Comment by DecoPerson

Using TypeScript + Node + esbuild + my own build system (that lets me do hygenic macros!! and also codegen), I have made:

Accounting system (creditors/payments, debtors/billing, bank reconciliation) with optimised workflows suited to our businesses (which exports to Xero so we have a “real” accounting system too). Has a touch of AI — I use ChatGPT to help with bank reconciliation.

Lots of tools related to the above. Like automating budget reports and stuff.

“megasearch” which is just a lightweight interface that wraps full text search queries of Everything (for files), Microsoft Graph (for emails, tasks & calendar), and Fuse.js (for iMessages, Telegram, & WhatsApp messages that I manually import). I really want to automate message importing, and I really really want to make this search actual file contents (alas Everything gets slow if you index content), and I really reallly really want to make this use a vector DB and AI search!

“video-clone” — paste any video url and it downloads it using yt-dlp, uploads it to my file server, and gives me a public URL.

Parcel inventory system for our post office. This was the most involved. I made an Android app AND REGRET USING REACT NATIVE! Version 2, which is nearly done, is a simple Java app with a web view. Version 1 has been used by staff since September 2022, handling thousands of parcels per day, with very little maintenance! It’s mostly a CRUD app, but I’m quite proud of it.

I also use this Node platform for random stuff — like one-off scripts for scraping web content, or crunching some spreadsheets in a way that’s annoying to do with just formulas or Excel’s other features.

Having an environment that is batteries-included, debugging-friendly, logged, connected, scheduler’d, web UI’d, CLI’d, etc, plus that I’m familiar with makes programming far more suited as a pocketknife tool. Oh, especially when it comes to dates, times, and datetime formatting! TC39 + my helper methods = less fear of dates