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

How timely! Just this week, I was able to bring together our client's large IT team with my agency's large team of engineers in a shared Slack, after nearly a year and a half of our only communications being through email and (lots of) ad hoc Skype calls.

My vision driving what has been a many-month push to get our teams together is to build a much higher degree of trust, respect, and collaboration between the teams of engineers, to enable our program team (consisting of both the client's team and our agency's team) to more nimbly plan and triage issues together, and to mitigate email grenades that unnecessarily pull in business stakeholders who, without context, see only bits and pieces and (understandably) fear the worst.

The combining of the teams is obviously still early in the experiment and there's a lot of history we are going to need to overcome together, but I'm optimistic this will be one of the simplest but most effective strategic moves I'll have made in my career up to this point. I'm excited about the future (challenges and all) for the team and will be doing everything in my power to make sure everyone is supported and building the trust necessary in any high-performance team.

I'm early in my career, but something that I did recently that seemed to have an impact was to encourage people, both tech and non-tech, to voice what they actually want, regardless of whether that thing seemed possible, and to then work with the group to walk back from there to something possible and reasonable. Prior to that point, everybody was in the habit of just not wanting anything that didn't seem immediately doable.

Sounds very silly and minimal but I've learned to say "no" and it changed my whole work life. I've gained so much out of it.

- respect of my opinion

- peace (as opposed to stress)

- Massive code quality increase

- Meet my deadline more often

and probably more... this was life changing

I played a really small role when looking at some caching data for a system another team run (their logs are ingested and processed by us) and noticed that a lot of the time the content requested is only requested once - this is sometimes referred to as a "one hit wonder"

Once I told them this and showed them some graphs etc they did an experiment to set it to only cache on the 2nd hit, and this reduced the write rate on the disks massively - potentially increasing their lifespan quite significantly (saving money)

They did the hardwork of engineering it, experimenting etc but I'm proud that my little contribution helped drive a real change in a domain outside my team :)

Man, I know exactly what I did that helped this, and it's so dumb, but I know it's made a difference.

We build consumer electronics, and typically, early on in the process, we find some sort of bug with our power supply designs that generally requires a bunch of people surrender their power supply PCBs to the designer. I didn't do a damn thing to fix the power supplies, but I did manage to find [these great connectors](https://www.adafruit.com/product/368?gclid=Cj0KCQiA4NTxBRDxA...) on Adafruit that people can use to power their systems using any barrel jack wall wart supply. All you gotta do is solder some wires and choose a wall wart with the right voltage/power rating.

Sure, it's not a to-spec power supply, and it typically can't play audio at max volume, but that's irrelevant - most of the new functionality that needs to be implemented has to be implemented in software, by software developers who just need access to the tiny computer in our products. Not a high power application - at least, not much more than your average router. (Which, incidentally, almost all have wall wart supplies.)

Plus, since they're barrel jacks, they're easy as hell to unplug if you need to get a hardware rework done.

Saved us a ton of time designing stupid, bespoke, one-off AC/DC supply harnesses to suspend line voltage electronics. Just get yourself a nice safe wall wart and go. Plus, I love that I'm helping funnel a bunch of bigco bucks to Adafruit, who's a company I love to support.