Then, while sitting in class, inspiration struck.

I started coding frantically on my TI-84. When the school day ended, I spent several hours in my room refining my program.

The next day, at the end of calculus, I asked this girl if I could see her calculator. (I was well known for creating games and other useful programs on TI's, so this wasn't that far out.) She handed me her calculator. I transferred the program I had written, set it up, and handed it to her. "Press ENTER", I said, and then scurried out the door.

The program apologized for the strange manner of my asking her out to a dance, then presented a menu saying "will you come to homecoming with me?" If she pressed "No", it would go to a new menu that begged, "please?" If she pressed "yes," it would confirm one more time with a cheerful "really?" Finally, if all was successful it would thank her for agreeing to come with me.

The next day, at the beginning of class, she walked up to where I was sitting, put her calculator down on my desk, and said "Press ENTER".

She had rewritten the program so that it would a.) tell me that she would come with me, and b.) didn't walk through the same series of menus. She wasn't a programmer by any means, but had managed to figure it out.

Nothing came from that other than just a good friendship. She married one of my friends, and I married a girl I met that summer. The four of us have hung out once or twice to play games, all just as good friends.

She declined since she was interested by one of my classmate, which I already knew, btw.

Tech does not solve every problem, but I was proud of the result anyway!

He primarily sold his products through big box retailers like Walmart and was getting squeezed on margins. I suggested he should sell direct through a website. He scoffed at the idea.

On the long drive back to Chicago my girlfriend brought it back up and asked if I could help put her dad’s business online. This was 2001 so there weren’t really any easy options to create what he needed. Ended up spending nights and weekends for the next month building a whole shopping cart, storefront, and payment gateway. Remember learning just what a pain getting SSL setup correctly was at the time — which was part of the inspiration for Cloudflare making it free and easy many years later.

Gave the site to him for Christmas. He spent the whole day playing with it and then bragging to his friends he was now in “e-commerce.” Girlfriend was very happy. We continued to date for another 4 years until her medical career took her East and starting a company took me West. Still friends to this day.

I think her dad’s company may still using a lot of my old code. (Which, to be honest giving my coding skills, is a bit terrifying.) Ecommerce has become a big part of their distribution. And I still buy and use his detergent, which is terrific for cleaning performance fabrics like Gortex and washing sheets if your skin is sensitive to perfumes or dyes.

I got married a few years back. We built a wedding website for people to get details on our wedding and to RSVP. It was pretty standard (think we just used Squarespace) except we included tracking pixels for the largest ad networks (Google, Facebook, etc) throughout the site. We then bid on impressions from anyone whose browser had triggered the pixel.

We bid something absurdly high, like $1,000/CPM (i.e., $1,000 per thousand ad impressions). As a result, we were always the highest bidder for those impressions of people who’d visited our wedding website. Because of how ad network bidding works, where you generally pay what the second highest bidder bids, and because we only invited around 200 people to our wedding, we didn’t end up spending much at all. Think all in it ended up costing around $100. But for our guests, our wedding followed them wherever they went online.

If you hadn’t RSVPed yet, we showed banners encouraging you to RSVP. Once you had, we previewed some of what we had planned. And then, for a week afterward, we ran ads thanking people for coming. We set the entire thing up in an afternoon and then it just ran automatically over the next few months. I was stunned when I checked in on it after the wedding how little it had cost.

Ad retargeting is super creepy, and it was scary to see how granular I could make the targeting for very little money. But, in this case, I think it may be one of the few times people really loved being followed around the Internet by an ad.

Nearly everyone commented on how fun it was. Friends would send us screenshots of our ads next to articles they were reading. And many of our privacy conscious friends with ad blockers actually turned them off temporarily when they heard about it so they could get retargeted by our wedding.

[1] http://ghostinfluence.com/prank

[2] http://partnersinpresence.com

Ah, 光棍节, the most spiteful wedding date possible.

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.

Is the source open?

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0AEM8Y2dlY&feature=emb_logo

It was a bespoke messaging system, essentially a forum that could only ever have exactly two users. The killer feature was the ability to see whether the other person had read the message you sent.

Plus, the page would auto-refresh and put "NEW" in the page's title, so it was really easy to see whether there were new messages. (I seem to recall the web-based email clients of the day hadn't yet started doing this, so it felt like I had stumbled on some huge innovation.)

My girlfriend loved it, and we became engaged later that year. Not that I'm necessarily implying causation here.

Over the years, I rewrote the system from scratch to evolve with my web development skills. It began in Perl. About a year later, I rewrote it in PHP.

Then, circa 2005, I rewrote it in Python/Django. It was one of the very first Django apps, as I did the conversion before Django was even open-sourced (I'm one of the original developers).

The system is still humming along today, with its main purpose at this point being a fun archive of all of our correspondence from the early days.

The catch, haul and other related data is available on the relevant government agency's webpage down to ship granularity level through a rather nice web interface. It however contains vast amounts of data, and there is no way to get the data in bulk form (even asking the agency resulted in a 'No this is sensitive data that we can't share in bulk form' answer).

So I was rather shocked when I heard her say that she had started copying the data by hand. Knowing that it would take her ages, and would probably never be possible for her to do, I wrote a small python scraper & data transforming tool and set about scraping couple of GiBs of data into a normalized sqlite database, which I then gave her to use with her R code.

We have been together ever since (4+ years).

Shortly after her last visit to our office, she contacted me offering me an extraordinarily well paid developer job.

She arranged a meeting in the dining room of the Hilton hotel, in which she had rather bizarrely covered a table with papers, and about a dozen blinged out mobile phones. After about an hour of semi-nonsensical rambling about 'innovation' and veiled threats and grand out of control promises, describing a dynamic life in which we would be travelling the world, living in 'luxury hotels' constantly moving hunting the next opportunity - she asked if I wanted to 'meet the team' and 'they're all upstairs'. Curious to see what the hell this madness was all about, I followed her upstairs to her hotel room, (bracing myself, in case I needed to fight to keep my kidneys) and sure enough, in a very small studio apartment style hotel room, with the bed pushed to the back of the room, six developers, who barely acknowledged my presence, were crammed around a trestle table, on hefty beige desktop pcs with clunky low res cathode ray monitors. At least on the monitors facing me, they were dragging and dropping visual basic controls.

She then made it clear that if selected to join her 'elite team' that a substantial part of my salary would be paid in sexual services.

Curiosity satisfied, I got the hell out of there, but I've always wondered what the hell was the story of those six men? Any of those six men, are you here? what the hell were you doing?

This led to me “researching” a lot of facts about toast and getting deeper and deeper into the bit. Long story short I now run toastfacts.com.

I only have about 7 facts on there right now, but I “discovered” some more good facts last night which I plan to add to the site when I get home.

> The word “toast” comes from the Latin word “tost” meaning “toast”.

That's a Middle English word. You can trace its etymology further back to Latin

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tostus#Latin

but it won't be just "tost" in Latin.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y

There was just one minor hiccup, I taught my roommates some rudimentary C and gave them a list of GPS coordinates they could pick from. The idea was that I wouldn't even know where we were going. However, they made a mistake and skipped an index in the array, leaving it as zeroed out data. We pressed the button and it listed the next location as 3000 miles away to the East. Luckily, I somehow had the foresight to install a reed switch in one of the corners. I grabbed a magnet from the car and skipped that landmark, breathing a sight of relief.

I have lots of good memories of drawing and sketching a secret project I titled RGCP (reverse geocache proposal) on the floor of my crappy apartment while she looked over my shoulder, trying to figure out what I was working on.

From a technical standpoint, it was a Teensy2.1 with a GPS serial module a SPI LED screen, and a servo for the latch.

https://hackaday.io/project/9449-reverse-geocache-proposal

So naturally I wrote a script that scraped Craigslist for listings (1) in our budget, (2) calculated our individual commute times, (3) filtered the results so that commutes were under an hour or something and (4) posted the listings to a Slack channel with all the info I could scrape. It was working perfectly until she dumped me several days later.

I also created https://anagrams.io with her/for her, but that was mostly because she was so excited about it.

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.

Not sappy honeymoon-period love (eros), but the long-term-commitment version of love that requires sacrificing my personal preferences in exchange for providing for my wife's and children's material needs (storge / agape).

Obviously I'm not unique in my willingness to do this. But looking back on my own life, the honeymoon-period love is bush-league.

Twilio has this thing called "Twilio Studio" [1] that is essentially a UI that can be used to make these fairly easily. I've asked things like cuisine and alcohol preferences, what time is best for them, and even done more creative things like SMS a scammy link for them to send details in order to collect their "grand prize" (the date).

Also, for the same person, I built an online game for her to play with her students, tailored for speech-language pathology. She works in a public school and was having a really hard time adapting curriculum to an online format (due to COVID). She and her co-workers loved it, and since then, we've made a lading page, more games, and thinking about turning it into a business! [2]

[1] https://www.twilio.com/studio [2] https://slpgames.com

I created a web based adventure in about 1998 for a girl’s birthday (featuring the A-Team, the cast of Friends, Peter Stringfellow, Alf from Home and Away, and many other celebrities whose photos I could find easily). I don’t have a backup, archive.org only had it partially and it was full of absolute filth so I wouldn’t really want to resurrect it.

In 2011 my wife (different woman, despite the excellence of the above) and I were struggling for baby names so I made a Mac app that used Bayesian stats to find out what kind of sounds and spellings you liked. I later polished it up and released it on the Mac App Store to some small but satisfying number of sales.

My son (named via the simpler algorithm of my wife deciding on her favourite name) is now 9 and I write code for/with him. Yesterday we wrote an app to show random arithmetic problems for him to practice on, in GAMBAS which is excellent for kids learning to code.

My dad wrote programming books in the 80s and we grew up around computers and learned to code quite young. I guess if anything I’d struggle to separate programming from love even if I tried.

I also encoded a love note into the Bitcoin blockchain but I prefer not to dwell on that one.

Oh and for a while I added a HTTP header to all responses from my websites professing my love.

And I'm just now remembering the secret chat command I added to my chatbot that would tell her good night + I love you but only to her username.

This is all coming back to me after seeing this post, lol.

I didn’t know the best way to deploy it, so ended up using Google Domains + a Google cloud Linux node server. It was terrible and went down all the time.

It should hypothetically be at https://breakup.live - but it’s currently down (and has been for god knows how long). Not sure what the metaphor means but I guess that’s what moving on is all about!

Also, would like to say how you made all that?

Thanks a lot!

Of course, the wife rejected most of the outcomes, but it did decide some of the tables, spitted out interesting sittings and it helped us doing the global layout.

At the end, the overall feeling was that everyone was close to their loved ones. The energy was fantastic and everybody had a great time.

Later I learned that decades earlier two brothers had stopped speaking forever over a misinterpretation of the searing arrangement at a family event - it was meant to be a table of "close family", but the attendee assigned there thought it was "the kids' table".

I think letting me do the algorithm and looking at the results was her loving way of getting me out of the way.

For our rehearsal dinner, we had maybe ~30 people, and did a 4-course meal.

For each course, everyone was assigned different tables, such that over the evening, everyone would get at least one course with everyone else

I did find https://www.improbable.com/news/2012/Optimal-seating-chart.p... as part of that process. It documents the formulation of the problem well

Approximately 3 months before VD, our relationship concluded. And then a week before VD, back on... like a house on fire. With nary enough time to execute the original plan, I pivoted the idea somewhat. I opted to export the 'best' few weeks from the WhatsApp convo, then proceeded to stand up a quick MVC site with the exported data presented as if it were a messaging app, complete with the very same images we each used for avatars at that time. Hosted the site off my lappy, and when she arrived for VD dinner, a link was sent to her phone, seemingly out of nowhere. She clicked it, and was greeted with this view, and the title "Budding Love" pinned as a header while she scrolled, smiled, and swelled with tears...

She was a techie chick, but didn't know how to code. She ended up confessing the best part was when I took her through and explained the purpose of all the code that I wrote for this gift I made. She even called me out for committing a sin or two (i.e. code dupe, embedded-SQL-in-C#, etc.) that I would often bitch to her about seeing at work :)

Wrote a Sudoku solver for my wife, and a Cryptoquote puzzle solver for her as well, for when she gets stuck.

Wrote an election list manager for a municipal candidate I supported.

A program to choose the position of strips of tongue-and-groove hardwood flooring, so that the cracks would not be adjacent. Had to measure every piece. Just so I would not have to listen to my wife remark "What a shame those two pieces are so close" for the next ten years. Named the program "Birch", from the wood. Ran ten minutes on a 286.

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 :-)

She was required by the district to do report cards in this very crappy Mac app, which then synced with a central server when you were done. The Mac app had no import utility nor any keyboard navigation, so I had to help her manually transfer the grades from the spreadsheets to the grading program, and each kid required about 90 mouse clicks (times 32 kids).

After the first time, I decided I was going to figure out a better way.

I ended up reverse-engineering the save file format, which was sort-of-but-not-really XML. I wrote a python program that could take CSV exports from her spreadsheet and recreate the save files for the app, so I would run that, load the app up, and then just spot check a few of the grades.

The first time I did the grades that way it took twice as long as just manually entering it, but after that, doing report cards was a breeze.

So I’d had enough and decided to build https://www.dreamlist.com for our baby shower and beyond. Now I’m adding all kinds of features for families and features for love, and partial contributions to larger gifts, and collaborative shopping. The sky is the limit. Competitors become stores and pummel you with ads, but I’m thinking of doing SAAS for Love instead - from personal memories preservation for loved ones to personal CRM, etc. The more my kids grow the more value I see in this kind of differentiation - having a product of a different caliber ready for them to use when they become of age, without advertising and the manipulative crud that comes with it. Ping me if you are interested in this space or have ideas.

I helped set them up with an SSH tunnel, and appropriate browser settings, for bypassing the Great Firewall.

I wanted to teach them how to play Magic: The Gathering, and MTGO at the time did not seem like a good option. I built a very basic 2-player game which allowed for specifying a decklist as a set of image URLs, and had the basic motion primitives of shuffling a deck, drawing, tapping cards, and such.

One particularly nice UI thing it had, which I wish I'd see more often, is that it showed you each others cursor positions in real time, so you could virtually "point" as part of discussion or communication. [The source for this has likely been lost to the bitrot of time, but it might be buried somewhere in a backup]

Finally, we liked to watch TV shows or movies together. This was initially done as "download the same file, get on VOIP, and count-down to start", but this was fiddly, especially if someone had to pause or rewind. I built a very simple utility to synchronize playback of the file between two VLC instances. It looks like this is actually my oldest github repo! https://github.com/YenTheFirst/VLCSync

More than a decade later, they're no longer in China and thus don't need to bypass the firewall, and we lost interest in M:tG, but we married, and the video synchronization problem became remarkably simpler. :)

My ex was a math major before switching gears to become a sign language interpreter. She was disappointed by the quality of math-related ASL resources and had this idea for an ASL math dictionary, so I built it for her. Fun fact, despite the interactivity, it doesn't use any JavaScript!

The source code is hosted over here: https://github.com/cosmojg/aslmath

This one was kind of thrown together: https://abbymudd.isverybeautiful.travisbriggs.com/

Also, as part of our bedtime routine, I write my wife a love letter email every day. They're pretty short, usually around 5-8 sentences. Well for Love Letter #400 (we celebrate certain numbers) I plugged all the previous letters into the GPT-2 small model (74 I think?) and came up with a fine-tuned model to generate automatic love letters.

I know that sounds cheesy and contrived, but she loved it. She thinks the computer letters are hilarious and remarks that some of them, I could send to her, and she wouldn't even notice the difference.

(Not going to link the GPT-2 website because it's a bit intimate).

She had no idea what this meant and did not care about it at all, and nothing romantic ensued.

The domain expired and is held by one of those spam exchanges now.

Love finds a way, even if that way is to an ad exchange.

Idea was that every message was encrypted with a specific password before it was shared via a server infrastructure. The message once attempted to decrypt with with the password would destroy itself after a successful or unsuccessful decryption attempt.

I had a working web prototype using JSCrypt for the cryptography part when the affair ended. Didn't continue with the project.

Worth noting that this was years before E2E encrypted messengers became mainstream.

For each permutation of variables, there is a copy of the whole world. So, for example, you are in the folder x2y3key0, and you select the "pick up key" option, it will be a symlink to the x2y3key1 room, and there will then be a copy of the entire dungeon, but with key set to 1. It's surprising how much you can do, I even managed to have a combat encounter with "HP" for the player and enemy. The limiting factor is the sheer number of folders you have to make, it explodes fast when you add variables. I ended up with somewhere around 40k iirc. Originally made it as a birthday present for my girlfriend at the time, but I've been working on cleaning it up (and removing personal parts) for a public version. Planned to post it on HN when I'm done.

Edit: I also made a treasure trail that involved typing encryption keys hidden in the world into a little c program (xor encryption :D). The pièce de résistance was when it eventually spat out an android app that would scan wifi networks for a known ssid, to verify she was in a specific location before revealing the next password. The ssid was "KFC" lol. Because I knew it was guaranteed to be available.

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

https://gist.github.com/Lambdanaut/1649116

https://jalwyndar.neocities.org/

Thanks for sharing.

There's a primitive 2D limited actions per day (I think these were a thing once?) web game built in the later era of Temple Ov Thee Lemur (if that name means nothing to you that's fine, if you laughed at the pun that's also fine) http://cities.totl.net/ -- there is also an HTTPS version but er, wow, TLS 1.0 and ancient insecure ciphersuites, I think you may just as well use the plain HTTP site in terms of functional security, maybe one of us will fix it some day. I am pretty sure it's all one terrifying Perl hairball so fixing it might be unexpectedly tricky.

Big parts of Cities are just archaic memes, but one of the main things going on there is that Chris, who built almost all of it, and is named 'King Chris in the game (it's short for Fucking Chris) was courting a woman who now lives with him and she played that game a lot when it was first built. So e.g. she abused the hell out of an addictive in-game amphetamine analogue, to get more actions per day, and he added a mechanism to somewhat undo the dibilatating effects of that, for her.

In the past few months her/their cat died and I believe Cities now has a late-game cat quest in memorial to that cat although it's possible that the subsequent arrival of new kittens in the house added a distraction which means that work wasn't actually completed, I don't play any more so I don't know.

I bought a domain name, <hernamehere>willyougooutwith.me and put it behind a tinyurl link. On her birthday I gave a gift to her with a piece of paper of that tinyurl.

If she visits that url, there will be a 3D envelope that she can click. If she clicks that 3D envelope, a 3 page letter will come out, with her photo on the first page that I stalk from Facebook (yeah I know I'm creepy lol), and then on the second page a sentence or two asking if she's willing to go out with me, and a list of restaurants. On the third page a form in which if she fills it out I will get a text message saying that she fills the form out.

Obviously she didn't fill the form lol, but I asked her several days later whether she saw the website, and she said yes.

My friends whom I told my attempt were all like "are you crazy? that's creepy as hell, no way she's going to respond", but hey, I just learned how to code (this was 7 years ago), and making the website was fun, so I went along with it.

Now that I think about it, it was indeed creepy. And it didn't help that I was just a FOB that didn't know how to be savvy around people. If I were to do it again now, maybe I'll do it differently lol.

After that one, I did a few other attempts, but in the end she was never interested in me at all. I am now happily married with another person.

At different points in time:

- I have developed things that I imagined them using

- I have developed things they would see (but were not the only target. e.g. a website, or a tool that would be used by the team we were both part of)

- I have developed things as part of an activity they were also part of (e.g. a tool used in the same association)

Each time, it provides very powerful motivation to make things right, easy to use, beautiful, or straight up keep on working on things.

In any case, the code was not specifically targeted for these people.

This also can works for friends, family and other people you love, even if it's not Love. For instance, my last project was meant to watch series with my sister while we were at a different location [1]. I don't recommend using it though, I've since discovered [2], which probably does a better job for this and works in the same way.

Try to imagine people you love using your stuff while you are building them. It helps motivate getting things right and to keep going, at least for me. But it worked and allowed us to have good laughs.

- [1] https://framagit.org/raphj/mpris-sync

- [2] https://syncplay.pl/

It was hand delivered on a beautiful red floppy, printed out some ascii art and made noise. Who could resist? (spoiler: she somehow managed to).

It was fun and infuriating to build it. In the end it only worked on her tablet, nowhere else, because I had scaling and coordinate issues, but quickly ran out of time. It was neat though! Her character had different facial expressions (depending on the screenshots I could find) and it really felt like an actual board game on a tablet, although obviously scripted.

She said she really didn't expect what would happen at the last stop, which still confuses me - I thought it was so obvious that it was rigged and where it would go! Really happy how it turned out for her.

As an homage, we put even more images of Tomodashis Life on the wedding invitations (you can marry another Mii in the game, which incidentally was me in her game - and her in mine, not that we used those screenshots). A friend of mine, working for Nintendo and on the game, forwarded the PDF of the invitation to the makers of the game and they even sent a message back. Just all in all an awesome little thing born out of such a simple idea.

While I'd love to, I don't want to share it because of a lot of personal information and the mentioned issues it has on "unsupported hardware".

Ian Murdoch is the creator of Debian and his ex girlfriend/wife's name is Debra.

— 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.

You can see the result here,

https://thiseyedoesnotexist.com/story/

It took 1 month for 2x 1080 GTX to train it.

I wrote up a simple web app that accepted two different secrets to "login" (one for each person). Once logged in, you were presented with a photo and asked for a comment (first thing that comes to mind or a reaction).

If only one comment was submitted, it would tell you to remind your partner to leave a comment. Once both parties submitted a comment, the photo displayed with both comments and a countdown to the next photo. The countdown varied from 12-48 hours randomly - to give me time to figure out when to actually propose. This ran for several weeks total.

It was fun to see our comments - sometimes they would nearly match. Or reveal something we didn't remember about a historical date/event we shared.

I eventually used the site to pop the question, and then made the whole thing into a photo book, including a word cloud built from each of our comments. Was really fun to see each of our most common words.

It was an incredibly simple, fun project using flask/sqlite on an ec2 instance.

1. Making a lite data analytics platform to help out a very close friend analyze some campaigns for an NPO she works for.

2. An interactive chord visualizer that visualizes triads in 3 dimensions (she's an amateur artist and intrigued by the visual side, I'm a musician and intrigued by mappings between sound and sight)

She's engaged to someone else now, but I still think the NPO thing is maybe a legitimately good business idea that I just need to shop around to gauge the wider demand.

The chord visualizer's also still neat. It's also a test-bed for a larger-scale ambition of mine of developing a platform for non-programmers to create interactive educational visualizations (in the vein of Nicky Case's articles, but with an emphasis on zero-code). That one's getting built for hate. Hate of the way our education system is held back for commercial gain.

[1] http://www.dithechef.com/

[0]: https://git.io/JJ1Ta

[1]: https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages

I designed a matching algorithm for a dating website - okcupid - just before dating my (now) wife.

I met with their CTO and convinced him it’d work over lunch at Mary Chung’s. He gave me the keys to the source so I could start the implementation.

Unfortunately, for OKC, I met my wife with a manual implementation of the algorithm. And thereby lost all time and inclination to continue.

(For those that care, it was a naive TF-IDF approach. )

These are generally indications of an underlying mental issue. Be on the lookout for it:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzv7xx/heres-why-narcissi...

Occams razor would suggest young love.

shared because relevant, but don't really want it hosted

I kept that up for a fair few years until I got burned out with handling a full time job and going home to do more of it. However, looking back and looking at where things are now...well, some of it remains: https://clinpsy.org.uk/

That's my first legit project (amongst a couple) and I wish I had that fervour and desire to do the same again. The community around that was fantastic and it was pivotal in my decision to find my independence.

She's now my wife.

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

She did not get lost.

https://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/notes.html#sl-2

Stop reading here if you want to try your hand at it yourself!

...spoiler follows...

Several years back I met someone at a conference who made an impression. She had good technical chops and a refreshing sense of humility. We spoke on many topics, including trepidation over a big life decision she faced. Out of encouragement, and perhaps an eye to eventual recruitment, I spent that evening creating this little challenge for her.

It started with a QR code linking to a snippet of source that draws an old IBM punch card onto the screen. To decode it, she had to learn a bit about 70's technology and the IBM 80 column format.

A couple days later, I got back a short program of her own that correctly decoded the characters and ended with the comment:

    // TODO: discover all of your secrets

Her code had clarity and elegance, and included ASCII art of a punch card which I first thought was documentation but actually served as a sort of Rosetta stone constant used to derive character mappings.

Watermarks on the punch card hinted toward the encryption algorithm used in the Enigma machine, and by the end of the day she'd cracked the code. It decrypted to a short but heartfelt message of inspiration. She loved the puzzle and I had a blast creating it.

And before you ask... yes, she was cute, but I was already spoken for (and IIRC I think so was she).

Thanks for asking such a poignant question, it's great reading all the other beautiful stories your submission has evoked.

First, I had friends and family of my (then) girlfriend send me videos describing what makes her awesome.

Next, I generated a dozen or so 6 character alphanumeric codes, and had Zazzle print them out for me.

Third, I built a web site that made it foolproof to type in codes and then play the videos. It had a huge textbox, and it turned lowercase into uppercase, and only accepted valid characters. It played the videos full screen. A few seconds before video ends, it has an overly with a hint for a scavenger hunt.

On the morning of the proposal,I made her breakfast in bed, gave her a gift and an envelope with the (very short) URL and the first code. After she watched the video and saw the hint, we got ready and I drove her to the location. Then gave her another envelope!

And so it went, until we arrived at our favorite waterfall hike, and at the foot of a waterfall, I handed her my camera and while she was distracted, got the ring out and got on one knee.

view-source:https://archive.org/download/aurora_20200721/aurora.c

Here it is without the ASCII art:

view-source:https://ia801401.us.archive.org/32/items/aurora_20200721/pre...

Both compile with a quick `cc aurora.c`. It prints random ASCII to fill up the terminal (I use it at 80x24), and at some point it adds my friend's name (aurora) and highlights it.

She said it was cute.

It's my first programming project, and it motivates to know my friend needs it too.

We got a lot of feedback that other people would want to be able to have a similar game, so we rebuilt a customizable version where people can create their own avatars, dialogue, and other game aspects. Obviously this is a rough year for save the dates, but we're still pretty pleased with how it has turned out so far.

https://www.pleasesavethedate.com

I quickly tested that JavaScript would be executed on the parts of the page she could control, so, I just used a simple script to replace the banner.

Somewhat unfortunately, my test to see if scripts were executed was to make an alert popup with "[name] is damn sexy" and a colleague of hers happened to be refreshing the page at the same time ;) (this was at 8pm when most people were home)

It was totally fine, banner was replaced, colleague laughed and I relearned the lesson to test things out in non visible ways (and with safe language).

We dated for a while, was a lot of fun.

We could either pick the set project or any other project that would demonstrate what they didn't specify was the language (assuming people would use the one taught in class) so I did a VT100 emulator in Object Pascal and she did the set assignment in the taught language (sadly VB6).

It's common to play games and have other activities at wedding parties here. So I spent about a week developing Get The Picture software, to be used at the wedding.

Man I was so nervous it would crash or something, but it all went fine.

I remember the weird kiddo feeling that if I could have some influence over what happened at their wedding, my crush wouldn't have _really_ been lost. Oh the cringe...

[0] https://sgloutnikov.github.io/Radina/

I used to be in a long-distance relationship. Like many lovers who were apart, we had lots and lots of phone calls. I made a visualization of them, and gave to her as a gift on Chinese Valentine's Day.

The name "an ocean apart" came from the Julie Delpy song [0] from Before Sunset. Oh I was young and romantic.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohiVnAyRDAA

In the 90's we got a dachshund, and I made a "dachshund head bouncing around the screen" app for the PalmPilot.

More recently, I made her an Alexa skill that tells you the weather at the track where this week's NASCAR race is being held, and a program that texts us when her favorite needle magnets come up on Etsy.

It hasn’t gotten as much traction as I’d hoped, but I still had fun making it and spending way too much time on that pixel art that perhaps no one will ever see...

It was a very simple game as you can imagine, and I have since lost the project files, however. I think it was made in Game Maker 7. I do not recall the exact mechanics but it had various birthday activities like filling and popping balloons, eating cake, and talking to people (not much in terms of dialogue though!)

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

The audio[1] is not autoplaying anymore except on Edge / IE.

[0] https://rickynotaro.com/ma/eeveeGood.html [1] https://rickynotaro.com/ma/ma/eevee/pokemon.mp3

It is designed to go with John Butler Trio's "Funky Tonight", so here is a video of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpcn84pc7-8

After a few minutes of that I just wrote the loop to give us all possible combinations; and from there we selected the name.

It took 2 minutes tops, and I’d have forgotten about this except she still talks about how I wrote a program to name our child.

I used the project as an opportunity to learn ReactJS. I thought she would enjoy the twist of the layout being heart shaped instead of rectangular but I think she's a purist ;)

Here's a small summary: https://hrishioa.github.io/my-home-cooked-meals/

Later that year we got married, and we still are - 14 years later

> It was developed around 2000 by Microsoft as part of its .NET initiative and later approved as an international standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) in 2002 and ISO (ISO/IEC 23270) in 2003.

Wait....2000 was 20 years ago. F. I'm getting old.

(I realize this feels pointless, but I honestly had to double-check the date it came out because I didn't want to accept I've been out of high school for 16 years.)

Never quite hung out but liked the attention she gave me. In hindsight felt like she used me but meh, can’t deny it felt good to get those complements from someone who was way out of my league.

It was a simple multi-step y/n prompt questions, with if/else conditional switches.

At the time, we were both trying out this CS50 course and C was the first part of it.

She said yes by sending me back a similar script and we dated for a while.

I had some spare time and decided to code something small that would be a fun timewaster with some inside jokes.

Sadly, I think the relationship fell apart, but it was a pretty clever way to propose, and it shows a lot of dedication.

One person became extremely egregious. So I put a tracking pixel in one of her responses to him, collected his IP address, and threatened to go to the police.

https://tiles.kevincox.ca

Built 2016 :) Google App Engine Free Quota. Lats see how long it continues.

It had a picture of our favorite beach spot we frequented along with the question.

It's been one of the most gratifying, intimate and occasionally frustrating things I've ever done.

She likes jigsaw so I printed a photo of us from back when we met on a generated multiple-of-24 piece jigsaw pattern to cut.

But that was a bit too simple. She enjoyed playing Human Resource Machine which was the closest she ever got to programming.

So on the back, I printed IOCCC-style Ruby code shaped in the form of a Christmas tree. With the pieces cut out and jumbled, you’d have no idea what the code would look like without solving the front side.

Once solved, when typed and run, it would reveal an URL to a XKCD-style drawing I made for the occasion.

It was tough to make code not too short nor too long, not too complex nor obvious, and able to survive the jigsaw cutting! Anyway, she enjoyed it through and through.

A quick extra en passant, a bash one liner I quickly banged out some years ago: https://github.com/lloeki/toolbelt/blob/master/hearts

I bumped into this on xkcd: https://xkcd.com/99/ and it gave me an idea.

I told my gf then that I made a little program for her. It printed out the little plaintext heart and then copied "i love you" into the clipboard.

She was impressed enough by the heart and I told her in chat to press CTRL+V. A friend of hers walked into her dorm at the time. Her friend was non-tech and really impressed with the gimmick, and that made my gf even prouder of it.

We married a few years later. My daughter has been doing zoom classes since corona. My wife used her laptop for this (which still uses Win XP) and we found the old program, which still runs fine.

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.