A great thing about being a programmer is that if you need specific, customised, tooling, you can just write it yourself. Often there are existing options, but of course it’s a lot more fun to write your own tools, especially when you have room for some experimentation.
This is how I came to write a simple tool.. 3 times, in different languages.
The experiment
My goal was to write a very simple command line tool that can generate one-time passwords compatible with Google Authenticator. Google authenticator uses the Time-based One-Time Password algorithm (TOTP) to generate codes. …
