I did the "I want to replace the lightbulb so I'm fixing the shelf so ... so I'm fixing my car" thing: on Monday I wanted to look at VPN providers to find a replacement for Mullvad. So far I have a tiny web service in OCaml, my Emacs set up to write Android apps, and the Android app to communicate with the service. I still haven't looked at a single VPN provider.
Both the service and app are pretty trivial. The only purpose is to store a piece of text on the server. It's supposed to streamline the process of copying some text on my phone and sending it to myself via an IM/email.
Sure, there are "universal clipboard" solutions or notes apps, and even the IM flow is fine, but all those either depend on an external service (and I have a perfectly fine homelab just sitting here), or are vibecoded pieces of shit that I don't want to touch, let alone run. It's also not quite a file storage system: the piece of text is not supposed to have a name, and if I open the site and don't immediately see the text I want then what's the point.
So I wrote the thing! The server [1] is like 20loc + an HTML form, and the app [2] is just a text field and a button, which can be prepopulated by sharing text to the app (the only reason for the app's existence is the Firefox doesn't support PWAs to act as share targets). But I'm happy that I wrote this. Turns out you can just do things, and write tiny programs for raising you QoL just a tiny bit, using your brain.
[1] https://codeberg.org/VojtechStep/textcell
[2] https://codeberg.org/VojtechStep/muscadet-portal