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Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

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Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#71

Post by drywater »

Yoric wrote: post #57

Mmmh... 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 :)

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?

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#72

Post by kqr »

mitefinedailes wrote: post #11

Convincing the team that always-on dashboards with critical, actionable metrics would improve release rates and uptime. Making sure that upcoming new features and achievements are showcased to the whole company through weekly demos.

What were the critical, actionable metrics?

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#73

Post by kqr »

jwcrux wrote: post #36
awinder wrote: post #16

I worked for a company that had gone from selling on premise software to cloud, and going from build to production release took a while. Realistically you could expect 1-2 days if everything went well. This was definitely not problem #1 at the company but I really wanted to push to see how much time we could shave off. I got some like-minded teammates to put time into a new release pipeline process, and we built some…

You’d love _The Unicorn Project_ if you haven’t read it. I highly recommend it, and it’s a story around roughly the same journey. https://www.amazon.com/Unicorn-Project-Developers-Disruption...

And/or anything related to the state of devops report. Nicole Forsgren et al. are doing amazing work in observational science around this.

The gist of it is that reducing your time-to-production is one of the best investments you can make. It changes everything about how you build things.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#74

Post by roydivision »

Being vocal about problems when others try to ignore them. I wasn’t popular for it at the time, but I gained respect from the people who matter. The result was averting many bad situations. This both required, but also built up my self confidence.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#75

Post by kqr »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #66
Stronico wrote: post #56

1. Setting aside a "20% day" to develop infrastructure - I went through a slow period about 15 years ago where I had the option of doing this without meaningful tradeoffs and I built some software that I still use to this day. It's tempting to call this a learning, or reading day but I've found that I lose focus if I have a full day to do that - if you decide that you will spend 8 consecutive hours building a persona…

Setting aside your own time for learning and your own agenda is so crucial. The sad reality is that most orgs which run on a ticket/sprint process will make room for nothing outside of tickets. Looking back at my previous gig, the biggest mistake we consistently made (but were somehow impotent to correct), was assuming that all of the “we should”’s which came out of post-mortems or brainstorming sessions would someho…

This is very insightful. The higher the level you want to perform on, the more responsibility you have to bear yourself. Asking for permission is really asking for someone else to take the risk, the blame, and therefore the responsibility. That only works up to a point, and you will have to get used to shouldering more and more responsibility on your own initiative to truly get anywhere.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#76

Post by inapis »

sn41 wrote: post #45

Designing 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 users. That's the kind of thoughtfullness we need!

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#77

Post by Yoric »

drywater wrote: post #71
Yoric wrote: post #57

Mmmh... 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 :)

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, but for something that used to run every 15 seconds on hundreds of millions of computers, this can cause data loss. That's why you really want to use a DBMS rather than roll your own format if data safety is critical.

For shutdown, it was also a case of initial architecture not matching the current situation anymore. Firefox was initially a synchronous, single-threaded, single-process architecture, but this had stopped being the case for a few years already. At some point, shutdown needed to be re-architectured, I happened to be the one who managed to convince people that the time was now :)

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#78

Post by tayo42 »

vsareto wrote: post #32
javajosh wrote: post #9

Three things: voting down a move to microservices, identifying a fundamental flaw in a core data-structure that is the high-level impetus for future refactorings, and encouraging people to be discontent with multi-minute long build-test-debug (BTD) loop. Unfortunately, I find very long BTD loops to be personally offensive though, to the point it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case. Despite know…

>I fear that I have such a large amount of contempt for those who don't share my view on this that it leaks out whatever I do. I even know, intellectually, that this is wrong - ignorance does not deserve contempt, but compassion, after all. It can be annoying, but at the same time, it forces them to take a break to think about things they're currently working on. When you have nothing to think about and your current…

Idk if it forces someone to take a break. If I get forced into a long compile. Maybe even 30 seconds I might pull out my phone and 5 minutes later.. Oh its done..

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#79

Post by bertr4nd »

I wrote a little tool that used perf profiles from our production fleet to generate a custom linker script that reordered our main server program’s binary to be significantly more cache friendly. The heuristic I came up with for reordering was one of the few (maybe the only) genuine “eureka” moments I’ve had in my career.

And the performance win was extremely nice :-)

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#80

Post by wool_gather »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #66
Stronico wrote: post #56

1. Setting aside a "20% day" to develop infrastructure - I went through a slow period about 15 years ago where I had the option of doing this without meaningful tradeoffs and I built some software that I still use to this day. It's tempting to call this a learning, or reading day but I've found that I lose focus if I have a full day to do that - if you decide that you will spend 8 consecutive hours building a persona…

Setting aside your own time for learning and your own agenda is so crucial. The sad reality is that most orgs which run on a ticket/sprint process will make room for nothing outside of tickets. Looking back at my previous gig, the biggest mistake we consistently made (but were somehow impotent to correct), was assuming that all of the “we should”’s which came out of post-mortems or brainstorming sessions would someho…

I'm just coming around to this position after a long period of frustration, and this anecdote is encouraging; thanks!
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