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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?

#2

Post by _9za9 »

For some people the most impactful thing they have done in life is create something that makes obscene amounts of money. I designed and built nanoshelters.com to help homeless people secure uninterrupted sleep. I should be worth more than most of you 'money is god' programmers but we live in a world that values how you much money you make rather than how you treat other humans.

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

#3

Post by gardenfelder »

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 hospital, where doctors determined the child could be revived. She was.

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

#4

Post by jiggawatts »

During a centralisation of public school local servers to a data centre, I created a consolidated library enquiry system. It served over 2,000 libraries, had 330 million titles, and had about a million users. It was efficient enough to run off my laptop, if need be.

AFAIK it was one of the top five biggest library systems in the world at the time.

I was asked to add some features that would have been too difficult in the old distributed system. Things like reading competitions, recommended reading lists by age, etc…

I watched the effect of these changes — which took me mere days of effort to implement — and the combined result was that students read about a million additional books they would not have otherwise.

I’ve had a far greater effect on the literacy of our state than any educator by orders of magnitude and hardly anyone in the department of education even knows my name!

This was the project that made realise how huge the effort-to-effect ratio that can be when computers are involved…

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

#5

Post by d23 »

Most of the most consequential changes to the reddit feeds a few years ago I was involved in or directly came up with. The most visible was probably the one that started putting discussion-heavy posts on the front page (things like legaladvice, amitheasshole, askreddit, unpopularopinion, etc). It’s weird to think about the resulting butterfly effects that are completely beyond my knowledge and comprehension.

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

#6

Post by egberts1 »

Impactful?

Designed and deployed credit card readers used in gas pumps back in 1979. (Sold to Gasboy)

Wrote a fine tuner to allow communication between satellites (precursor to TDRSS days). Still used to this day.

Failover of IP in ATM switches (VVRP, PXE, secondary DHCP, secondary DNS, secondary LDAP, secondary NFS). While not invented here, it is still used today as this is a Common setup to this day.

Printer drivers for big, big high-speed Xerox printers on BSD. Still used to this day by big, big high-speed printers.

Also, early IDS products (pre-Snort) at line-speed. Sold to Netscreen.

Easy zero-setup of DSL modem before some BellCore decided to complicate things (thus exploding their field deployment budgets; Southwestern Bell/Qwest enjoyed our profitable zero-setup). Sold to Siemens.

1Gps IDS/IPS before selling it to 3Com/Hewlett-Packard Packard.

Now, I'm dabbling in a few startups (JavaScript HIDS, Silent Connections, replacing the systemd-temp).

Impact? It is more about personal pride but its impacts are still being felt today.

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

#10

Post by buildbot »

Hmm oddly probably my first “real” full time job is where I had the most impact - I was one of two programmers hired for a summer to redesign a stress testing suite for a server hardware vendor, prime95, cuda-burn, etc. integrated into one single python application to collect the data. I stayed there during the school year part time and the next summer I got to hire another dev (my counterpart left to facebook).

We then worked on a baremetal automation system that worked through IPMI to completely automate the burn in process -remotely starting servers as soon as they got their IP registered, PXe booting them to the burn in image, and then kicking off the testing process. We had a way overkill rabbitmq system to collect streaming logs from every server as they ran, and all orchestrated via rethinkdb change feeds. I think it is still the most complex software project I have done. Basically one python file would launch 7 separate python processes, each their own rethinkdb change feed. This predated docker otherwise it probably would have been 7 docker containers haha.

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