[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
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Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
I'll start. For me, I think the most impactful thing I've ever
built was an internal application for a FX trading desk that
eventually went on to handle billions in daily trades. It didn't
use any fancy frameworks, just plain old CRUD on Java.
Author : rafiki6
Score : 103 points
Date : 2022-11-18 18:47 UTC (4 hours ago)
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Wow, weird to think about.
|
| Nothing. I haven't built anything with a significant impact. I've
| made things that made a significant impact on businesses, but in
| the scheme of things, nothing exciting.
|
| The thing I made which generated the most revenue was easily the
| most harmful, and likely the most impactful. Unfortunately. It
| was an ad exchange that did extremely well. The owners went from
| random guys with a gross idea to multimillionaires in a couple
| years. They both spend their days buying up startups.
|
| I should have done better by now. I feel like I need to make up
| for building that exchange. I was young and had no idea what I
| was getting into until it was too late.
| chamakits wrote:
| A temporary low resource form for people in Puerto Rico to send
| an SMS message out to family outside of PR after Hurricane Maria.
|
| During Hurricane Maria most of Puerto Rico was offline. Slowly
| but surely, some people started having access to some online
| services. To this day, I don't know how, but I saw frequent posts
| in social media (Facebook and others) of people saying they could
| access spotty internet but SMS and making calls wasn't working,
| and asking people to let their family outside of Puerto Rico know
| that they were okay.
|
| So I setup a site on glitch.com with real simple 2 field form.
| One for a phone number and another for a message to send. It was
| dead simple, no framework, no CSS, just little bits of vanilla
| HTML and JS, and a bit of backend code connected to Twilio. Some
| text on the top with instructions too. I was making it
| intentionally small so that a spotty connection wouldn't have a
| problem using it.
|
| Any time I saw someone posting in social media asking for someone
| to reach out to their family, I posted a link. I also shared it
| in a slack where many from the PR diaspora where trying to
| contribute ways to help. Before I knew thousands of people were
| using it. I did some continuous monitoring to make sure nobody
| was using it for abuse, and making sure it was being used as
| intended. It would have been EXTREMELY easy for someone to abuse
| it if they wanted to.
|
| No one abused it. Thousands used it as it was intended. Left it
| up for weeks, and I kept monitoring it to make sure it wasn't
| being abused. I eventually saw it had stopped being used entirely
| for two weeks and spun it down.
|
| I saw some people posting about it afterwards being thankful they
| were able to receive messages from their family, and I'm happy I
| rushed through to write very sloppy high impact code.
| _jcrossley wrote:
| I helped build V1 of https://www.balanceapp.com as part of a
| small team. Meditation is a super crowded space, but it's a
| lifestyle habit that I really believe in. Proud that it's reached
| a fair number of people, even if it isn't as well known as the
| competitors
| halifaxbeard wrote:
| I wrote a vaccine booking availability scraper that helped double
| digits of people get a COVID vaccine a few weeks sooner
| otherwise.
| [deleted]
| thisisbrians wrote:
| I cofounded a startup (bractlet.com) that uses IoT data,
| thermodynamic simulations, and other technologies to optimize
| building energy consumption. We've prevented around 10,000 tons
| of CO2 emissions, which equates to many millions of dollars in
| energy savings.
|
| Shameless plug: we're hiring :)
| arnon wrote:
| I built (together with my team) an entitlement service, which
| makes creating new billing plans a lot easier, and reduced our
| time to launch in new markets down to just a few minutes.
|
| I wrote about it here https://arnon.dk/why-you-should-separate-
| your-billing-from-e...
| RajSinghLA wrote:
| A hotel concierge that's helped 50 million guests during their
| stay. The goal is to create unforgettable experiences for a
| billion people!
|
| Ivy sends you a text message introducing herself as a virtual
| concierge when you check in. She answers FAQs in 1 second using
| NLP and routes anything more complex to the front desk team for
| resolution in 2-3 minutes. All in one simple text thread, no apps
| or UI needed.
|
| Guests often come to the front desk trying to tip Ivy, rave about
| her in reviews, ask her out on dates, and even drop off hand
| written thank you notes for her.
|
| One woman texted Ivy in a panic asking about the nearest drug
| store to buy Benadryl because her son was having a severe
| allergic reaction. A guest service agent brought Benadryl to her
| door in 3 minutes at a large Las Vegas property. She called Ivy a
| life saver.
| waltbosz wrote:
| I wrote code to generate the graphic for a decal that gets
| applied to units in the mobile equipment fleet for Dupont. It's a
| bit satisfying to drive past a Dupont site and see my work out in
| the real world.
|
| Also I helped publish a Simpsons themed mod for the video game
| Doom 2. It's got it's own fan wiki page at this point.
|
| I wrote a pretty popular sequential image downloader in the early
| 2000s. I suspect it may be the reason why websites started
| randomizing the filenames of their image assets.
| coutego wrote:
| Monodevelop, I think: https://www.monodevelop.com
|
| It wasn't a planned thing. I had recently got injured playing
| football, so I was stuck at home, not being able to walk or
| drive. I started checking the #mono IRC channel (it was 2003 and
| internet was something you did over a 48k modem, when your home
| phone line was not needed). Some guys, lead by Miguel de Icaza,
| the founder of Gnome, were implementing a compiler of C# and a
| bytecode interpreter of .NET IL, and I was very curious about it.
| I kept downloading, compiling and trying things out.
|
| Then one day Miguel wrote in the channel that it would be nice to
| have some graphical editor and that somebody could perhaps port
| SharpDevelop over to Linux, by replacing Windows.Forms by calls
| to GTK. I said that I'd give it a shot and... well, 10 days later
| we had a working editor and half a dozen of contributors.
|
| https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Mar-14.html
| nam17887 wrote:
| I love MonoDevelop, I used it to write C# for Linux before the
| .NET core days
| Bacito wrote:
| I created Tiny Flashlight for Android 12 years ago. It's been
| downloaded almost 500m times. Back then every hardware vendor
| implemented the camera API in their own way and it wasn't easy to
| start the camera led. I had to purchase many different devices
| from different carriers from all around the world just to find
| out a way to start the camera LED. It was very helpful when the
| vendor published the kernel source code with the camera drivers
| for the particular device model. I could send custom commands to
| the driver to start the LED, where it was not possible using the
| standard camera API.
| leet_thow wrote:
| The second generation Web UI of a Series A startup in 2011 that
| went on to be acquired for $1B in 2020. I have another promising
| personal project in the works I'm hoping overtakes it.
| tromp wrote:
| In late 2013 I came up with the first memory hard Proof-of-Work
| puzzle, Cuckoo Cycle [1], based on finding fixed-length cycles in
| random graphs. Recently, custom chips were developed to solve it
| more efficiently than GPUs can.
|
| That probably had more impact than the Binary Lambda Calculus
| language I designed [2] or the logical rules of Go I co-
| formulated [3].
|
| Computing the number of Go positions [4] or approximating the
| number of Chess positions [5] had little impact beyond satisfying
| my intellectual curiosity.
|
| [1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo
|
| [2] https://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html
|
| [3] https://tromp.github.io/go.html
|
| [4] https://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html
|
| [5] https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking#readme
| don-code wrote:
| About 14 years ago - before I'd taken as much as an intro to CS
| class - I wrote some software that helped a bar keep track of
| who'd drank what. They were the type of bar where, if you drank
| every beer they had available, you'd get a free mug. Prior to it
| being computerized, the staff used index cards in shoeboxes. Lots
| of the wait staff's time was lost fumbling through those boxes,
| unsticking them from each other (gross!), etc.
|
| I've since gotten a degree and written software for a handful of
| companies.
|
| When I think of how many people are actually _using_ my software,
| though? Fourteen years later, the mug club software is still live
| in a production environment, used every day by wait staff who
| turns over every few months. No doubt hundreds - potentially
| thousands (it got deployed at a few different bars) - of people
| have interacted directly with it. That code embarrasses me
| nowadays, but as far as impact goes: that's probably it.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| Right now I'm quite humbled by the number of people who are using
| Notado[1] to liberate their Twitter Liked Tweets before the
| collapse that everyone is worrying about.
|
| There are also thousands of people using a tiling window manager
| for Windows which I originally built for myself and decided to
| share publicly for free.[2] I still can't believe how popular it
| has become.
|
| [1]: https://notado.app
|
| [2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi
| tspike wrote:
| I was leading mobile platform engineering at Walmart when they
| first merged their Walmart and Walmart Grocery apps into a single
| app. It was a herculean effort and the resulting product left a
| lot to be desired, but my work certainly impacted hundreds of
| millions of people.
| decodebytes wrote:
| https://sigstore.dev - although its really not true to say I
| built it. I started it off, but very quickly smarter folks then
| me jumped on board and really took it to all sorts of new
| directions.
| koliber wrote:
| I've built 15Five, a employee engagement platform. It was an
| effort of many people working together over many years, and I had
| the good fortune to be there at the start. Many people use it
| weekly to communicate with their managers and peers. I've seen it
| deliver a positive connection in remote and on-site teams.
| martininmelb wrote:
| Many years ago I built some software to allow people with
| cerebral palsy to use a computer. I did not get paid and it was
| not used by thousands of people (as far as I know) - but what
| made it impactful for me was that I got to see the delight of the
| people who hadn't been able to access a computer and who were
| then able to access one.
| user3939382 wrote:
| For 10 years until recently a statistics research system that was
| the primary tool for keeping granular measurements on the health
| of the US economy.
| justsocrateasin wrote:
| First job out of college, I was at a consulting firm doing
| software development for DHS (Homeland Security). I got a lot of
| flack from my friends and family for "working for the devil", but
| the work was actually objectively good for society - basically
| there was a big data problem where when an immigrant trying to
| illegally cross into the US was apprehended, and if they were
| sick, their custody would be transferred from US Customs and
| Border Protection (CBP) to Health and Human Services (HHS) so
| they could receive medical attention. There was zero data
| transparency between these two orgs, so when that transfer
| happened it usually caused families to be separated (Sick dad,
| healthy mom and child, sick dad gets brought in for care and
| never finds his family again). Since HHS and CBP don't have data
| communication and everything is siloed, the handoff was really
| poor and they often wouldn't find each other for months
| afterwards.
|
| There was a lot of talk about this in the news, and although the
| software I was working on didn't entirely fix the problem, it
| allowed the agencies to communicate better. Their data wasn't
| siloed, and families got separated for only a few days rather
| than (sometimes) permanently.
|
| I really miss that job. The pay was atrocious and zero WLB, but
| everyone agreed it was an important problem to solve, and I think
| the tool we had built really was helping.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I built the first version of a Facebook gaming app that, just
| before I handed it off, was wasting about 475 person-years worth
| of people's time every day.
| kokocute wrote:
| 2 million users @ 2h/day.
|
| Charitably, it was providing leisure.
| sterlind wrote:
| a couple of algorithms deep in the core infrastructure of Azure:
| the cluster scheduler for placing VMs (published as "Protean"),
| and a color-constrained shortest path solver for route planning
| in the WAN.
|
| amazingly I once failed an interview at Google, despite my
| abilities. I think because it takes me a while to think before I
| get anywhere.
| throwaway2729 wrote:
| Myself. Came from a dysfunctional family, enormous debt and have
| survived lots of trauma to reach a decent position + decent net
| worth.
| uptown wrote:
| Way to go stranger internet friend! Glad to see not only that
| you've overcome what you say you have, but also that it's a
| point of pride. Keep it up!
| throwaway2729 wrote:
| Thank you!
| solarmist wrote:
| This is a very underrated comment
| adamdusty wrote:
| I worked on the epitaxy for vcsels that go into iphones for the
| facial recognition. Not that impactful but cool to know that the
| stuff I worked on is in use all around me.
| gardenfelder wrote:
| I guess my most impactful project was a microprocessor-based
| weather station for siting wind energy systems and fruit frost
| prediction in the early 1980s. Turned out that one of my
| stations, being used by a frost predictor, was across the street
| from a rural drainage ditch in which a young child was discovered
| face down in the water. The frost predictor faxed temperature
| profiles for the previous several hours to the hospital, where
| doctors determined the child could be revived. She was.
| dan_wood wrote:
| That's amazing.
| gardenfelder wrote:
| Interesting that one my the developers on my projects was Dan
| Wood.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Wow! That's a pretty amazing story. Thank you for sharing.
| gardenfelder wrote:
| Thank you! Took me by surprise when my client phoned and said
| my weather station was on the evening news.
| pmarreck wrote:
| wait... they won't try to revive a child unless they can first
| _prove_ that said child _can_ be revived? Why not just... try
| to do it regardless and hope for the best?
|
| Also, as a new parent, my immediate thought is of course "WHO
| wasn't watching the kid??"
| jph wrote:
| BoldContacts: a mobile app that helps elderly people call their
| friends, families, and caregivers. I wrote it for my folks, and
| the app is now translated into 60 languages worldwide. All free,
| open source, pro bono.
|
| https://github.com/sixarm/BoldContacts
| jiggawatts wrote:
| During a centralisation of public school local servers to a data
| centre, I created a consolidated library enquiry system. It
| served over 2,000 libraries, had 330 million titles, and had
| about a million users. It was efficient enough to run off my
| laptop, if need be.
|
| AFAIK it was one of the top five biggest library systems in the
| world at the time.
|
| I was asked to add some features that would have been too
| difficult in the old distributed system. Things like reading
| competitions, recommended reading lists by age, etc...
|
| I watched the effect of these changes -- which took me mere days
| of effort to implement -- and the combined result was that
| students read about a million additional books they would not
| have otherwise.
|
| I've had a far greater effect on the literacy of our state than
| any educator by orders of magnitude and hardly anyone in the
| department of education even knows my name!
|
| This was the project that made realise how huge the effort-to-
| effect ratio that can be when computers are involved...
| silasb wrote:
| ... and this is how OCLC was created?
| sideshowb wrote:
| > had a far greater effect on the literacy of our state than
| any educator by orders of magnitude
|
| Nice work, but check your ego mate. Seems your growth hacking
| would have had zero result if those kids couldn't read to start
| with, so you could share some credit ;-)
| silasdavis wrote:
| Maybe it wasn't meant that way. If they hadn't had been there
| then somone else would have been. You can be on the crest of
| a wave and be not responsible for its power.
| robbywashere_ wrote:
| Cool story! what languages, frameworks, etc did you use? Or are
| you about to tell me COBOL? :P
| nicbou wrote:
| > This was the project that made realise how huge the effort-
| to-effect ratio that can be when computers are involved
|
| I love Steve Jobs' metaphor: computers as a bicycle of the mind
| [0]. Unfortunately, a lot of effort is concentrated on problems
| that scale to billions of people. There's a lack of attention
| to problems that would have a big effect for a relatively small
| number of people. It's a shame, because they're a blast to work
| on.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L40B08nWoMk
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| They really are. I think the most rewarding software I ever
| wrote was my first paid gig, where I automated lap swim
| scheduling for my local swim club. Took me maybe an hour, got
| paid more money than I'd make in two days as a lifeguard, and
| they were thanking ME for it. Turned out I had saved a
| volunteer upwards of an hour every week. With a shitty little
| JavaScript program.
| domlebo70 wrote:
| Any more info? This is fascinating.
| davidw wrote:
| Probably political stuff, for better or worse:
|
| * Made it easier to create a limited liability company in Italy:
| https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-litt...
|
| * Pro-housing organization here in Bend, Oregon:
| https://bendyimby.com/
|
| Software wise, I really enjoyed my time working on these devices:
| https://www.icare-world.com/us/
| nicbou wrote:
| Fixing bureaucracy is a gift that keeps on giving. Well done!
| yboris wrote:
| Built _Video Hub App_ that almost 5,000 people have purchased. I
| was a math teacher, became a web dev 6 years ago, built this 5
| years ago. Most proceeds go to charity. Very minor by comparison
| to others, but I 'm just starting out ;)
|
| https://videohubapp.com/ && https://github.com/whyboris/Video-
| Hub-App
|
| What I _did_ that is most impactful is that I 've been giving at
| least 10% of my income to _cost-effective_ charities for over 10
| years now (see _Giving What We Can_ - thousands of others do the
| same). This amounts to almost $100,000 given to charity which
| translates to _thousands_ of people protected from malaria for
| many years of their lives.
| mradek wrote:
| Very cool! Thanks for sharing.
| mehphp wrote:
| Nothing crazy, but I built a Shopify app years ago that some
| customers say is "crucial" to running their store.
|
| It's not making me rich but it feels good knowing it's
| legitimately helping people run their business.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| for me, the most impactful thing in terms of users, was
| introducing graphite/grafana to a large news org.
|
| Before it was all splunk, everything took ages, and you needed to
| have a degree in weird regex/SQL syntax to get anything useful.
|
| I started showing off graphite/grafana to a few devs. I put some
| basic CPU/Memory/HTTP request time metrics in. They started
| putting it in the expressjs layer they had. This meant that any
| HTTP call was automatically logged, along with CPU memory and
| anything else they wanted.
|
| By the time I left, splunk was used to do post mortems, and
| virtually every team had a grafana dashboard, with the
| Product/buisness owners setting the SLAs/alerts.
| calmtech wrote:
| Found a single line of byte code that cost $4M of compute per
| year.
| suprjami wrote:
| Please tell us more. This sounds like a good investigative
| story.
| munk-a wrote:
| A library for streaming database interactions including piping a
| query to a client as a CSV/JSON and running row-wise functions on
| it as it passes through without ever holding the whole thing in
| memory. It's well sugared syntax-wise, very easy to learn and
| battle tested.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| In the early days of rails I wrote a monkey punch for Active
| Record that'd raise a fatal exception if any query lacked a limit
| clause or returned more than a couple 100 rows. Just a couple
| lines of obvious stuff, but you wouldn't believe how much impact
| committing that to a repo back then would have.
| Phelinofist wrote:
| A software solution for supply chain tracking under the Dodd-
| Frank Act Section 1502 aka Conflict Minerals. I like to think
| that this does not only have a positive impact for the turnover
| of my (ex-) employer but also on the lives of the people in e.g.
| DRC.
|
| It was also the first project were I was the lead for the
| development side of things and also made myself known as the
| domain expert. Fun times :)
| harel wrote:
| I was tech lead and architect on the system that runs the UK's
| digital trade remedies platform to control trade tariffs and
| special measures post Brexit. It's the first and only platform of
| it's kind. I suppose that's the most "impactful" as it manages
| events that affect entire industries on a national scale.
| mxstbr wrote:
| Definitely styled-components[0].
|
| #257th most starred repository on GitHub, used by millions of
| developers to ship millions of websites -- you've very likely
| visited websites that are built with it!
|
| [0]: https://github.com/styled-components/styled-components
| p0deje wrote:
| Security Kit for Drupal: https://www.drupal.org/project/seckit. I
| built it when I was a junior QA engineer both learning how to
| program in PHP and doing first steps in the security. I open
| sourced it, pretty much moved to Ruby and forgot about it just to
| learn several years later that it's used on 50k websites across
| the world.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I didn't even build anything here, just set up an online service.
| In 2020 I volunteered with a small bail fund serving about 100
| clients a year with annual donations of about $40,000 - primarily
| checks, but increasingly online payments. In May I moved their
| donation process from an excel spreadsheet manually reconciled
| with PayPal to a saas donation portal, which managed recurring
| donors, generated tax receipts, etc. I imported all our existing
| donor records, set up the option to pay by Square instead, etc,
| it was great. My notes from choosing the service mention that if
| we ever hit 12,000 unique donors we would go up a payment level.
|
| Later that month, when George Floyd died and people started
| protesting, they also donated to bail funds - many of them
| explicitly to bail out protestors but many plain donations. I
| think our new donation portal handled over one million donations
| in two days.
|
| (Our new square account was, for obvious reasons, instantly
| locked for fraud and we managed to get their support to re-open
| it within a few hours on a Sunday, they were very responsive! We
| didn't keep all the money - there's a National bail fund
| coalition and it was very random which funds were shared as
| donation recommendations, so the massive influx of donations to a
| few funds was distributed across the country.)
| blakesterz wrote:
| I built a blog in 1999, very small impact, but it was the most
| impactful thing I've built. I wanted to build a website to be
| Slashdot for librarians, and it was quite popular for years. I
| ended up starting my own webhosting business, and changed my
| entire career path. So it mostly impacted me, but I think there
| were some small ripple effects.
| jmstfv wrote:
| https://rectangles.app
|
| It's a way of visualizing time differently - 144 blocks, where
| each block represents 10 minutes of your day.
| simonsarris wrote:
| I built GoJS, which is one of the most popular commercial JS
| diagramming libraries: https://gojs.net
|
| I built carefulwords, a very fast thesaurus and quote site for
| inspiration, used by... tens of people a day. Eg:
| https://carefulwords.com/gift https://carefulwords.com/solitude
|
| I made the site because I was mad that it was hard to type in
| urls to use thesaurus.com, and because that site fails to focus
| the cursor in the search box. So I made my own site that did. I
| mostly made it for myself, me and my wife use it all the time. I
| am slowly editing down the thesaurus to manageable size.
|
| I built a 12x16 "Goose Palace" barn out of local pine timbers,
| which taught me timber framing, and taught my tiny baby who
| turned 2 years old while doing it that this is just the kind of
| thing that people normally do, build barns in their driveway.
| Some context: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/the-goose-palace
|
| Some photos of building it with the baby:
| https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1584169368203956225
|
| I designed my house, and have been writing extensively about
| that. Maybe this is the most impactful, since photos of it are
| all over Pinterest and other sites, now. The first post on that:
| https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/designing-a-new-old-home-...
|
| I am not sure what is most impactful. Maybe ultimately it is
| building my family.
| cameronperot wrote:
| During my master's, I took a job in a physics group that works
| with high pressure time projection chambers for neutrino
| detection. They have a bunch of simulation and experimental data
| they wanted to organize and share with colleagues.
|
| I first worked on improving the database (adding indexes,
| reducing redundancy, etc.). Next, I wrote a Python package to
| make it easier to interact with the database from the command
| line and Python, and act as a backend package for a frontend
| Flask API I wrote to serve the data. Finally, I made a simple
| website [1] where users can query the data.
|
| It was great because I not only got to help out the people
| working in the group, but I also contributed to making the data
| available to other physicists around the world.
|
| [1] https://rwth-aachen.de/gasdb
| mod wrote:
| I built an integration for a charity that processed many millions
| per year. The money went to support needy folks in an
| impoverished nation. Children could get sponsors for schooling,
| food, and orphanages.
|
| The high-impact part comes from the organization and their
| mission moreso than my contribution to it, but it was also the
| most technically challenging work I did (shoehorning previous
| functionality into places it didn't belong and all the fun that
| comes with that).
|
| It's been about 9 years and I can see that largely, my backend is
| still running. The site had a facelift since then, though.
|
| This was a fully custom project, with a pretty standard Rails
| backend. The complexity was mostly dealing with Convio, the CRM /
| payment processing system from Salesforce for nonprofits.
| atum47 wrote:
| I've built a platform that helps furniture factory hire workers.
| Given that the typical factory worker is not that tech savvy, the
| platform did not see a lot of users, around 5k the last time I
| checked. Nevertheless some people found job using it. Everything
| using PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and JS.
| qroolen wrote:
| i was watching a documentary about The Beatles and at some point
| their bus driver said something like: 'you should know how to
| build and dismantle the vehicle you use to hit the road' so i
| learned how to build my bicycle wheels!
| chrisrickard wrote:
| My software consultancy developed a surveying system for young
| people suffering with mental health issues. It was used before
| their sessions with medical professionals, and helped inform
| their clinician on their current state, along with overlaying
| data from previous sessions to help point out patterns and
| possible risks.
|
| We met with focus groups of young people (and separately,
| clinicians) in developing the app, and I felt a strong affinity
| for the entire project. It still gets used thousands of times per
| day, and I'm glad I could help bring it to life.
|
| I'd always loved building software, but this project showed me
| it's so much more than technology.
| hollmare wrote:
| I used to work in a CPU/MCU IP company, dealing with embedded
| linux testing. The flow had been extremely manual and tedious so
| I created a FPGA Farm for that.
|
| Specifically, a general run-through of a test had involved the
| following steps - Choose the right type of FPGA - Get a right
| bitstream from design teams - load the bistream onto the FPGA -
| Connecting the FPGA to your PC physically and then using OpenOCD
| - Use gdb as the loader to load Linux image - With a telnetd in
| the init script, remotely execute the test on that linux after
| the boot by using expect/libexpect bindings.
|
| With the FPGA farm, many FPGAs were connected to a server, and it
| provides web interface and APIs so that people could login, claim
| a board, upload bitstream, attach openocd and expose tty through
| socat. In other words, the first half of the mentioned steps
| became remotely doable.
|
| My team did a bit fight and advocation, and soon CXOs bought in
| and people shifted to use the system. Productivity got higher.
| Also coincidentally, COVID breaked out, this system further
| rooted in our culture. It changes how engineers do their work and
| how sales do demo.
|
| Despite the success, I always have wanted to replace the home
| made architecture with something like OpenStack with modified
| plugins. The closest thing I know is OpenStack with Ironic, but
| it requires PXE, which is impossible for our embedded-case FPGAs.
| Any hints or suggestions?
| wvenable wrote:
| I built a content management system back when that meant
| something like Slashdot instead of Wordpress. It powered many
| sites but the main one was https://www.coffeegeek.com. It was
| launched in 2001 and I stopped working on the software in 2007
| and it continued to power that site, basically unchanged, until
| 2020.
|
| I think a 20 year run for a popular website and application was
| probably most impactful thing I've done.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Worked on software used in cash registers owned by Target,
| Walmart, the US Postal Service, and various large European and
| Asian equivalents. Comparing the previous model's UI to the new
| one was similar to the jump from command line UIs to GUIs, in
| that they were easier to understand without having to know a
| bunch of obscure commands. The company did a lot of work to
| ensure they were also fast to use like the old text-based ones.
| It really made the obscure cases easier for cashiers with little
| training to handle.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| So far most impactful thing I've built is web app for police in
| my country. When I had issues with police, I noticed that they
| used my app to look up my details. It was somewhat funny. Didn't
| tell them, I don't think they would believe me.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| I like to write personal open source projects to learn a language
| / learn a statistical concept to its core. To learn Python, I
| build a missing-value imputation package. This one hit it (to my
| standards) pretty big. 500k downloads so far, but as someone who
| uses it daily, I'm most proud of the fact that it's still the
| best at what it does[1]:
| https://github.com/AnotherSamWilson/miceforest
|
| [1] according to my personal benchmarking/use cases and anecdotal
| experience, no promises.
| m00dy wrote:
| I built a decentralised ai network, it is more like openAI but
| like without content policy.
| evronm wrote:
| This: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Farmer%27s_Market . Helped
| a few thousand people get their meds before we all got arrested.
| No regrets.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Reading your comment I thought this was going to be a darkweb
| site for cheap pharma stuff from Canada/Mexico to the U.S., did
| not expect straight up drugs.
| sterlind wrote:
| oh wow. you were adamflowers? did you just get out of prison?
| glad you have no regrets, I can't imagine how much serving that
| much time must suck.
| cableshaft wrote:
| For personal: Proximity[1], a flash game that ended up being
| added to hundreds of flash sites and, from the stats I was able
| to easily find across several popular websites, got up to over 10
| million plays after only a couple of years.
|
| For professional: Built a large and involved interactive speech
| application (IVR) from scratch that allowed hospitals, doctors,
| etc to call and check a person's health insurance status for a
| Fortune 100 health insurance company. Was used in over two
| million calls while I was there and was still being used when I
| had quit a few years later.
|
| [1]: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/183428
| cdiamand wrote:
| I built https://topstonks.com, it was one of the early sources of
| information during the meme stock craze, and a primary source for
| several major news outlets.
| ksubedi wrote:
| When the big earthquake in Nepal happened in 2015, I was working
| with a volunteer organization called Translators Without Borders
| to help with translation during relief efforts. Since I was in
| the USA I could not contribute back physically, so this was the
| next best thing.
|
| My goal was to help volunteers that were in the field in Nepal
| communicate in English -> Nepali and back. Even though this was
| somewhat effective, there was still a communication gap because
| most people in Nepal in remote parts could not even read in
| Nepali.
|
| I looked around for solutions but couldn't find any Nepali Text
| To Speech solutions. The builder brain in me fired up and I
| decided to build a Nepali Text To Speech engine using some of the
| groundwork that was laid by Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (Big
| Library in Nepal) which they had abandoned halfway.
|
| I spend all night hacking along to build a web app that let the
| volunteers paste translated text and have it spoken. The result
| was https://nepalispeech.com/ and the first iteration of this was
| built in just 13 ish hours.
|
| I hope the people that got affected by the earthquake are in a
| better situation now.
| jbirer wrote:
| I developed a model contest mobile app where models from
| Venezuela and Latin America can submit their SFW pictures and
| earn Dash coin as upvotes. Many of those ladies thanked us for
| giving them a way to earn during the tough times in Latam without
| having to resort to camming work. I am kind of proud of myself
| that I gave them an opportunity to survive the pandemic.
| nunodonato wrote:
| Nothing groundbreaking. But during my few years in game dev I
| built a relaxing game that had a spiritual component to it. Was
| one of my first games so.. plenty of flaws from a game design
| perspective. But one day I got an email from a player thanking me
| because the game helped immensely during a difficult time. Made
| my day... actually, I still think about once in a while. So, I
| guess you can say it was impactful for one ;)
| jedberg wrote:
| The thing that puts the title of the reddit link into the reddit
| URL. Massively boosted our SEO.
|
| At least that's the most visible thing I've done.
| soinus wrote:
| I think the most impactful thing I've built for now is an open
| source project used to auto complete C++ code in sublime text:
| EasyClangComplete. It does not take over the world, but I've been
| using it for years along with tens of thousands of people and
| that's good enough for me.
| neilk wrote:
| Did a lot of work on Wikipedia with media, usability, and
| internationalization. As with all such things that merely
| facilitate volunteers, it's hard to say what's mine or put dollar
| values on it. But it's touched at least a billion lives, and
| facilitated a large fraction of a media library that will likely
| outlive me.
|
| I've worked on minor stuff that was foundational to Google's
| commercial offerings, but I think that isn't as high impact and
| probably someone else would have done that as well or better. For
| the Wikipedia stuff, for good or ill, I owned some of those
| decisions.
| nicbou wrote:
| Wikipedia could not work without that sort of work. Same with
| Open Street Map and all the little contributions to the map. It
| adds up to a lot.
| unclemase wrote:
| The 2nd most used analysis tool on NSANet in response to the 9/11
| commission report that the agencies weren't sharing data.
| https://twitter.com/masonrothman/status/1521407937985404928
| nosmokewhereiam wrote:
| Spyspace and the Mitch Hedgeberg Quote Generator pages were a
| hoot!
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Did you work with Bill Binney? I had a chance to meet him once
| and got the impression he was the go-to "get shit done" guy at
| NSA around that time. IIRC, he mentioned having a group of
| contractors that worked with him throughout his career and
| credited them with his success.
| daguar wrote:
| GetCalFresh.org. Way easier way to apply for food stamps. Felt
| good to have left after 6 years going from helping 1 person get
| help to over a million. Still going strong.
|
| Also lots of strangler pattern iterations! That was fun.
| jtmcmc wrote:
| Community
| denuoweb wrote:
| For some people the most impactful thing they have done in life
| is create something that makes obscene amounts of money. I
| designed and built nanoshelters.com to help homeless people
| secure uninterrupted sleep. I should be worth more than most of
| you 'money is god' programmers but we live in a world that values
| how you much money you make rather than how you treat other
| humans.
| iuvcaw wrote:
| What do you mean by "worth more"?
| striking wrote:
| I appreciate the good you've done for the world, but isn't that
| last sentence just a little bit ironic?
| pertique wrote:
| I won't speak for the parent comment, and this isn't a
| critique on you, but I think it's more of a reflection on the
| reader than an ironic take.
|
| Many would read "I should be worth more than..." as "I should
| have more money than...", but that's exactly what the parent
| comment is railing against. In the corporate world, and
| especially in the startup space, money is often the metric
| that defines worth. In the parent comment's world, I imagine
| they would rather that not be the case, and by <some other
| metric> they would be worth more than these startups/"money
| is god programmers" that are "only" worth money.
|
| It could've been put a bit more nicely by not implying the
| reader is a 'money is god programmer,' but otherwise it's a
| valid opinion, I think.
| theylovezmw wrote:
| When the vaccines were first rolled out, my friends and I made a
| site that showed PA citizens hospitals and pharmacies near them
| that had covid vaccines available.
|
| Every week, PA would release a spreadsheet of all places that
| received vaccines and we would call the places listed to see
| their availability. We ended up scaling the operation to ~200
| volunteers.
|
| There wasn't much on the technical side, though. We had an
| Airtable where volunteers would update records an a next.js site
| that displayed the date via Airtable API. We found the Airtable
| embed to be too complicated/ugly and even though wrangling
| Airtable API was a huge pain, it was worth
| unwind wrote:
| Not sure if it counts as building something concrete (I have been
| programming commercially for ~20 years so I'm pretty sure there's
| something if I dig) but does Stack Overflow impact count? I have
| over 6,000 answers posted and a calculated reach/impact of over
| 50 million people. That sometimes makes me smile and feel that I
| have contributed something.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| I designed a typeface and while small, the impact of bringing joy
| and productivity to people is greatly satisfying:
| https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/berkeley-mono/
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| I built the first "post-play" experience for Netflix. It made it
| so that Netflix would automatically start playing the next
| episode of the show you are watching after a 15 second count
| down. We built it in the Silverlight player on the web because it
| was the fastest way to A/B test new features at the time.
|
| Before post-play, you had to open the episode menu and click on
| the next episode to play it. We didn't want to do autoplay for a
| long time because we were afraid people would fall asleep with
| Netflix playing and it would break the internet. So we included
| the now infamous "Are you still there?" popup a few minutes into
| episode 3 with no interaction with the player.
|
| Now it is everywhere - YouTube, Hulu, HBO, etc. And people watch
| way more TV than they should.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I want to say I hate automatic playing of content after my
| content is complete but when I really think about it I love it
| when I want it to do that and hate it when I don't and i'm too
| lazy to tell my UI which is which.
|
| I guess when something just works your users will assume the
| cases where it is working properly are just the way things are
| and the cases where it does something they don't like is your
| fault.
|
| So well done!
| kkamperschroer wrote:
| As I was reading your comment I was thinking "whoa, that sounds
| like Damien or Robert" and sure enough :)
|
| Hope you are doing well!
| fillskills wrote:
| Ah good old Silverlight. I once wrote a Drag and Drop library
| in SL. Good times. I miss XAML.
| srhtftw wrote:
| Some FreeBSD code which later found its way on to every
| OSX/iOS/macOS system.
| d23 wrote:
| Most of the most consequential changes to the reddit feeds a few
| years ago I was involved in or directly came up with. The most
| visible was probably the one that started putting discussion-
| heavy posts on the front page (things like legaladvice,
| amitheasshole, askreddit, unpopularopinion, etc). It's weird to
| think about the resulting butterfly effects that are completely
| beyond my knowledge and comprehension.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's crazy how things have changed. Reddit is now heading in
| the opposite direction. It's a shame, because I think that your
| approach was the better one.
| buildbot wrote:
| Hmm oddly probably my first "real" full time job is where I had
| the most impact - I was one of two programmers hired for a summer
| to redesign a stress testing suite for a server hardware vendor,
| prime95, cuda-burn, etc. integrated into one single python
| application to collect the data. I stayed there during the school
| year part time and the next summer I got to hire another dev (my
| counterpart left to facebook).
|
| We then worked on a baremetal automation system that worked
| through IPMI to completely automate the burn in process -remotely
| starting servers as soon as they got their IP registered, PXe
| booting them to the burn in image, and then kicking off the
| testing process. We had a way overkill rabbitmq system to collect
| streaming logs from every server as they ran, and all
| orchestrated via rethinkdb change feeds. I think it is still the
| most complex software project I have done. Basically one python
| file would launch 7 separate python processes, each their own
| rethinkdb change feed. This predated docker otherwise it probably
| would have been 7 docker containers haha.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Working now at a bigco, the most impactful thing I do these days
| is in guiding projects away from building the first thing they
| think will solve a problem. People don't spend much time doing
| thought experiments of how changes will evolve in the future or
| with adjacent scopes. After thinking in that mode for a while you
| realize that there are concepts here that could and should be
| separated. A small tweak here and there, changing some
| naming/terminology goes a long way to saving tons of
| refactoring/cleanup down the road.
|
| If you mean single-handedly, kinda hard to say. I also rewrote
| chunks of a retail FX app written in Java1/awt -> Java5+/Swing.
| Right now I'm enjoying using my own HN viewer (hackerer.news).
| I'd like to make an SQL-oriented library so people don't have to
| settle for JPQL/Hibernate--started but not done/promoted.
|
| A recent stroke of luck was working on a small team building buy-
| online-pickup-instore for thousands/millions of merchants, that
| completed just before the pandemic hit.
| not_the_fda wrote:
| I've worked on numerous medical devices, many startups. From
| treating cancer, kidney disease, or providing tools for
| reconstructive surgery.
|
| Nothing hits you in the feels than having customers thanking you
| for improving their quality of life, or a child thanking you for
| giving a parent more years of life.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Whats the most exciting medical device technology today? Red
| light therapy?
| ushercakes wrote:
| Depends how we want to define impact.
|
| Is it - what is the thing I made that the most people use? A core
| service within AWS. Very insane scale.
|
| Is it - what is the thing I made that I think will be the most
| intrinsically "beneficial" to society? Probably
| https://contractrates.fyi I've done a lot of freelancing myself
| and there really doesn't seem to be any single community or hub
| for freelancers that isn't trying to squeeze every last dollar
| out of them. I'm trying to make a thing that is legitimately
| helpful and completely free.
| revskill wrote:
| Migrate a responsive web app to iOS and Android store without any
| code changes.
| ohadpr wrote:
| First implementation of CAPTCHA circa 1997
| uptown wrote:
| Thanks! I hate it.
| jcuenod wrote:
| In an MA program in biblical studies, I realized that the best
| way to understand what words mean in context is to see how
| they're used in similar contexts. To do that, you've got to be
| able to find similar contexts. I didn't like the solutions
| available from the major software vendors, but it turns out
| there's a whole bunch of tagged data that's openly licensed. So I
| built a webapp that has all the search functionality that I need
| and I put it online (https://parabible.com).
|
| Apart from word of mouth and the occasional post like this, I
| don't advertise it, but it's getting about 100 users a day. Many
| of my users come from the majority world and couldn't afford the
| software from the major vendors, which is very gratifying.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I like the layout of this. Do you plan on adding any other
| versions of the text? BibleHub also shows multiple versions of
| the text, but has a wide variety of translations to choose
| from. Though their layout isn't quite this elegant
| jcuenod wrote:
| Thanks, I have put a non-trivial amount of thought into
| making the interface friendly. I appreciate the compliment :)
|
| I've got a staging environment at dev.parabible.com with
| other versions (it's a bit rougher and can break, but it
| supports searching in Greek along with a bunch of other
| translations). I've also added Apostolic Fathers there
| (which, I believe, is the first place that Ap. Fathers have
| been available in English and original language in parallel
| for free anywhere).
|
| I'd love to get versions like the ESV, NIV, NASB... but
| they're all copyrighted and when I've spoken to publishers
| about licensing they want me to pay (and I'm a grad student
| with no income). There are some other free translations I
| could add (like the KJV, etc.), but I'm aiming at a scholarly
| audience, who I think don't care about most of the
| translations that you'll find for free (the KJV is one
| exception there, tbh).
| waltbosz wrote:
| When I was in college I wrote a Windows app to do the side-by-
| side translations of the bible just like you have on your site.
|
| It was commissioned by a multilingual church.
|
| Funny thing is, I'm a atheist raised by Catholics. I'm not sure
| if I would take the job today. I feel it would be unscrupulous
| for me to facilitate religious studies.
| jcuenod wrote:
| I mean, parabible is really aimed at research. In that sense,
| hopefully there's something useful about it as a tool for
| study, irrespective of personal convictions. That said, I'm a
| Christian and I'm studying the Bible because I believe that's
| how we know God, and I would be the first to say that there
| is something different about that kind of research.
| mughinn wrote:
| This probably isn't that impactful on the grand scale, but I want
| to mention 2 things
|
| On a problem meeting to get better at detecting some SMS fraud,
| we realized some manual labor the fraud team had to do with
| Excel. I made a program that automated the checks and presented a
| resulting ranked list, I saved that team (according to them)
| around 1 hour a day of boring, stupid work and let them either
| rest or use that time for better work
|
| I did a small audit on webpage size on my company to see how
| impactful the changes would be. Approximately 30% to 40% of the
| page could be reduced. The calculated cost saved was low, $150 to
| $200 per month, but also around 100kg to 150kg of CO2 released on
| the atmosphere. If replicated on other pages the total cost saved
| on both dollars and CO2 could be tripled
|
| While not a lot, I like to think that those small things done
| everywhere could ne a substantial help on global warming
| pjc50 wrote:
| About 25 years ago, with a group of friends:
| https://www.srcf.net/
|
| It was what you'd call a community-run webhost, but at a time
| when such things weren't common. The main innovation was making
| it easy for multiple people to administer and hand over websites:
| we'd noticed that student society websites tended to get lost or
| rebuilt every year, because they were run under people's personal
| accounts which stopped working when they graduated.
| lyptt wrote:
| I worked on an ad attribution service for a AAA games company and
| sold my soul in the process. It was neat maintaining a service
| that had 130m+ hits a day though, never had to deal with scaling
| like that since. Even neater was it was just two instances in
| production. Vertical scaling all the way!
| jasonrojas wrote:
| A nodejs closed caption converter. I'm not a developer but can
| get along just fine for most of my projects.
|
| Funniest part was, I open sourced it. Then a few years and an
| acquisition later the parent company tried to sell us a tool for
| converting caption files based off my own code.
|
| https://github.com/jasonrojas/node-captions
| suprjami wrote:
| How did you feel about that from a licensing perspective?
|
| Not trying to bait a copyleft vs permissive argument, I'm
| genuinely interested.
| seefish wrote:
| I'd love to hear more details about how that interaction went!
| projproj wrote:
| https://flexbox.help/ I get a lot of people saying it was very
| useful.
| FigurativeVoid wrote:
| Oh I like this a lot. This a helpful little tool.
| wglb wrote:
| The first commercial remote automated Electrocardiogram Analysis
| Service, receiving ECG data from hospitals throughout US and
| Canada, and returning English language analysis within 10
| minutes. I was lead developer/architect.
| simonw wrote:
| Probably this JavaScript function I posted on my blog in 2003
| https://simonwillison.net/2003/Mar/25/getElementsBySelector/
| kmoser wrote:
| Wow, 10 years before document.querySelectorAll()!
| iamwil wrote:
| He's understating, perhaps on purpose.
|
| Datasette, Django, and Lanyrd.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| Wow. You were the original querySelector. It's funny how you
| forget that somebody actually sat down and wrote these things
| into existence at some point. Thanks!
| ryanbigg wrote:
| Maintained Spree as it's community manager
| (https://GitHub.com/spree/spree) for 2.5-3 years, depending on
| how you count. Taught me a lot about OSS. Dollar figures
| processed using code I wrote / maintained hurt my brain. What
| hurt my brain more was US sales tax rules.
|
| I also wrote quite a few programming books
| (https://ryanbigg.com/books) and some of the Ruby on Rails
| guides. These have gone on to teach thousands of people around
| the world. I really love hearing from those who've read my work.
| loudouncodes wrote:
| I spent 11 years working as a contractor for the U.S. State
| Department. During this time I:
|
| - In 1996 built and deployed a system to keep track of the
| removal of landmines in Bosnia. In 2015 I met someone who knew my
| work as a child in Sarajevo, producing the maps they'd give out
| to schoolchildren.
|
| - I managed a project with over 30 team members to build a system
| to help former Soviet Union countries manage their import/export
| control policies.
|
| - I helped create a system for generating some annual reports for
| Poland that was a requirememnt for them to join NATO.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Never worked for the federal government but my first "real"
| full time dev job was at a small state government agency and
| the work I did there had very visible positive effects for
| people interacting with the agency. Pay was really low though.
| dusted wrote:
| Compared to most of these comments, I've not built anything
| impactful.
|
| But the software I've written that seems to have gotten most use
| is SDL-Ball and the FinalKey password manager.
|
| Well, I also built a "digital bulletin board" for a youth org
| back when PHP was in fashion, it's no longer used, but they used
| it, and bought minor upgrades for almost 15 years, so I like to
| think it had a positive impact on that org. They ended up
| primarily using a booking system that we designed together
| exactly to fit their needs.
| waprin wrote:
| Despite being in the industry a long time, I think most of what I
| worked on had little to no impact.
|
| In terms of impacting other people, probably the biggest thing
| was blog posts and sample code. It's funny how sample code has
| less "cred" than "real" code, but if you've ever been trying to
| start a new project in a new language or framework you know how
| invaluable sample code can be.
|
| In terms of impact in general, what I'm working on now has been
| the most impactful , because it's improved my health. Im trying
| to innovate on the concept of a habit tracker. Since I started
| working on it, I've lost 10 pounds, quit drinking, went from
| about a gram of marijuana use a day to about a gram a month, quit
| addictive video games, went surfing much more consistently, and
| been able to put in many more hours of focused work than I ever
| have before despite working alone and only being accountable to
| myself.
|
| Generally when Ive gotten feedback about the project, I've gotten
| told it's too complex, people want simplicity, I should focus on
| B2B, and I shouldn't write any code at all unless I've validated
| a problem. I try to communicate to people that I don't want to
| sacrifice my own health progress to simplify things. But I am
| hoping long term I can figure out how to build a bridge between
| what's effective for myself and what's appealing and
| understandable to everyone else. Lots of work to be done! But I
| think improving my own life a lot more impact than most of the
| stuff my employers had me doing :)
| chrchang523 wrote:
| Adopted an orphaned open-source project that was still widely
| used in the genomics community, despite no updates in ~4 years.
| Used SIMD instructions, careful memory management, and other
| strategies to speed up most operations by 1-4 orders of magnitude
| and support the current generation of biobank-scale genome-wide
| association studies
| (https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/4/1/s13742-015-...
| ).
| ggambetta wrote:
| Interestingly, I think the most impactful thing I've built is
| Computer Graphics from Scratch, a book! Teaching people is high-
| impact and also super rewarding.
|
| In terms of code, probably some stuff that runs on every Android
| device (although I don't think any of my original, 2013-2014 code
| is still in use, but the project itself is very much alive)
| stevage wrote:
| Professionally, probably findmyschool.vic.gov.au. Used by
| hundreds of thousands of parents every year to find what school
| zone their house is in. Built and maintained almost entirely by
| me.
|
| Also SchoolScape, an internal department tool used by dozens of
| public servants to plan which schools need to be built or
| upgraded. I just coded it, with the hard stuff being done by
| economists. But from the feedback I get, it has made a huge
| difference to the people who do that work.
|
| As a hobby, opentrees.org. Definitely seems to have caused some
| ripples in how tree data is seen and used.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| As a Victorian parent who moves house way too often I would
| like to say thank you.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| I once built a test rig to evaluate the strength of different
| designs of CNC'd bicycle crankarms I'd made. Basically a weighted
| sled slammed into the side of a jig mounted crankarm. That was
| pretty impactful.
| dzink wrote:
| I run https://www.dreamlist.com and it's become a major, if not
| the top, online gift drive platform in the US. Anyone who knows
| families in need can organize a gift drive for them. You can add
| items to lists, lists to groups of lists, to multi-branch
| organization pages full of items wished by children and families
| who may not be able to afford gifts otherwise. It's like a Y
| Combinator for direct giving.
|
| DreamList is free to all participants in the system and I spend a
| lot of Q4 helping giant drives set up to get just the right gifts
| to many many thousands of children (some drives support 15-30,000
| children in foster care, single parent families, natural disaster
| situations, or church communities across multiple states, and we
| support an increasing number of drives). Q1-3 are spent building
| more functionality to make the next Q4 easier because it is
| inevitably bigger than the last.
| wazoox wrote:
| I designed and implemented the whole graphic system for the World
| Cup '98 (working 100h weeks for months). Billions of people have
| watched in real-time the result of my work and I earned
| absolutely nothing from it :) (there's a fun story to write about
| this, the tremendous amount of work, setting up the WAN
| connecting the SGI machines together, building the remote control
| hardware, etc).
| ashishbijlani wrote:
| I'm building Packj [1] to flag malicious/risky open-source
| dependencies. It offers "audit" as well as "sandboxing" of
| PyPI/NPM/Rubygems packages and reports hidden malware or "risky"
| code behavior such as spawning of shell, use of SSH keys, and
| mismatch of GitHub code vs packaged code (provenance). We found a
| bunch of malicious packages on PyPI/RubyGems using the tool,
| which have now been taken down.
|
| 1. https://github.com/ossillate-inc/packj
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| A few years ago we made therapeutic decision assistance software
| for use in clinical psychology. A psychologist would see a
| readout of the perceived 'engagement' in the current stimulus,
| usually a question or a task in the session, to use as a decision
| point in altering the therapy - it was moving to hear patients's
| stories. We only took on a handful, but each made trajectory
| altering changes in their lives - from one on academic probation
| to achieve honor-roll, another to releasing their anxiety to be
| more social, and a couple finding new ways to identify their ADHD
| triggers. That was impactful and meaningful work.
| maccard wrote:
| I work in video games and have worked from writing gameplay code
| all the way up to online infrastructure. It's only been
| "impactful" culturally, rather than some of the other posts. My
| top highlights are:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/sports/fortnite-world-cup...
|
| I was a programmer working on Fortnite, and I ended up working on
| the on-site fortnite events, doing everything from the custom
| cameras and broadcast specific UI, to hooking up the events in-
| game to the lights in the stadium. It was pretty cool!
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=EWANLy9TjRc - I worked on this game
| (and the demo in this video) for a few years. I wrote much of the
| code for the asset pipeline for the destruction, lots of the
| gameplay code for how it interacted with the game and a good
| chunk of optimisation on the cloud physics side.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Impactful?
|
| Designed and deployed credit card readers used in gas pumps back
| in 1979. (Sold to Gasboy)
|
| Wrote a fine tuner to allow communication between satellites
| (precursor to TDRSS days). Still used to this day.
|
| Failover of IP in ATM switches (VVRP, PXE, secondary DHCP,
| secondary DNS, secondary LDAP, secondary NFS). While not invented
| here, it is still used today as this is a Common setup to this
| day.
|
| Printer drivers for big, big high-speed Xerox printers on BSD.
| Still used to this day by big, big high-speed printers.
|
| Also, early IDS products (pre-Snort) at line-speed. Sold to
| Netscreen.
|
| Easy zero-setup of DSL modem before some BellCore decided to
| complicate things (thus exploding their field deployment budgets;
| Southwestern Bell/Qwest enjoyed our profitable zero-setup). Sold
| to Siemens.
|
| 1Gps IDS/IPS before selling it to 3Com/Hewlett-Packard Packard.
|
| Now, I'm dabbling in a few startups (JavaScript HIDS, Silent
| Connections, replacing the systemd-temp).
|
| Impact? It is more about personal pride but its impacts are still
| being felt today.
| rglover wrote:
| Obligatory: https://youtu.be/jjaqrPpdQYc?t=14
| keepquestioning wrote:
| How did you find all these product market fits?
|
| Have you made more than a typical SWE?
| nicbou wrote:
| Definitely All About Berlin. A few years ago, I started
| documenting how to deal with German bureaucracy as a foreigner.
| The website grew and grew until it became a well-known resource
| for immigrants. It has become my full-time job at some point in
| 2020.
|
| It's been a little over 5 years since I started, and I'm still
| super stoked about my work. I still enjoy doing the research,
| rewriting guides a dozen times, and answering reader mail. People
| seem really grateful for it, and it means a lot to me.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| That's awesome! Wish I had heard about it when I moved there,
| definitely going to hunt through the site to see if you have a
| guide to getting some of my pension payments refunded now that
| I've moved
| nicbou wrote:
| I do! https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pension-payments-
| refund
|
| Don't forget your tax return too. If you didn't work the full
| year, you'll get money back.
| spery wrote:
| I use your site often. Thank you for creating it, it's a great
| resource!
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