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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.
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…
I've since gotten a degree and written software for a handful of companies.
When I think of how many people are actually _using_ my software, though? Fourteen years later, the mug club software is still live in a production environment, used every day by wait staff who turns over every few months. No doubt hundreds - potentially thousands (it got deployed at a few different bars) - of people have interacted directly with it. That code embarrasses me nowadays, but as far as impact goes: that's probably it.
There are also thousands of people using a tiling window manager for Windows which I originally built for myself and decided to share publicly for free.[2] I still can't believe how popular it has become.
[1]: https://notado.app
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.
I appreciate the good you've done for the world, but isn't that last sentence just a little bit ironic?
Many would read "I should be worth more than..." as "I should have more money than...", but that's exactly what the parent comment is railing against. In the corporate world, and especially in the startup space, money is often the metric that defines worth. In the parent comment's world, I imagine they would rather that not be the case, and by they would be worth more than these startups/"money is god programmers" that are "only" worth money.
It could've been put a bit more nicely by not implying the reader is a 'money is god programmer,' but otherwise it's a valid opinion, I think.
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.