I helped a friend at the gym fix their hotkeys in Windows when some out of date writing software started screwing with it. Outside of that, I've learned that well-tested (user tested) UI of any kind is some of the most impactful work a software dev/designer could be doing on a regular basis, regardless of what backend devs or w/e will tell you. Making a scrollable area more clearly look like a scrollable area, or making a password entry process less arduous, is incredibly important work, if not only because it saves some other people from being confused and wasting energy on a problem they shouldn't have; this is particularly true of any public service interface stuff.
Ask HN: What's a software project that made people's lives better?
21–26 of 26 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a software project that made people's lives better?
#22I made a web app that lets people check their bikes in and out of a bike valet service at a big hospital near me. I set up a usage dashboard and it’s neat to see that 300-400 people use it everyday to make their commutes a little more hassle free.
Re: Ask HN: What's a software project that made people's lives better?
#23I worked on a data science platform that is being used to accelerate research for diagnosing cancer at early stages and for researching treatments for cancer and other diseases.
Re: Ask HN: What's a software project that made people's lives better?
#24My trading algorithms have been profitable, and I enjoy the freedom that money brings. I appreciate the things it allows me to buy and the experiences it unlocks. More importantly, it positively impacts the people around me
Did you write the algorithms as an independent trader or part of a firm?
Re: Ask HN: What's a software project that made people's lives better?
#25This was a software project for me, wanted something that lets me know what things to do in the area, where are shops, what are their hours, how to contact them, etc. Not only for businesses but for public spaces (say you wanted to rent the local park for an event-contact info is there), also event information, local notices, etc.) I've used it several times checking if some store in the town I'm headed is open (go t…
Re: project for your employer: Is 211 not a viable option in California or in the counties your org serves? Don't get me wrong, I've tried working on 211 in Washington, DC and experienced the same thing, ultimately: Individual nonprofits creating their own resource and referral systems since 211 was not cutting it and would likely never cut it.
Last time I heard about 211 in our counties - about 20 years ago - they (the agency that got a tri-county grant) had a resource directory website and were looking into doing phone support but funding left for some reason and the site is long gone. (Found Calaveras 211 - has only PG&E public safety/Hate crime support line/tobacco cessation info.)
Will see if it has regained any support up here - don't see much advertising for it in this rural area, and looking at the California 211 most of the resources point to the central valley... Thanks for the heads up!
Re: Ask HN: What's a software project that made people's lives better?
#26One project I really enjoyed making was an open-source indoor web map for a museum: https://map.fieldmuseum.org/
(Speaking for myself only. I don't work there anymore.)
I don't know if the map's made people's lives any better, or just a little more annoying, maybe =/ Personally, I would've preferred a regular paper map on the back of a brochure, which can be both much bigger than a phone screen and not require any learned UI interactions. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be stopped using paper maps during COVID (a decision I tried to fight, unsuccessfully). So our visitors could either use this map on their phones or not have one at all. In that sense, I guess it was better than nothing...?
At the time we built this (a few years ago), indoor mapping (as opposed to the typical outdoor street mapping of Google/Apple/OSM/etc.) was a pretty niche area, and the commercial solutions we saw were all some combination of 1) expensive, 2) slow, 3) clunky, 4) too proprietary, or 5) not mobile-friendly.
So we set out to make our own... with a budget of $0 and a dev team of 1 inexperienced web dev (me). It was the first time I ever worked on a web map, and trying to hack indoor areas and multiple floors onto it was... a challenge! It's got a lot of problems (it's laggy on some phones, editing the geometry is a huge PITA, UI isn't great and has bugs, branding/marketing imposed many restrictions, etc.). Honestly, it's pretty jank code that I wish I could rewrite from scratch. We had a whole roadmap of planned improvements and cleanups, but our team was forced to moved on right after initial release.
But on the plus side:
1) It's free and open-source: https://github.com/arcataroger/openlayers_indoor_map (but it's abandoned and I wouldn't recommend using it unless you really have no other options; check https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Indoor_Mapping first for alternatives)
2) It uses vanilla JS/HTML/CSS. This is a decision I question in hindsight, as it made state and UI management unnecessarily difficult. But it seemed right at the time, given the need to minimize long-term maintenance (i.e. JS framework churn) because of the limited dev resources available in the museum and nonprofit worlds.
3) It's better than nothing :)
I wish I had the time and resources to rewrite this whole thing from scratch, having learned from this experience. I'd fix a ton of bugs, change up the UI, clarify the symbology, and maybe try to push some of the indoor-specific features as proper upstream PRs to OpenLayers & QGIS rather than just hacking them into this app as one-offs.
I think having a "proper" open-source frontend indoor mapping solution would be a great boon to many museums, art galleries, airports, malls, colleges, etc. Google Maps actually does a pretty good job at this for certain places like airports (e.g. SFO: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6164644,-122.3859568,17.78z), but their process for that is totally opaque, and it's never clear to me how an institution can ask for their space to be mapped like that (or submit their own?). Even when I worked at the museum, we could never figure out how to actually get their map of us corrected. It's still missing all the floors and many exhibitions are in the wrong places: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8661273,-87.6169018,20.06z
Maybe I'll pick this up again someday and try to work on it as a side project...