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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?

#41
First job out of college, I was at a consulting firm doing software development for DHS (Homeland Security). I got a lot of flack from my friends and family for "working for the devil", but the work was actually objectively good for society - basically there was a big data problem where when an immigrant trying to illegally cross into the US was apprehended, and if they were sick, their custody would be transferred from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to Health and Human Services (HHS) so they could receive medical attention. There was zero data transparency between these two orgs, so when that transfer happened it usually caused families to be separated (Sick dad, healthy mom and child, sick dad gets brought in for care and never finds his family again). Since HHS and CBP don't have data communication and everything is siloed, the handoff was really poor and they often wouldn't find each other for months afterwards.

There was a lot of talk about this in the news, and although the software I was working on didn't entirely fix the problem, it allowed the agencies to communicate better. Their data wasn't siloed, and families got separated for only a few days rather than (sometimes) permanently.

I really miss that job. The pay was atrocious and zero WLB, but everyone agreed it was an important problem to solve, and I think the tool we had built really was helping.

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

#42
post #7

This: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Farmer%27s_Market . Helped a few thousand people get their meds before we all got arrested. No regrets.

Reading your comment I thought this was going to be a darkweb site for cheap pharma stuff from Canada/Mexico to the U.S., did not expect straight up drugs.

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

#44
post #15

Definitely All About Berlin. A few years ago, I started documenting how to deal with German bureaucracy as a foreigner. The website grew and grew until it became a well-known resource for immigrants. It has become my full-time job at some point in 2020. It's been a little over 5 years since I started, and I'm still super stoked about my work. I still enjoy doing the research, rewriting guides a dozen times, and answe…

That's awesome! Wish I had heard about it when I moved there, definitely going to hunt through the site to see if you have a guide to getting some of my pension payments refunded now that I've moved

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

#45
Probably political stuff, for better or worse:

* Made it easier to create a limited liability company in Italy: https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-litt...

* Pro-housing organization here in Bend, Oregon: https://bendyimby.com/

Software wise, I really enjoyed my time working on these devices: https://www.icare-world.com/us/

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

#49

I guess my most impactful project was a microprocessor-based weather station for siting wind energy systems and fruit frost prediction in the early 1980s. Turned out that one of my stations, being used by a frost predictor, was across the street from a rural drainage ditch in which a young child was discovered face down in the water. The frost predictor faxed temperature profiles for the previous several hours to the…

Wow! That's a pretty amazing story. Thank you for sharing.

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

#50
For personal: Proximity[1], a flash game that ended up being added to hundreds of flash sites and, from the stats I was able to easily find across several popular websites, got up to over 10 million plays after only a couple of years.

For professional: Built a large and involved interactive speech application (IVR) from scratch that allowed hospitals, doctors, etc to call and check a person's health insurance status for a Fortune 100 health insurance company. Was used in over two million calls while I was there and was still being used when I had quit a few years later.

[1]: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/183428

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