[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 : 515 points
Date : 2022-11-18 18:47 UTC (1 days ago)
| wetpaws wrote:
| An idle game about cats
| shultays wrote:
| Something small in scale but I am quite happy with it. I work as
| a game developer and in my last job I added lots of modding
| features. More scripting features, making more studf moddable,
| ability to add new ui etc. Things that allow more technical
| modders to make even more complex mods.
|
| People did a lot of stuff using those, some even surprised me. So
| all that work paid very well I think
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| After school I did an IT support role for a further education
| college.
|
| They used to spend most of the summer formatting the machines,
| reinstalling Windows, office, anti-virus etc, doing them manually
| a classroom at a time.
|
| We replaced it with a system of hidden partitions and a disk
| image, then the ability to trigger a refresh remotely if pre-
| requisites were met.
|
| This is common practice nowadays, but it was quite innovative at
| the time, and we had to write a lot of the code ourselves for
| remote admin and to make the disk refresh reliably.
|
| We could then click a button and refresh ~500 machines in the
| space of an hour as opposed to 6 weeks of manual labour.
|
| I've worked on more prestigious stuff, but that was the most
| satisfying and the most obvious avoidance of manual efforts.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I helped design a portable home kidney dialysis machine, it's now
| called the Outset Medical Tablo. I've designed a bunch of medical
| devices but I think this one has had the biggest impact so far.
| 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.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Yeah, just a few weeks ago I saw an ad for an institutional
| real-estate investing platform that buys single-family homes.
| Not every software should be built.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I dunno, I haven't build anything impactful either, and I got
| in relatively early (early enough to build Facebook/Google). I
| imagine that's true for lots of people.
|
| I have a humongous list of failed stuff though, so much that
| when I look back I wonder why I couldn't just stick with any
| given thing.
| dvko wrote:
| You're not alone. I've been doing better in the last few years
| but when I was just starting out as a web developer set on
| building a successful SAAS, a lot of them were
| marketing/advertising related. One of them is a pop-up
| builder... Sorry!
|
| It still brings in some revenue but I have been intentionally
| neglecting it for years now, as I personally hate those things
| with a vengeance. But still, I don't pull the plug on it.
| pryelluw wrote:
| Hard to choose. Here's a short list of favorites:
|
| - PyATL (Python Atlanta). Group already existed. Didn't build it
| from scratch. Adapting to the pandemic and pivoting to keep the
| community strong was a challenge. We made it through and now
| better than ever.
|
| - Worked on ESG software. Helping people invest according to
| their values. Most people are good. Means the software shifts
| investments from shitty companies to better ones (IMHO).
|
| - Fixed part of the MCAT registration portal performance a short
| while back. It went from definitely not able to handle scale to
| being resilient.
|
| - Worked on Fieldscope. An important scientific app used for
| environmental research like the Chesapeake Bay cleanup project.
| Flash in 2018 was a nightmare but made it work.
|
| - All the smaller open source contributions that help remove
| paper cut level issues from projects. That way maintainers can
| focus on making the bigger impact.
|
| I know this was rather off topic. We don't usually get to share
| this. It's nice to signal to others that they can make a
| difference at all levels. You can make the world better right now
| and right where you are. Go!
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| Software for Navy RDCs - they basically double data entry info
| during recruit training on a paper in the day, then re enter it
| into their systems at night in personal time. made a fully
| offline capable little SPA to track the data and sync it later.
| saved 100s of hours each cycle. was challenging (pwa talking to
| soap..) but felt good
|
| then it got pulled, shelved and never saw the light of day but
| this was after our time as contractors and i never heard why. but
| it's probably my most meaningful development aside some niche
| detection and warning sensor products
| Avisite wrote:
| A while back I made a mod for fallout new Vegas that has around
| 50k downloads now https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/56786/
| Recently while watching YouTube I came across the firearms expert
| reacts guy reacting to fallout new Vegas mods guns. I was
| surprised to see the mine on a stick made it into that video
| https://youtu.be/xBMgQH9I8is
| mav88 wrote:
| The whole back end for a TV solution that worked on mobiles and
| over Edge connections - 64kbps - for millions of users in Africa.
| garyrob wrote:
| A statistical technique I developed was incorporated into a
| number of award-winning spam filters, including SpamAssassin.[1]
|
| I'm also apparently the original inventor of the tracking cookie,
| which had the implication that no one was able to patent it. It
| was presented in a patent of mine[2] that was about a
| collaborative filtering technique for recommending ads; I'd come
| up with the tracking cookie mechanism to support that technique.
| So, it didn't attempt to patent the tracking cookie separately;
| but because it was the first publication describing the method,
| no one else could patent it either. In 2021 a joint legal brief
| filed by Google and Twitter together, defending themselves
| against a patent troll, called it "Robinson's Cookie". My patent
| is owned by Google now. It contained a lot of details for giving
| users control of the data derived from tracking; that part was
| pretty much ignored by people implementing it.
|
| [1] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6467 [2]
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US5918014A
| garyrob wrote:
| The spam filter stuff used Paul Graham's word probabilities
| described in his seminal article A Plan For Spam. It changed
| those probabilities a bit, to better account for the number of
| emails a word appeared in. But in the main, my article was
| about a statistical method (NOT Bayesian) for combining those
| probabilities. The word probabilities were Bayesian, but the
| way of combining them used frequentist statistics. Even so,
| spam filters that used the technique were always referred to as
| Bayesian as if nothing frequentist was involved.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Legendary story, we've used your spam filter contributions -
| thank you!
| muddi900 wrote:
| A Python script full of spaghetti code I worte for my family
| business.
|
| It syncs their various ecommerce channels into a single Google
| Sheets. I wrote over two weeks during the early days of lockdowns
| because they had to pivot to ecommerce _fast_.
|
| I have been making it more efficient since but it is a lot of
| spaghetti code.
|
| It has saved the business about 20,000 hours.
| 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.
| dvko wrote:
| Awesome story, well done putting it out there, glad nobody
| abused it and thanks for sharing!
| ashishknitcs wrote:
| An on-prem CDN for enterprise level video streaming on LAN/WAN in
| and geographically distributed branch offices.
|
| Used wowza, nginx, python-flask
| smcameron wrote:
| Hmm, feel pretty small compared to many here.
|
| Probably most impactful, I wrote the linux driver for HP's (now
| PMC Sierra's?) SmartArray RAID controllers, of which many
| millions were sold, most inside HP servers.
|
| Back in 2009-2012, I built a cyclekart[1] in my driveway, and
| documented it on youtube[2]. Back then almost nobody was building
| cyclekarts, apart from the original inventors, the Stevensons.
| Many people have told me my videos inspired them to build their
| own cyclekarts, (maybe because I succeeded despite obviously not
| knowing what the hell I was doing) and today there is a thriving
| worldwide cyclekart community. I don't know for sure how much
| difference my videos made, but I like to think I had a hand in
| popularizing the hobby.
|
| In the hobby software world, I made Space Nerds in Space[3], but
| I don't think that was very impactful, as nobody plays this game
| because it's too hard to gather together a crew, but as part of
| making that game, I made gaseous-giganticus[4], which creates
| textures for gas-giant planets, and has been used by people
| creating mods for Kerbal Space Program, and I haven't seen a
| _better_ gas giant texture generator out there yet, despite that
| there are some obvious (but difficult) avenues to pursue.
|
| [1] https://cyclekarts.com/ [2]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaNHLvHGONc&list=PLcSUyKz3gf...
| [3] https://spacenerdsinspace.com [4]
| https://github.com/smcameron/gaseous-giganticus
| _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.
| lucb1e wrote:
| To check my understanding: this is about changing the order of
| vaccinations rather than speeding up vaccinations right?
| [deleted]
| syndacks wrote:
| I spent several years writing a book. It hasn't been published or
| anything, but creating something from nothing and having it be
| 100% mine is an accomplishment no other compares to.
| benburleson wrote:
| I built a little Golang lambda on top of Unidoc/Unipdf to simply
| populate form fields on PDFs and return a combined and flattened
| PDF. Nothing fancy, but it's fast and reliable and replaces a use
| case we had for DocuSign (very slow), saving hundreds of
| thousands of dollars per year.
| 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 :)
| xgbi wrote:
| I helped build the Linphone app (voip) that Navalny used to out
| his poisoners.
|
| When I watched this video I was flabbergasted.
| spullara wrote:
| For 7+ years mustache.java rendered all the web pages and all of
| the emails for Twitter. It just does the emails now - they
| switched to React Native for web. I created it to render my 20k
| user web site.
|
| https://javarants.com/the-ideal-web-application-templating-s...
| semireg wrote:
| Over the last 4 years I built a label design and print app using
| Electron/React. It has 5000+ desktop users and will reach 7
| figures in revenue in the next year. I recently launched a new
| thermal label printer brand named mydpi. Right now I'm selling a
| 300 DPI direct-thermal version to compete with DYMO and low-end
| Zebra. In a month I'll launch a thermal-transfer version with
| bundled ribbon/labels. I never thought I'd play in the "label
| printer" niche, because honestly, I hate printing labels... but
| my app makes it possible to easily achieve impressive results.
| I'm also working on a cloud-based renderer that will make user's
| designs available as an API that accepts variables for inside the
| label and returns a rasterized image or the specific-printer-
| language to print the result.
|
| My life's work...
|
| https://label.live and https://mydpi.com
| lxe wrote:
| I just watched the entire label live video demonstrating the
| features. Looks super solid and easy to understand. Great UX
| all around. Nice work.
| abruzzi wrote:
| a system for tracking gas turbine and diesel engine parts, the
| engines they were installed on, and the ships the engines were in
| or docks they were stored at for one particular division of the
| US Navy.
| timwaagh wrote:
| I contributed to the software for a new environmental regulation
| that makes flights more expensive. Every person flying from my
| country is affected. I am still wondering whether the
| environmental gains weigh up to the amount of young people who
| won't be enjoying their first vacation because of it. But I guess
| those are matters for politicians, not lowly programmers.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I guess a proxy plugin for IIS and Apache, with extension points
| in shared libraries and TCL scripts, that our customer support
| team discovered and used it for stuff I never considered in first
| place.
|
| Back in the good old .com days.
|
| There were others, but this is probably still the top one.
| fimdomeio wrote:
| Hard to measure, but I would say that from 2001 - 2003 I created
| an then co-ran the most well known punk rock website in Portugal.
| This was way before I knew how to code and before facebook events
| became a thing, so it was a really valueable source of
| information for the comunnity.
| 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...
| cjg wrote:
| Contributed a patch to the Java String class that caches the hash
| code.
| cjcenizal wrote:
| flexboxpatterns.com -- I don't have a way to measure its actual
| impact on folks, but it's still kicking around and getting
| traffic after 7 years.
| 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.
| dubcee349 wrote:
| That is awesome. Great work.
| akrymski wrote:
| Is this a startup? Does it have a name?
| jv22222 wrote:
| ModernTeacher.com - The platform has helped 1000's of schools
| modernize learning away from traditional 1900's style classrooms
| to a modern blended approach. It's not just about technology it's
| also about curriculum, classroom layout, adaptive learning per
| child etc.
| frellus wrote:
| anyone who does something in the educational space .. that's an
| upvote from me!
| 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.
| sbisson wrote:
| Two things for me. An electromagnetics finite element analysis
| package that was then used to design the actuators for the
| landing gear for the 737NG-series; where millions of people's
| lives have depended on that landing gear working. And the
| coupling filters for the HF amplifiers in the Australian over-
| the-horizon radar array.
|
| In all these I was only part of the project, but everyone's work
| added up.
| agentq wrote:
| I researched & prototyped (in R), and ultimately put into
| production (C++) a core set of spectral risk analysis analytics
| that replaced outdated VaR and vol forecasts for an extremely
| large asset management firm and left immediately afterwards.
| Technically speaking, guided risk mgmt/investment decisions at
| the trillion-dollar scale, ran as-is for 8-10 years before being
| recently re-implemented in some other language.
| wspeirs wrote:
| I'm the father of 2 children.
| warangal wrote:
| We are two friends working on a native app to analyze videos
| using computer-vision [0]. We have been developing it for more
| than 2 years, to make sure it works in real-time for all CPUs.
| Not sure about impact but it is really cool to play and analyze
| videos in real time and help unlock some of the values stored in
| lot of video libraries. [0]
| https://ramanlabs.in/static/videointel.html
| password4321 wrote:
| Perhaps somewhat bold to insert your beta into the
| conversation, but I'm actually looking for something like this
| to catalog home video - especially faces, speech, and speaker.
| cpa wrote:
| Although I did not build it as in "I've coded it myself", I've
| designed and supervised the implementation of all the digital
| systems of the COVID vaccination campaign in France (supply
| management, logistics, side effects monitoring, vaccination
| certificate generation, open data...).
|
| It was hectic, I knew nothing about the health industry
| beforehand and the deadlines kept shortening, but we delivered
| products that worked, on time and had no major incidents.
|
| 10/10 would never ever do it again.
| citilife wrote:
| Anti-fraud detection system at a major bank. Reduced fraud by
| around $3-5m per day.
|
| A close second was a script I wrote at a collections agency to
| pull and write off the max amount of debt allowed (per company &
| partners policy) per day. Would write off medical debt for a few
| thousand people a week.
| 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.
| krashidov wrote:
| haha this is sweet, did you monetize it? Did you make your
| money back from buying all those phones or just consider a tax
| for making a cool app?
| rkagerer wrote:
| How many Android phones does it take to turn on a lightbulb
| ...sorry.
| Bacito wrote:
| Around 200 ;)
| 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.
| [deleted]
| powerpurple wrote:
| Impactful? Not sure but I'm proud about it.
|
| In high school I started a private torrent tracker with open
| source projects. At the time I was pretty new to programming and
| was gluing things together and slowly after years I started
| getting a lot of traffic. I was getting good at programming as
| well, forked the project multiple features addition, dedicated
| servers and just doing it all.
|
| It used get a daily 1 million visits with 4-5k unique visits
| every day and slowly we breached the top 25 websites in our
| country and somewhere around under ~10k in Alexa ranking. But
| that's when things started getting a bit heated, I had to be more
| cautious about my footprint and what started something as hobby
| consuming a lot of my energy.
|
| I really liked it but the fact that I couldn't talk or share
| about it to anyone was a bummer. I just had it, made a lot of
| money while I was in school blew it all up quickly but only a
| handful of irl people knew.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Built a scheduling system used by my organization and several
| related organizations. Has been in use for a few years, and is
| the central scheduling system.
| 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
| lucb1e wrote:
| > the first memory hard Proof-of-Work puzzle
|
| Scrypt is from 2009, per Wikipedia. That's memory hard, and
| using hashes with some zeroed out bits is a thing done for a
| long time (Bitcoin 2009; some old meaning of "cryptographic
| pepper" (fallen out of use) that iirc dates back to the 90s).
| Am I misunderstanding what you built?
| adastra22 wrote:
| SCrypt was thought to be memory hard. It was not, and making
| asics for it ended up being pretty trivial.
| tromp wrote:
| Scrypt _is_ memory hard. The reason ASICs were easy to make
| was the small memory requirement chosen to make PoW
| verification not too slow.
| tromp wrote:
| Scrypt [1] is a password based key derivation function
| (PBKDF), which can be used as a hash function that takes a
| configurable amount of memory to compute.
|
| The reason it makes a very poor PoW (as choice of hash
| function in the Hashcash Proof-of-Work) is that the PoW
| verifier needs as much memory as the PoW prover, whereas a
| good PoW should be instantly verifiable.
|
| This is why blockchains using scrypt as hash function
| severely limit the amount of memory used (usually to 128KB).
| So that verification, while slow, is not horribly slow.
|
| Cuckoo Cycle also requires a configurable amount of memory to
| solve (subject to certain tradeoffs), but crucially, can be
| instantly verified with no memory use at all. And thus makes
| for a good PoW.
|
| In the form of the Cuckatoo32 variant that most mining takes
| place with, it requires 0.5 GB of SRAM and 0.5 GB of DRAM to
| solve most efficiently.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt
| lucb1e wrote:
| > the PoW verifier needs as much memory as the PoW prover,
| whereas a good PoW should be instantly verifiable
|
| Ooh, yes I see, that is a big difference. Cool work!
| mystickphoenix wrote:
| One of my first developer projects. Was working for a GIS company
| reverse engineering ancient geospatial databases (and our own).
| Nothing had foreign keys, there was a "global connection table"
| that provided many-many-joins, primary keys were strings, etc.
| Hundreds of tables and thousands of columns.
|
| Most of our days on the data migration team were spent tracking
| down missing connections between entities, inconsistencies in the
| data that our clients had found, etc. I took a "find a string in
| every column" stored procedure and rewrote it as a python desktop
| app. Once the basic functionality was there I multithreaded it to
| run each query simultaneously. After that, I provided a graph-
| layout GUI that the users could click through and build their
| queries dynamically based on existing connections they'd already
| found.
|
| No idea if it's still a thing anymore but it was amazing for my
| team. We went from guessing at relationships between entities
| because we didn't want to wait for the stored proc to run for
| hours to knowing which entities had what relationships in
| minutes. Single best thing I've ever written.
| tmilard wrote:
| In the 2005 I published a guide (cafes-wifi.com) to 130 cafes in
| Paris with good free wifi and electrical plug. Tested myself.
| Made it for my friends, nomad software workers. But quickly
| became a big success among many nomads workers but also tourists
| in Paris who needed connexion.
|
| In 2017 The website was closed.
|
| Overall for a decade I had 10.000 unik visitors / month.
| Impactfull I would say
| kaveh808 wrote:
| Probably the 3D animation code I wrote early in my career, which
| was then used to animate the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park".
| nickkell wrote:
| Do you know unix?
| kaveh808 wrote:
| I've worked with a number of Unix variants over the years.
| This animation code was developed on SGI IRIX.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Pokemon GO.
|
| It was such a surreal moment to finally leave the office after
| months of crunch time, walk out into the sunshine for lunch for
| the first time and see almost every person on the street playing
| the game.
| Jamie9912 wrote:
| You personally made Pokemon GO?
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Bits of it. I wrote the code to figure out where on the
| planet all the pokestops and gyms should go, for example[1].
| But there were five other backend engineers by the time we
| launched, plus a bunch of front end people, artists, etc.
|
| [1] To be extra-clear, all code in the game was touched by
| more than one person, every one of them better engineers than
| I am.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Your experience needs to be documented for history.
| Seriously. The people, personalities, the development
| setups, the day to day creation - all that is of keen
| interest to millions.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| I'll write it up.
| dang wrote:
| If you do, let use know at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll
| put it in the second-chance pool
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it
| will get a random placement on HN's front page.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Will do! Thanks.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| Being an extensive ingress player, i'm quite surprised at
| this considering this should have been ingress code to
| begin with. Did pogo not share much code with ingress, just
| the dataset?
| 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.
| colecut wrote:
| It is amazing how much you can do with code when you only have
| minimal knowledge and the desire to make something work, before
| having ideas of "how it should be done" or "how to do it right"
| cpsns wrote:
| Nothing, I have realized nothing I have ever built actually
| mattered. Some of it made a bit more money, but none was
| impactful.
|
| It's actually really hard to deal with.
| franze wrote:
| thinking, in the end what had the most impact was not what I
| built / specified but what I teached - and other built on that
| knowledge. So the most impactful was a book.
| random3 wrote:
| Created the first data team in 30yo corporation in 2007-2008 that
| shifted the company from proprietary to open-source tech.
|
| A cookie store handling over 50B transactions/day for over 1T
| profiles
|
| The London Olympics realtime (online) video analytics able to
| handle over 3M streams on 10 servers (physical).
|
| The March Madness realtime online video analytics
|
| The first realtime distributed OLAP cube
|
| Sold then built then launched a financing tech service to a large
| bank. Bootstrapped :) Never had more than 2 engineers including
| myself. System is still live.
| monkeycantype wrote:
| I've developed an application that presents information about a
| patient's circulatory system to anaesthetists during surgery to
| give them clearer information about the patients heart and
| vasculature so that they can make finer grained, individualised
| treatment decisions. There's currently only a small group of
| users, as we haven't been able to afford to go through clinical
| trials yet, but the evidence is mounting that it is getting
| patients through surgery with fewer complications and better
| prospects of a full fast recovery. I've been in the theatre and
| watched someone wake up after a 9 hour surgery and instantly be
| alert enough to say they'd like a cup of tea, which the
| anaesthetist attributed to the decisions he was able to make
| informed by the software. It seems as if it has already had an
| significant positive impact on the health of the people treated
| by anaesthetists using the software. If further studies support
| the anecdotal evidence from our users, the software might have a
| significant impact on millions of people.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| Would love to hear more. Discussed this sort of possibility
| with an anesthetist friend at length and heard all about the
| importance of intuition. And limitation/absurdities of existing
| technologies ("humans aren't a solid ball of fat and flesh!").
|
| Clinical trials sound incredibly difficult to achieve - such a
| slow industry!
| WndlB wrote:
| A whole bunch of labor agreements that extended our operations
| over thousands of new route miles. Got pretty much had what both
| labor and management really needed, got ratified by membership,
| worked decently in the real world.
|
| I used Microsoft Word.
| mooreds wrote:
| The written word is underestimated as a tool of leverage by
| many technologists.
| davidshepherd7 wrote:
| The company I work for has saved people and businesses in West
| Africa roughly $1B in banking fees this year.
|
| It's a big company but I'm really proud to have done my part
| towards this.
| 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
| azherebtsov wrote:
| I was working on a suite of projects to compose briefing packages
| for pilots. Before pandemic the result of this work was present
| in ~1/7 cockpits around the planet. I cannot count how many
| millions of passengers impacted by this, in a positive way of
| thinking of course. I was not alone, these software products are
| joint efforts of many-many smart people. The funny thing about
| that impact is that there should not be impact on crew and
| passengers - everyone love safe flights performed on time.
| cpojer wrote:
| I didn't start Jest, but I made it what it is today.
| 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.
| didip wrote:
| Once upon a time, I sped up Tornado Web Framework by quite a bit.
|
| I used to write one or two popular Go libraries.
|
| There are (or were?) big McRouter + Memcache clusters behind New
| Relic. I prototyped that and deployed to prod in ~3 weeks.
|
| I was one of the few engineers that introduced Go to New Relic.
|
| These days I would send small patches to Apache Druid.
|
| Besides Druid work, I can't really say all the cool things I do
| these days.
| 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.
| ill0gicity wrote:
| Most impactful? Wrote a Slack chatbot that allowed on-call
| operations engineers to leave their laptops in their cars. The
| bot could help investigate, diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve
| issues ranging from single-site slowness to service outages. It
| talked to databases, CDNs, caching layers, logging
| infrastructure, servers, load-balancers, and routers. Access was
| controlled using a tree permission scheme with user and group
| permissions. Informational commands were generally left open to
| all engineers and actions were tightly controlled.
| ZachSaucier wrote:
| Customizable, feature packed read mode that is used by a lot of
| teachers and people with disabilities: https://justread.link/
| 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.
| suprjami wrote:
| In 2012 I was running a Minecraft server for a friend and wrote
| an initscript to handle it as a daemon, do backups, etc. I threw
| it up on GitHub and didn't expect anyone to see it. A couple of
| years later I learnt it was used on commercial Minecraft hosts.
| Was pretty cool to have built something that other people could
| tangibly use as income.
|
| I also ratelimited logging in Linux cifs. Now a spammy log
| message can't hang or panic a client system.
|
| That's probably technically and commercially more impactful but I
| like my Minecraft script more personally.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Our zero-downtime release process (brainstormed and built with
| one other dev).
|
| We went from 2-4 hours of downtime for every release to sometimes
| going over a year between order gap-inducing downtimes.
|
| Some trickery with database views to merge multiple transactional
| databases, scripts, a script execution structure, and a list of
| fairly straightforward rules to follow were the only technical
| parts needed.
|
| It was in prod from August 2005 through March 2022 and likely
| saved 60-100 hours per year of downtime (annoyance for users and
| revenue loss for the company).
| chx wrote:
| NowPublic, while being a citizenship journalism site had a
| Katrina missing persons board which was much, much more popular
| than the site itself ever was.
| [deleted]
| tech-historian wrote:
| Probably the thing I feel best about is the museum I made with my
| son that educates people about how older versions of websites,
| operating systems, and apps used to look:
|
| https://www.versionmuseum.com/
|
| I don't want people to forget our "technology heritage," if that
| makes sense.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Spent the last hour binging - incredible what UIs I haven't
| seen before. Do you have a monthly donation option?
| ParanoidShroom wrote:
| A bunch of captcha OCR software 10 years ago, recaptha(45%
| success), various file sharing captchas like megaupload etc. It
| used a neural network before it became cool. Bit embarrassed
| about the destructive nature, caused a lot of spam for services
| like twitter. I was a broke student, too bad these things don't
| have w good future
| DarkContinent wrote:
| I'm a fairly junior engineer at a subsidiary of one of the big 4.
| Before that, I was at a well-known big box store working on a few
| different projects.
|
| The most impactful thing I delivered at my previous company was a
| script that moved all of our team's data from a self-hosted db to
| something on company cloud that was a lot more stable. The script
| itself wasn't very complicated (essentially just mongodump and
| mongorestore), but it made a big impact on ensuring that our
| team's dataset search tool would continue to be accessible to
| regulatory compliance folks. In turn, the regulatory people could
| use the tool to protect the company from getting fined under
| CCPA, etc.
|
| It made a pretty big impression on me that something incredibly
| simple like that could make as much financial impact in
| expectation as that script did. Now when I mentor interns and
| newer, more junior people, I always tell that story as an example
| of how high impact can be surprisingly uncomplicated.
| sideproject wrote:
| I started an indie side project marketplace in 2014 called
| SideProjectors.
|
| https://sideprojectors.com
|
| Back then Flippa was probably the only dominant online
| marketplace for digital businesses.
|
| It's a big claim I know but I'm proud that the marketplace still
| is thriving and since then there has been dozens of similar
| marketplaces popped up. Also in the past few years it's been so
| much easier for anyone to start online projects with various
| nocode tools and all.
|
| Can't say how impactful it has been, but I'm happy how far it has
| come.
| CM30 wrote:
| Hmm good question. On the one hand, I work for a very large
| company as a software engineer at the moment, and the team I'm on
| handles their public website. So anything on the site home page
| (or site wide) would count. I've also worked with companies who
| have had other large corporations as clients, and have worked on
| things like CRO tests and full website redesigns for them. So any
| one of the things I've worked on in a professional capacity could
| count.
|
| But at the same time, my personal websites and videos have had a
| pretty big impact too, with a fair few of the latter reaching
| over a million views, and a few articles on the former getting
| covered by all kinds of news publications and getting a good
| number of views there too.
|
| So it's hard to be sure.
| ipnon wrote:
| The impact was terribly negative. I worked for a couple of years
| on a CMS for health insurance companies. It was purchased for
| exorbitant sums by companies around the country. It never worked.
| Millions of Americans saw increases to their already expensive
| medical insurance for no benefit, and I contributed. It would be
| easy to say I needed the money and the company bears the ultimate
| responsibility, but my code is still running accomplishing
| nothing and costing much to people who can't afford it. Now the
| company is slowly dying and nothing of value will be lost when
| it's gone.
| 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.
| jeremi23 wrote:
| An open source social protection platform to deliver food or cash
| to the most vulnerables populations: openspp.org . I have been
| working on social protection platforms with my company for almost
| 6 years, solution we built has been used to distribute billions
| of dollars of assistance to people in over 40 countries. We are
| now implementing one in open source that is being implemented in
| a middle east country and few other countries are interested.
|
| Edit: Typo
| 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.
| is_true wrote:
| Is there a place to read more about that?
| mabbo wrote:
| A pipeline approval tool (internal at Amazon) that counts
| metrics.
|
| I was a fairly fresh college-hire SDE1 at Amazon. And I was
| annoyed, because I'm lazy. Every time I was oncall, I had to
| manage the deployment pipeline for my teams software- the UI for
| the tool used by Pickers inside Amazon Warehouses. On Monday,
| deploy the latest changes to the China stack (small). On Tuesday,
| check if anything bad happened, and then deploy to the Japan
| stack (small-ish). On Wednesday, Europe (big). Thursday, North
| America (biggest). Repeat each week.
|
| And I thought "why am I doing this? There are APIs for all of
| this stuff!". So I made an automated workflow that hooked into
| the pipeline system. You gave a metric to look for, a count of
| how many times the thing should have happened, and an alarm to
| monitor. If everything looks good, it approves. I hooked it up
| for my pipeline, and then it usually finished the entire weekly
| push before Tuesday afternoon. I made it in about 2 weekends on
| my own time.
|
| And I left it open for anyone in the company to configure for
| their own pipelines. A few weeks later I was checking if it was
| still operating normally and realized there were something like
| 50 teams using it. Then 100. Then a lot more.
|
| The last I heard, it's considered a best practice for all teams
| within the company to use it on their pipelines. Before I left in
| 2021, it was running something like 10,000 approval workflows per
| day.
|
| I named it after the BBQ/grilling meat thermometer in my kitchen
| drawer- "RediFork". Given the overlap of "people who read HN" and
| "devs who worked at Amazon", I probably saved someone reading
| this an aggregate hour or two of work.
| ignoramous wrote:
| I had always wondered why it was called "RediFork"... thought
| it might have been using Redis or something.
|
| Thank you for creating it!
| mabbo wrote:
| Literally stole it from this:
| https://www.amazon.com/Maverick-RediFork-Rapid-Matrix-
| Thermo...
|
| Eg: Stick a fork in it and see if it's done yet
| ForrestN wrote:
| Contemporary Art Library, a massive non-profit archive of
| documentation that will organize, preserve and make accessible
| the art history of our time[1]. How long that will take depends
| on the extent to which we can learn how to fundraise, but we
| already have more than 400,000 pieces of media (images, documents
| and video) documenting exhibitions, performances and other public
| artist activity from all over the world. If anyone knows any
| internet-friendly funders that might want to help accelerate our
| efforts, let me know! [2]
|
| I created the organization, did the design and helped a colleague
| building the software. We've had more than 4 million visits from
| 300k+ users (distributed throughout the world, roughly in
| proportion to the interest in contemporary art in those
| countries) and continue to grow most months.
|
| [1] https://contemporaryartlibrary.org
|
| [2] forrest -at- contemporaryartlibrary.org
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| https://boxprover.utr.dk
|
| It's an online tool for writing, checking and typesetting Fitch-
| style proofs in first-order logic, using the Twelf proof
| assistant under the hood. Its main feature is that it follows the
| notation from the teaching material 1-1 and offers no assistance
| in terms of proof tactics in order to help tech the fundamentals
| of doing formal proofs while still providing feedback when you
| make mistakes.
|
| I built it while TAing a course in logic about 7 years ago, and
| it is still being used to this day.
| deutz_allis wrote:
| I built an automation on a form for students who have free-time
| during lunch. Admin wanted some accountability on where students
| were. The form allows teachers to set limits on the attendance
| for the room, records names and emails every day and keeps a
| record of who was signed up to go somewhere on a given day.
|
| helps teachers stay organized and helps keeps the students
| accountable. Its simple, quick and eliminated paper hall passes
| etc...
|
| it is small and quiet. But the students use and respect it the
| admin appreciate the simple records it keeps and teachers like
| the extra time they get avoiding paper sign ins.
| 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.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Wow, that's fantastic work! Hopefully you haven't been turned
| off of gov work forever, there are now more and more programs
| to bring in tech talent (e.g. the Presidential Innovation
| Fellowship, TechCongress, USDS, U.S. Digital Corps) at more
| reasonable pay scales for impactful roles. May be worth
| checking out if you want to do it again
| 616c wrote:
| Sadly true and relatable. Thanks for fighting that good fight.
| polynomial wrote:
| Related: What are the most salient lines of code you've written?
| not_the_nsa wrote:
| I was first in, best dressed to write the R API wrapper for an
| open source server (ODK Central). Proceeded to go through open
| source peer review at rOpenSci and made it a robust R package
| that is now used by a good few people.
|
| The package is of course nothing HN worthy, but I'm proud of
| having contributed something back to FOSS.
|
| The crunchy bit was parsing form data by introspecting a form
| schema (then XML, now JSON) which initially nearly made me lose
| my mind, hence the package name "ruODK"?
| JaggerFoo wrote:
| #1 Computer simulation of automobile emissions testing, that
| proved more stringent emission standards could be implemented in
| the state of California.
|
| #2 Space shuttle launch system programming
| viiralvx wrote:
| I was an early part of the team that helped build GitHub Actions.
| It had some crazy moments of flying for impromptu meetings and
| rewriting parts of the system (three times) to what Actions
| became today, but overall, I think its the most impactful thing
| I've worked on in my career yet. Seeing it go from its infancy to
| where it is today (even though I've since left GitHub) is
| amazing.
| aviditas wrote:
| I wrote a data integration between two internal, siloed tools at
| a major ISP. This let me build security alerting on social
| engineering attempts and successful compromises. These se
| campaigns were using information from other corporate and gov
| data breaches to access accounts that had not been setup with
| pins/passphrases, and going for quantity over quality for
| targets. Anyone was fair game to them and if they couldn't steal
| money then they'd resell the access and PII to even more unsavory
| types for identity theft. At the time, if a caller had the
| account holder's PII, they'd be able make limited changes to the
| account. Unfortunately, those 'limited' changes were things like
| forwarding phone or email service. They did pool the data
| eventually and the alerts continue to be used today to identify
| compromise and lock email/phone to prevent them from being used
| for bank fraud. The reduction of financial fraud on normal people
| was significant. My work kicked off a ton of other initiatives to
| prevent other avenues of compromise as well. I went from working
| customer compromise investigations in the scale of thousands a
| year to a few hundred after implementation. Having clear data of
| malicious access that couldn't be ignored prompted those
| initiatives to be seriously funded and maintained. Moving from
| reactive to proactive on these was very satisfying.
| FpUser wrote:
| I wrote what was most likely the very first real time internet
| auction with browser front end some time I think in 94. For
| backend I just wrote a little native webserver that along with
| handling http also implemented all business rules. It was
| business to business and replaced dial-in phone based system
| working on mainframe.
|
| Not sure about impact, most likely miniscule and I have designed
| and implemented much bigger software systems later on but for
| some unknown reason I feel particularly warm about that auction
| thingy.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| A friend and I built a site and app (latest version of the app
| with a third friend) for finding public pinball machines to play
| - https://pinballmap.com/
|
| 14 years later and it's still going strong!
| sitkack wrote:
| I used this in France and Germany on trips. I am in the states.
| Thank you!
| 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.
| [deleted]
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Sadly I never/rarely get to see the impact of my code and a lot
| of the time my contribution is to the team who delivered, so more
| like a bee colony making the honey. That said I think back to
| making systems for fire stations and hospitals to help roster
| their staff. These systems should have gave the staff an easier
| time swapping shifts and suchlike. I hope it was good for them!
| js2 wrote:
| With my wife, I built two kids both in college now. That's
| definitely the most impactful.
|
| In the online world, I've contributed bits and pieces to open-
| source here and there as far back as the late 90s. I think my
| first contribution was to the shadow package, but I've
| contributed to Apache, Radius, git, random packages that I use
| that I discover bugs in, etc.
|
| A python script I wrote to allow folks to bypass AT&T's
| residential gateway was used by more people than I ever expected:
|
| https://github.com/jaysoffian/eap_proxy
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| Not to flex too much, I raised a pretty good couple of kids that
| I am proud of.
| eKIK wrote:
| I'm one of the co-founders of Hotjar, so a fair bit of the
| original code was mine. Most of it has obviously been replaced by
| others after all these years.
|
| I'm equally, if not more, proud of an extremely bad Dig Dug clone
| I made in Amos Pro as a kid though :). That's what eventually
| caused me to pursue a career in software development.
| alfl wrote:
| Fun question to reflect on answering! It's all about teamwork!
| I'm defining "impact" as user count:
|
| About 8 years ago I built (as tech lead) a very simple commenting
| system that is seen by about a million people a day with several
| thousand DAUs.
|
| I also made a triple-A cricket video game that was huge in India
| (batsman and umpire AI, some physics).
|
| Made (as enterprise architect) a mobile banking app for a bank
| with several million customers.
| raphaelmerx wrote:
| A translator app/website for the Tetun language, which now has
| over 50,000 monthly active users: https://tetun.org
|
| Tetun is the national language in Timor-Leste, and it's not
| available on Google Translate. Most of my users are Timorese
| students translating educational content from English to Tetun.
| Lapsa wrote:
| patched tmux to have 24 bit color support
| 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.
| hakfoo wrote:
| A custom feature-flag system for my current firm. It lets them
| roll out things unattended ("add 2% of users every day until it's
| fully on"), gated in ways that fit their business structure.
|
| We're in a space(payments) where deployment is a tightly managed
| compliance thing, and people get very touchy about specific
| assumed behaviour. A lot of support inquiries are literally "you
| just fixed things and got fully certified to be compliant with a
| third-party service? But we LIKED the old behaviour!"
|
| Feature flags have lowered the tension. We can put sensitive
| customers into a penalty box until they're ready to use the
| updated feature, and if something blows up too badly, we just
| entirely deactivate the change until it can be properly fixed,
| with a few clicks. Virtually any significant project has one or
| more flags, and it's ,mostly been a "alternate Fridays are for
| side projects" sort of task.
| sharmi wrote:
| I built a word exploration site niftyword.com. It is used by
| around 200K people a month. At it's peak it was used by half a
| million people a month. It is useful enough for some people that
| random strangers email when I am careless enough to let it go
| down :)
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Not really relevant anymore, but back in the day,
| nodebeginner.org did help a lot of people to get into Node.js
| development I think.
| holoduke wrote:
| I created some of the early Android and ios football result apps
| back in 2011. I used to work as a regular dev and became
| relatively rich somewhere in 2013. It gave me room to start other
| businesses and become financially independent.
| memorable wrote:
| I don't know if this is impactful, but the projecy that reached
| out to the most people that I can think of is Mil[0]. It is a
| small stack-based language that I wrote in C as a learning
| language. I first showcased it on HN, thinking nothing much than
| to get feedback. It turned out to do decently well in views and
| reach, even reaching out to the Chinese tech community because
| someone posted it on a Chinese social website (I forgot the
| domain name).
|
| Even though Mil's popularity is pretty typical of my other
| projects, but seeing it going out to other social media is pretty
| cool.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/HoangTuan110/mil
| mikewarot wrote:
| I wrote Forth/2, a native code direct threaded Forth for OS/2.
| Brian Matthewson wrote an excellent manual for it.
| fpdavis wrote:
| I don't have one big thing, but several small things that I am
| proud of having done. I wrote an application to assist in
| comprehensive cardio and vascular screenings that has been used
| to [hopefully] save many lives. I wrote an application to process
| prescription orders using HL7 for a national hospital system to
| print out shipping labels for their prescriptions. I designed a
| never implemented system to allow patients to securely control,
| share and revoke, their medical information between pharmacies,
| doctors, and other health care providers (if such a system were
| ever implemented it would have a tremendously positive effect for
| a lot of people). I wrote a Memcached port for Windows. A couple
| of libraries to assist other developers. My proudest
| accomplishment though has probably been mentoring new software
| developers.
| cdavid wrote:
| Hard to say, as they were contributions to existing projects.
| Those would have happened without me most likely.
|
| - ported numpy/scipy to windows 64 bits, and making sure windows
| was well supported
|
| - pushing for numpy/scipy to move from svn to git
|
| - wrote a prototype of what would become scikit learn. The
| project really took off after I stopped contributing though
|
| I do very little coding now, but I had several people I managed
| go on good careers and thanking me for it. That was maybe in the
| end the most impactful thing I do, I hope.
| miej wrote:
| I created a solution to the prior authorization processes in
| healthcare that has saved Americans several lifetimes worth of
| waiting for insurance approval for their medically necessary
| procedures, prescriptions, and treatments. What would otherwise
| be a several day to several week long process where the patient
| has no recourse but to wait and continue to suffer their illness
| without treatment, my products have shortened substantially, and
| sometimes even resulting in on-the-spot approvals before they
| have even left their doctor's office.
|
| It's still relatively small (/early) in terms of
| rollout/adoption, but I'm always proud to be able to make a real,
| positive difference for humans in their times of need.
| a5seo wrote:
| Built a niche ratings and reviews site that grew to 10M visitors
| a year before I sold it.
|
| I'm mainly proud of the fact that we kept strict separation
| between revenue ops and content moderation despite a lot of
| pressure from billion dollar companies to delete reviews they
| didn't like. We left lots of money on the table, but fuck those
| companies.
|
| 15 years on, reviews are woven into most websites in the industry
| and they're all pretty biased and controlled by the companies we
| resisted before selling.
| 0xpotato wrote:
| This is impressive and hugely respectable at the same time. I'm
| working on a ratings site using zero-knowledge cryptography,
| would you mind if I reach out?
| radar1310 wrote:
| In 2005 I created podcastbunker.com with mambo cms. MmI listed
| only the best podcast. I came from a radio background. You could
| listen to the podcast right on the site.
|
| It was chosen as one of the "50 coolest web sites of 2005" by
| Time Magazine. I did it all from my basement on a 3 meg down 750k
| up dsl. It's stil listed on the Time Magazine web site.
| tagami wrote:
| A network of science labs linked to the International Space
| Station for science centers, museums, libraries, and schools
| around the world.
|
| Our 10th mission launches next Tuesday on SpaceX-26 cargo Dragon.
| https://magnitude.io/exolab-10/
|
| Next mission in planning stages Feb 2024.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| I developed the country matching algorithm and microservice for
| the worlds second largest consumer DNA genotyping service.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Relationships.
|
| Tech wise, very early Docker and Docker-related integrations with
| a bunch of other amazing people.
| 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!
| nothrowaways wrote:
| Well done! Be proud of yourself.
| solarmist wrote:
| This is a very underrated comment
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The Syncplicity Desktop client. At the time, we were a major
| Dropbox competitor and an overall industry leader. I was able to
| make our desktop client faster than Dropbox and handle ~250,000
| files.
|
| Shortly after I left, Dropbox released their Rust-based client. I
| don't know how they compare.
|
| The big complication in a product like this is the metadata.
| Things that might not seem like a big deal, like string
| comparisons, must be super-optimized.
| 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.
| joelthelion wrote:
| I built image processing pipelines that have been used to follow
| patients throughout dozens if not hundreds of large clinical
| trials.
|
| Apart from that, I built autojump, a command line tool that
| accelerates navigation in the terminal. This in turn inspired z,
| zoxide, and other tools.
|
| A funny one is that I asked a few fairly basic questions when SO
| was still in its infancy. These turned out to have an enormous
| success. Some are still the authoritative page on the question.
| 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??"
| 13of40 wrote:
| Just a guess, but it might have something to do with whether
| the brain is able to be saved vs. just the body.
| pmarreck wrote:
| yes but why wouldn't you try regardless of knowing? In the
| time you spend gathering temp data, you could already be
| reviving
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Because chances are extremely slim:
|
| > Various degrees of hypothermia may be deliberately
| induced in medicine for purposes of treatment of brain
| injury, or lowering metabolism so that total brain
| ischemia can be tolerated for a short time. Deep
| hypothermic circulatory arrest is a medical technique in
| which the brain is cooled as low as 10 degC, which allows
| the heart to be stopped and blood pressure to be lowered
| to zero, for the treatment of aneurysms and other
| circulatory problems that do not tolerate arterial
| pressure or blood flow. _The time limit for this
| technique, as also for accidental arrest in ice water
| (which internal temperatures may drop to as low as 15
| degC), is about one hour._ [84]
|
| Also you can't just warm the body back to 38 degrees, it
| should be carefully brought up AFAIK.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I imagine they were doing that regardless, but were very
| happy to learn that there was an actual chance of
| success.
| gardenfelder wrote:
| That, in fact, is how I figured it went. I did not get to
| see the video, so everything remains speculation.
| 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
| teslae wrote:
| During my junior year of college i developed a chrome extension
| called 'stackinspector' which displays the best matching answer
| from stack overflow in the right hand side of google search
| results (best match based on your search). To this day it still
| speeds up the development iterations of me and my
| friends/coworkers - but more importantly i know of at least one
| of the teachers at my college which now uses this project as an
| example to inspire other students.
| 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 ;-)
| dang wrote:
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| By that logic, the people who farm the trees that make the
| books have more impact than anyone before them, unless you
| want to consider the people that make the tools, or feed the
| farmers, etc etc.
| 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 not be responsible for its power.
| robbywashere_ wrote:
| Cool story! what languages, frameworks, etc did you use? Or are
| you about to tell me COBOL? :P
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The legacy back-end system being migrated was Clipper + dBase
| III on DOS, which is reminiscent of COBOL.
|
| The part I added was built with ASP.NET 2.0 on top of
| Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and was eventually upgraded to 4.0
| and 2008 respectively.
|
| The only magic sauce was the use of SQLCLR to embed a few
| small snippets of C# code into the SQL Server database
| engine. This allowed the full-text indexing to be specialised
| for the high level data partitioning. Without this, searches
| would have taken up to ten seconds. With this custom search
| the p90 response time was about 15 milliseconds! I believe
| PostgreSQL is the only other popular database engine out
| there that allows this level of fine-tuned custom indexing.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| p90 for a full-text search on 330 million documents was
| 15ms?
|
| I know you can tune the hell out of search performance, but
| that seems a bit too insane for what looks like a
| relatively unspecialized setup (Standard DB).
| tgtweak wrote:
| Not likely the full book, just title, author and a few
| other low cardinality fields I'm sure. Also not likely
| 330 million unique volumes, but total books. This is
| within reach of a single database with proper indexing.
| itsthecourier wrote:
| Can you elaborate a little bit more about how you
| partitioned it?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I simply added the "library id" as a prefix to almost
| every table's primary key. Every lookup specified it with
| an equality filter, so essentially it was thousands of
| standalone libraries in a single schema.
|
| One hiccup was that when the query cardinality estimator
| got confused, it would occasionally ignore the partition
| prefix and do a full scan somewhere, bloating the results
| by a factor of 2000x! This would cause dramatic slowdowns
| randomly, and then the DB engine would often cache the
| inefficient query plan, making things slow until it got
| rebooted.
|
| This is a _very deep rabbit hole_ to go down. For
| example, many large cloud vendors have an Iron Rule that
| relational databases must never be used, because they 're
| concerned precisely about this issue occurring, except at
| a vastly greater scale.
|
| I could have used _actual_ database partitioning, but I
| discovered it had undesirable side-effects for some
| cross-library queries. However, for typical queries this
| would have "enforced" the use of the partitioning key,
| side-stepping the problem the cloud vendors have.
|
| Modern versions of SQL Server have all sorts of features
| to correct or avoid inefficient query plans. E.g.: Query
| Store can track the "good" and "bad" version of each plan
| for a query and then after sufficient samples start
| enforcing the good one. That would have been useful back
| in 2007 but wasn't available, so I spent about a month
| doing the same thing but by hand.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| is this symphony or horizon or spydus or koha? or?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| This makes the performance a lot more understandable if
| you're only searching in a single library. I assume that
| cuts out >99.9% of those 330 million documents.
| 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
| triyambakam wrote:
| The first time I heard that metaphor, I thought that he meant
| it in the way that bicycles are really fun to ride. I agree
| with both interpretations.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I have a bunch of small scale ideas that I want to implement.
| Not necessarily for profit. Any ideas on how to execute?
| nicbou wrote:
| Pick one that scratches one of your itches, and get
| started. Release early, keep iterations small. It's easier
| to keep working on something you actively use.
| 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!
| solardev wrote:
| Hi! Just signed up for Bend YIMBY :) Thanks for sharing that.
| n8agrin wrote:
| https://www.inaturalist.org/
|
| While I deserve no credit for its current success, it's been used
| by millions to:
|
| * catalogue millions of plants and animals around the world
|
| * tagged image data has become critical for computer vision
| training models
|
| * map species range and impact of various natural changes to
| biodiversity, with data cited in scientific journals
|
| * new species have been discovered through the app
|
| previous HN thread -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22442479
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| iNaturalist is wonderful!
| n8agrin wrote:
| :heart:
| teruakohatu wrote:
| What was your involvement in iNaturalist?
| n8agrin wrote:
| Look for "A Little History":
| https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about
| YZF wrote:
| My wife (and sometimes me) use it. It's awesome!
| n8agrin wrote:
| :heart:
| 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.
| colecut wrote:
| What was your app build with if you dont mind me asking
| yboris wrote:
| It's _Electron_ (Chromium & Node) running _Angular_. Has
| _FFmpeg_ under the hood to generate screenshots. The full
| code is in the repo - see link above :)
| 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.
| mathstuf wrote:
| _Impactful_? Probably CMake policy CMP0053[1]. Improved
| performance of CMake configures by 30%-50% depending on how
| intricate the code was.
|
| While not done yet, getting C++20 modules to compile via CMake
| will probably eclipse that.
|
| [1] https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/policy/CMP0053.html
| 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.
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| sleep(3)
| calmtech wrote:
| We noticed that one line of byte code was crazy hot. We
| traced it back to the code, and realized it was a special
| case fallback.
|
| They were summing 10mb of 8 bit encoded integers, in the
| 99.5th percentile of traffic, so no one noticed. It was using
| 10% of fleet compute.
|
| We changed the encoding to 64bit; the data size stayed
| constant, the 99.5%tile latency plummeted, and I got a bonus.
| Took a week. My contribution to climate change.
|
| A lot of stuff can hide past 99%.
| suprjami wrote:
| That's awesome!
| sagarpatil wrote:
| I built a WordPress plugin that helps you to generate free SSL
| certificate using Lets Encrypt. At it's peak, it was being
| actively used by 50,000+
|
| [https://wordpress.org/plugins/ssl-zen/]
| 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 :)
| eventemitter wrote:
| I created https://infect.info which is a software used by doctors
| to determine the best antibiotic to subscribe to patients based
| on symptoms or bacteria properties.
|
| The software helps save lives on a daily basis.
|
| It uses recent data from lab tests to show which bacteria is
| resistant to which antibiotic.
| 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.
| brailsafe wrote:
| In terms of value per person probably improving the faceted
| search marginally on one of the biggest auction sites in the
| world.
|
| In terms of the impact I care about, I try to give aspiring
| programmers my time and talk to them about how they can improve
| their hirability by building useful skills that you'd use day to
| day. I haven't had much success, but the little success I do have
| was helped in large part by an influential mentor. Those can be
| hard to come by, and time is expensive.
| rippercushions wrote:
| Early in my career at a FAANG, I set out to fix a minor bug in
| how some labels were displayed in non-Latin scripts and ended up
| rewriting a small part of the font handling system. Nothing
| fancy, basically just a hash table lookup.
|
| Ten years later my code lives on in a product used by billions of
| people, meaning it has been executed trillions of times since,
| far more than the total sum of all the other code I have written
| in my career.
| andyjsong wrote:
| It's called, "In Demand." Once a campaign closed on Kickstarter,
| the funding button would redirect to any URL you wanted,
| generally your website. I knew that campaigns had a long tail in
| traffic or that sometimes your campaign would get a press hit at
| the end of the campaign reporting how much money they raised. If
| you didn't have a Shopify to continue collecting orders, you left
| money on the table. So basically KS funneled visitors to IGG via
| Press > Closed KS Campaign > IGG In Demand. The first campaign we
| did this with was Baubax, it got a press hit from the NY Times 13
| days after the campaign was finished on KS. If they didn't do In
| Demand they would have lost out on $2.4 million.
| ronyfadel wrote:
| I guess, my internship project at Apple: I added approximate
| string search to Spotlight.
|
| So even if you made a typo writing something, you'd still get
| correct search results.
|
| Considering Spotlight is used by millions, I guess that's super
| impactful?
| ansgri wrote:
| Adding approximate string search anywhere is super impactful,
| it should be the default.
| tjpnz wrote:
| I built a system which would notify VFX artists when their shot
| would be played during dailies. Prior to that there would be
| lines of people waiting outside of conference rooms. Afterwards
| you would show up, get feedback from the supervisor/director for
| ten minutes and then leave. When you've got a crew of thousands
| those time savings add up.
|
| Very simple implementation wise: get the media player to push the
| playlist together with what was being played to a REST API and
| then have a webapp poll it (websockets weren't standardised at
| that point).
| shagymoe wrote:
| I saved my company ~$18 million with a 100 line perl script that
| I wrote in order to learn programming.
|
| It parsed a text file containing Jeep parts that needed to be
| sequenced and printed barcode labels to Zebra printers. One day a
| construction crew dug up all of our data lines and we lost all
| comms to Chrysler and our data center.
|
| We had to have a rotation of floor supervisors driving to
| Chrysler to copy/paste orders onto a floppy disk and bring it
| back to be processed. We kept the line running for about 30
| hours, which basically saved our company because our contract
| with Chrysler stipulated that we would be charged $10,000 per
| minute if we stopped the line.
| mooreds wrote:
| I'm so curious.
|
| So the process was:
|
| * supervisor drives to Chrysler, pastes part orders into text
| file, saves it a floppy
|
| * floppy returns to your company, you open it up and run the
| perl script, which prints barcode labels
|
| * ... then what?
| shagymoe wrote:
| The labels printed directly to the warehouse floor where
| parts were being sequenced. So, for example, the Rear Right
| Fender Flares printer would print barcodes labels and the
| person sequencing would pick up the next label in sequence,
| look at which color fender flare it specified, go pick that
| part, apply the label and put it in a sequencing rack. When
| the rack is full, it gets loaded on a truck bound for the
| plant.
| froh wrote:
| so you kept the just in sequence supply chain of some
| Chrysler plant alive with a perl script that could import
| their sequence orders from floppy disks into your system,
| just as if they had arrived via wire? amazing.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_in_sequence
| 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
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Though-provoking Q!
|
| In terms of sheer amount of people affected it's gotta be all
| those docs I wrote for Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse, and
| https://web.dev.
| colinwilyb wrote:
| I was the creative co-founder of The Mysterious Package Company
| (mysteriouspackage.com) and we - gasp - sold mysterious packages.
| It was a wild idea pitched by my cofounder, to which I was a
| hesitant buy-in, but the impact we had on people is astonishing.
|
| Rich stories, physical things (letters, puzzles, hair..), and a
| customized elements are still extremely rare to find in a product
| offer.
|
| I'm no longer involved (and I didn't get rich), but I'm still
| proud of the experiences we created for the human bonding that
| occurred after delivery.
|
| To this day there are people who come up to me saying "You!! I
| couldn't sleep for a week!" or "You!! My father and I went over
| your aged documents with a fine tooth comb and they were _REAL_."
| I'm so proud to have given these people a moment of awe and
| wonder.
| 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.
| sturza wrote:
| A childhood friend has a car garage. He wanted to give a paper to
| his customers to show the work that had been done, what they
| asked for etc. There were no free AND easy to use solutions for
| one man show type of business. So i built something that fit his
| needs, with his input. It's a simple form with 6 steps that you
| can print at any stage. I put it on a domain under his name so he
| knows where to find it at all times. For some reason google
| picked it up and it's now the first search result. It has over a
| thousand returning users(at least yearly) and a few hundred MAU.
| It's still free, people send me emails/call me to tell me how
| useful it is and how much they love it, some ask "is it really
| free" - it's under firebase so no costs to me either, other than
| occasional bugs and "features".
|
| Another thing i built which had a bigger impact was a covid "get
| outside motivation paper" during lockdowns. I had the "form
| technology" from the previous project and i just adapted it for
| the covid needs and added a signature for touch displays. You
| could generate a pdf with all legally required fields and sign it
| and print/show it to the authorities, on your phone. It had half
| a million users over a few months, then the government set up
| their own. I even had a GDPR authority contacting me thinking i'm
| stealing people's data etc. I actually showed them that the PDF
| is generated locally, there was no database and once the site
| loaded, you could even generate it offline. They did not follow
| up.
|
| Another thing i built, with questionable impact, was a election
| fraud checker. The government had a API and feeds data every 5
| minutes with number of people who voted at all locations. I
| wanted to see this in real time with a GUI/graph to see who
| registers more votes per minute than the actual systems
| allow(tablets). I actually found some locations that had bursts
| of hundreds of votes in a few minutes, that was physically
| impossible. Sad to say i did not do anything with the
| data(although it was public at that time).
|
| Some of the most impactful things i built.
|
| Edit: typos
| 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.)
| abhilash0011 wrote:
| rukshn wrote:
| I built the national covid health information system (NCHIS) for
| my country that helped to mitigate the pandemic. It streamlined
| the sample collection to issuing reports and aggregated data
| nationwide and generated reports for government to make decisions
| on lockdowns and track the pandemic progress.
|
| Well this was not completely built by me but I got help from 20
| odd university students but I overlooked the project and did lot
| of coding myself. Even though it's not used now since the
| pandemic has settled I'm happy what I have done.
| schoen wrote:
| > I overlooked the project
|
| May I suggest "oversaw"?
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oversee
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/overlook
|
| Even though both words have older meanings that are somewhat
| opposite of their current meanings, "oversee" is normally used
| today to mean "supervise" or "superintend" (in fact, I suspect
| "oversee" could be a calque of "supervise"), while "overlook"
| is normally used to mean "ignore" or "fail to perceive".
| bmalicoat wrote:
| In terms of number of times executed, the most impactful code
| I've written was a JavaScript GUID generator used on the Xbox One
| for launch and for a few years after. It was simple code that a
| colleague showed me, but had to be written in native code and
| then exposed over WinRT. Anyway, I built the DLL on my personal
| machine and forgot to set it up on a build machine. Microsoft
| doesn't like shipping private binaries for a number of reasons
| and, well, a nice build engineer found me about a month after
| launch and let me know. This DLL was used by just about every
| JavaScript app on Xbox One at launch.
| 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.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| 1: Porting YNAB from a spreadsheet to a C# Windows app back in
| 2006. (People tell us YNAB has changed their life) 2:
| Subsequently helping build the YNAB company/team. They are an
| amazing group of people and I'll likely never be prouder of
| anything in my life.
|
| To be very clear: I can't take credit for the original idea or
| spreadsheet. That would be our original founder, Jesse.
| iboisvert wrote:
| YNAB did change my life, thank you!
| TheTaytay wrote:
| That means so much to me! Thank you for telling me!
| jmstfv wrote:
| https://rectangles.app
|
| It's a way of visualizing time differently - 144 blocks, where
| each block represents 10 minutes of your day.
| schoen wrote:
| Let's Encrypt (along with the coauthors of
| https://abetterinternet.net/documents/letsencryptCCS2019.pdf and
| many other contributors). Now the world's largest public
| certificate authority!
| arthuredelstein wrote:
| Let's Encrypt is incredible. Thank you!
| Anon4Now wrote:
| I think we all owe you, your co-authors, and the sponsors a big
| thanks.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I refused to use certificates for my own projects as it was too
| complicated and expensive, until LE came along. Thank you!
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| Just to say thank you for Let's Encrypt - it's saved my bacon
| on at least a dozen times in the past six months alone.
| Rietty wrote:
| Thank you so much for this! I use it on my personal site and it
| was as simple as configuring a few cron jobs!
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I was about to say I built this beautiful IVR for a taxi company
| 20 years ago. It was so good, solved so many of the annoyances I
| had observed with IVRs before... so perfect it was, that it
| remained untouched all these years... I was about to say that.
| But out of nostalgia I just called the number and it's been
| replaced with some Byzantine piece of crap.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I've been lucky, starting young, early industry, eager to please,
| and willing to work on interesting over a better salary:
|
| * I was a beta tester and original 3rd party developer for the
| Mac, in '83, a year before the Mac's release; (Everything was
| written in assembly at that point.)
|
| * I worked for DeVanney & Mandelbrot on their original Fractal
| Mathematics publication, the work later became the book _Beauty
| of Fractals_.
|
| * Back when the Mac was new and there were many DOS GUIs floating
| around, before Windows 3.1 became the standard, I wrote the
| "official" in-house DOS GUI for AT&T internal use. I wrote that
| in '88, and it was their in-house GUI for about 5 years.
|
| * I co-wrote the video subsystems for both the 3D0 and the
| original PlayStation. That was a two very different adventures.
|
| * I was on the first Tiger Woods PSX Golf game dev team, the one
| with the South Park animation (for reals accidentally) left on
| the published CD. I wrote the front-end using an opinionated
| framework I made, which went on to be used by several E.A.
| titles.
|
| * I was director of research for the first Internet Live Video
| Infrastructure provider. Wrote code that got patented, stewarded
| the patent process, produced live shows. This was '99.
|
| * Worked in VFX on some milestone films, such as Chronicles of
| Narnia, both as a digital artist and as a financial analyst. Two
| Oscars were won during my time at R&H. I was doing an MBA at the
| same time my later period there. I wrote a production resources
| forecasting system that would be called a deep learning trained
| algorithm today, but I wrote it in 2001. Used on 9 major release
| features.
|
| * I created, patented, and went bankrupt trying to commercialize
| what are now called _deep fakes_. I was too early, with a working
| patented system in '08. Financial crisis plus no one believed
| the tech was possible at that time, and those that did wanted to
| do porn, which I & my team refused to produce. That was hard,
| 'cause it worked, but humans are like cats...
|
| * After that I was principal engineer on a globally leading
| enterprise FR system. Did that for 7 years to dig out of
| bankruptcy. That was stressful and I quit 1.5 years ago.
|
| Yeah, I'm both lucky and overly ambitious. I'm currently taking a
| boatload of DL/ML & Docker/K8 classes, preparing to make
| something that combines my history and skills.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| During a brief stint at a hospital I coded some logic to check
| for medication interactions with procedures and anticoagulants.
| Then the head of the pharmacy department showed me a report
| showing me the number of times that catheter / anticoagulant
| interactions had been caught because of my code (apparently this
| is less intuitive to the system than base medication
| interactions). Was one of those, oh wow, I'm actually helping
| people moments.
|
| Almost makes up for when some of my software was used to identify
| a manufacturing problem with a particular facility producing
| parts for missiles. Sometimes doing a good job helps people,
| sometimes it helps to harm them. Realizing the larger impact of
| your code can hit hard both ways.
| willhinsa wrote:
| My life. I had help, surely, but it's been mostly me for some
| time now. :)
| 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.
| r0s wrote:
| Sometime around 2010 I made a custom skin for an email
| notification app called Pop Peeper, it's a recording of my pet
| duck Carl that was downloaded over 11,000 times:
| https://www.esumsoft.com/pop-peeper/notifier-skins/#Carl
|
| Just kidding. I was lead engineer on a login page for an Experian
| identity monitoring remediation product for a major data breach
| affecting over 20M government employees. Millions of people
| interacted with my code, kinda cool but everything about that
| code was very boring.
| yosito wrote:
| It's hard for me to say. I've written a few random open source
| projects for Wordpress and Webpack that consistently get a few
| hundred daily downloads even 7 years later, but it's all behind
| the scenes stuff that doesn't really get talked about even by the
| people that use my projects.
|
| I've also created a question-based card game for social
| connection that I produced and sold 200 units of. Far less scale,
| but people tell me weekly about the impact that it had on their
| lives and the connections that they formed through it. It's
| really shaped the values of the social community I belong to, so
| in a ripple effect kind of way, I think it's had a pretty huge
| impact.
|
| And I've also worked on some widely used web apps for NASA and
| OpenStreetMap, written a lot of code and shipped some big
| features but only as a productive IC.
| vinibrito wrote:
| A GUI PDF creator. Some people told me they needed specifically
| that to go all in on their businesses, and some told me they rely
| on it.
|
| Probably used in a few hundred apps at least, and generating a
| few thousand PDFs for end users daily.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I helped to design a visa targeting remote workers and
| corresponding program for a South American government in an
| effort to drive more sustainable tourism to the country in the
| wake of the covid pandemic. They implemented the visa idea but
| not the program (which was focused on creating more of a
| concierge service for newcomers and helping integrate them into
| local communities, eg. volunteering at a local makerspace rather
| than just hanging out with other remote workers). Still very
| early days but hopefully it turns out to be impactful.
| 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
| [deleted]
| collingreen wrote:
| Chronolapse
|
| Originally was for the windows folks participating in ludum dare
| (48hr game dev competition) so that we could easily make
| timelapses of the development process ( and so I didn't have to
| look up the ffmpeg command line arguments every time). These were
| interesting because all games had to be made from scratch in the
| 48 hours but windows didn't have an easy one liner for it like
| our linux friends. It grew some simple bells and whistles like
| cropping, picture-in-picture (it could take a screenshot AND a
| webcam capture at the same time), and adding audio.
|
| It is terribly, terribly dated at this point (it didn't look
| great when I released it!) but folks still use it and I get
| emails from time to time (and a pull request upgrading to python
| 3 just recently!). I think there were like 50k downloads on
| google code before they shut that down. It's totally open source
| and I never marketed it or anything so it was fun to see it
| featured in some books on indie game dev and some random sites
| like lifehacker.
|
| The best part for me was all the people who found and used it for
| things I had never dreamed of - I was sent timelapses of
| sunrises, custom engine builds, PhD research growing bacteria,
| construction projects, a ton of digital art, a custom arcade
| cabinet build, and one guy's year long journey making on very
| detailed, very cool cyberpunk scene.
| st3fan wrote:
| Firefox for iOS and Firefox for Android. Used by tens of millions
| of people.
|
| Not just me - big team effort. Engineering manager of both.
| ako wrote:
| Application to register donor organs so they could be matched
| with potential transplant recipients as fast (we reduced the
| registration time from 4 hours to 45 minutes if I remember
| correctly) and accurate as possible. Java offline swing
| application (no UMTS available in the operating theater), details
| would be send with soap to a matching service. First actual field
| test resulted in 7 patients receiving new organs. Was really
| weird experience to be in the Operating theater seeing a surgeon
| walking around with a heart in his hands.
| sasha_fishter wrote:
| I've build tennis platform. It's maybe not so significant but it
| solves problem in the tennis clubs. It's used by cca 300 users
| per day, which I found pretty good without any marketing.
| pgt wrote:
| How I lost my first pension: I built an invoicing system for a
| friend's phone repair business that I licenced for a modest
| monthly fee. Over the next 10 years I gradually added more
| features as the business grew to 36 retail stores and built the
| product into a proper ERP system, rewriting it twice to keep up
| with new requirements. Eventually I sold the IP to them for cash
| and stock and became CTO at 27. It was a fun, but difficult time.
|
| Unfortunately, the founder raised way too much money on
| unfavourable terms and hired the wrong people, which forced the
| company to expand at an unsustainable rate and drove all the good
| people away. The company overextended itself and entered business
| rescue soon thereafter. The company is now a former shell of
| itself, but my product handled millions of rands and over 500,000
| repairs. What I lost in a pension, I gained in an MBA.
| 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.
| kureikain wrote:
| I built an email forwarding app[1] which now all of my engineer
| fiends and my family used it to signup for random services that
| ask their email. I also use it to route email to both me and my
| wife such as biz@ourdomain or finance@ourdomain
| insurance@ourdomain etc
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://mailwip.com
| thevulcanlogic wrote:
| I did enable IPv6 in one ISP of one small country :-)
|
| Country jumped lots of positions in IPv6 adoption
| ww520 wrote:
| Built the software to process the Positive Train Control data
| that is fed into the train engine to perform automatic safety
| control of the train. It's been deployed and running on passenger
| rail lines. The goal of PTC was for preventing train derailments
| but can be used for "autopiloting" a train.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| I solved for decentralization with a Nodejs app, but have no idea
| what to do with it. No, it has nothing to do with crypto-coins or
| blockchain.
| [deleted]
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Potlatch, the user-friendly editor for OpenStreetMap from 2007 to
| 2013.
|
| I'd been involved in OSM since its first few months (2004) but
| found contributing intensely frustrating. I wanted something
| where drawing a road was as quick as it was in Illustrator, which
| I was used to. Previously you had to create nodes, link them into
| segments, link those into ways, and manually add tags. Potlatch
| was a Flash app that allowed you to go click-click-click, choose
| "residential road" from a dropdown, and there it was - you'd
| added a road.
|
| I wouldn't for a moment claim it was great code - it really
| wasn't. But it was the right thing at the right time for OSM. By
| 2013 people with money were starting to sniff around the project,
| and Mapbox got paid to build something better and more polished.
| I was frankly relieved because I'd had enough of defending the
| newbies against the self-described power users. Still, a
| significant part of OSM being where it is now is thanks to
| Potlatch, and I'm proud of that.
| johnofthesea wrote:
| > as it was in Illustrator
|
| I have also used your osm2ai Perl script. It inspired me to
| create own OSM processing scripts. I remember later, as
| student, writing these perl-scripts with pencil into small
| notepad while waiting at the airport.
| habi wrote:
| cycle.travel is also something to be proud of!
| 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!
| dimva wrote:
| https://sfzoning.deapthoughts.com. It changed the conversation
| about zoning in San Francisco, and lots of politicians and
| activists now quote the topline stat (apartments are illegal to
| build in 3/4 of San Francisco).
| darnfish wrote:
| During COVID-19: https://washyourlyrics.com
|
| Changed my life in many ways that I would never have imagined :~)
| NomDePlum wrote:
| I've been lucky in lots of ways on what I have ended up working
| on. I've worked across the sectors but ultimately working on
| government services has been the most rewarding, which is far
| removed from being the most enjoyable.
|
| The most difficult but ultimately rewarding was a system that
| performed checks on people who wanted to work with children or
| vulnerable adults. I ended up having ultimate responsibility for
| this being successful which whilst now I can look back on with
| some pride, I wouldn't attempt again.
|
| Before that I'd rewritten exam appeal systems and been a key
| developer in the UKs first online student loan offering. I still
| meet people 20 years on that have to browse my code when
| reworking those systems/codebase.
|
| Working for banks pays the bills, and I never do subpar work but
| not something I look back with fondness on, even though I did my
| share.
| thunfisch wrote:
| Setting up an automated lecture capture system at my university,
| based around the open-source https://opencast.org software. We
| did everything from buying hardware components to build machines
| that were specifically tuned to encode videos on the fly with the
| least space/noise possible to be put into lecture halls, writing
| the software to run on that, to running the video management
| system with opencast, integrating it with e-learning suites,
| setting up livestreams, etc.
|
| I left the university and that job exactly one year before
| COVID-19 hit, and as far as I heard having that system in place
| saved a lot of butts - lectures seamlessly shifted to fully
| virtual with teachers recording videos either at home or in empty
| lecture halls, and pushing it through these video management
| systems.
|
| We pushed a lot in 2015 to get approval for this whole endeavour,
| even though the university big-wigs pushed heavily against this,
| fearing that students would not come to lectures anymore. Turns
| out: that fear was bullshit, and in the end it helped out a lot
| of people.
| 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.
| joddystreet wrote:
| Internet infrastructure monitoring, monitors a third of India's
| internet backbone, and a 100% of that of Bhutan. In production
| since 2014.
|
| Python, C/C++, Perl, Celery, Redis, MySQL, Bare Metal.
| 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?
| coldtrait wrote:
| God I am so inadequate
| babuloseo wrote:
| I wish I was born earlier lol.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Holy crap. I feel you. At the same time, I am amazed at the
| people that gather here. Makes me want to do better.
| coldtrait wrote:
| Hopefully my inspiration lasts longer than a few hours.
| dang wrote:
| Mine too
| rmen wrote:
| sharedsolar.org
|
| Back in 2010, I built the software systems to manage solar-
| powered microgrids providing prepaid electricity in remote, rural
| offgrid communities with no internet connectivity. People could
| pay for the electricity service when they wanted and could, with
| no minimum amounts required; aside from the tech, we wanted to
| demonstrate a viable, sustainable business model for scaling so
| free electricity was not the objective.
|
| Constraints for the software system running at the microgrid
| included - server hardware should not draw more than an energy-
| efficient bulb at peak load, cost <$100, little-no internet conn
| in the regions we deploy but remote access required, little-no
| technical capacity available locally (made things interesting for
| debug/updates...), integrate with meters + charge controllers +
| gsm modules etc each speaking potentially different protocols,
| allow for meter data collection every 1-3 seconds(!) and utilized
| in distribution + tariff accounting, etc.
|
| Took about 3-4 months to go from concept note to first field
| deployment in Mali. Over the course of the next couple of years,
| increased robustness and features and expanded to over 20
| villages in East and West Africa (Mali, Uganda). These were all
| villages/communities that for the first time had homes with AC-
| electric outlets that they used then for applications like
| lighting, cell charging, small fans, etc.
| g8oz wrote:
| Amazing!
| 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.
| DougWebb wrote:
| A long time ago I worked for one of the big medical journal
| publishing firms. (No, the other one.) I was one of the lead
| software developers, nominally in charge of the web application
| that served all of our licensed content to medical professionals
| and librarians all over the world. I was senior enough at that
| point that I attended regular planning meetings with the CEO and
| her team.
|
| We were working on a new product, electronic access to textbooks.
| I'd built the entire system that takes the textbook XML we got
| from the content side, created indexes used by our search engine,
| and made it possible to efficiently display in the web
| application any text fragment from a full chapter down to a
| single sentence containing a search result.
|
| The CEO called an emergency meeting: many of our library
| customers were government funded, and their funding required the
| library to receive a physical object in exchange for the
| licensing fee. They didn't want to have to store the physical
| textbooks and we didn't want the overhead of sending them
| textbooks. So the team starting talking about creating an entire
| new subdivision dedicated to the production, management,
| warehousing, and shipping of CD versions of the books, just so
| the customers could be given something physical.
|
| I interjected: "If a CD is good enough, I can generate that using
| everything I've built already. I'm already converting the content
| to HTML for display in the app, so I can render the textbook out
| to a folder, one HTML page per chapter, with a table of contents
| and all of the images, and create an ISO image that the
| librarians can download using a link in the web application. Let
| them burn it themselves if they want a physical copy. They could
| also store the ISO locally so they still have that version if
| they let their license expire." That was a funding requirement as
| well.
|
| So that's what we did. It took me a couple of days extra to
| implement that feature, and I saved the company a fortune
| compared to what they were considering doing.
|
| I believe I got a $25 Starbucks card as a reward.
| petra wrote:
| That's an annoying part about capitalism.
|
| For example, the guy who invemted the process to create
| artificial diamondsnfor GE,got a nice plaque and $1.
| NunoSempere wrote:
| Personally, maybe metaforecast.org, which aggregates forecasts
| from different prediction market & forecasting sites.
| Move37 wrote:
| My nonprofit Invest it! which has helped 1000+ people so far.
| 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.
| wilg wrote:
| Strange, I thought this would be people posting six or so
| screenshots of source code they've recently committed!
| cardamomo wrote:
| I built a dirt-simple phone service for people to call and
| scream[0]. It went viral and got mainstream media attention. My
| partner was not wild about the hours a day I spent moderating
| 3-second recordings of random strangers screaming.
|
| [0] Just Scream (https://justscream.baby)
| 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.
| frellus wrote:
| ULPT: would have maybe been a good point to have a backdoor in
| that app, maybe... or some sort of a filter for your name
| primax wrote:
| Impacting others? I started a Facebook group about a live stream
| for a falcon nest in Melbourne's CBD. It's had international news
| coverage and has been involved in a bunch of curriculums for
| schools around the world.
|
| Personally? I built a heavy duty portable hard drive shredder
| than can shred a drive down to 1mm pieces in 60 seconds. Overall
| I sunk about $300k into the business and probably made back maybe
| $100k. I think we're 10 years ahead of the market, at least in
| Australia. But, it had huge impact on how I think about business,
| the customer, and how to pair the two instead of building awesome
| solutions no one needs (yet)
| treme wrote:
| seems like it'd find a market fit in military/intelligence
| market, did you have any luck reaching out to DOD?
|
| would have been useful in situations like these
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident
| stuckinhell wrote:
| Honestly just a simple salesforce HR system for several large
| american universities. Not fancy, not special, but it powers and
| affects the lives of thousands and thousand of students and
| faculty.
| havaloc wrote:
| I started an airplane turbulence forecasting website for nervous
| travelers back in 2005 (think - will it be bumpy when I take my
| flight from Chicago to New York tomorrow?). It started by
| repackaging government turbulence maps in an easy to use manner,
| and has evolved into a service where I handwrite forecasts of
| turbulence for your flight, and now offering automated turbulence
| forecasts.
|
| It has been used by employees at nearly every airline, including
| dispatchers, flight attendants, captains, and I've gotten many
| emails saying it has allowed people to fly again, to take new
| jobs, and continue relationships because they know what to expect
| when they fly.
|
| Site: www.turbulenceforecast.com
| 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.
| drzel wrote:
| FortressOne, a fork of the 1996 Quake mod Team Fortress. Though
| there are only a few dozen players, for them, and me, the game
| and the friendships that have built up around it means the world.
| m00dy wrote:
| I built a decentralised ai network, it is more like openAI but
| like without content policy.
| keraf wrote:
| My most impactful project was definitely NoCoin [0], the first
| web miner blocker. Back when Monero miners started appearing and
| sneakily mining on pages, like The Pirate Bay for example, I
| decided to throw together a browser extension that would simply
| block requests to the resources that hosted these mining scripts.
| The project was in no way a technical achievement, it was simply
| intercepting requests and blocking them based on a list. I could
| have very well added the resources to some other project like
| uBlock origin. But it got traction, ended up in the press (WIRED,
| Motherboard, Gizmodo) and ultimately started being integrated
| within browsers (Opera was first) and most of the popular ad
| blockers. The project lost its relevance as everyone else was
| doing it better and maintaining the list of blocked resources was
| too time consuming for me. Nevertheless, the goal was achieved,
| which was to "get rid" of crypto mining on the web. The mission
| got carried by bigger actors, which brings me more satisfaction
| than the popularity of the project.
|
| Another impactful project of mine was also a browser extension.
| Internal tool that started as a lunch time project to make my
| team's life easier. Can't go in detail on that one, but basically
| they liked it and start suggesting improvements. So did a
| department that was working with us. And bit by bit, it became a
| really useful tool that became standard in these departments.
| Last I heard, the tool is now deployed company-wide. Crazy to
| think it started just from some lunch time hacking :-)
|
| [0] https://github.com/keraf/NoCoin
| 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.
| jwilk wrote:
| Better link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer's_Market
| tasuki wrote:
| Why better? More canonical, sure. But honestly, Wikipedia
| interface is bad: the super long lines are hard to read. Also
| WikiWand shows the table of contents in the left sidebar,
| making it always visible and accessible. I find this much
| nicer than having to go to the top of the page.
| 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
| marenkay wrote:
| Built MaNGOS in 2004/2005 with a bunch of other people as the
| first Open Source World of Warcaft server. Over the years it was
| the biggest project on Github for a while, even trumping projects
| like Ruby on Rails in forks and at some point most if not all
| private servers were using it.
|
| Eventually Nostalrius forked it, slapped marketing and a website
| on it, became huge and those guys got to visit Blizzard
| Entertainment, in the end leading to Blizzard finally giving in
| an providing World of Warcaft Classic as a service.
|
| Cost me tons of money to keep the project running because we were
| constantly under attacks from god knows who and in the end burned
| me out after a decade of doing this.
|
| To this day private servers are using it, and probably six
| figures of people play on those.
| ysleepy wrote:
| Oh wow! I ran a mangos server years ago with it because I loved
| that it was possible. I didn't even play WoW, it was just for
| the sake of it. It was the time when I was really into Diablo2.
|
| Sorry it sucked so much out of you.
|
| I got over a week of excited tinkering and fun out of it. Thank
| you for starting the project!
| nik736 wrote:
| We were running a pserver for quite a while. It was based on
| Ascent though, does anyone know what happened to Burlex?
| 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.
| pradn wrote:
| I made a Chrome extension used by 17 people (including me). It
| adds fuzzy search to the main Old Javanese->English dictionary
| website. I assume these users are all scholars of some sort. It's
| unlikely to be the biggest impact of what I've done in terms of
| numbers, but I hope it may help unlock insights in this under-
| resourced language.
| Random_Person wrote:
| I was a warehouseman in the Marine Corps in the late 90s. Our
| warehouse was absolute garbage. we couldn't fill something like
| 30% of our orders because we couldn't find the items or the
| inventory was off. We were also still running on nightly batches
| from some IBM AS400 system. I wrote a receiving program to print
| labels and properly assign stock locations to incoming inventory.
| Coupled with better control procedures we turned the ~$4MM
| operation around and ran at over 99% efficiency. Earned myself
| two NAMs for that work. It was 100% VB with a custom flat-file
| database.
|
| Then I stopped working on software for ~15 years because I burned
| out
| KentBeck wrote:
| JUnit
| 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.
| DocJade wrote:
| At work: In house tool for helping image computers without
| interacting with them as much. (I work in IT)
| OhNoNotAgain_99 wrote:
| Software for payed toilet gates, yeah now well at least they got
| cleaned now. It's all over the world now :)
| rnk wrote:
| For one of the leading database engines, I created the cost model
| that the database uses to pick between database query plan
| choices for almost every query (except trivial ones). For that
| same database engine I led the card estimation team and did part
| of the design of the cardinality estimation and statistics that
| powers the cost estimation.
| 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.
| adefa wrote:
| My first job out of college I worked for an international
| telecommunications company.
|
| The first big project I worked on was to develop a call detail
| record (CDR) search tool.
|
| This tool was used to help locate a missing family who had been
| lost in the Nevada wilderness for more than 48 hours:
| https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/11/us/nevada-family-found-alive/...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > The first big project I worked on was to develop a call
| detail record (CDR) search tool.
|
| Dunno if they're still used but I wrote a whole bunch of CDR
| libraries/viewers/decoders for a telco consultancy that saved
| people a whole bunch of time back in ~2006-7.
| Terretta wrote:
| maybe paid video streaming "one ticket one seat" where one
| entitlement gets one stream even on a global CDN; tried to take
| it to realnetworks, they said nobody would pay for video on the
| internet so i took it to microsoft; we did HBO, Showtime, WWE,
| together -- turns out people will pay for video on the Internet
| and various Microsoft tech we collab'd on for 2+ years before
| release went on to be foundations of online video w/ rights for
| folks like Netflix
|
| https://news.microsoft.com/2000/02/09/microsoft-unveils-digi...
|
| https://news.microsoft.com/2000/06/12/microsofts-new-digital...
| 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.
| foxtrottbravo wrote:
| A solution for a major retailer for sportswear where I designed a
| compact Certificate Authority module for our product that can be
| used to easily generate TLS Certificate for internal services.
|
| The main benefits for the customer is physical security, the
| device is built to be savely stored in a safe or at a bank vault
| when not in use.
|
| It is built in a way which give total control over the keys to
| the customer so that our support teams managing the services
| never have to touch a private key and is easy enough to be used
| by a non-technical employee of our customers.
|
| For the same audience I'm working on replacing the traditional
| multi-hub-and-spoke VPN we've built over the last few years
| (around 500 Hubs in Germany + Spokes) with a true End to end
| encrypted Mesh system with around 2000 wireguard nodes.
|
| Lastly this is something I hope to do in the near future,
| building out the first cloud strategy, team, infrastucture and
| procedures for said sports retailer.
|
| Oh I built a Powershell Wrapper around some parts of the Dynect
| API and a mostly complete wrapper around the tailscale API which
| is not widely used but made an impacton a handful of people.
|
| At the start of the pandemic I ran a couple of Jitsi Meet
| instances for people to connect with their close-ones which was
| used by a low five figur number of people.
|
| I started a project where we 3d printed a few thousand earsavers
| for wearing A FFP2 mask for for our local school. I think we at
| least got two school fully supplied and about a thousand pieces
| where donated to the hospital that saved my life.
| makestuff wrote:
| It never saw the light of day, but I developed a really cool
| prototype with WebRTC that allowed our customers to remotely log
| into another machine. It was basically what google has in this
| product https://remotedesktop.google.com/. It was one of the few
| things I worked on where I was genuinely excited to code it up.
| veidr wrote:
| For me, it was the second application I ever released, when I was
| a student at university and still didn't really know how to
| program properly.
|
| The application was Dash Board[1] for Newton OS, and it only ran
| on the final generation of Newton hardware (created by Apple, but
| spun out as a separate company in its final days, before being
| killed by Steve Jobs shortly after his return).
|
| It "only" sold a few thousand copies. (But it was during the
| warez heyday, and I am pretty sure there were also tens of
| thousands of bootleg copies being used, thanks to the
| registration code generator by "DocNZ" that was widely shared on
| Hotline back then.)
|
| But that was really pretty great, since the final MP2000/2100
| generation of hardware it required was thought to have only sold
| about 200,000 devices in total.
|
| I have since had a fairly normal software engineer career, and
| have worked on apps that shipped far more copies, and today I
| work on customer facing web applications and API SDKs that have
| more users, and arguably do stuff that is more "important" (e.g.
| help companies manage large fleets of machines/robots/IoT stuff)
| than what Dash Board did -- which was basically just improve the
| user interface of the Newton.
|
| But it's 100% clear to me that the _magnitude_ of user impact of
| Dash Board was much higher than any other thing I 've built.
| People really loved it -- I know because hundreds of them
| actually wrote to us to let us know. (LOL I mean wrote to me "me"
| -- old habits of pretending the company wasn't just one student
| in his tiny apartment die hard).
|
| Of course, I made more money later, and worked on things that
| touched a much larger _number_ of people 's lives. But "impact"
| has both X and Y axes. It was the _depth_ of the users ' fondness
| for Dash Board that makes it eclipse everything since. I don't
| think there are that many chances to just go for "user delight"
| as the number one metric.
|
| For me, developer satisfaction is a function of that user delight
| more than anything else.
|
| [1]: http://www.fivespeedsoftware.com/dashboard
|
| [2]: 15 years later, I open-sourced the code and gave it a proper
| retrospective: https://github.com/masonmark/Dash-Board-for-
| Newton-OS
| 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
| terramars wrote:
| I took couple years off coding to build a Kenyan infrastructure
| engineering firm - we're still going although I've started
| programming again. The biggest thing we've done is 6.7km of a
| mountain / lakeside ring road in Homa Bay on Lake Victoria
| (Kodula village section specifically, the work is visible on
| satellite). We're actually not completely done with it but
| watching the community growth from having the paved road reaching
| completion and improving the accessibility was absolutely
| incredible. Extremely frustrating sector to work in and difficult
| to pay yourself a salary even when it's not charity, but
| sometimes the rewards are awesome. I have a physics background so
| doing civil / electrical / mechanical stuff is tractable for me
| beyond programming, then we use the classic PM tooling to make
| things run ~relatively better than most people doing stuff out
| there. All Kenyan engineers other than me, lots of smart people
| who are highly motivated to meet and work with.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| What's Kenya like for infrastructure development compared to
| regional neighbors? Seems always that Kenya is miles ahead of
| other countries in that part of Africa on almost every metric?
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I was in Kenya and Cameroon for projects last year and went
| to Uganda on holiday, Kenya is far ahead of Cameroon, Uganda
| actually had decent infrastructure but it was all two lane
| highways so when you get heavy freight there can be huge
| delays (ditto for much of Kenya, but they built a rail line
| at least). Power was a bit better in Kenya than Cameroon, but
| in my apt (in a nice part of Nairobi) it went out about once
| a day and had to switch to generators for a bit.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Wow, super cool, I was in Kenya and Cameroon last year on two
| different projects (one tech, one traditional consulting doing
| market research) and there are so many problems still to be
| solved. If you're thinking about impact/scale for problems to
| tackle over there, what would you be working on? Somewhat crazy
| q, given how bad traffic and roads are, what do you think about
| dirigibles for goods transport between some major cities (or
| even regions like cobalt mines in DRC to Zambia)?
| haltingproblem wrote:
| Moving atoms must be 6x10^23 more satisfying than slinging
| electrons. Kudos to making the leap to building infrastructure
| for the community.
|
| May I ask what made you take the leap?
| 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"?
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| sleep in ze pod, eat ze bugs
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait
| comments to Hacker News? You've unfortunately been doing that
| repeatedly and we end up having to ban that sort of account.
| I don't want to ban you.
|
| If you'd please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to
| the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| I take offense at this. I value other humans, I help other
| humans. Most people do. But I take care of myself and expect
| other people to mostly do the same.
|
| I think it's telling that you frame your most impactful work in
| the context of how much better you are than other people, and
| how the world owes you something other people have because it's
| an unjust place, and the mindset probably does more harm to you
| than you'd realize. If you want to help people, do that, focus
| on that.
| 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.
| striking wrote:
| I understood it to mean "most of the people on this site",
| and I certainly didn't take it personally.
|
| The irony I understood from the comment is that the metric
| the commenter suggests should be considered more strongly
| is how one treats others, and they do so in the same breath
| as talking down on some group of people, which would
| probably take a few points off of their value as measured
| by that metric. The irony, in my mind, does not hinge on
| whether or not they'd be more valuable than the subjects of
| their missive but rather on the fact that their actions
| conflict with their value system.
| jim_lawless wrote:
| Some things I built on the side, outside of my day job:
|
| In the late 90's, I sold a command-line SMTP e-mailer for
| Windows. It was easy enough for folks to integrate e-mail
| transmission into their systems ... even 16-bit systems since
| spawning a copy of the shell would allow 16-bit systems to invoke
| my 32-bit mailer. Lots of folks had used these tools for all
| sorts of things. I got registration checks and cash from around
| the world before I started taking credit card payments.
|
| I have an open source command-line MP3 player for Windows that
| folks still use and incorporate into their systems, JS libraries
| for node.js, ...etc.
|
| https://github.com/jimlawless/cmdmp3
| peterkelly wrote:
| I was a contributor to a little pair of libraries called KHTML
| and KJS, a HTML renderer and JavaScript interpreter. Joined about
| a year into the project and while I didn't lay the foundations I
| helped improve the DOM and JS support a fair bit.
|
| People I respected told me I was wasting my time because Internet
| Explorer was the de-facto standard and the idea of a new browser
| engine becoming prominent was fantasy.
|
| Then Apple decided they wanted do a browser and looked around at
| what open source engines were available they could use as a
| starting point. Thus was born WebKit [1].
|
| I consistently ignore anyone who tells me I shouldn't try
| something because it's "too hard" or "nobody will use it". Most
| of the time they turn out to be right. But not always.
|
| [1] https://marc.info/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197104218786&w=2
|
| Edit: Here's an interesting presentation by Lars Knoll and George
| Staikos on the history of the project:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tldf1rT0Rn0
| gyulai wrote:
| > I consistently ignore anyone who tells me I shouldn't try
| something because it's "too hard" or "nobody will use it".
|
| Inspiring. Thanks for your contribution!
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Do you have any insights into how someone should approach a
| renderer today for HTML and CSS 2.1 rasterization?
|
| Tiled rendering seems to be what all the major renderers use,
| but the layers of abstraction they utilize to get there are so
| dense they're unreadable without extensive amounts of time.
| yanokwa wrote:
| I'm one of the founders of ODK[1]. It's an open-source offline
| data collection app that, according to WHO[2], helped eradicate
| wild polio from Africa. It's become the de-facto app that social
| impact orgs (e.g., Red Cross, Carter Center) globally use to
| collect data in the field. It's kinda wild to think about, to be
| honest.
|
| [1] https://getodk.org
|
| [2] https://www.africakicksoutwildpolio.com/the-top-five-tech-
| so...
| zestyping wrote:
| I had the privilege of being a contributor to this project.
|
| (Hi Yaw!)
| ninimotom wrote:
| I love ODK! I've worked with it for a community health
| volunteer program and contributed a bug fix, even. The impact
| of ODK goes beyond the software itself, since so many other
| survey platforms use it as their base. Kudos and thanks from
| everyone in global health.
| rmen wrote:
| We never met but I had evaluated ODK for the Sharedsolar
| project at Columbia U for data collection purposes. I used to
| work alongside mberg and ODk was an indispensable tool for
| nearly all the health initiatives and surveying. Truly
| impactful, congratulations!
| 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
| cronin101 wrote:
| My first internship had me and my then flat-mate (he was
| independently selected for the only other internship spot,
| neither of us knew about the other's application, while overseas
| on Erasmus study, which is uncanny) adding "pay this invoice with
| online payment" (PayPal/Stripe/...) functionality to a product
| that handled time-tracking, tax reporting, and invoicing for
| Freelancers, with a enthusiastic user-base of SMB/sole-traders
| and a high UX-bar.
|
| It was the number one UserVoice request and we were incredibly
| lucky to have the entire feature ownership to pair develop (with
| minimal but stellar oversight from the tech lead) and it had a
| huge multiplier effect on the product offering overall.
|
| I'm very grateful for being in the right place in the right time
| and it's contributed a lot to the "valuable code is the code that
| your users are benefiting from" lesson that constantly reminds me
| that book-smarts are nothing without a solid understanding of
| user needs.
| tracer17 wrote:
| I wrote a slack bot for a college club that liked to share music
| recommendations. We only had the free tier of Slack and were
| losing old recommendations as the messages were deleted and there
| wasn't an easy way to listen to all of them at once. I added a
| bot so that any spotify link sent to the channel is automatically
| added to a running playlist I own.
|
| I have code running now at work that gets millions of requests a
| day and I'm not sure it's more "impactful". I'm not sure how many
| customers would notice or care if it disappeared, but the slack
| bot broke once and a couple people messaged me pretty quickly to
| let me know.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I wrote a long reply, and then decided a short one was better.
|
| I stand atop mountains and throw pebbles at the snow - I've only
| had 25 years or so of being really active in the world, but I'm
| satisfied that some of the pebbles I've thrown have turned into
| avalanches - either the thing has been an idea which proved
| popular, or it has been something which enabled someone else to
| do something else, or it was the collaborations and partnerships
| I spawned through the people I put together in my past ventures.
| Some of the things I flung out into the aether changed the world.
| For instance, in '03, I cheerily introduced SMS based
| microblogging, along with proof of concept code and the ability
| for friends to subscribe, and I know, based on who used it, what
| it went on to spawn.
|
| I rode an avalanche once, and it was hard work - it's just as
| satisfying to watch them from afar, and know that you were a key
| component to making that causal chain occur.
| Jach wrote:
| As part of a team at my last job, I worked on some core features
| of https://www.salesforce.com/products/experience-
| cloud/overvie... -- if I'm tricked into a bragging mood I like to
| say a book got written about it https://www.amazon.com/Practical-
| Guide-Salesforce-Communitie... The product is still useful to
| thousands of businesses and transitively their customers, so it's
| probably the most impact I've made even if it's a shared impact
| with many others.
|
| Individually, nothing much. Maybe an old python2+numpy re-
| implementation of a slow matlab script for radar, specifically
| SAR RMA imaging: https://github.com/Jach/radar_sar_rma I still
| get the occasional ping about it. A handful of other things have
| over the years been helpful to a handful of other people, like a
| hacky jira-to-github-issues migration script, or a simple ranked
| choice voting counter using scraped web data. That's always nice,
| but nothing super impactful. I don't mind.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| A warehouse management system of sorts. I spent a long time on
| the systems passing orders in to take out the human intervention
| first. On a busy monday the couriers would be collecting at 5pm
| and the pickers would not have finished the 'next day' orders. A
| few weeks later it was peak season and they had finished by 9am!
|
| On my last day a picker came over and hugged me and said I had
| changed their lives. Proudest moment of my career!
|
| It was a bit of Python and SQL and a lot of thought!
| 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.
| HaZeust wrote:
| 100% counts! Keep rocking!
| djmips wrote:
| Yes that counts.
| unwind wrote:
| Thanks! :)
| 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/
| __rito__ wrote:
| Co-created Dall-E Mini (now named Craiyon, and I am not involved
| anymore).
|
| It was among the first text to language models created
| independently. And it was fully open source.
|
| It also got covered by New York Times in the article covering
| Dall-E 2 by Cade Metz.
|
| Links:
|
| - GitHub: https://github.com/borisdayma/dalle-mini
|
| - Hugging Face Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/flax-
| community/dalle-mini
|
| - NYT article:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/technology/openai-images-...
|
| ___
|
| (I know this is not as much impactful as others in this thread.
| But I did this after less than 2 years after transitioning to
| tech from Physics, and at the age of 22.)
| sebmellen wrote:
| Creating DALL-E Mini at 22 is a huge achievement, especially
| with less than two years of experience!
| black_13 wrote:
| Two functioning adults
| alexdumitru wrote:
| I built and launched corona.help in January 2020. Almost nobody
| expected a pandemic, but somehow I thought it was possible and
| decided to centralize all Covid cases. Just 2 months later it had
| over 5 million users daily. Eventually Google and other huge
| companies started doing the same thing and users tanked.
| andrethegiant wrote:
| Thanks for making this! I was one of those 5 million DAU :-)
| 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.
| meltyness wrote:
| I prototyped this as a Java Robots in like 2011 so I could fall
| asleep to Futurama. I guessed Netflix would take steps to ban
| it, but later they embraced it.
| 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!
| halpmeh wrote:
| I miss contemplating the content I watch. The attention
| economy has really perverse incentives. No thinking, only
| consuming.
| 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!
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| Hey Kyle!
| HaZeust wrote:
| This place is bat, haha!
| 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.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| I was an SRE (one of a very small team) on Houseparty, a now-
| shuttered Videochat startup. We saw some good traction, but
| didn't manage to make the hockey stick continue for long enough
| and were bought out by Epic Games. I left shortly before them.
| About a year after that, the pandemic hit, and I was asked to
| help again as it hyperscaled; Growing 10x our previous peak in
| the matter of <6 weeks. Millions of people used it to connect
| with their friends and family in the early and uncertain days of
| COVID. I put together the cluster and databases that powered all
| of that.
|
| That's definitely my greatest impact, and the part of my career
| that I'm most proud of.
| 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.
| rish1_2 wrote:
| Atomic v2 (pending) - OSS Clockwise alternative with fine control
| and training of AI assist for time blocking & get together w/
| 1:many + outside user - this will be impactful
| stokedbits wrote:
| Updated the architecture for the deployment model for millions of
| hospital devices. It originally required service techs to take a
| thumb drive to a hospital with the update and manually using a
| series of installers and scripts to perform tedious steps that
| could take days to update one device... usually with errors
| because the steps were not followed correctly.
|
| The update was to put all the build steps into source control,
| decouple all the logic, setup ci/cd to support the changes, and
| use a series of aws services (greengrass, kinesis, S3, lambda,
| cognito, systems manager, app sync, Api gateway, cloudfront,
| dynamo, etc) to facilitate an event driven architecture. Then
| threw an easy to easy to use gui (nextjs/react) on top of it for
| the customer support teams to use that was as fail proof as
| possible with a holistic view of system state and update
| progress.
|
| Easily saved the company 10s of millions of dollars yearly and
| update times for the most critical systems went from days to
| hours. Failure rates went from a problem to a minimal occurrence
| which we had the observability in place to resolve in future
| scenarios by adding additional tests for any regression issues
| found.
|
| Super fun project, learned a lot about AWS. Made a lot of
| customers happy and hospitals more safe.
| 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.
| coverj wrote:
| > I'd like to make an SQL-oriented library so people don't have
| to settle for JPQL/Hibernate--started but not done/promoted.
|
| I'm sure I'm asking this on behalf of many people - any chance
| of a sneak preview?
| karmakaze wrote:
| Sure, SafeQL[0] SQL library. It's been sitting in a close but
| not enough to promote state for a while. The main thing I
| wanted was to have generation of the bindings to existing DB
| schema. I also want to combine using Moja[1] datatypes for
| uniform handling of single/multi, normal/async, and errors.
|
| I suspect I'm mostly driven by the unknown and as I get close
| to practically solving a problem start to lose the curious
| itch.
|
| [0] https://github.com/karmakaze/safeql
|
| [1] https://github.com/karmakaze/moja
| wfaler wrote:
| Not sure it's long term the most valuable thing I built, but
| definitely short-term most profitable:
|
| Built an airline pricing system as the sole developer in 3 months
| in the early 2000's. When demoed during late stages of
| development, it received pre-order guaranteed sales from airlines
| of $60mn for the next 12 months.
|
| I was paid a paltry $500/day for the contract, and got my
| marching orders when it was done.
| vermaden wrote:
| Three things. - beadm ----->
| https://github.com/vermaden/beadm - automount ->
| https://github.com/vermaden/automount - lsblk ----->
| https://github.com/vermaden/lsblk
|
| All of them for FreeBSD system.
| kristianp wrote:
| clickable (I just removed the indentations):
|
| - beadm ----->
|
| https://github.com/vermaden/beadm
|
| - automount -> https://github.com/vermaden/automount
|
| - lsblk -----> https://github.com/vermaden/lsblk
| vermaden wrote:
| Thanks for fixing clickability :)
| tibudiyanto wrote:
| I built and am still currently running a livestream tipping
| service localized for Indonesian. We need specialized service for
| this because Indonesians don't use credit card so existing
| services like Streamlabs is a no go.
|
| I would like to think that it sparked this new cultural
| phenomenon and made livestream tipping a normal thing.
|
| I am just amazed that something that started as a weekend project
| can help others tremendously.
| y0ssr3n wrote:
| When we were all WFH'ing during Covid, I couldn't stand listening
| to presenters saying "Next slide please" over and over. We use
| Google Meet at work and it doesn't provide any way to give others
| control of your desktop or slides. So I built a Chrome extension
| that allows multiple users to control a Google Slides
| presentation from within Google Meet. It's only got about 2K
| installations, but people have simulated almost 250K slide clicks
| with it in the past 3 years. So this is probably my most
| impactful contribution, especially on my own mental health having
| to never hear "Next side again".
|
| Homepage: https://fonner.gitlab.io/shared-slides-clicker/
|
| I wrote a blog about some of the trickier parts of building it
| here: https://jedfonner.com/2020/11/06/shared-slides-clicker/
| [deleted]
| 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?
| cvg wrote:
| A JavaScript app that automated the resolution of half of
| Twitter's support tickets. Logic got refactored after a few
| years, but still used at Twitter. Probably saved Twitter about
| $10 million a year over the last ten years.
| progre wrote:
| For my kids kindergarten you had to send a very specificly
| formated SMS if the kid got sick so that it would auto-update the
| attandance list for the day. I built a webpage that would format
| the SMS and open the phones SMS app. First time I had random
| people come up to me and say thanks.
| baccredited wrote:
| I wrote the code that puts headers on USA federal court documents
| (PDFs). I see them all the time in the real world and still get a
| kick out of them
| treelovinhippie wrote:
| lisper wrote:
| I was nominally the lead engineer on the first release of
| AdWords, though most of the actual code was written by Jeremy
| Chau. AdWords pretty much changed the world, though not, I think,
| for the better. :-(
|
| If you want to know what I actually made by myself that I'm most
| proud of it would be this: https://graceofgodmovie.com/ (I am
| referring to the movie, not the web site.)
| origin_path wrote:
| I think AdWords changed the world definitely for the better. A
| whole lot of niche businesses became viable that otherwise
| wouldn't have been, and it kept search results clean and fast.
| The state of the art before then was banner ads on serps.
| lisper wrote:
| Good point. Thanks for the perspective.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| A nights & weekends project that has since become a worldwide
| federated database and software infrastructure.
|
| Took ten years of managing it alone, but it's been in the hands
| of a pretty capable team, for the last few years.
|
| It was/is a free project, designed to Serve a pretty challenged
| demographic. It has turned out to be quite successful, for a
| number of reasons; many of which have little to do with me, as
| the new team has taken it to the next level.
|
| It is not hyperbole, to say it has saved lives.
|
| I'm leveraging that infrastructure as a component of the app I'm
| developing, currently.
| joisig wrote:
| Looking back, and filtering for things I built from scratch,
| probably GRIT [0], the Google Resource and Internationalization
| Tool. I originally wrote the tool when I had enough of 3-way
| merges of resource files for Google Desktop, and it ended up
| being one of a couple of key technologies that enabled Google
| Chrome to launch from day one in 43 languages, which I think was
| probably quite impactful to the adoption of that browser.
|
| [0]
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/tools/grit/+/...
| DanielGeisler wrote:
| I created http://tetration.org which explores what lies beyond
| exponentiation. My life's work has been to extend the Ackermann
| function to the complex numbers and matrices. I believe my
| website lead to a renaissance in tetration research. The
| following Mathematica code replaces a thousand lines of earlier
| code. It computes the flows from maps. Combined with the historic
| three argument Ackermann function it allows the Ackermann
| function to the extended to the complex numbers.
|
| order=10;
|
| H[0]=0;
|
| H[1]=f'[0]^t ;
|
| Do[H[max]=First[r[t]/.RSolve[{r[0]==0,r[t]==Sum[Derivative[k][f][
| 0]BellY[max,k,Table[H[j]/.t->t-1,{j,max}]],{k,2,max}]+ f'[0]
| r[t-1]},r[t],t]],{max,2,order}];
|
| Schroeder=f'[0]^t z+Sum[1/k! H[k]z^k,{k,2,order}]
|
| Abel=Limit[Schroeder,{f'[0]->1}]
| kurtreed wrote:
| Are there applications?
| 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.
| zadjii wrote:
| The Windows Terminal. It was a long journey to get the console
| code fairly modernized and maintainable. Another long journey to
| build a whole new application that could be compatible with the
| old. And years now of iterating of that original prototype, out
| in the open.
|
| It's not a perfect application, by any means. But the bar was
| _so_ low, that I can't help but think of how much we've helped
| users just over the last few years.
| joshschoen wrote:
| With talkjs.com we process millions of user messages monthly :)
| schappim wrote:
| - State Rural Fire Service App (showing maps, warnings, and
| alerts)
|
| - App for our national airline
|
| - EPG and remote recording app for cable company
|
| - MacOCR command line app: https://github.com/schappim/macOCR
| bag_boy wrote:
| I created a really popular park in a mid-sized city. It's surreal
| to see all kinds of people play on it.
| awslattery wrote:
| In my career to date, a web application developed at breakneck
| speed (3 weeks for functional demo to stakeholders, which
| included members of CDC on Operation Warp Speed advisory
| committee) by myself and the CTO at the time to facilitate
| applications to receive and distribute COVID-19 vaccine in late
| 2020.
|
| This is when the official option afforded by the CDC was a 7 or 9
| page, non-fillable PDF that they expected hospitals, clinics, and
| your primary care office to print, complete, sign, scan, and
| return to the public health agency you fall under -- who would
| then transcribe that into a massive CSV for import into one of
| their immunization data systems.
|
| The application was demoed before multiple PHAs, ultimately
| becoming the sole solution for an entire state, and one of the
| largest PHAs in the world. It has since become a showcase project
| for ongoing data modernization initiatives within these two large
| PHAs.
|
| Tens of millions of vaccinations were made possible by this
| effort, and it's still in use today.
|
| --
|
| Outside of my career, the persistent browser based game (PBBG) I
| made when I was 13. Several years before I would enlist in the
| military myself, I received a message from two players --
| brothers, one of which was deployed to Iraq at the time, the
| other in school stateside -- who were able to maintain a higher
| degree of connection with one another, given limitations of
| communication otherwise.
|
| --
|
| OP, great thread. I always knew there were amazing folks in this
| community, but it is incredibly inspiring to see the many other
| responses in this thread.
| carbonrider wrote:
| Ideated and built a low-code platform in 2011, that went on to be
| primary tool for a company and won accolades from Gartner.
| Company achieved multifold growth, opened door for partnership
| with giant software firm and eventually the department itself was
| sold for more than $500 million. We worked for crazy hours, not
| caring how it impacts health and family. At the end, we didn't
| get anything apart from regular paycheck. :(
| ohadpr wrote:
| First implementation of CAPTCHA circa 1997
| jer0me wrote:
| Ironically, there are people here bragging about popular
| scraping software they wrote back in the day
| schoen wrote:
| Though not every use of CAPTCHA intends to prevent or limit
| scraping -- some sites let you read everything with no
| CAPTCHA, but apply one if you want to write something (or
| take an action that affects the outside world somehow).
| 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).
| Minor49er wrote:
| This is really cool. It's quite sad that the other versions
| are under copyright. The KJV is probably the one that
| people would look for the most as a baseline, I think.
|
| My holy grail (no pun intended) is the pre-Challoner
| version of the Douay-Rheims Bible. There is a PDF scan of
| it up on archive.org, and a seller produced books of the
| text but with their own Old-English-to-English translation,
| but I haven't found any text-only versions of the original
| online
| 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.
| waltbosz wrote:
| I'm curious: When you say "something different" what do you
| mean? For example,when you engage in bible reasearch, does
| it feel that a different part of your self is gaining
| sustinance?
| tasuki wrote:
| Hey I built something vaguely similar!
|
| See it in action to compare translations of Enchiridion
| (https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/) or Tao Te Ching
| (https://ttc.tasuki.org/).
|
| The project is at https://github.com/tasuki/side-by-side, it is
| backendless: just drop in some markdown files, and serve it as
| a static website.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| Added a "reply" button to Wikipedia discussions; design was later
| picked up by the Wikimedia Foundation and properly
| productionized. Probably saved a lot of people some time, because
| what you used to do was open the source code for the entire
| discussion, scroll down to find the comment you were replying to,
| and insert your comment after it in the code.
| joshu wrote:
| Wrote del.icio.us and invented tagging. Echoes of my original
| design are still around (notably account urls being
| web.site/userid)
| jherdman wrote:
| My first web app was a del.icio.us clone, it helped me get
| started as a web dev. I still write clones of it when testing
| new web tech. Many thanks!
| HaZeust wrote:
| My social network Touchbase (www.touchbase.id) owes you a great
| deal for account URL schemas used by online platforms, thank
| you!
| dang wrote:
| And inspired the design of HN!
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20051220094850/http://del.icio.u...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903365
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/joshu/sets/72157600740166824
| (credit to joshu)
| carabiner wrote:
| yo
| akrymski wrote:
| Delicious was awesome, and is dearly missed. Thank you for your
| contribution.
|
| I have always wondered if it could be scaled to a Google
| alternative. Ranking pages by how many people have bookmarked
| them seems like a good alternative to PageRank.
| itsthecourier wrote:
| I designed and implemented a betting system using those Chinese
| POS you normally use for credit cards, made a deal with Telco for
| data packages for more than 10k paid users consuming under 5MB a
| month for 40 daily transactions.
|
| We end up serving millions of users a month and the system became
| part of Dominican culture
|
| Made some good money from it, was 21 at the time
| 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
| thom wrote:
| I am not sure I want it to be this, but back when I worked on
| software for airports, there was a concept of a Target Startup
| Approval Time (TSAT). This is the moment an aircraft is expected
| to power up in preparation to roll back and taxi to the runway
| before taking off. I worked with some clever statisticians who
| were focused on optimizing this exact moment. That calculation
| has hopefully contributed to reducing more pollution than
| anything else I could conceivably do in my lifetime.
|
| That's incredibly boring though, and I work in sport now. The
| most _emotionally_ impactful achievement is the first soccer
| player signed based on my statistical models. He helped win his
| club their first title in a decade, got his first international
| callup, and won his country their continental cup (he also made
| his club a lot of profit when they sold him and my sell-on
| percentage never materialised).
| motohagiography wrote:
| Looking back, impact-wise:
|
| - the patient privacy protection for a medical intake/assessment
| tool used for millions of patients would seem to have the most
| impact on individual lives, particularly in some high profile
| cases of catching medical record snooping, and have used privacy
| laws to prevent numerous public services from being used as mass
| surveillance tools.
|
| - the original intrusion detection infrastructure for a large
| govt and what they call "cyber" now.
|
| - a security protocol for mesh membership verification and
| updates for space based assets, and a strategic mission change.
|
| I've done a lot of other very public and prestigious, but
| ultimately, net-low impact things. However in doing so, I have
| been an example to others where I've shown them what's possible
| and I can think of several people who, directly and not, my
| example gave them the confidence to attempt and achieve some
| really huge things on their own. As though my role has been,
| "See, I can do this and even make it look cool, and I'm a deeply
| and laughably flawed person, but when you challenge it, the bar
| to these things only looks that high when you percieve it that
| way."
| femto wrote:
| In 1995 I (and a few others) designed and built the first WiFi
| node [1]. At the time there was only one WiFi unit in the world,
| and it was the one on our bench. It now has about 20 billion
| descendants.
|
| [1] https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1109/40.566198
| comboy wrote:
| Awesome. What made it win? Were there any close competitors?
| Was infrared close to being the winner? I'm also surprised big
| enough FPGA was already around. Thanks.
| femto wrote:
| > What made it win?
|
| Initially, ignoring the wisdom of the time that said OFDM was
| no good for indoor channels. The research project was
| eventually shut down due to lack of commercial interest, but
| the research leaders had enough faith to immediately start
| their own company (Radiata). Later, commercial success for
| Radiata came from being in the right place at the right time.
|
| > Were there any close competitors?
|
| In the research phase, not that I was aware of. In the
| commercial phase, Atheros. The story I was told after the
| event was that Cisco had decided to buy whichever company
| came to market first. Radiata came to market 2 weeks before
| Atheros and so Radiata was acquired.
|
| > Was infrared close to being the winner?
|
| It could have been, but specular reflection in IR channels
| causes inter-symbol interference, which limits the data rate.
| If someone could have solved that problem then IR might have
| happened instead of WiFi.
|
| > I'm also surprised big enough FPGA was already around.
|
| At the start of the project FPGAs were not big enough, so we
| had to partition across multiple 3000 series Xilinx parts.
| Bigger FPGAs had been released by the end of the project, so
| the transmitter fitted on a single XC4025 FPGA, using manual
| placement. The 4025s were brand new and Xilinx (as always)
| were difficult to deal with, so we had to beg for devices and
| they magnanimously granted us 3 or 4 chips.
|
| At the time there wasn't much sense of occasion, as we were
| busy doing the work and none of us knew how big it would get.
| dragonshed wrote:
| For me, by far the most impactful is: The logistics planning
| software used by a major sports league in the US. The package I
| worked on allowed management to comb through a full season
| schedule, fine-tune a myriad of different associated weights, and
| push it through a specialized simulated annealing program to
| yield the schedule for every player, referee, etc for the season.
| The league went from manually producing perhaps 2 to 3 full
| schedules a season, then having to almost immediately scramble to
| handle exceptions, to producing hundreds.
|
| Twenty years between various agencies and contract terms, I've
| worked countless projects, and the ones which improved business
| processes, where end users lives were made much easier, were the
| most rewarding. Conversely, most of the 'fun' projects were
| almost immediately obviated (I'm looking at you, Silverlight).
| 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.
| relwin wrote:
| Built the prototype in-vehicle data collection system used by
| NHTSA to evaluate vehicle safety devices back in the 90's.
| Probably the first MPEG2 encoder used in a car to record various
| cameras.
|
| Co-produced "Pinball 101", helping thousands of pinball players
| up their game: https://youtu.be/_RroLKc4wEQ
|
| Created "Le Dominoux" for a 555 timer contest. Now popular
| electronics project. https://youtu.be/PQOjkuJtBfM
| 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!
| kevinconroy wrote:
| https://www.globalgiving.org
| Nican wrote:
| This is only a personal project. I am building a Twitter graph
| tool. It created a 2d graph of all of your followers (Up to
| 20,000 followers), and calculates proximity based on shared
| followership.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/Nican/status/1592010109202616322 [2]
| https://graph.bunnypa.ws/
| vijaybritto wrote:
| This is nothing compared to others here but I'm happy though:
|
| 1. My first and the most satisfying impactful work was a small
| tool to generate spreadsheets from a form and mail to management.
| I did this to learn React a bit more and this ended up as an
| important tool for all contractors in the company. It was used by
| more than 300 employees and literally everyone knew it was my
| project and thanked me often for saving their time. The
| management moved it from heroku to their internal domain and its
| still in use 3 years after I left.
|
| 2. The second one is at the current job where I have made a site
| that has data from JIRA, Github, some automation for frontend
| tasks and some for backend tasks with simple button clicks.
| People use this everyday and has become the first page to look at
| every day. Planning to make this a new tab screen in Chrome next.
| kloch wrote:
| At work: the CDN for Megaupload. I was also the guy who had to
| shut it down when the FBI seized it.
|
| Personal non-code project: The first adult LEGO fan conference in
| 2000. While I got out of that business years ago it has been
| replicated by dozens of other annual cons around the world. Back
| then the LEGO group didn't really understand and was very weary
| of adult fans. Now there's a whole reality tv show about them
| with LEGO designers as the judges, and LEGO actively supports
| cons and clubs.
|
| Open source project: A project I released anonymously ~2010.
| Several github repos (unrelated to me) keep this project alive
| (the main one has ~600 stars and ~200 forks) and it's apparently
| used in several commercial products too.
|
| Website: ip4.me/ip6.me serves 3-5M queries per day. I want to
| find a good non-profit to take this over to keep it ad and
| javascript free forever.
| nanidin wrote:
| Legoland in my city still requires adults to be accompanied by
| children to enter. Kind of bizarre.
| agotterer wrote:
| That doesn't surprise me. It's a very child focused park and
| I'm guessing they want to control the experience and
| environment as best they can. A bunch of high schoolers
| running around might change the dynamic.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| I am charmed by the innocence of this comment.
| kqr wrote:
| I am appalled by the lack of statistical awareness of
| this comment.
| v-erne wrote:
| I am astonished by lack of PR impact proportionality
| intuition of this comment :) (its not like we are talking
| here about black swan events - and one is more than
| enough for profits go down the drain)
| jmt_ wrote:
| Please tell me you're legally allowed to talk more about
| Megaupload and the work you did - sounds like an absolutely
| amazing blog post, would love to hear as much as you're able to
| discuss.
|
| Also, I have a project in production at work where a device
| needs to grab its public IP address. My code has a list of
| sites that provide that info and I have ip4.me as a fallback in
| that list, so thank you for building it!
| dev_0 wrote:
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _I want to find a good non-profit to take this over to keep
| it ad and javascript free forever._
|
| Maybe worth reaching out to Mozilla. That's the only actual
| non-profit I can think of who I think would have both the
| ability and the incentive to keep it online.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _I think would have both the ability and the incentive to
| keep it online._
|
| Ability? 5M/day for "what's my ip" is not much, and I'd wager
| most of us on this site would be able to keep it up and alive
| just fine. As for incentive... in addition to the Mozilla
| Foundation, orgs like Calyx, NLNet, Quad9 come to mind.
| scrollaway wrote:
| A non-technical nonprofit will fuck up regardless of the
| load. Beyond "keeping it online", it can be something as
| simple as "knowing how to configure the dns for it".
| kloch wrote:
| You are correct it uses very little resources, especially
| since most queries are http instead of https. Since there
| are no user accounts and it doesn't track anyone it doesn't
| even have a backend database to connect to. Just a couple
| dirt simple programs written in C with some very easy to
| remember domain names.
|
| I'm not getting any younger so it's really about
| survivability. Transferring to another individual HN'er
| probably wouldn't solve that.
| tpankaj wrote:
| I'm 25 and I'd totally take it on, but you're probably
| looking for an actual nonprofit if you want true
| survivability. As someone who has used this tool for at
| least 10+ years (as long as I've known what an IP address
| is), I'd love to help make sure it stays around.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Maybe it's an option to found a nonprofit especially for
| this goal?
|
| If it doesn't already exist anyway.
| tpankaj wrote:
| The process is quite complex so it's usually too heavy
| handed for a project of this size. That's why people look
| for an existing nonprofit to take it on. But if kloch
| mainly wants a couple other people who care about the
| project to be around to make sure it continues, I'm
| onboard.
| scrame wrote:
| or maybe the internet archive?
| [deleted]
| robswc wrote:
| >Website: ip4.me/ip6.me
|
| >At work: the CDN for Megaupload. I was also the guy who had to
| shut it down when the FBI seized it.
|
| >adult LEGO fan conference
|
| Wow, what a small world. That's what I love about HN. The
| people that make things you use are on it :)
|
| I wish I had something nearly as impressive. I just have open
| source stuff that people use. Nothing recognizable though.
| powerpurple wrote:
| what a chad
| MivLives wrote:
| Thank you for the Lego thing.
|
| My mom got into adult lego when she took apart my child hood
| lego and reassembled them to resell.
|
| Now we mail each other sets that the other is done with, and it
| gives us a great opportunity to connect. We're both anxious
| people and there's something relaxing about just assembling
| something where everything has a place.
|
| When she found out there's a lego con in my town, she made
| plans to come visit me so we can go together and I can show her
| around the city I just moved to.
| agotterer wrote:
| That's a wonderful story!
|
| My 3 and 6 year old love lego kits. Historically I found
| myself sitting with them and helping when they got stuck or
| directing them when I saw they made a mistake. More recently
| I decided to pick up my own kit and build along side them.
| I'm currently working on the Saturn V rocket. It's been a lot
| more fun for me and a way to bond with my kids.
| desaiguddu wrote:
| In 2019 - Built an App for Child Health & Growth Tracking. Helped
| over 400,000 users & answered 7,00,000 Queries in their child
| growth & development tracking. So far, it is completely free. We
| were able to help parents from India, Bangladesh, Kenya &
| multiple countries who have limited access to child healthcare.
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inikworld....
|
| On commercial side, I have been part of founding team of a Sports
| Startup. This is an underdog team & with the tech product that
| team won a SuperBowl. Not sure, how impactful this is.
| 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.
| a_square_peg wrote:
| htts://oikolab.com - it's essentially a weather data api but
| catering more to anlaysts who need historical data for planning
| and evaluation.
|
| We provided 30+ years of hourly historical weather data for more
| than 16,000 locations around the world to a popular website that
| generates free weather files for architects to do energy
| modelling. Most architects don't know it but if they use any
| recently updated weather file, there is a very good chance that
| it came from us.
| richardfeynman wrote:
| As a pandemic project, I started a kids stories podcast with my
| then 5 year old son. Two years later, it has over 5.5 million
| downloads and I get letters from parents telling me how the
| podcast has impacted their kids lives. I actually haven't posted
| an episode in over a year, and need to get back to it!
| aeontech wrote:
| Would love a link!
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| My guess, over the long run, is that it'll be Cryptopals. Which
| is funny, because it's just a blog post that we chopped up into
| email challenges because I didn't want to give [redacted] a bunch
| of new terminology to use against me in stupid Twitter
| slapfights. Dumb reason, good outcome.
|
| https://cryptopals.com/
| cpach wrote:
| Aha! Fascinating backstory (:
|
| Cryptopals are freaking awesome. I had so much fun trying to
| solve those challenges.
| smaug7 wrote:
| I used to work for Twitch and built the Custom Live notifications
| for streamers. It was a relatively straightforward change where
| we just changed the payload of what the streamers wanted the iOS,
| Android, email notifications to show. There were some behind-the-
| scenes work where there is actually a language/curse word check
| and decisions on if we needed to translate the copy to the
| receivers local language.
|
| The measurable change was a 30-60% increase in the notification
| CTR and resulted in hundreds of millions of incremental hours
| watched.
| pixelbeat__ wrote:
| Maintained/released the GNU coreutils for the last 10 years
| https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commits?author=pixelb
|
| Designed/Built/Deployed Meta's backend operating system for the
| last 7 years
| cperciva wrote:
| Probably bsdiff; a few hundred lines of code hacked together over
| a weekend has saved people over a hundred thousand years of
| waiting for software updates to download.
|
| Next up is probably scrypt; it would rank higher if
| cryptocurrencies used it, but instead they use nerfedscrypt which
| defeats the entire point of scrypt.
|
| Third is probably FreeBSD/EC2. Of course I didn't do all the work
| for that, but I can certainly claim the status of technical
| project manager.
|
| My day job, Tarsnap, comes in fourth.
| koolba wrote:
| You forgot my favorite cperciva project: spipe
| cperciva wrote:
| I didn't forget it, and it's one of my favorites too -- but I
| don't know if it qualifies as the most impactful. People who
| use it love it, but it's not very widely used compared to,
| say, bsdiff.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| One of the things I did was helping at a company I contracted at
| for a few months.
|
| The company did these pdf invoices and the design team would
| change the design weekly. And there was a junior dev working
| there and she spent 4 days a week trying to get these new designs
| into html to generate the invoice and convert to PDF.
|
| She was quite down because she felt like she was missing out on
| working on stuff she could learn from.
|
| So I went talked to the design team and got them to generate
| their designs as Adobe forms with named fields.
|
| Then I sat with the dev and we implemented in about 2 hours Adobe
| form field data and outputting a pdf.
|
| Then each week she got given a new form. Double checked the
| fields. And then replaced the form.
|
| The weeks that followed she would spend 1 hour a week doing her
| task and was able to work on the main application and get real
| work.
|
| Edit: wow people have contributed a lot of awesome stuff. I feel
| like I haven't contributed anything now haha. I just picked this
| particular story because I felt like I helped someone out of a
| crappy situation.
| simonw wrote:
| Probably this JavaScript function I posted on my blog in 2003
| https://simonwillison.net/2003/Mar/25/getElementsBySelector/
| Beta-7 wrote:
| What a coincidence. Just yesterday i've used
| getElementsBySelector for the first time while making a
| greasemonkey script.
| kmoser wrote:
| Wow, 10 years before document.querySelectorAll()!
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Wow, 10 years before document.querySelectorAll()
|
| querySelectorAll wouldn't ever appear without jQuery which
| got its idea from Simon's idea.
|
| And even then querySelectorAll was so poorly implemented that
| it didn't even have any useful helper methods.
| s1291 wrote:
| Ten years ago I was reading [0] and I remember your name was
| mentioned somewhere. Here is a quote:
|
| > Locating elements by their class name is a widespread
| technique popularized by Simon Willison
| (http://simon.incutio.com) in 2003 and originally written by
| Andrew Hayward (http://www.mooncalf.me.uk)
|
| [0] Page 91 from "Pro JavaScript Techniques" by John Resig.
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah here's Andy's getElementsByClassName post (via the
| Internet Archive): https://web.archive.org/web/20030402172546
| /http://blog.moonc...
| jmt_ wrote:
| Hey Simon, thanks for creating Django with Adrian. I was deeply
| interested in programming from a young age but learning Django
| in my teens sparked a passion for web development that has yet
| to feign so many years later! Appreciate all your contributions
| to this space.
| yuuu wrote:
| wane
| hnfong wrote:
| OMG.
|
| My most impactful thing I've done outside of paid work is a
| website running on Django. I could live without
| queryBySelector or their descendants, but not without Django.
|
| Thank you, Simon.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I like seeing this. At the time I remember thinking we needed
| something like this, and why doesn't the browser have it
| already?
|
| Then thinking, I suppose you could do it by (exactly the method
| you used), but never actually doing it because if it were that
| simple, someone would have already done it.
|
| Actually, seeing the date, I realize this predates me even
| leaving high-school, which makes it even more atrocious that I
| never knew of it!
| karaterobot wrote:
| IOU 1 beer.
| 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!
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Even more impressive to me is writing things into existence
| without the benefit of being able to dig in to the underlying
| browser tech, and only being able to use the public (at the
| time) DOM APIs like getElementById, etc.
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I wrote a Mach-O parser for Homebrew (the macOS package manager)
| that's invoked on just about every package install, so that's
| probably a couple of million daily users. It also ended up as a
| dependency of CocoaPods at some point, so it's on the critical
| path for a good chunk of the App ecosystem as well.
|
| I also implemented 2FA and API tokens for PyPI (and
| helped/continue to work on lots of other parts of that
| ecosystem).
| 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.
| patio11 wrote:
| I kickstarted and was the CEO of a non-profit which functioned
| for about six months as the shadow covid vaccine location data
| infrastructure for the U.S. during the early months of the 2021
| rollout. We worked with Google, the federally-blessed initiative,
| California, many county health departments, etc.
|
| My best estimate is many millions of Americans were successfully
| vaccinated as a result of data we sourced, collated, verified and
| distributed.
|
| The probable magnitude of the impact is thousands of lives saved.
|
| Our tech stack in the early days was a static site generated with
| Ruby with search results all in a single JSON file filtered by
| the client in JS, with the backing data store being Airtable. It
| got more sophisticated over time.
| xrayarx wrote:
| Please elaborate. What did the next evolution look like? Why
| was ruby not sufficient?
| patio11 wrote:
| One of our engineers has a good writeup:
| https://simonwillison.net/2021/Apr/12/porting-vaccinateca-
| to...
| umen wrote:
| I did many infustracture / bussiness developments over the years
|
| but the most impactful software is mobile app which i build
| together with my kids
|
| which they did the voices and selecting the images and over all
| they felt involved in dady's work . the software was to teach
| them the Hebrew letters. for them it was cool small game , for me
| it ment allot .
|
| Open sourced it : https://github.com/meiry/Cocos2d-x-Guessing-
| Game
| miki_tyler wrote:
| The software that DB used to model most of the financial assets
| that went south and caused the recession of 2008.
|
| Back in the days I was not fully aware of what we were building
| (we were a team of 3 engineers working for a "reputable" London
| based bank), but there were subtle cues in the requirements like
| the options given by the software to base the SPEs (the company
| that issues the repackaged bonds) in places like Bermuda, Cayman
| Islands, etc.
|
| In hindsight, watching "The Big Short" for the first time was a
| big come to Jesus moment to me.
| renierbotha wrote:
| A data dictionary of 200+ business metrics used in a large water
| utility company, listing clear explanations, pseudo SQL and
| source data lineage.
|
| Before this there were 5 different ways to calculate specific
| things like "minimum night flow".
|
| Plus we then built the data product which calculates all that
| stuff and serves it to the business in a self-serve query
| interface.
|
| But by far the most impactful was bringing together different
| teams to align on how actually to calculate core business terms.
| 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 :)
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| >Despite being in the industry a long time, I think most of
| what I worked on had little to no impact.
|
| This is kinda what drove me out of tech a few years back... I
| could point to tens of millions (at minimum) of people who had
| used my work. I could point to hundreds of millions in net
| revenue / cost savings for my employers and clients. But was it
| "impactful"? IE: was any major world problem solved, or were
| lives actually made better by my work? Even worse, the three
| coolest projects I worked on - seriously cool tech, highly
| scalable, etc - I'm not sure ever really saw the light of day
| because they were killed by changing business goals. Hard to
| feel motivated when you know you are doing good work but its
| all ephemeral.
| colecut wrote:
| its all ephemeral
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Isn't that amazing? And yet there are so many of these jobs.
| They pay well too.
| ArturT wrote:
| I've created a knapsack ruby gem for CI parallelisation that has
| over 122 million downloads. Primarily due to the fact, Gitlab is
| using it.
|
| I spin off https://knapsackpro.com from the knapsack gem and we
| are helping our customers run fast CI builds.
| 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-...
| ).
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I worked on a system for querying letters from prison inmates
| that would allow advocates to detect and respond to abuse by
| guards or fellow inmates.
|
| While I don't think I had a huge impact compared to other
| contributions, nor did it scale to billions of users, I like to
| think that it helped at raise awareness about abuses in a dark
| corner of the world. It is still in active use.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Actually a few. First VRS systems under ms-dos, a at-pc could
| handle 60 lines per machine, later we were able to connect them
| though Lan networks (5Mb). We did handle over 500k calls a day.
| Data collection for utility, gas, water, electricity. No more
| physical meter readings, we occupied 85% of the Dutch market.
| 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.
| stevage wrote:
| Hehe, well as with most things built professionally, I can't
| really take any credit for the concept or even the design,
| but I do take the responsibility of keeping it up and running
| pretty seriously.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| I don't know how much other government-hosted software you
| use, but I guess I'm thanking you for the fact that it
| actually works (and please don't reply that you also worked
| on the census website :/ )
| 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.
| Beauregard wrote:
| I was leading the team that build the software architecture for
| some of the Covid vaccine production instruments.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think the most impactful thing I've ever done was build a
| market information website for EVE Online (EVEMarketeer).
|
| It was definitely the thing that I've had the most fun building,
| since I was both product manager and developer, and I had zero
| other responsibilities at the time.
| 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).
| didip wrote:
| World Cup '98 was the bomb! Your work is part of an amazing
| history.
| 101008 wrote:
| As a football fan and obsesive, France 98 has a special place
| in my heart because it was my first world cup as a child (I am
| from 1990, I wasn't fully aware in USA 94), so please please
| please write more about this.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Quite insane. If you ever write about it, I'll surely be
| reading.
| itsthecourier wrote:
| Please follow up
| 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
| [deleted]
| 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?
| egberts1 wrote:
| It was actually a wandering hyperactive/ADHD mind that often
| said "why isn't there one" and follows through doggedly to
| the very end.
|
| It is one of those traits where a mind clicks and said "this
| is it and how" and surprisingly gets into the most illusive
| hyperfocus/high-energy mode (without using any drug).
|
| Slow-path network processing (arguably me) was commercially
| made in Ascom Timeplex in 1982 and someone else leaked it to
| Cisco (or ripping AT's patent off). I got that from observing
| how different river bends (re)connect year-after-year while
| doing trout fishing trips.
|
| Money-wise, I am disabled, got abled, disabled again in
| different way, re-enabled, now just coasting with my own
| ideas: JavaScript Host-Based Intrusion Detection/Protection
| System, being one of them. And an portable AirPod detector
| (for home/auto/travel) is another idea. And DNSSEC for within
| private enterprise is almost done.
|
| Money is not my thing but it does help greatly in the pursuit
| of my ideals (so many hardwares, so many test equips).
| taforask272277 wrote:
| can you please explain what is JavaScript Host-Based
| Intrusion Detection/Protection System?
| egberts1 wrote:
| It is simple. Too many malicious and privacy-violating
| JavaScript abounds, especially after being boiled down to
| seemingly-indecipherable WebAssembly bytecode.
|
| And a typical enterprise NIDS would not be able to see
| beyond those encrypted packet containing JS over 2-way-
| signed TLS/SSL, or HTTPv3 (QUIC) (or a few other E2E
| protocols).
|
| Since JavaScript won't be banned (unlike Adobe
| Flash/ActionScript, BTW Adobe's JavaScript is still being
| used within PDF files) anytime soon, this is another
| example of seeing a void and rushing to fill its need for
| the betterment of Internet citizens.
|
| Just yesterday, another "this is it and how" moment came
| to me: this Python PDF guy (and a few PDF experts) got me
| thinking "this is how to remove or make inert the
| JavaScript inside PDF":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33646951
| itsthecourier wrote:
| How did you get disabled?
| egberts1 wrote:
| A bacterial infection. Differently twice.
| tuyguntn wrote:
| OMG, Who are you?
| [deleted]
| ynniv wrote:
| user: egberts1 created: May 5, 2015 karma: 1337
|
| _chefkiss_
| egberts1 wrote:
| Leet!
| nelsonenzo wrote:
| Rebuilt the entire app UI for Onelogin. The ceo - who made the
| original UI - was refusing to launch it. The sales team wasn't
| able to close a single deal on the legacy UI though and forced
| him to release it. I made a whopping 36k from the company sale 10
| years later, so I have that going for me.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Honestly, I have built nothing impactful in an 30+ year career.
| It's mostly been working on my own or other people's ideas that
| didn't pan out or that I got disillusioned with, or building
| internal systems that a few dozen people use.
|
| I'd estimate that the vast majority of the code I've written is
| not running anywhere at all today.
| colecut wrote:
| at my current trajectory i'll get to where you're at in 10
| years...
| nyolfen wrote:
| why not find something that you would find rewarding to work
| on, even if it's on the side? the things i've done that feel
| impactful are little tools i've made to help the people i know
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Honestly, I have lost the motivation. Or perhaps it that I
| find nothing about computers to be rewarding anymore. I've
| almost decided that life was simpler and better when
| everybody was not buried in a phone 12 hours a day and didn't
| need to be online from home to deal with the basic demands of
| working and living.
| eternityforest wrote:
| I still have an interest in tech. Whenever I read about new
| sensors to keep kids from being locked in hot cars, or
| efficient smart thermostats, or a kerosene lamp being
| replaced with LEDs, or even just drone based light shows, I
| usually think "Yeah, this is totally worth being spied on
| 247".
|
| My problem is that I have no clue how you actually get
| involved with anything that matters unless you're top 1%
| skill.
|
| I'm perfectly happy with connection as a modern
| requirement, it replaces the requirement to dedicated many
| square feet to using and storing papers, but endless
| scrolling and the algorithm that makes you keep doing it is
| fucking _depressing_ to think about, and casts kind of an
| ugly hue over the whole tech industry, and so much of the
| industry is dedicated to delivering content people don 't
| even particularly want.
|
| I've also mostly lost interest in DIY tech for the most
| part. I've done lots of open source work, usually nobody
| cares. The only time I get excited is collaborating with
| existing projects.
|
| I don't know anything about how people start new projects
| and actually have them take off, so I don't think about it
| much anymore. Startups mostly feel like scams to me.
|
| Like, many of them provide a real useful service. But I
| wouldn't recommend most of them to anyone or use them
| myself. Most of them don't do anything that some cheaper
| service already does, and they usually have a bigger dev
| budget and a more predictable future. I don't want to
| tangle up my workflow with something brand new run by 3
| people without a really good reason.
|
| And worse, a lot of them _don 't_ provide anything useful.
|
| And I'm even more disillusioned with DIY scale personal use
| tech. I can't think of any software I want that wouldn't
| take years to write, and I'm not going to spend 3 years
| working on some software just for myself. I'm sure I can
| save up and just buy a solution in that time. Anything I
| can do in a weekend probably already exists and I'd rather
| just use that.
|
| And to make it worse, I'm not really happy with the tech
| community right now. The "Hacker ethos" is basically anti-
| tech. They only care about code as an exploration of ideas,
| and seem to hate real usable software in practice. They
| want pen and paper and film cameras back, and seem to care
| much more about even small amounts of metadata privacy than
| all the benefits tech could bring.
|
| It's less this exciting underground scene building the
| future as this sad group of weekend tinkerers who hate the
| modern world.
|
| I'm not sure where that leaves me as far as doing anything
| impactful. Maybe eventually I'll try again to start yet
| another new project and see if it gets any traction.
|
| At least I have a job that does provide some level of real
| value, even if it's just entertainment.
| Bhurn00985 wrote:
| The security architecture for a new aircraft.
| helsontaveras18 wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
| tonto wrote:
| It's not something I built necessarily but my stack overflow
| account, which I've only posted on about 100-200 times, says my
| answers have been viewed by 5.4 million people. Anyone with a
| stackoverflow account can check this in their profile I believe
| (for me it is in top right and says 5.4m which I presume is
| million pageviews on q&a pages I've posted), q&a is incredibly
| impactful.
| mooreds wrote:
| I worked on a site that was the most popular real estate search
| site in my US state for 5+ years. It helped thousands of people
| every day search for a home. There's so much interesting home
| data, so we were able to offer many dimensions for folks to
| search on. Things I built:
|
| * an advanced search widget (using GWT) which let people search
| across 20+ dimensions
|
| * an integration with a standardized MLS data provider, which
| allowed us to easily bring on new areas for searching
|
| * replaced the underlying ORM system with hibernate and ehcache
| to increase performance
|
| Small team, big impact. In addition to helping tons of folks, it
| was also a key driver of the business (some percentage of people
| would reach out to the company for help buying a place).
| 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.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Ha, amazing, thank you!
| spery wrote:
| I use your site often. Thank you for creating it, it's a great
| resource!
| franky47 wrote:
| The Arduino MIDI Library [1]. Back in 2008, I learned C++ to
| control my guitar effects pedals with custom electronics as part
| of my engineering degree. It kickstarted my career into tech and
| open source. Members of the community do all sorts of crazy
| things [2] with it.
|
| [1] https://github.com/FortySevenEffects/arduino_midi_library
|
| [2]
| https://diyelectromusic.wordpress.com/2020/09/19/introducing...
| chasd00 wrote:
| I architected and led the team that delivered the Covid vaccine
| system for a US state government. Hitting that perpetual moving
| target and deadline was the hardest thing I've done so far. It
| had a lot of technical impact on that state's department of
| health, lots of kudos from healthcare professionals and regular
| people plus won awards from the governor and secretary of health.
| imjared wrote:
| I did agency work for a while. One of our clients around 2010 was
| the US Holocaust museum here in DC. They had stumbled on a trove
| of pictures of orphaned children and needed help identifying
| them. We built a site to display them and integrated a handful of
| carefully selected social networks including Polish network Nasza
| Klasa. The idea was that people could share these photos and
| through the network effect, the museum would be able to find,
| tell, and archive the stories of these children. I was skeptical
| that anything would come of it but almost immediately, the site
| started getting results like "that's my father" or even "that's
| me". It still amazes me.
|
| Looks like the site is miraculously still up though the Cufon is
| looking a little rough these days: https://rememberme.ushmm.org/
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