Since moving overseas away from my family and friends nearly two years ago, one problem I have had is keeping in touch with everyone. A combination of distance, time zones and busy lives means it’s easy to forget to say hi or check in on people back home.
To take the load of remembering off myself, I delegated this small but important task to a basic hacky service I wrote in Python. It runs on a DigitalOcean server and sends me emails every so often reminding me to call my Mum and others (the frequency is configurable per person). It’s made the distance feel a little easier to handle, and the code (warning: very basic!) is on my Github here.