Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

[throwaway3189]

Hi Hacker News, Few months ago I met someone that shook my world a little. Things were a little crazy and happened over 3 different continents in a very short time. It was wonderful, and it was greyscale. It was grandiose, and it was so desperately poor. It didn't work out.

In the beginning of our relationship, just when I was about to leave the country for a few months, I made them a website. A small one, with some notes and songs and interpretations. I'm not a painter and I'm not a musician. Coding was my go-to tool when I wanted to tell them stuff.

Recently, love wilted but the website stayed [0]. I thought, all those things that we're doing because of love, aren't they great? Aren't they a beautiful expression of us being humans? Perhaps stupid, senseless, silly - but loving humans. I'm sure I'm not the first one to create something digital, online, out of love. I wished there was this exhibition where people could go and feel some warmth, and be reminded of the different ways love looks like.

Did you ever code something for love? Or any other digital form of creation? It would be great if people could share things they've done, and also, if they feel comfortable, I'd be happy to know if they want to get a subdomain at *.thingslovemademedo.com [1] and have their content there. I'm obviously not asking for any copyright permissions, just playing with the thought of creating this anonymous archive of all-things-love. And before someone asks, no, there will never be any ads or analytics there, and I have no plans on monetizing this...

[0] chelsea.thingslovemademedo.com [1] thingslovemademedo.com

[ashton314]

During my junior year of high school, there was a girl in my calculus class that I wanted to ask out to our homecoming. Time was running short and I had no idea how I would ask her.

Then, while sitting in class, inspiration struck.

I started coding frantically on my TI-84. When the school day ended, I spent several hours in my room refining my program.

The next day, at the end of calculus, I asked this girl if I could see her calculator. (I was well known for creating games and other useful programs on TI's, so this wasn't that far out.) She handed me her calculator. I transferred the program I had written, set it up, and handed it to her. "Press ENTER", I said, and then scurried out the door.

The program apologized for the strange manner of my asking her out to a dance, then presented a menu saying "will you come to homecoming with me?" If she pressed "No", it would go to a new menu that begged, "please?" If she pressed "yes," it would confirm one more time with a cheerful "really?" Finally, if all was successful it would thank her for agreeing to come with me.

The next day, at the beginning of class, she walked up to where I was sitting, put her calculator down on my desk, and said "Press ENTER".

She had rewritten the program so that it would a.) tell me that she would come with me, and b.) didn't walk through the same series of menus. She wasn't a programmer by any means, but had managed to figure it out.

Nothing came from that other than just a good friendship. She married one of my friends, and I married a girl I met that summer. The four of us have hung out once or twice to play games, all just as good friends.

[lazybreather]

Whoa! I have to say, I love these kinds of stories. No happy ending or sad ending. It's just a simple, plain and interesting story. Worth sharing and worth reading/watching.

[MaanuAir]

I did something similar on my HP28S, writing such a question on top of a programmatically generated bitmap background, made of some hearts pattern (boolean pixel art, really).

She declined since she was interested by one of my classmate, which I already knew, btw.

Tech does not solve every problem, but I was proud of the result anyway!

[allenu]

Thank you for sharing. That is such a sweet story. That must've been the most amazing feeling to witness her response.

[pknerd]

This is a beautiful story. Am I the only one who kind of got disappointed after reading the end? :)

[rochak]

Thanks for sharing this. It really warmed my heart.

[eastdakota]

I dated someone whose father had a small business that made home goods products (e.g. specialty laundry detergent, waterproofer, etc). He was a smart but challenging guy. Definitely the sort of father who didn’t think any guy was good enough for his daughter. Remember the first time she took me home to meet her parents in South Carolina for Thanksgiving he was, literally, cleaning his gun on the front porch.

He primarily sold his products through big box retailers like Walmart and was getting squeezed on margins. I suggested he should sell direct through a website. He scoffed at the idea.

On the long drive back to Chicago my girlfriend brought it back up and asked if I could help put her dad’s business online. This was 2001 so there weren’t really any easy options to create what he needed. Ended up spending nights and weekends for the next month building a whole shopping cart, storefront, and payment gateway. Remember learning just what a pain getting SSL setup correctly was at the time — which was part of the inspiration for Cloudflare making it free and easy many years later.

Gave the site to him for Christmas. He spent the whole day playing with it and then bragging to his friends he was now in “e-commerce.” Girlfriend was very happy. We continued to date for another 4 years until her medical career took her East and starting a company took me West. Still friends to this day.

I think her dad’s company may still using a lot of my old code. (Which, to be honest giving my coding skills, is a bit terrifying.) Ecommerce has become a big part of their distribution. And I still buy and use his detergent, which is terrific for cleaning performance fabrics like Gortex and washing sheets if your skin is sensitive to perfumes or dyes.

[eastdakota]

One more that’s fun, though maybe doesn’t really count as “programming.”

I got married a few years back. We built a wedding website for people to get details on our wedding and to RSVP. It was pretty standard (think we just used Squarespace) except we included tracking pixels for the largest ad networks (Google, Facebook, etc) throughout the site. We then bid on impressions from anyone whose browser had triggered the pixel.

We bid something absurdly high, like $1,000/CPM (i.e., $1,000 per thousand ad impressions). As a result, we were always the highest bidder for those impressions of people who’d visited our wedding website. Because of how ad network bidding works, where you generally pay what the second highest bidder bids, and because we only invited around 200 people to our wedding, we didn’t end up spending much at all. Think all in it ended up costing around $100. But for our guests, our wedding followed them wherever they went online.

If you hadn’t RSVPed yet, we showed banners encouraging you to RSVP. Once you had, we previewed some of what we had planned. And then, for a week afterward, we ran ads thanking people for coming. We set the entire thing up in an afternoon and then it just ran automatically over the next few months. I was stunned when I checked in on it after the wedding how little it had cost.

Ad retargeting is super creepy, and it was scary to see how granular I could make the targeting for very little money. But, in this case, I think it may be one of the few times people really loved being followed around the Internet by an ad.

Nearly everyone commented on how fun it was. Friends would send us screenshots of our ads next to articles they were reading. And many of our privacy conscious friends with ad blockers actually turned them off temporarily when they heard about it so they could get retargeted by our wedding.

[ponker]

I was going to say how sad that something like starting a company ended your relationship then clicked through to see what company you started.

[citeguised]

I made a game for our wedding-website. The player has to control her and me simultaneously. It's pretty short, though. I did everything myself, graphics, music, gameplay.

https://10-5.de/game/

A funny anecdote: Some years ago, a person asked me if it would be ok to modify the game for the wedding for his friend. They wanted to play it at their wedding as a joke. At first I didn't know what to say, but then he told me he already downloaded it and modified all the animation-spritesheets by hand, to match the look of the couple. He must have spent hours on this. I thought that was so cute that I gladly allowed him to do whatever he wanted with this. I even offered him to re-export the animations, but he already was done by then.

[freedomben]

That game is really good! I'm not a gamer but I really enjoyed it. Took me a minute to figure it out but then I had fun.

Is the source open?

[wbharding]

Props to you, that’s a fun game, even on mobile. I’m guessing the wife must’ve loved it.

[randycupertino]

Just played- super fun! Really cute idea for a wedding website, no wonder your buddy wanted to borrow your idea!

[jedberg]

This gameplay is brilliant! It gets super hard when they have totally different obstacles and I love it.

[PaulHoule]

Reminds me of this game mechanic which is more fun to play than it is to watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0AEM8Y2dlY&feature=emb_logo

[yamrzou]

Really cool, I love it.

[maximp]

Just wanted to say - I had a lot of fun playing this!

[grugagag]

This is great, I loved it

[dodobirdlord]

Very neat concept.

[Carl_Platt]

Nice game

[adrianh]

In 2001, I was dating a girl long-distance. We'd emailed each other so often (and cellphones weren't really a thing yet) that I decided to make a web-based app for messaging ourselves.

It was a bespoke messaging system, essentially a forum that could only ever have exactly two users. The killer feature was the ability to see whether the other person had read the message you sent.

Plus, the page would auto-refresh and put "NEW" in the page's title, so it was really easy to see whether there were new messages. (I seem to recall the web-based email clients of the day hadn't yet started doing this, so it felt like I had stumbled on some huge innovation.)

My girlfriend loved it, and we became engaged later that year. Not that I'm necessarily implying causation here.

Over the years, I rewrote the system from scratch to evolve with my web development skills. It began in Perl. About a year later, I rewrote it in PHP.

Then, circa 2005, I rewrote it in Python/Django. It was one of the very first Django apps, as I did the conversion before Django was even open-sourced (I'm one of the original developers).

The system is still humming along today, with its main purpose at this point being a fun archive of all of our correspondence from the early days.

[MrDresden]

When my gf and I met she had recently started her Phd in environmental sustainability science and was specifically looking into the fishing quota system in Iceland with mathematical modeling in mind.

The catch, haul and other related data is available on the relevant government agency's webpage down to ship granularity level through a rather nice web interface. It however contains vast amounts of data, and there is no way to get the data in bulk form (even asking the agency resulted in a 'No this is sensitive data that we can't share in bulk form' answer).

So I was rather shocked when I heard her say that she had started copying the data by hand. Knowing that it would take her ages, and would probably never be possible for her to do, I wrote a small python scraper & data transforming tool and set about scraping couple of GiBs of data into a normalized sqlite database, which I then gave her to use with her R code.

We have been together ever since (4+ years).

[monkeycantype]

Ok this is not really what you asked, but it such an odd story, I think I should share it. 20 years ago I had a job at a company where the general manager hired a 'business consultant' who seemed to actually be a highly entrepreneurial sex worker, who after having sex with him in his office, (during business hours + it was a small office, less than 20 people ) she presented him with an invoice for $30,000 for 'business services'

Shortly after her last visit to our office, she contacted me offering me an extraordinarily well paid developer job.

She arranged a meeting in the dining room of the Hilton hotel, in which she had rather bizarrely covered a table with papers, and about a dozen blinged out mobile phones. After about an hour of semi-nonsensical rambling about 'innovation' and veiled threats and grand out of control promises, describing a dynamic life in which we would be travelling the world, living in 'luxury hotels' constantly moving hunting the next opportunity - she asked if I wanted to 'meet the team' and 'they're all upstairs'. Curious to see what the hell this madness was all about, I followed her upstairs to her hotel room, (bracing myself, in case I needed to fight to keep my kidneys) and sure enough, in a very small studio apartment style hotel room, with the bed pushed to the back of the room, six developers, who barely acknowledged my presence, were crammed around a trestle table, on hefty beige desktop pcs with clunky low res cathode ray monitors. At least on the monitors facing me, they were dragging and dropping visual basic controls.

She then made it clear that if selected to join her 'elite team' that a substantial part of my salary would be paid in sexual services.

Curiosity satisfied, I got the hell out of there, but I've always wondered what the hell was the story of those six men? Any of those six men, are you here? what the hell were you doing?

[simonbw]

Somehow on dating apps my most successful profile line has been “Message me if you want to learn an interesting fact about toast.”

This led to me “researching” a lot of facts about toast and getting deeper and deeper into the bit. Long story short I now run toastfacts.com.

I only have about 7 facts on there right now, but I “discovered” some more good facts last night which I plan to add to the site when I get home.

[schoen]

One of these is not quite right:

> The word “toast” comes from the Latin word “tost” meaning “toast”.

That's a Middle English word. You can trace its etymology further back to Latin

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tostus#Latin

but it won't be just "tost" in Latin.

[spappal]

Since toast is discussed on HN: I remember this video [0] nicely explaining some nice engineering of an interesting toaster.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y

[max0563]

I just learned a whole lot about toast.

[matthewfcarlson]

When I proposed to my now wife, I built a reverse geocache box. It had a one way mirror on the top and button on the top. It showed you how far you were and what direction you needed to move towards. It took us to various locations where we had gone on notable dates. Once we got to a particularly scenic hill side, it unlocked and the ring was inside with some roommates hiding in the bushes with a DSLR.

There was just one minor hiccup, I taught my roommates some rudimentary C and gave them a list of GPS coordinates they could pick from. The idea was that I wouldn't even know where we were going. However, they made a mistake and skipped an index in the array, leaving it as zeroed out data. We pressed the button and it listed the next location as 3000 miles away to the East. Luckily, I somehow had the foresight to install a reed switch in one of the corners. I grabbed a magnet from the car and skipped that landmark, breathing a sight of relief.

I have lots of good memories of drawing and sketching a secret project I titled RGCP (reverse geocache proposal) on the floor of my crappy apartment while she looked over my shoulder, trying to figure out what I was working on.

From a technical standpoint, it was a Teensy2.1 with a GPS serial module a SPI LED screen, and a servo for the latch.

https://hackaday.io/project/9449-reverse-geocache-proposal

[hardeeparty]

My gf at the time and I were looking to move to NYC for school. Apartment hunting isn't super fun - especially in a place neither of us were super familiar with that also happened to be NYC. AND we were going to attend separate campuses.

So naturally I wrote a script that scraped Craigslist for listings (1) in our budget, (2) calculated our individual commute times, (3) filtered the results so that commutes were under an hour or something and (4) posted the listings to a Slack channel with all the info I could scrape. It was working perfectly until she dumped me several days later.

[TN1ck]

I created https://pokemoncries.com because my girlfriend said she was really good at this as a child and I thought she would like it. She LOVED it. I polished it a bit more after this and posted it on reddit. I was amazed by the reactions/usages. People did “Pokémon cry challenges” on YouTube and it was quite viral in the Pokémon community. It has still good metrics and I updated it with the last generation. I just like that people have fun with it, I don’t think much more will come out of it.

I also created https://anagrams.io with her/for her, but that was mostly because she was so excited about it.

[Minor49er]

I just tried Pokemon Cries with my girlfriend and quizzed her on Gen 2. She got 10/10 right

[keenmaster]

This reminds me of a similar minigame on the living room TV in Hey You Pikachu for N64. Good stuff.

[peterteter]

Great! I have done a similar quiz for pokemon routes, maybe I should polish and release it.

[saagarjha]

Apparently I had hundreds of these locked in my head without realizing it…

[raybb]

this is very awesome thanks for sharing! Been having a lot of fun with pokemoncries

[kthejoker2]

They are thankfully no longer in existence, but I actually cut most of my mid 90s web dev chops building tribute pages to my girlfriends, replete with image carousels, autoplaying songs, marquees ...

Their chief effect was to make me indirectly desirable to a lot of other girls because they wanted their own vanity URL ..

It was a strange and glorious time.

[theironlily]

This is essentially instagram

[em-bee]

you may have missed a business opportunity there :-)

[DoofusOfDeath]

Every day that I do programming for a living, it's coding for love.

Not sappy honeymoon-period love (eros), but the long-term-commitment version of love that requires sacrificing my personal preferences in exchange for providing for my wife's and children's material needs (storge / agape).

Obviously I'm not unique in my willingness to do this. But looking back on my own life, the honeymoon-period love is bush-league.

[scott113341]

Robocalls are super annoying, but kind of an amazing way to ask someone out on a date (not first date - followups where you know they'll say "yes").

Twilio has this thing called "Twilio Studio" [1] that is essentially a UI that can be used to make these fairly easily. I've asked things like cuisine and alcohol preferences, what time is best for them, and even done more creative things like SMS a scammy link for them to send details in order to collect their "grand prize" (the date).

Also, for the same person, I built an online game for her to play with her students, tailored for speech-language pathology. She works in a public school and was having a really hard time adapting curriculum to an online format (due to COVID). She and her co-workers loved it, and since then, we've made a lading page, more games, and thinking about turning it into a business! [2]

[1] https://www.twilio.com/studio [2] https://slpgames.com

[thom]

One of the first programs I wrote on the Amstrad was a random number driven matchmaking program that would pair up boys and girls in my primary school class. I guess that was more titillation than love though.

I created a web based adventure in about 1998 for a girl’s birthday (featuring the A-Team, the cast of Friends, Peter Stringfellow, Alf from Home and Away, and many other celebrities whose photos I could find easily). I don’t have a backup, archive.org only had it partially and it was full of absolute filth so I wouldn’t really want to resurrect it.

In 2011 my wife (different woman, despite the excellence of the above) and I were struggling for baby names so I made a Mac app that used Bayesian stats to find out what kind of sounds and spellings you liked. I later polished it up and released it on the Mac App Store to some small but satisfying number of sales.

My son (named via the simpler algorithm of my wife deciding on her favourite name) is now 9 and I write code for/with him. Yesterday we wrote an app to show random arithmetic problems for him to practice on, in GAMBAS which is excellent for kids learning to code.

My dad wrote programming books in the 80s and we grew up around computers and learned to code quite young. I guess if anything I’d struggle to separate programming from love even if I tried.

[dudeinjapan]

My girlfriend complained that I ignored her texts on the messenger app LINE which is popular in Japan where we live. So I wrote a LINE chatbot that would respond to her texts with lots of interest "I'm so glad you messaged me, please tell me more!"

[randycupertino]

:D This is one of my favorites in the entire thread.

[Ameo]

I set up my VPS to ping the router of my long-distance girlfriend every second 24/7; it made me feel nice to know I was flipping bits in her router's memory every second and having some tiny impact on the space she was living in despite being hundreds of miles away.

I also encoded a love note into the Bitcoin blockchain but I prefer not to dwell on that one.

Oh and for a while I added a HTTP header to all responses from my websites professing my love.

And I'm just now remembering the secret chat command I added to my chatbot that would tell her good night + I love you but only to her username.

This is all coming back to me after seeing this post, lol.

[kirillzubovsky]

At one point in the distant past, when a girlfriend broke up with me, I knew that she was still occasionally reading my blog. I made sure that all traffic from her ip and geolocation was getting Rickrolled. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[narush]

I learned web dev + svg animation last year to write a bunch of dramatic essays processing my breakup - at the end of a 5 year relationship. I sent it to my ex, and it was cathartic for the both us.

I didn’t know the best way to deploy it, so ended up using Google Domains + a Google cloud Linux node server. It was terrible and went down all the time.

It should hypothetically be at https://breakup.live - but it’s currently down (and has been for god knows how long). Not sure what the metaphor means but I guess that’s what moving on is all about!

[Ozzie_osman]

I downloaded my WhatsApp chat history with my then long-distance fiancee (now my wife), and created a bunch of graphs and analysis. Everything from word clouds to regression to anomalies (eg when she visited or I visited, chat frequency dropped dramatically, etc).

[sakawa]

Wow, did you get something insightful from that?

Also, would like to say how you made all that?

[pks016]

Same thing but I did with R I think iirc. I tried with my old crush. Sadly or gladly we did't end up dating for longer.

[dzolob]

For our wedding, I asked my now wife and a few friends and relatives to fill a “guests’ distance matrix”, where 0 equaled superclose friends and 5 complete strangers, and from a random initial layout, it bruteforced random swaps between guests untill reaching minimum distance configurations. It was a pretty dumb algorithm, but it took into consideration table capacity, party size and closedness of tables.

Of course, the wife rejected most of the outcomes, but it did decide some of the tables, spitted out interesting sittings and it helped us doing the global layout.

At the end, the overall feeling was that everyone was close to their loved ones. The energy was fantastic and everybody had a great time.