<story><title>Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?</title><text>Could be CLI, GUI, web, mobile, other. Asking out of interest. Thanks in advance to all.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>midgetjones</author><text>A few years ago, my wife and I decided to adopt a rescue cat from battersea.org.uk. However, it was a frustrating experience as the staff didn&amp;#x27;t always update the website regularly, and we&amp;#x27;d find that any suitable cats would be snapped up before we&amp;#x27;d even seen them.&lt;p&gt;I spotted that the website served its data to the frontend via an unsecured internal JSON API, so I built an Elixir app that would poll the API endpoint and upsert the cat data into the database. Any new records would get posted to a twitter account (a free way to get notifications on my phone).&lt;p&gt;It worked beautifully, and when a black cat called &amp;quot;Fluff&amp;quot; popped up, we both knew he was the right one, and we were able to phone them and arrange a meeting before anyone else. Fast forward five years, and he&amp;#x27;s sitting next to me on the sofa right now, purring away.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fortydegrees</author><text>I have a similar story of accessing an internal JSON API for my own benefit.&lt;p&gt;I left my airpods in a car I rented using zipcar. I spoke to support etc but nothing had been handed in. I checked to see if the car was still where I left it so that I could re-hire and claim them, but it had been moved.&lt;p&gt;The app tells you the &amp;#x27;name&amp;#x27; of the car you rented which is used as an identifier. It also shows a map of where all available cars are. I sniffed the requests the app made to display this map, and was able to filter it by the car name. From this I was able to locate where the car I left my airpods in was. Was able to head there, unlock the car, and to my amazement the airpods were still there!</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?</title><text>Could be CLI, GUI, web, mobile, other. Asking out of interest. Thanks in advance to all.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>midgetjones</author><text>A few years ago, my wife and I decided to adopt a rescue cat from battersea.org.uk. However, it was a frustrating experience as the staff didn&amp;#x27;t always update the website regularly, and we&amp;#x27;d find that any suitable cats would be snapped up before we&amp;#x27;d even seen them.&lt;p&gt;I spotted that the website served its data to the frontend via an unsecured internal JSON API, so I built an Elixir app that would poll the API endpoint and upsert the cat data into the database. Any new records would get posted to a twitter account (a free way to get notifications on my phone).&lt;p&gt;It worked beautifully, and when a black cat called &amp;quot;Fluff&amp;quot; popped up, we both knew he was the right one, and we were able to phone them and arrange a meeting before anyone else. Fast forward five years, and he&amp;#x27;s sitting next to me on the sofa right now, purring away.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>teleforce</author><text>This a great example on the usefulness of data availability via JSON API.&lt;p&gt;If the data is read only it&amp;#x27;s a GOOD thing especially for non-confidential data that are meant to be public, every government agency should open their public data like this.</text></comment>