Morloc

Re:Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job? on Tuesday December 05, 2023 @08:29AM (#38530426)

Back in 2010, while graduating in computer science I wrote an iOS app called "Ricarichiamoci" that allowed students of Pisa University (unipi.it) to recharge and manage their dining facility cards via mobile instead of queuing for 30 minutes in front of a few ATM-style recharging machines. The app scraped and submitted data via a form on the official facility company website (unusable on mobile)

The company lawyer called me and accused me of "hacking" their website and ordered me to shut down the app or I would be sued. 30 (very long) minutes later the CEO called me, apologised, and offered me a job as iOS engineer.

And this is how I landed my first job, and the one that shaped my career for the next 13 years.

Re:Ask HN: Show me your half baked project on Monday October 16, 2023 @06:22AM (#37897799)

https://federicocappelli.com/torrenthound.html

A Mac app for searching torrents across multiple platforms that I developed for personal use, for now supports 1337x.to, The Pirate Bay and Kick Ass Torrents. The idea was to expand the sources and features list if anyone is interested.

Any requests and feedback is welcome: https://github.com/federicocappelli/TorrentHound/issues

Re:Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself? on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @11:26PM (#35797505)

Recently I restarted to seed and download Torrents and I was frustrated with the various search engines, all the dodgy adds and banners, the clunkiness and the difficulty of sending the torrents to my home server.

So I created Torrent Hound https://federicocappelli.com/torrenthound.html a macOS app for searching torrents in 3 major search engines and with more advanced download options like multiple download and send to server.

After a bit my girlfriend and some friend started using it and gave me interesting feedbacks, so I made the app easier to use and with some features for helping less tech-savvy users.

The app is free and I'm happy to implement new features and add search engines if requested, any request or feedback can be done here: https://github.com/federicocappelli/TorrentHound/issues