Ask HN: Have you used or wrote custom software for use within your friend group?

2 points by yeahman 6 years ago | 2 comments

I am an active member in a number of overlapping friend groups. Some as small as 3 best friends, others are 10ish people we go on holidays with.

I was thinking has anyone set up or even better wrote software/ systems where the use case is private usage by a group of friends?

I have had two ideas, but looking for stories and inspiration.

My first is a holiday planner that we can fully customise to our process of planning a holiday, this would save links and discussions all over WhatsApp/discord/ google sheets/ you name it.

The second is a private photo server we can run. Have tools that help migrate photos onto our servers and have a convenient way to tag them (people, event etc) in a few sittings. Then have a nice ui with a filter for those tags.

What do you guys think?

TallGuyShort 6 years ago |

I've never gone as far as what I would consider "writing software". Whenever I've seen something software would easily solve, it's been easy to hack together with some off-the-shelf tools. Several times I've set up Google Forms (or just had everyone edit a spreadsheet directly) to collect input and then sent the CSV to a little Python script that solved some problem.

Probably my favorite was when my parents decided to pre-bequeath a bunch of their books, movies, and other items they thought their children would like to keep and weren't worth selling. I had everyone enter their prioritized preferences on hundreds of items, and implemented a little algorithm to give people their first preference, with preference towards people that desired fewer things. Saved my parents a lot of overhead and everyone was happy with the result.

eitland 6 years ago |

Edit: First of all - great idea!

At a time when I was incredibly frustrating with our time sheets system at work I started working on a new one. I never got anyone to test it out and it was never finished, but I gutted it and reused the login parts to create a system that friends of mine and I used to sign up for shared tasks.

Then I began realizing how amazingly unsecure it was (cheap hosting, no code reviews, slow patching - at that point I had way too much on my plate). I was almost begging them to replace it with something supported.

It was great fun to create something that was used regularly over time by more than 100 users but (edit: given the circumstances) also a great relief to get it away.

Today I'm also wishing to create a photo sharing solution. I'll probably try to make it on Google Cloud or Azure this time.