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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?

#71

Post by stevage »

Professionally, probably findmyschool.vic.gov.au. Used by hundreds of thousands of parents every year to find what school zone their house is in. Built and maintained almost entirely by me.

Also SchoolScape, an internal department tool used by dozens of public servants to plan which schools need to be built or upgraded. I just coded it, with the hard stuff being done by economists. But from the feedback I get, it has made a huge difference to the people who do that work.

As a hobby, opentrees.org. Definitely seems to have caused some ripples in how tree data is seen and used.

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

#73

Post by maccard »

I work in video games and have worked from writing gameplay code all the way up to online infrastructure. It's only been "impactful" culturally, rather than some of the other posts. My top highlights are:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/sports/fortnite-world-cup...

I was a programmer working on Fortnite, and I ended up working on the on-site fortnite events, doing everything from the custom cameras and broadcast specific UI, to hooking up the events in-game to the lights in the stadium. It was pretty cool!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=EWANLy9TjRc - I worked on this game (and the demo in this video) for a few years. I wrote much of the code for the asset pipeline for the destruction, lots of the gameplay code for how it interacted with the game and a good chunk of optimisation on the cloud physics side.

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

#74

Post by nicbou »

davidw wrote: post #45

Probably political stuff, for better or worse: * Made it easier to create a limited liability company in Italy: https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-litt... * Pro-housing organization here in Bend, Oregon: https://bendyimby.com/ Software wise, I really enjoyed my time working on these devices: https://www.icare-world.com/us/

Fixing bureaucracy is a gift that keeps on giving. Well done!

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

#76

Post by coutego »

Monodevelop, I think: https://www.monodevelop.com

It wasn't a planned thing. I had recently got injured playing football, so I was stuck at home, not being able to walk or drive. I started checking the #mono IRC channel (it was 2003 and internet was something you did over a 48k modem, when your home phone line was not needed). Some guys, lead by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of Gnome, were implementing a compiler of C# and a bytecode interpreter of .NET IL, and I was very curious about it. I kept downloading, compiling and trying things out.

Then one day Miguel wrote in the channel that it would be nice to have some graphical editor and that somebody could perhaps port SharpDevelop over to Linux, by replacing Windows.Forms by calls to GTK. I said that I'd give it a shot and... well, 10 days later we had a working editor and half a dozen of contributors.

https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Mar-14.html

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

#77

Post by tromp »

In late 2013 I came up with the first memory hard Proof-of-Work puzzle, Cuckoo Cycle [1], based on finding fixed-length cycles in random graphs. Recently, custom chips were developed to solve it more efficiently than GPUs can.

That probably had more impact than the Binary Lambda Calculus language I designed [2] or the logical rules of Go I co-formulated [3].

Computing the number of Go positions [4] or approximating the number of Chess positions [5] had little impact beyond satisfying my intellectual curiosity.

[1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo

[2] https://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html

[3] https://tromp.github.io/go.html

[4] https://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html

[5] https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking#readme

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

#78

Post by tspike »

I was leading mobile platform engineering at Walmart when they first merged their Walmart and Walmart Grocery apps into a single app. It was a herculean effort and the resulting product left a lot to be desired, but my work certainly impacted hundreds of millions of people.

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

#79

Post by nicbou »

neilk wrote: post #28

Did a lot of work on Wikipedia with media, usability, and internationalization. As with all such things that merely facilitate volunteers, it’s hard to say what’s mine or put dollar values on it. But it’s touched at least a billion lives, and facilitated a large fraction of a media library that will likely outlive me. I’ve worked on minor stuff that was foundational to Google’s commercial offerings, but I think that…

Wikipedia could not work without that sort of work. Same with Open Street Map and all the little contributions to the map. It adds up to a lot.

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

#80

Post by keepquestioning »

egberts1 wrote: post #6

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 drive…

How did you find all these product market fits?

Have you made more than a typical SWE?

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