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

359 points by throwaway3189 ↗ HN
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

223 comments

[ 13.4 ms ] story [ 1124 ms ] thread
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?

Ozzie_osman
Pretty much a Python notebook. Well one thing I remember was usage of the word "love". After we said it in real-life, there was a huge spike in usage in the chat. But the interesting thing is that even before we said it directly (eg "I love you" ), there was a build up of indirect usage (like "I love spending time with you").
tejado
Would be great if you pubslish your notebooks :))
ffpip
How did you download whatsapp chat history? I thought there was no way to do it. Please help me, I need a way too. Thanks!
Ozzie_osman
I'm in Android and I see an "Export Chat" option under the menu of a chat with someone. I assume that's what I used but it was years ago.
ffpip
Ohh.. I didn't know it could be done on a per-user basis.

Thanks a lot!

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
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.
mfeldheim
Absolutely. Had a blog only she would read. Added a new inspiring quote, a song or a picture every evening and even added a comment section to capture her reaction. It’s no longer online sadly
vegannet
I’ve made quite a few things _for love_! From websites that tried to quantify the love through stats (number of messages exchanges, seconds together, things we enjoyed) to text-based adventure games that were just reference after reference to ourselves and our relationship. Unfortunately because they were so personal I cannot share them as I don’t have the consent of the others involved, however I would say that from my experience, code is a fine form of expression of love and everybody who feels inspired should do it.
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.

em-bee
you may have missed a business opportunity there :-)
thefrog
I have a website that I once coded for love. I don't want to share details because of my identity, but I loved a distant woman. We had strong affection for each other but at the time the romance wouldn't work for many reasons. The website mirrored something she worked on (similar to a fashion blog, but not that subject - again, identity) and I made this one in a few hours and sent it to her. She loved it.

Three years later, we're together - and couldn't be happier.

d--b
Did a RPG for my wife’s birthday. It’s only 30 minutes from start to end but full of personal references, so it was a good laugh. She’s not a gamer at all, but she used to play zelda on her nes when she was a kid.
ta17711771
Wow, that's super cool. Did you write about it?

Thanks for sharing.

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.

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

diggan
The source is open (https://10-5.de/game/c2runtime.js, seems to be built with the framework "Construct" so you'd have to find the actual game logic in there) but it doesn't seem to be open source so don't go copy-paste it willynilly.
TomGullen
It’s great seeing our game engine pop up in posts like this!
citeguised
Thanks for making it!

In case somebody is wondering: The game was made with Scirra's "Construct 2", which is a great 2D game-maker. You can immediately try it (the current version 3) in the browser on https://www.construct.net/en/make-games/free-trial

I'm a hobbyist, and usually use Construct, Phaser or vanilla JS.

I have put the source-file on https://github.com/niorad/Ninio, you'll need Construct 2 or 3 to open it, though (paid version I think).

Tom, please allow me to say thanks for your work! As front-end-dev, I'm stunned by having C3 in the browser. I would highly enjoy reading about its software-architecture and approaches one day, especially since it's not based on any of the big front-end-frameworks.

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.
maximp
Just wanted to say - I had a lot of fun playing this!
gorgoiler
Charlotte, my dear, let me not die...

— Charlie

Define ‘love’ Charlie. Love is not a toilet, get me?...

— Charlotte

http://www.ioccc.org/1990/westley.c

She loves you not. Thirty years on and this still gets me.

arexxbifs
20 years ago or so, I stumbled across a few poems written as perl code. They struck me as very clever at the time, but I haven't been able to find them again.
tasogare
I once made a very small page generating a random number of sheeps emoji, for my ex-gf to count them. This is because she said to me she wanted to count the sheep sometimes before sleeping. She enjoyed the attention.
swiley
I've written lots of small things. Some of them maybe used love as an excuse to explore some interesting idea.

For valentines day once I wrote a stupid little hack in javascript where some hearts bounce around the screen and leave trails. I sent it to a bunch of girls including one that I really liked.

I have this penpall in Germany, at one point we were really close and would talk all the time. Before bed we would always send eachother long strings of something (it was Sl[eE]*p for a while, then when emojis became popular it was the sheep emoji) so I made her a little clock with sheep around it.

I probably was sexting more than I should. I used to not keep a pin on my phone (it's so inconvenient and on android you don't even need a lock screen) so to keep the kids at church from going through everything I wrote a little web page that lets you encrypt images along with a text note and generate a data: URI that has a tiny (homebrew! yikes!) RC4 implementation to decrypt them. The whole thing was entirely client side and kind of nifty IMO. I think I got one person to use it once. I ended up finding some ugly bugs in the application (not that it mattered, it's RC4 heh) for example the original version always included an image (it would be a black png that was always the same size if you didn't add one yourself.) So if someone sends a text note with no image and then sends an image using the same password you could decrypt the first few hundred bytes of the secret image without knowing the password.

There was a girl in college I was dating and I made her a display hack in GLSL that draws a 3d flower using the cosin rose. It was rendered by relating the fragment brightness to the distance of a bunch of points in orthographically projected 3d space. The whole thing unfolded from a single bright blob and as time went on the points would move across each other making this pulsating pattern that got more and more intense until the whole thing shrank back into the single bright point. I added some code to the viewer that would check the phone's accelerometer/gyroscope so when you moved the phone around the flower would move too which give it this pretty intense VR feel.

At another point in college I was dating this other girl, it seemed like we would be apart for a while and she didn't like video games so I wrote a chess program that would let us play over text by sending moves in algebraic notation (you could also play it on the same computer, it would even check argv[0] for "cgi" and give you a web interface.) I thought I had written something pretty minimalist and was all proud of myself until I found the 4k chess program for z80.

seiferteric
Haha yes, when I was learning D3D and c++ in the early 2000's I made a rotating colorful cube with my girlfriend's name on the sides... for some reason. I don't think I have the code anymore.
twic
I wrote an animated Valentine's Day card in the form of a Java applet for a girlfriend at university. It was extremely basic - soppy romantic phrases in various shades of pink drifting slowly round the screen and bouncing off the edges. She liked it, as far as I remember.
asadawadia
I wrote a daemon that triggers every morning at 8am. It goes and fetches a positive quote, or affirmation, or advice and sends it as a text to the both of us.

Both of us wake up to the same positive thought every day.

Today's was:

Positive thought for today: Whenever we are afraid, it's because we don't know enough. If we understood enough, we would never be afraid

katsume3
Interesting you say this, because I've seen many side projects on Github that have 'Made with love' in the footer. This typically means the project was crafted lovingly and with care (Something that can be absent when software is rushed out the door at break-neck speed)
klyrs
I've named projects after people I loved. Those named after unrequited crushes are still cherished... all else is regret. It's never the person's name. Sometimes a name will match their initials, maybe there's a subtle double-entendre that references something I admire about the person.
infofarmer
My first ever coding experience was on a Casio fx-6800G, a low-res graphic calculator with a limited Basic and a whopping 400-character user-programmable memory.

Had a hopeless crush in middle school. Once spent hours painstakingly coding a slowly-rendered pixel-perfect heart to show her. I think she thought it was some built-in picture function, said “oh cute”, and lost interest the next moment :-)

Sodaware
Back in 2004 I made a Pocket PC app for my girlfriend; it was an interactive map that showed how to get from the bus stop to my university. She was visiting from abroad and didn't know the area, but wanted to come visit me after my lectures. It had photos of the important junctions and landmarks that could be enlarged by tapping on the map.

She did not get lost.

axegon_
Long long ago in a galaxy far far away... Yes. She was practically obsessed with puzzles that transition into the real world. Correct me if I'm wrong but iirc, these days they are known as warp(or larp, can't remember) games. So I built one secretly, which picked up at the time. Something like 120 people registered(all those dozens of Stephen King novels came in handy when I had to make it a bit more sinister). There was just one problem - as someone who started writing programs when he was 10 and was magnitudes more obsessed with programming than she was with those games, I over-engineered the crap out of it and no one managed to solve the cryptographic/steganographic puzzles. Tl;dr epic fail at it's finest.
dariosalvi78
Ok it's not coding but I modded a PC. That was in the early 2000, when the PC modding fashion started, there was no ready-made solution and components were not easy to find in my city, it was all DIY.
orta
About decade ago a girl I knew moved off to Australia for a year, as her iPad was her main communication device, I made a just-for-her iPad app with Spotify playlists I could edit from my computer. https://orta.io/Mixtapes/

She's now my wife.

(and you don't have permission to put this on that site)