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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?

#111
Compared to most of these comments, I've not built anything impactful.

But the software I've written that seems to have gotten most use is SDL-Ball and the FinalKey password manager.

Well, I also built a "digital bulletin board" for a youth org back when PHP was in fashion, it's no longer used, but they used it, and bought minor upgrades for almost 15 years, so I like to think it had a positive impact on that org. They ended up primarily using a booking system that we designed together exactly to fit their needs.

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

#112
Wow, weird to think about.

Nothing. I haven’t built anything with a significant impact. I’ve made things that made a significant impact on businesses, but in the scheme of things, nothing exciting.

The thing I made which generated the most revenue was easily the most harmful, and likely the most impactful. Unfortunately. It was an ad exchange that did extremely well. The owners went from random guys with a gross idea to multimillionaires in a couple years. They both spend their days buying up startups.

I should have done better by now. I feel like I need to make up for building that exchange. I was young and had no idea what I was getting into until it was too late.

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

#113

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…

... and this is how OCLC was created?

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

#114

Myself. Came from a dysfunctional family, enormous debt and have survived lots of trauma to reach a decent position + decent net worth.

Way to go stranger internet friend! Glad to see not only that you've overcome what you say you have, but also that it's a point of pride. Keep it up!

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

#115
A temporary low resource form for people in Puerto Rico to send an SMS message out to family outside of PR after Hurricane Maria.

During Hurricane Maria most of Puerto Rico was offline. Slowly but surely, some people started having access to some online services. To this day, I don't know how, but I saw frequent posts in social media (Facebook and others) of people saying they could access spotty internet but SMS and making calls wasn't working, and asking people to let their family outside of Puerto Rico know that they were okay.

So I setup a site on glitch.com with real simple 2 field form. One for a phone number and another for a message to send. It was dead simple, no framework, no CSS, just little bits of vanilla HTML and JS, and a bit of backend code connected to Twilio. Some text on the top with instructions too. I was making it intentionally small so that a spotty connection wouldn't have a problem using it.

Any time I saw someone posting in social media asking for someone to reach out to their family, I posted a link. I also shared it in a slack where many from the PR diaspora where trying to contribute ways to help. Before I knew thousands of people were using it. I did some continuous monitoring to make sure nobody was using it for abuse, and making sure it was being used as intended. It would have been EXTREMELY easy for someone to abuse it if they wanted to.

No one abused it. Thousands used it as it was intended. Left it up for weeks, and I kept monitoring it to make sure it wasn't being abused. I eventually saw it had stopped being used entirely for two weeks and spun it down.

I saw some people posting about it afterwards being thankful they were able to receive messages from their family, and I'm happy I rushed through to write very sloppy high impact code.

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

#116
I cofounded a startup (bractlet.com) that uses IoT data, thermodynamic simulations, and other technologies to optimize building energy consumption. We've prevented around 10,000 tons of CO₂ emissions, which equates to many millions of dollars in energy savings.

Shameless plug: we're hiring :)

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

#117
I built (together with my team) an entitlement service, which makes creating new billing plans a lot easier, and reduced our time to launch in new markets down to just a few minutes.

I wrote about it here https://arnon.dk/why-you-should-separate-your-billing-from-e...

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

#118

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…

> had a far greater effect on the literacy of our state than any educator by orders of magnitude

Nice work, but check your ego mate. Seems your growth hacking would have had zero result if those kids couldn't read to start with, so you could share some credit ;-)

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

#119
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…

Obligatory: https://youtu.be/jjaqrPpdQYc?t=14

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

#120
post #71

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…

As a Victorian parent who moves house way too often I would like to say thank you.
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