Convincing the team that always-on dashboards with critical, actionable metrics would improve release rates and uptime.
Making sure that upcoming new features and achievements are showcased to the whole company through weekly demos.
Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
11–20 of 216 posts
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#12Writing accessible documentation. Most people either write no docs or they write a doc that assumes the reader already knows what the thing is. I write docs that assume you're a new employee and explain the thing in simple, plain English before building up the technical details. Notably, these kind of docs make it easy to handoff maintenance and further development to someone else so you can move on to new projects.
For user facing documentation, always ask Karen in accounting to read through it and provide her opinion.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#13Resigning.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#14Writing accessible documentation. Most people either write no docs or they write a doc that assumes the reader already knows what the thing is. I write docs that assume you're a new employee and explain the thing in simple, plain English before building up the technical details. Notably, these kind of docs make it easy to handoff maintenance and further development to someone else so you can move on to new projects.
I really appreciate people like you.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#15Having two dry erase boards with various colored fine tip markers on hand
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#16I worked for a company that had gone from selling on premise software to cloud, and going from build to production release took a while. Realistically you could expect 1-2 days if everything went well. This was definitely not problem #1 at the company but I really wanted to push to see how much time we could shave off. I got some like-minded teammates to put time into a new release pipeline process, and we built some nice integrations where you could control the release process & see results from inside of slack.
So there were 2 kinds of big categories of things that happened. One was that we really slashed the amount of time from first master branch build to deployment. If things went well we could release to production in under an hour. This radically changed everything about our process. We started building smaller stuff because we could try things out in production very quickly. Code review times dropped a lot because we had smaller units of code. Planning meetings went faster because we were talking about smaller things so discussions didn’t go sideways. The team seemed to really like it.
Second class of thing that happened was that people from other teams would drop by our slack channel and see us rolling out code by talking/clicking to a bot, and they’d want to know more. And then we’d show the speed improvements and how it integrated into the rest of the prod architecture so that you could make the migration to using it too. So it kinda organically became the defacto release architecture at the company over time.
I’m a little bummed out now because it was super fun to see this all go down, it was almost accidentally the most far-reaching change I’ve instigated at work and the impact was great.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#17I am no longer with this company, but it was a small web dev company that had a problem with insecure legacy code on just about all 200 of its clients.
I wrote a software firewall to prevent the exploitation of these insecure websites as well as a monitoring system to identify any websites that got compromised in other ways.
It moved us from spending 80% of our time recovering endlessly defaced websites to 5%, pushed us on to newer and bigger projects, and made several hackers and at least one pen tester actively curse the systems in their exploit code.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#18Though this is probably not what you're asking for...
Realizing that my career is my own, and that I owe nothing to anybody. Nobody is doing _you_ a favor by hiring you. At most, it's a calculated risk.
Furthermore, realizing that I shouldn't suffer for management decisions. If you've been putting out fires for a whole year, either the whole team has been consistently doing a very poor job (unlikely, though possible), or the fault is out of your reach (quite likely IMO). In either case, it's totally acceptable to jump the ship to another team.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#19Three things: voting down a move to microservices, identifying a fundamental flaw in a core data-structure that is the high-level impetus for future refactorings, and encouraging people to be discontent with multi-minute long build-test-debug (BTD) loop. Unfortunately, I find very long BTD loops to be personally offensive though, to the point it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case. Despite know…
I'd be interested to hear more voting down microservices. The title didn't actually specify, but I assume you felt it had a positive impact? :)
When was this, and how does it look now?
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#20Ban pull requests if they aren't a big change resulting from a RFC.
Therefore most feature code should be shipped to master with feature flags.