I missed an emoji picker for Linux. I couldn't find anything that was not integrated into Gnome/KDE or maintained. So I set out to write one myself, just a simple Python script with rofi. I uploaded it to Github, because maybe someone else also wanted that.
That was several years ago, and now [rofimoji] can do all UTF-8 characters (and custom ones), works on Wayland and is packaged for some distros. I'm so happy how my tiny project turned out and how many people helped with PRs and issues.
[rofimoji]: https://github.com/fdw/rofimoji
Professionally, I (and the whole team) lost track of our deployed artifacts, as we're not on a release schedule but also not really on continuous deployment. Mainly, we released when someone noticed that a release has been running stably on staging for a while.
We also needed a way to ensure our configurations were correct and to track API versions. So I started hacking together a small React app (new for me at the time) to collect and display all that information.
It had a good welcome in our team, and so a colleague and I improved it a lot, added an actual backend and, for example, integrated it into our CI so that you can now see which commits happened since the last deployment and deploy through it, with just two clicks.
We also automated a lot of our previously manual checks for larger deployments. It's become the main tool for that stuff, even for our not-so-technical PO.