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Discussion on: What's your favorite piece of software that you built for yourself?

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pinotattari profile image
Riccardo Bernardini

Well... I have few pieces of software that I especially like and that proved quite useful to me too.

Eugen

This is a "generator of European project proposals." Starting from a compact and non-redundant project description (a basic text file) generates (in LaTeX) all the WP descriptions, deliverable list, milestones, GANTT, number of person month per partner and per WP, and so on...

Instead of updating the project in many places at every little change, I just changed the description and regenerated all the files.

It saved me an humongous amount of time...

I presented this at FOSDEM 2020

Template expander

This is still work in progress, although I already used it to generate a web page for my course of didactic laboratory. I began working on this because I wanted (and still I want) to use it in eugen, to replace the hard wired LaTeX generator.

It is a library implementing a template expander, like the ones used to generate HTML pages "on the fly," something that sometimes is done in PHP.

Its syntax take inspiration mostly from Ruby and Ada, with just a bit from PHP. Differently from PHP, the data used to build the result are presented as builtin variables defined by the code that uses the library.

As I said, it is still work in progress, but I like the fact that it allows me to do some processing at the template level, without aiming to be a full general-purpose language (as PHP). The syntax is maybe a bit too verbose, for someone taste, but I like it this way.

If I succeed in bringing it to a "publishable" state, I am planning to present it to the next FOSDEM, in the Ada Dev room (If the FOSDEM will be in presence, if the Ada Dev room will be part of it and if my proposal will get accepted, of course...)

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Waylon Walker

I love these projects built to scratch your own itch.