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Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
121–130 of 216 posts
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#122Taking the initiative in doing the right thing. For example, when I worked at Data I/O, their LogicPak communicated via a serial line. This required a terminal emulator on the IBM PC side, and there were various ones of erratic quality available for the customers.
I just decided to write a simple VT-100 terminal emulator for the PC in assembler as a rogue project. It worked out so well Data I/O included it with every LogicPak for many years, as then the customer had everything they needed in the box, and Data I/O didn't have to support emulators they had no control over.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#123Exposed key events happening in the product as an anonymized feed in a dedicated Slack channel, where each event links back to the CRM, a support profile, and a log of the session. (Only those with appropriate access can actually use the links.)
Strung together Segment, Zapier, customer.io to make it possible.
It’s ridiculously useful, and also gave others ideas for other types of feeds we can have for smaller teams.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think they weren't working so good in the first place? I mean, why was a bad solution implemented in an open-source product?
For Session Restore, there were two problems. One of them was that it had gained lots of features and the architecture wasn't adapted anymore. That's the kind of things that happens with all long-lived projects. The other one is that getting file safety correctly is really hard. The OS likes to the developer, the filesystem lies to the OS and the hardware lies to everyone. For most applications, that's not a big deal…
In my time writing databases, I found that not only the mount-flags could result in data-loss despite fsync, given you use fsync as it is supposed to be used [0], but even enterprise-grade hardware would at times (at that scale [1]) drop and/or corrupt a few bits here and there.
That reminds me of the case where AWS famously revealed that a single NIC in their ginaromous S3 fleet flipped a single bit once in a while and that caused an outage because their gossip-daemon responsible for fleet health-checks failed spectacularly [2].
Bryan Cantrill's talk on the realted topic of hardware/firmware bugs is pretty good [3].
[0] https://danluu.com/fsyncgate/
[1] https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/04/at-scale-rare-even...
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#125Taking the initiative in doing the right thing. For example, when I worked at Data I/O, their LogicPak communicated via a serial line. This required a terminal emulator on the IBM PC side, and there were various ones of erratic quality available for the customers. I just decided to write a simple VT-100 terminal emulator for the PC in assembler as a rogue project. It worked out so well Data I/O included it with every…
This.
When something needs doing, I just get it done. If you wait for everyone to agree that it needs planning to be done at some point in the future, it'll never get done because the feature firehose never relents.
This has cost me a few weekends, but a) it meant that I kept my sanity in the long run and b) despite said fixes reducing the company's dependency on me (ie. supposedly damaged the job security) taking the initiative has allowed me to demonstrate a different and entirely more significant kind of value.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#126100% Discovering and using Karabiner. https://medium.com/@nikitavoloboev/karabiner-god-mode-7407a5...
As someone who recently switched from Fedora to OSX for work reasons this looks amazing.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#127Mmmh... I rewrote big chunks of Firefox's Session Restore to ensure that people stopped losing their data in case of crashes. Pretty big impact on both Firefox and, hopefully, the life of a few hundred million users. I rewrote the Firefox Shutdown so that it actually worked. I also introduced structured async programming, async testing, async exception reporting in our codebase. And yes, I do enjoy bragging :)
Thank you!
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#128Designing more forgiving interfaces. I work in the public sector in India. Usually forms here are phrased in threatening terms - you can submit any document only once, and there is a threat of perjury for just uploading the wrong document etc. I proposed that we can utilise cheap cloud storage so that users can submit documents as many times as they want, and as long as any of the uploaded documents are correct, then…
That is superb. What you're really saying is that 80% of your customers no longer feel the need to phone you.
"What you're really saying is that 80% of your customers no longer feel the need to phone you."
No, they're saying call volume went down by 80%. We know nothing about how many callers generated the calls before and after. Maybe each and every customer used to call them 5 times per month, and now each customer calls them only once per month. That would be an 80% reduction in calls, but a 0% reduction in # customers who feel the need to call.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#129Designing more forgiving interfaces. I work in the public sector in India. Usually forms here are phrased in threatening terms - you can submit any document only once, and there is a threat of perjury for just uploading the wrong document etc. I proposed that we can utilise cheap cloud storage so that users can submit documents as many times as they want, and as long as any of the uploaded documents are correct, then…
IT in Indian Govt is stuck in 90s. Can't upload documents many times, unncessarily strict restrictions (like images uploaded have to be 120x120 and within 150 kb), the threats you mentioned AND the ABSOLUTE fetish with captcha and OTPs I hope the Indian govt sets up something similar to that design/tech agency set up by US/UK govts. In the meantime, a lot of props to you for designing interfaces that empathize with u…
That sounds like the (NC)DMV.. Of course, there are no risk of perjury (that I know of), but if something goes wrong you'll be invited to stay in line for another 4 hours.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#130Designing more forgiving interfaces. I work in the public sector in India. Usually forms here are phrased in threatening terms - you can submit any document only once, and there is a threat of perjury for just uploading the wrong document etc. I proposed that we can utilise cheap cloud storage so that users can submit documents as many times as they want, and as long as any of the uploaded documents are correct, then…
That's amazing, kudos to you, I imagine it's difficult to pull this change? Are there political consideration that a line of command must all answer to?