laserboot VS zenbot-sim-runner

In this way I estimate I create about 32 new programs a day for only my own personal use. But in many cases I only use each one once. ^R makes it easy to use them again a few times, but in other cases I save them into a shell script to make them easier to distribute to other machines, parameterize, and maintain. The one I most often use is probably a user interface for YouTube via youtube-dl or yt-dlp that consists of a few such shell scripts.

My main editor is Emacs. If I want to do the same thing repeatedly (e.g., delete a line containing the string .LVL) I create a keyboard macro with F3 and F4 (or C-x ( and C-x )) when I do it once, then run it repeatedly with C-x e. I probably write about 4 programs a day in this way.

Emacs has a M-: command to evaluate Lisp expressions, which are programs. Recent programs I have written in this way include (/ 43.2 1.7), (* 9.3 1.2), and (+ 8 3 2.50 3.50 3 7 3.50 3 1.50 4.50 6 5.50 6.50 6 3 2.50 2.50). Probably I write about 1 program a day in this way but I only use each one once. Longer Lisp programs like this can be written in scratch and executed with C-j or in .emacs (or .emacs.d/init.el) and executed with C-x C-e. For example, (global-set-key [f5] 'recompile). I use my .emacs file constantly every day but probably only add something to it about once a month. An outdated version is at https://github.com/kragen/kragen-.emacs.d/blob/master/init.e....

Sometimes I write bigger programs for my own personal use too.

A few years ago I wrote https://github.com/kragen/pytebeat for a livecoding performance of bytebeat in a bar. I finished writing it in the train on the way to the bar.

In https://github.com/kragen/laserboot I wrote a simple parametric 2-D CAD system for laser cutters in PostScript.

For Dercuano http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano I wrote a kind of shitty HTML rendering engine that generates a PDF file, as well as a simple CMS for generating a tree of HTML files from a directory of Markdown.

The other night I wrote a bytecode interpreter with a graphical display in C as a sort of mockup for the operating system of a small computer I recently got the parts for; it's in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/erika.git.

I've also written compilers, interpreters, ray tracers, database engines, parser generators, graphics libraries, logic circuit optimizers, 2-D game engines, etc., for my own use. Some of the recent ones are in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3.

I built a currency trading backtesting and bot monitoring framework [1]. At times I vaguely considered turning it into a product, but for a number of reasons decided not to. However, I am running it successfully, hosted on my own server and am quite proud of what I achieved :)

[1] https://github.com/jefc1111/zenbot-sim-runner

Zenbot: https://github.com/DeviaVir/zenbot Zenbot Sim Runner (my app): https://github.com/jefc1111/zenbot-sim-runner