Show HN: I rewrote my 2012 self-signed cert generator in Go — cert-depot.com

A tidy resurrection

A developer dusted off a decade-old tool and rewrote their self-signed certificate generator in Go, posting the result as cert-depot.com on Hacker News. It has been reported that the aim was simple: take something that worked in 2012, strip out cruft, and make it feel modern again. Why bother? Because small utilities are the grease that keeps development and ops running smoothly — and because refactoring an old hobby project can be oddly satisfying.

What changed (and why it matters)

The new incarnation appears focused on ease and portability: a single-language rewrite, fewer dependencies, and a clean CLI for generating self-signed certs for local development and testing. It has been reported that the maintainer emphasized simplicity over feature bloat, leaning into the practical needs of devs who want a quick cert without wrestling with larger tooling. Think of it as a fast, no-nonsense screwdriver rather than an entire auto shop.

Community reaction

The Hacker News thread mixed nostalgia with scrutiny. Some commenters welcomed the cleanup and the attention to UX; others waved the evergreen alternatives — mkcert, Let's Encrypt for public-facing sites — as reminders that self-signed certs belong primarily to local or testing environments. It has been reported that the discussion also touched on the broader trend: old scripts being reborn in Go or Rust, swapping makefiles and Python 2 relics for static binaries and modules.

Small piece of code, big little win. Rewriting a 2012 utility may not change the world, but it scratches an itch — and for many developers, that itch is the point. Would you rather keep tripping over ancient tooling, or give it a fresh coat and call it done?

Sources: Hacker News