11–20 of 759 posts
Nothing hits you in the feels than having customers thanking you for improving their quality of life, or a child thanking you for giving a parent more years of life.
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.
Is it - what is the thing I made that the most people use? A core service within AWS. Very insane scale.
Is it - what is the thing I made that I think will be the most intrinsically "beneficial" to society? Probably https://contractrates.fyi I've done a lot of freelancing myself and there really doesn't seem to be any single community or hub for freelancers that isn't trying to squeeze every last dollar out of them. I'm trying to make a thing that is legitimately helpful and completely free.
The 2nd most used analysis tool on NSANet in response to the 9/11 commission report that the agencies weren't sharing data. https://twitter.com/masonrothman/status/1521407937985404928
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 answering reader mail. People seem really grateful for it, and it means a lot to me.
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.
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…