Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
I built a weightlifting workout tracker. I did this because at the time I wrote it (2014) none of the current tools fit my use cases due to the fact that I compete in the sport of Olympic weightlifting and this was still pretty rare back then. I also wanted to be in control of my data and be able to run analysis on it as I saw fit.<p>I began by writing a django app deployed via heroku. I then decided I wanted to rewrite it in ruby on rails because I had never worked with rails in my career and was already working on django professionally. I then wrote a react&#x2F;redux SPA frontend, not for any other reason than to practice and learn those libraries. Finally, I decided to buy a VPS and manage deployments myself because I wanted to learn some basic devops stuff myself.<p>Building and maintaining this project I got first hand experience on building a web application from scratch, designing UX and product requirements, maintaining my own infrastructure (Linux server hardening, supporting SSL, managing my own domain, etc) and got experience in languages I didn&#x27;t work in professionally. Also I got a few friends to begin using my app and immediately found where my poor UX choices were, which was pretty enlightening.<p>I think the experience really boosted my confidence as an engineer. I had to learn a whole bunch of new skills and become my own one person startup. In the end it helped me appreciate all that goes into building a software product and highly recommend the experience. I still track my workouts using the app and now have 7 years of data.