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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?

#51

Post by gardenfelder »

thewebcount wrote: post #49
gardenfelder wrote: post #3

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.

Thank you! Took me by surprise when my client phoned and said my weather station was on the evening news.

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

#52

Post by sterlind »

evronm wrote: 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.

oh wow. you were adamflowers? did you just get out of prison? glad you have no regrets, I can't imagine how much serving that much time must suck.

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

#53

Post by seefish »

jasonrojas wrote: post #31

A nodejs closed caption converter. I’m not a developer but can get along just fine for most of my projects. Funniest part was, I open sourced it. Then a few years and an acquisition later the parent company tried to sell us a tool for converting caption files based off my own code. https://github.com/jasonrojas/node-captions

I'd love to hear more details about how that interaction went!

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

#54

Post by gardenfelder »

dan_wood wrote: post #35
gardenfelder wrote: post #3

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…

That’s amazing.

Interesting that one my the developers on my projects was Dan Wood.

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

#55

Post by jcuenod »

In an MA program in biblical studies, I realized that the best way to understand what words mean in context is to see how they're used in similar contexts. To do that, you've got to be able to find similar contexts. I didn't like the solutions available from the major software vendors, but it turns out there's a whole bunch of tagged data that's openly licensed. So I built a webapp that has all the search functionality that I need and I put it online (https://parabible.com).

Apart from word of mouth and the occasional post like this, I don't advertise it, but it's getting about 100 users a day. Many of my users come from the majority world and couldn't afford the software from the major vendors, which is very gratifying.

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

#57

Post by Bacito »

I created Tiny Flashlight for Android 12 years ago. It's been downloaded almost 500m times. Back then every hardware vendor implemented the camera API in their own way and it wasn't easy to start the camera led. I had to purchase many different devices from different carriers from all around the world just to find out a way to start the camera LED. It was very helpful when the vendor published the kernel source code with the camera drivers for the particular device model. I could send custom commands to the driver to start the LED, where it was not possible using the standard camera API.

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

#58

Post by sterlind »

a couple of algorithms deep in the core infrastructure of Azure: the cluster scheduler for placing VMs (published as "Protean"), and a color-constrained shortest path solver for route planning in the WAN.

amazingly I once failed an interview at Google, despite my abilities. I think because it takes me a while to think before I get anywhere.

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

#59

Post by KaiserPro »

for me, the most impactful thing in terms of users, was introducing graphite/grafana to a large news org.

Before it was all splunk, everything took ages, and you needed to have a degree in weird regex/SQL syntax to get anything useful.

I started showing off graphite/grafana to a few devs. I put some basic CPU/Memory/HTTP request time metrics in. They started putting it in the expressjs layer they had. This meant that any HTTP call was automatically logged, along with CPU memory and anything else they wanted.

By the time I left, splunk was used to do post mortems, and virtually every team had a grafana dashboard, with the Product/buisness owners setting the SLAs/alerts.

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

#60

Post by p0deje »

Security Kit for Drupal: https://www.drupal.org/project/seckit. I built it when I was a junior QA engineer both learning how to program in PHP and doing first steps in the security. I open sourced it, pretty much moved to Ruby and forgot about it just to learn several years later that it's used on 50k websites across the world.
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