 UTC] No.35741211[source]▶
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

replies(2): >>35744275 #>>35749004 #
1. myko ◴[29 Apr 23 01:08 UTC] No.35749004[source]▶
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