Throughout my day-to-day life, both personal and professional, there is a need for lots of "small" utilities, like converting a TSV to a Markdown table, generating a random choice, converting PNG to ICO, or quickly counting the number of lines in a C# project.
In the past, I've addressed all of those with a mix of Pure and C# - most are available in source. However, lately I've been hitting efficiency bottlenecks even with Pure or Divooka.
Today I was once again trying to convert a TSV to Markdown. However, since I haven't done it for a while, even though I know the script must exist somewhere on my disk, I do not want to waste time looking for it using Everything. Instead, what I really want is to be able to instantaneously spawn it and just run it. We could set up shortcuts, and maybe even make use of Launcher (Big White Dot) - but it would be really nice if there were a single entry point to search for such tools, and it's always available, no matter where I am, or which device I am using - like a random choice generator.
Apparently, for such simple small tasks, like random choice generation, Markdown conversion, Markdown table conversion, and PNG/ICO conversion, there are already tons of similar websites for quick, easy online use. However, most of them are filled with ads or have unclear privacy terms. It's thus more desirable to have a host of my personally built, personally customized, clean utilities, completely under my control.
Nowadays, with video coding and advanced code generators, I can create a single-page website in a few minutes, push it to GitHub, and a few minutes later the utility is accessible online - no ads, no hosting, no additional cost. That code is in HTML + CSS + JavaScript, though.
A similar thing happened a few weeks back for a personal project in which I had invested heavily in C++ before. During a revisit, I realized I could easily achieve the same results, plus more, with Python and some third-party libraries. I won't consider that setup "production grade," but it's stable, safe, and can likely run for years to come.
We always say "use the right tool for the task" - but we can be conservative by asking questions like: what if I need to link this in other apps, what if I need to reuse it, what if the code grows and I need more advanced debugging support? But eventually, the right approach is just to start over in a new language or setup when the time comes. I know C# is the way, but Python can get things done, and JavaScript is just convenient for immediately making things accessible.
What does this mean for Divooka? Well, convenience has many facets, and I think we should focus on accessibility first.
Top comments (0)