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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?

#123

Post by pmarreck »

gardenfelder wrote: post #3

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…

wait... they won't try to revive a child unless they can first prove that said child can be revived? Why not just... try to do it regardless and hope for the best?

Also, as a new parent, my immediate thought is of course "WHO wasn't watching the kid??"

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

#124

Post by mod »

I built an integration for a charity that processed many millions per year. The money went to support needy folks in an impoverished nation. Children could get sponsors for schooling, food, and orphanages.

The high-impact part comes from the organization and their mission moreso than my contribution to it, but it was also the most technically challenging work I did (shoehorning previous functionality into places it didn't belong and all the fun that comes with that).

It's been about 9 years and I can see that largely, my backend is still running. The site had a facelift since then, though.

This was a fully custom project, with a pretty standard Rails backend. The complexity was mostly dealing with Convio, the CRM / payment processing system from Salesforce for nonprofits.

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

#125

Post by chrchang523 »

Adopted an orphaned open-source project that was still widely used in the genomics community, despite no updates in ~4 years. Used SIMD instructions, careful memory management, and other strategies to speed up most operations by 1-4 orders of magnitude and support the current generation of biobank-scale genome-wide association studies (https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/4/1/s13742-015-... ).

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

#126

Post by ggambetta »

Interestingly, I think the most impactful thing I've built is Computer Graphics from Scratch, a book! Teaching people is high-impact and also super rewarding.

In terms of code, probably some stuff that runs on every Android device (although I don't think any of my original, 2013-2014 code is still in use, but the project itself is very much alive)

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

#127

Post by dzink »

I run https://www.dreamlist.com and it's become a major, if not the top, online gift drive platform in the US. Anyone who knows families in need can organize a gift drive for them. You can add items to lists, lists to groups of lists, to multi-branch organization pages full of items wished by children and families who may not be able to afford gifts otherwise. It's like a Y Combinator for direct giving.

DreamList is free to all participants in the system and I spend a lot of Q4 helping giant drives set up to get just the right gifts to many many thousands of children (some drives support 15-30,000 children in foster care, single parent families, natural disaster situations, or church communities across multiple states, and we support an increasing number of drives). Q1-3 are spent building more functionality to make the next Q4 easier because it is inevitably bigger than the last.

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

#128

Post by nam17887 »

coutego wrote: post #76

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…

I love MonoDevelop, I used it to write C# for Linux before the .NET core days

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

#129

Post by harel »

I was tech lead and architect on the system that runs the UK's digital trade remedies platform to control trade tariffs and special measures post Brexit. It's the first and only platform of it's kind. I suppose that's the most "impactful" as it manages events that affect entire industries on a national scale.
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