[HN Gopher] What is the most useful project you have worked on?
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What is the most useful project you have worked on?
Follow up to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942397
Author : laksmanv
Score : 78 points
Date : 2024-04-06 19:40 UTC (3 hours ago)
| monsecchris wrote:
| I made a hundred million TVs boot in half the time.
| mywacaday wrote:
| Any idea why my Sony TV randomly reboots when I turn it on and
| takes over a minute to reboot
| monsecchris wrote:
| It's probably busy thinking about all the terrible things you
| make it display.
| null_deref wrote:
| That is the single most sassy comment I've seen on this
| site
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "thinking" -> reporting??
| h1fra wrote:
| I hope it's not the feature they call "Fast boot +" which is
| basically always keeping the TV on then it's not good :D
| monsecchris wrote:
| I wouldn't brag about that kind of solution.
| sandspar wrote:
| The next trick is getting people to turn them off in half the
| time.
| rvba wrote:
| Maybe you know why TVs cannot swap channels immediatelly but
| with this 1 second of static?
| ore0s wrote:
| I made a UI that allowed call center managers to search through
| historical transcripts by keyword. Previously they clicked
| through a table of chatlog popups and CTRL+F'd for hours.
| gutuie wrote:
| I have worked in the rail industry for most of the last 10 years.
| The project with the most impact was a rail signalling upgrade
| for Norway's railways - using technologies whose foundations were
| layed 25-30 years
| chasd00 wrote:
| I worked on a bunch of COVID testing and vaccine related projects
| for a US state government. Testing result aggregators and the
| system of record for COVID vaccines, hardest thing I ever done
| but also the most rewarding, I've been terribly bored ever since.
| istillwritecode wrote:
| Google search
| mavili wrote:
| Wait, who are you?!
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Fair enough, that does seem useful.
| musicale wrote:
| for searching Google.
| preezer wrote:
| I made the calendar in redmine actually useful.
| thom wrote:
| Worked with a PhD student who had an algorithm to tell airline
| pilots exactly when to turn their engines on. Probably saves more
| pollution than I or my descendants will generate in all of our
| lives so I feel I'm comfortably in the black there.
| thom wrote:
| Same company as my answer to the useless question tbh so just
| goes to show...
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Could you elaborate? Why would a pilot not know when to turn
| their engines on, and why is the timing not obvious (eg, "when
| we want the airplane to move")?
| 93po wrote:
| The engines need time to spin up and warm up, and
| additionally you might start them then (for a million
| possible reasons) have delay between starting them and
| actually pushing back from your gate.
| thom wrote:
| Ever started your car engine in a parking space but not been
| able to immediately pull out? Airports are extremely dynamic
| and complex and do not run like clockwork - they are pushing
| big hunks of metal through the air and across concrete with
| constant contention in both cases, and waiting for humans in
| between. But modern airports do try to optimise their Target
| Startup Approval Time (TSAT) and you can Google that term if
| you want to go deeper.
| a_d wrote:
| I made a device that lets my kids engage with chatGPT without eye
| strain [1] and parental controls. No need to give them my phone
| or laptop, no more worrying about them wandering onto the
| internet [2]. IMO it is incredibly useful to have kids interact
| safely with AI.
|
| [1] an old fashioned B&W monochrome LCD.
|
| [2] its a stupid little dumb terminal
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| Working on medical devices. It's mostly modern C++, it's
| demanding, you need to write a lot of unit tests and
| documentation (it's the law), and the specs must be good (well,
| at least better than other software), but it's really fun and
| useful in the end, and you learn a lot of things that can make
| you write better software in other fields.
|
| I really think every SWE should spend a few years writing this
| kind of thing to be better.
| noman-land wrote:
| I would love to do an exchange program like this. Where the
| code I write is critical to human survival. I want to know what
| those people know.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Saying this as someone who's done medical devices for close
| to 20 years, the only thing we know that you may not is that
| we _have_ to follow procedures, or else.
|
| Honestly, that's what it boils down to.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I tried pretty hard to get into medical technology for a while
| but just never landed any of those jobs
|
| Sadly there's just only so much of that kind of work to go
| around and we all have to pay bills
| not_the_fda wrote:
| I've worked on a variety of medical devices: CT scanners, patient
| monitors, infusion pumps, radiation therapy devices, contrast
| injectors, dialysis machines, assistive devices for the blind.
|
| Last year I had to go to the ER it was pretty cool to see that
| some of the equipment was stuff I've worked on. I needed a CT
| scan with contrast, I had worked on the standards body that
| defined the protocol that allowed CT scanner talk to a contrast
| injector, and they were using the device I worked on with the
| feature I defined and implemented.
|
| Its pretty cool to see your work keep you alive.
| Uehreka wrote:
| I've worked on medical device stuff too, and it's not like
| anything else. I'll never forget the first time I found out
| that code I'd written had saved someone's life. I'd done plenty
| of awesome things, and in that moment they all felt small.
| serhack_ wrote:
| I had to deal with some of projects you mention. At least where
| I'm from (italy), we rely on a bunch of old proprietary and
| very sh* technologies that I think it's really killing patients
| (metaphorically speaking... or maybe not...). The thing is that
| most of people aren't asking AI/the superb cure, but something
| that just _works_.
| pants2 wrote:
| I'm fairly familiar with infusion pumps, where bad software
| regularly kills patients. Just look up "infusion pump
| software recall" and you'll find dozens and dozens of very
| recent examples of how bad software implementations have led
| to a lot of preventable deaths.
|
| I have some friends trying to fix this[1] and they have
| amazing tech, but it's a difficult industry to break in to.
|
| 1. https://www.altrainfusion.com/
| ryandvm wrote:
| That's fascinating. Sadly, based on the quality of software
| engineering I've witnessed (and produced) over my career, if I
| were to find myself having to trust my life with any of it, I
| would be terrified.
| fragmede wrote:
| That's when you beat on the code until you aren't scared.
| Don't let the code out the door until you've unit tested,
| integration tested, QA'd it to hell and back.
|
| If it's some random cat pic frontend website code and it
| breaks, yeah whatever, just fix it as it breaks because you
| have the luxury of hourly deploys. but on the other side of
| the spectrum, if you're writing firmware and it's isn't
| remotely updatable, you don't just sling the code over the
| wall in the same way. in that realm you have the luxury of an
| actual spec and a less complicated system.
|
| everyone gets scared. what you do in the face of it is up to
| you.
| seanvelasco wrote:
| > protocol that allowed CT scanner talk to a contrast injector
|
| was this part of the DICOM protocol?
|
| i have worked with medical imaging devices as well, but was not
| fortunate enough to work with the CT modality. cool stuff!
| benwerd wrote:
| I made an open source social networking platform that was used by
| non-profits like Oxfam and Greenpeace to train aid workers; the
| Canadian government as an intranet; the Spanish anti-austerity
| movement as an organizing platform; universities like Stanford
| and Harvard to teach; and Fortune 500 companies as a social
| intranet.
|
| I had no idea what I was doing at the start. I'm very, very lucky
| that it worked out the way it did.
| serkanh wrote:
| Care to share the project repo?
| benwerd wrote:
| It's this: https://github.com/Elgg/Elgg
|
| It's pretty long in the tooth now - it's pretty old! But
| there's an amazing community and new core team that still
| keeps it up to date.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Well, if "use" is defined as "profit made" - a variance swap and
| index option market making algorithm.
| mateuszbuda wrote:
| I'm still working on a web scraping API
| (https://scrapingfish.com/). For some people it's evil bot but
| for others it's enabler for public data access. I think it's
| useful.
| formal-function wrote:
| I was the lead engineer for the USA's first internet Census
| (2020).
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I worked on a phone for the hard of hearing. It is loud, and it
| also displays what the other party says in text on the screen. So
| when a hard-of-hearing person can't hear what the other party
| says, they can read it three seconds later.
|
| It matters. When people can't hear, they lose their social lives.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Cool. It it available for anyone anywhere to buy?
| audiodude wrote:
| I re-wrote (in Python) the WP1 bot, which compiles information on
| the importance and quality (Featured Article, A, B, Stub) of
| Wikipedia articles in Wikipedia projects. It's currently the bot
| with the most all time edits on English Wikipedia.
| dragonwasrobot wrote:
| Been working on the same project for close to a decade now:
| remote patient monitoring in the healthcare sector. (Mainly
| chronic) patients get to live longer and more normal lives
| knowing that any worsening of their condition is caught early on
| by clinicians and as a result the national (usually European)
| healthcare services save a ton of money by avoiding
| (re)admissions to their hospitals, one of those rare win-win
| scenarios. Improved the lives of thousands of patients over the
| years.
| worik wrote:
| Interesting. Good, useful
|
| What do you think about the direction medical mo ignoring is
| going g? Data collection, enshitification etcetera.
|
| Is it a beat up?
|
| Are we correct to be worried?
| kevingadd wrote:
| I spent a couple years working on "a portable compilation target
| for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for
| client and server applications", but none of the code I wrote
| during that time actually shipped, so it's hard to say how useful
| that was. The technology itself seems to have turned out useful,
| though! I suspect "none of the code I wrote during this time
| actually shipped, but the project was a success*" is a common
| story in the industry at this point?
|
| * though my understanding is almost everyone on the project
| struggled to get promoted since it was behind schedule
| joshuaturner wrote:
| In 2020 we had a pretty hard pivot due to COVID and worked with
| several state parties and organizations to coordinate mail-in
| voting registration drives and handle registration form OCR and
| phone validation before having them sent to the state. It was a
| chaotic year, and I know if we hadn't been there another company
| would have filled the role, but it was really meaningful work
| that had a direct impact on the elections that year.
| mavili wrote:
| Have you noticed how non-Americans usually clarify which
| country they're from when what they're talking about is
| something relating to the country, but Americans are like "it
| had a direct impact on the elections". Of course everyone must
| know you're talking about America right? Cause where else is
| there? :)
| koliber wrote:
| I once joined a team where I had a secondary responsibility for
| configuring and generating periodic reports. These were daily or
| weekly activity reports for the platform I was expanding and
| supporting. When I joined, each report required custom coding and
| it took about two weeks to turn around.
|
| I got bored of coding these reports. Bit by bit, I built a
| templating system and a configuration-based way of building these
| reports. Users were able to get reports not only in CSV files,
| but also in HTML, plaintext, and Excel files. They could get them
| not only by email, but also via FTP and SFTP. Reports could be
| customized in a variety of ways. Most importantly, with the new
| system, I could turn a report around in about five minutes.
|
| When I joined there were less than 20 reports in the system. When
| I left, there were hundreds. Our internal users found these
| reports valuable, but the emotional cost of requesting and
| waiting for one was a burden. Removing this burden was a
| pleasure.
|
| No one ever said that this needed to be done. It was an itch that
| got scratched.
| daevis wrote:
| https://github.com/lucidl/tededroid
| bsmith wrote:
| I wrote multiple systems that import most of the tax return data
| for the Finnish Tax Administration, a system that imports payroll
| data (and helped with the previous version of the system), and
| tax payer data extraction for other government agencies.
| Downstream process use this data to automatically fill out
| taxpayers' tax returns in Finland each year, and individuals only
| file tax return corrections. So if everything looks good, which
| happens for 90+% of taxpayers, there's nothing to do each year.
| We even won a few awards for the project.
|
| https://www.pry.fi/en/activities/news/the_finnish_tax_admini...
| jakjak123 wrote:
| About when was this? Just curious about the time period
| bsmith wrote:
| Project started in 2014 and is still ongoing, but I think
| it's mostly small add-ons these days. I was on this project
| for nearly 6 years.
| winrid wrote:
| What technologies did you use?
| bsmith wrote:
| Old boring tech, VB.NET and t-SQL. Never understood the hate
| for VB.NET, I swear it's from people misconstruing VBA, which
| is awful, or they had terrible infra and coding standards.
| The system we had was a general core product that was
| configurable (I mean, taxes are the same, they just have
| different rules), but also customizable. Finland wasn't the
| first international project, but it was maybe the biggest
| one, so a lot of the solutions ended up being custom for the
| project. Unfortunately been difficult to find work with the
| boring tech background, but it was enjoyable (especially
| considering it was taxes).
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _Never understood the hate for VB.NET_
|
| Not many people "hate" this or that tech, is my
| observation. As a guy who more or less refuses to work with
| anything else beyond Elixir, Golang and Rust these days, I
| can tell you that my stance comes from informed trauma over
| my 22+ years of professional experience; many runtimes like
| the JVM and .NET are quite good but have defects that tend
| to show up in exactly the wrong moments (like a burst of
| load that usually nobody ever tests for).
|
| You absolutely have my respect for working on that system
| and it makes tangible positive impact on people's lives.
| Kudos. Wish I had even one such project in my long career
| but alas.
|
| That being said, we should always qualify our statements.
| Your code likely never has to work in 100K+ requests per
| second conditions, and latency barely matters -- as long as
| people don't see 30s HTTP timeout canned pages then it's
| all good, right?
|
| Many of us work on much more demanding stuff however, and
| there the programming stack actually makes very real and
| measurable difference on many axii -- programmer
| productivity, runtime resilience to bursts or just high
| loads, raw speed, easiness of deploying a hot fix, and
| others.
|
| Again, you have my respect. Choosing boring / old tech is
| viable in many cases. But definitely not all. All our tools
| come with tradeoffs. You simply chose one whose negative
| tradeoffs will never manifest.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Please move to every country on the planet and replicate your
| work there.
| bsmith wrote:
| I'd love to, this is exactly the use case for digital
| technology; automate the stuff we can making more time for
| more meaningful taska for everyone. Finland is ahead of it's
| time for these kinds of integrations. Problem is, it requires
| a central authority having all of the data, and the US has
| absolutely zero trust in it's government to not fuck it up.
| With good reason
| noman-land wrote:
| Maybe you can start at the city level and move your way up.
| This is a great way to do it in the States.
| rvba wrote:
| Is that true that one can see everyone's salary in Finland? Or
| was it only for those above EUR 100k? Can people outside of
| Finland see it? Doesnt this attract thieves? They know whom to
| rob. What is the impact on dating scene? Do rich people put
| full names on Tinder?
| weinzierl wrote:
| Not a (big) project but as a student I worked in third level
| support and we had to make sure that the service number was
| always available. The contract had harsh penalties in case we
| missed a call and so we had to reroute the number even for short
| breaks. This was done via a terrible, clunky and ancient Cisco
| web interface several levels deep. It took like a minute or more
| to log in, navigate to the right place and copy and paste the
| right number.
|
| I think the 30 minutes I spent to automate this was the best
| return on investment I ever reached, because the script was used
| for years by many people and did not only help to prevent us from
| penalties but must have saved a considerable amount of time over
| the years.
| tobych wrote:
| I worked on software that runs in an IoT gateway on bucket trucks
| used in the power industry, that raises audible and visual alarms
| if a worker doesn't have their harness clipped onto the bucket
| while they're operating it. In particular, I wrote a Finite State
| Machine library in Python that supports what tracks what's
| happening with the bucket, and helped develop the (MQTT) protocol
| to communicate with the backend. It was a lot of fun, and very
| satisfying.
|
| Having said this, some of my more cynical friends have told me:
| "You weren't saving lives. You were just helping these companies
| reduce their insurance premiums."
| bombcar wrote:
| Someone's family doesn't even know to be thankful to you,
| because dad came home after it squeaked at him.
| jll29 wrote:
| One of my most fun projects of the 2010s was an event extraction
| system my team and I developed that could extract events like
| floodings, fires, terrorist attacks and several others, determine
| their properties (when, where, how many fatalities, monetary
| damage etc.) with the added capability that it could tell whether
| an event in a tweet (on "X", the system formerly known as
| "Twitter") was the same event that an agency news article talked
| about.
|
| There's a little video we made for our KDD'18 paper about it:
| https://www.kdd.org/kdd2018/accepted-papers/view/an-extensib...
|
| Another cool project was to develop a state of the art legal
| search engine that was put into production across law firms in
| the US, and that was/is used by the U.S. supreme court justices
| (they were given anonymous accounts so even we could not tell who
| entered which query).
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Pathologic, a Drupal module which uses some simple heuristics to
| find and correct broken links and image paths in content which
| might happen because the content was migrated between servers,
| the URL of the server it was hosted on changed (such as when they
| started using HTTPS - early versions of this module predated the
| "all sites must use HTTPS" idea), the content used relative paths
| but was being viewed in a context where a full URL was necessary
| like a feed reader, etc.
|
| It came about when I was working on the site for a local
| newspaper where the writers would work on articles using an
| internal copy of the site which would then be migrated to the
| live site when published, but when they linked to other articles,
| they would often copy-paste the URL of the article as it was on
| that internal site, causing a broken link when the article was
| published. Rather than try to teach a bunch of crusty journalists
| what relative paths were, I just wrote a bit of code to fix those
| URLs for them. With the client's permission I later cleaned up
| and open-sourced that module.
|
| At its peak it was installed on over 70,000 Drupal installations
| that we know of (not all of them reported usage data). It's still
| being developed, though by other developers in the last few years
| as I have lost interest (and client work) in Drupal, but I'm
| still quite proud of it, and I still love to hear from people who
| say it was a must-have for their sites and made their lives so
| much easier.
|
| https://drupal.org/project/pathologic
| conaclos wrote:
| I am one of the main maintainers and contributors of Biome [0], a
| formatter and linter for the web. It is great to see that so many
| users are enthusiastic about Biome. It is really gratifying to
| work on a project that is appreciated and useful to the
| community.
|
| [0] https://biomejs.dev/
| kgeist wrote:
| When I started my job as an intern, I was surprised to learn that
| before each release, the techlead of our team would always
| manually verify every commit in the release branch to make sure
| that the issues in the issue tracker that correspond to the
| commits are actually marked as "to be merged" and greenlit by QA,
| that there's no commits accidentally merged from other branches
| which aren't ready for a release yet (juniors often mismerge by
| accident), he also checked that all commits from the original
| feature branches were merged and none were missed (happens
| sometimes) etc. It would take him 1-2 hours to sift through all
| commits every time (each release would incorporate tons of
| features/fixes and commits weren't squashed, so there was a ton
| of work). The techlead also didn't allow anyone to do this work
| because he feared people wouldn't be as attentive as him. I
| remember there was one time when it was 11 PM and he was still
| verifying the commits and the release managers had to wait and
| couldn't go home.
|
| I wrote a script which finds new commits not present in the
| master branch and compares them to the corresponding issues in
| the issue tracker (each commit message has an issue ID as a rule
| so it's easy to find the connections), and then generates a nice
| report like "the release branch cannot be released as is because
| issue 1234 is not marked as ready by QA, while commit 3456 is not
| present in any of the listed feature branches and could be a
| result of an accidental merge".
|
| After we started using this script, the time it took to verify
| release branches decreased to something like 10 minutes. The
| techlead finally decided to delegate this kind of check to other
| devs (not a bottleneck anymore).
|
| The idea was then copied by all other teams (web devs, etc.) and
| the script is still in use today, with many more features than I
| originally envisioned.
|
| That small silly script was probably my most useful contribution
| because it saved a lot of time for everyone.
| wslh wrote:
| I think compressing daily X.25 transfers for a national tax
| agency that pay per Satellite use.
|
| The challenge in that context was that the compression should be
| done in an IBM mainframe without buying C because it was a
| infinite bureaucracy process. Another challenge was that it was
| not possible to connect the mainframe to the ethernet network
| because they also need to buy an expensive network interface. So
| we cannot compress it in a normal PC and transfer it
| automatically.
|
| We did two versions one in Cobol and another in REXX.
| kebsup wrote:
| I've worked in the bankid system in my country. Most people I
| know have used it already, which is a nice change compared to the
| projects in which I haven't met a real user IRL. :D
| ThalesX wrote:
| 911 system for my country. Was part of a small 'special unit'
| team and we implemented the entire system end to end.
| Administration, telephony system, even special asset monitoring.
| Best project I've worked on, and will probably have worked on in
| my life. Smartest people I've ever worked with.
| chucky_z wrote:
| I wrote a Tampermonkey script which more or less was a true
| 'automate someone out of a job' situation, except it didn't do
| that at all; it freed up 20+ hours a week that someone had to sit
| there and do this awful manual thing with vendor portals, csv's,
| and spreadsheets.
|
| I haven't worked at that job for almost a decade, and last I
| heard it's continued being used with only a small amount of
| maintenance.
|
| That's the most compliments I've ever gotten for any software
| I've ever written and it had very real human impact.
| ipunchghosts wrote:
| SAS, synthetic aperture sonar. I made the algorithms and software
| to make the near photographic pictures of the ocean floor from
| these systems. Completely amazing way to see the ocean floor! The
| software is in wide use by sever groups and runs in real time on
| a Remus 600 UUV.
| jakjak123 wrote:
| What actually made the most money for society and not
| shareholders was probably automating payments for student housing
| and taking it online. The student housing association are
| separate from the colleges and are non-profit organizations in my
| country, so this increased their efficiency by quite a bit.
| thestepafter wrote:
| 20+ years ago I wrote a completely custom open order dashboard on
| top of Oracle database that was modeled after a 30+ page daily
| report that the warehouse guy was printing every morning (M-F)
| and making 15 - 20 copies, then delivering to management. Aside
| from saving some trees the warehouse guy was able to come into
| work an hour later! (He was salary, so no issues there.)
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| I lead and (re)wrote Ganache, the most popular Ethereum
| simulator. The company I work for shut it down last year though,
| despite success and consistent growth.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Clippy and the rust project as a whole.
| Havoc wrote:
| Built a python PDF solution to replace a process that used to be
| a thousand+ instances of print out paper, fill it in, scan it,
| email it back, someone try to read the bad scan & transcribe it.
| jpeggtulsa wrote:
| https://sidelinescout.com/
| notamy wrote:
| I made a tool to control where Linux applications put their files
| via bind mounts and environment variables:
| https://github.com/queer/boxxy
|
| I've heard that it's made it as far as university HPC clusters to
| help control iffy code written by students; I'm glad I managed to
| make that stuff a bit easier for the people operating them.
| howard941 wrote:
| Wrote the firmware for an amateur packet radio terminal
| controller that flew on the shuttle a number of times in
| terminal+bbs mode, was somewhat popular in terrestrial use, and
| had a few other bells and whistles like RTTY, SSTV, AMTOR and
| FAX.
| layoric wrote:
| I was first employee and only software engineer for 12 months at
| a startup working on increasing large scale solar power
| penetration in electricity networks globally. Worked there for 4
| years solving all sorts of interesting problems working with
| meteorologists and electricity network specialists to build solar
| power forecasting systems. Implemented direct integration with
| several national electricity markets putting forward bids on 5
| minute power generation which indirectly controlled many utility
| scale solar farms. This and more while keeping costs down and
| whole company to less than 10 people. Put lots of automation in
| place early on which enabled this as people joined. Having good
| monitoring solution along with CI from day 1 was a great enabler.
|
| The project moved the needle for the amount of solar power that
| could be confidently installed into electricity networks in
| Australia, and many countries around the world. I got heavily
| burnt out, didn't get any equity, and initially took a
| substantial pay cut to work there, but on balance still the most
| impactful work I've done, and will be hard to top.
| b4ckup wrote:
| Maybe not the most useful thing, but certainly useful and the
| coolest thing I built is a code formatter for the m language
| (also known as powerquery). At the time there was only
| daxformatter.com but no formatter for powerquery. So I wrote one
| and some people are using it. Imo it has a very nice ruleset to
| format code that I would prefer to formatters in other languages
| that I use myself. People reported issues and I took care of
| every single one of them. It's not much but it's honest work.
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