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Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

#391

Post by yosito »

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

#392

Post by pgt »

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

#395

Post by keraf »

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

Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

#396

Post by alasdair_ »

Jamie9912 wrote: post #380
alasdair_ wrote: post #321

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.

You personally made Pokemon GO?

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

#397

Post by ricardobayes »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #112

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

#398

Post by vijaybritto »

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

#399

Post by habi »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #210

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…

cycle.travel is also something to be proud of!
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