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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?

#141

Post by idiotsecant »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #135

I built the first "post-play" experience for Netflix. It made it so that Netflix would automatically start playing the next episode of the show you are watching after a 15 second count down. We built it in the Silverlight player on the web because it was the fastest way to A/B test new features at the time. Before post-play, you had to open the episode menu and click on the next episode to play it. We didn't want to…

I want to say I hate automatic playing of content after my content is complete but when I really think about it I love it when I want it to do that and hate it when I don't and i'm too lazy to tell my UI which is which.

I guess when something just works your users will assume the cases where it is working properly are just the way things are and the cases where it does something they don't like is your fault.

So well done!

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

#142

Post by kkamperschroer »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #135

I built the first "post-play" experience for Netflix. It made it so that Netflix would automatically start playing the next episode of the show you are watching after a 15 second count down. We built it in the Silverlight player on the web because it was the fastest way to A/B test new features at the time. Before post-play, you had to open the episode menu and click on the next episode to play it. We didn't want to…

As I was reading your comment I was thinking "whoa, that sounds like Damien or Robert" and sure enough :)

Hope you are doing well!

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

#143

Post by koliber »

I’ve built 15Five, a employee engagement platform. It was an effort of many people working together over many years, and I had the good fortune to be there at the start. Many people use it weekly to communicate with their managers and peers. I’ve seen it deliver a positive connection in remote and on-site teams.

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

#144

Post by Phelinofist »

A software solution for supply chain tracking under the Dodd-Frank Act Section 1502 aka Conflict Minerals. I like to think that this does not only have a positive impact for the turnover of my (ex-) employer but also on the lives of the people in e.g. DRC.

It was also the first project were I was the lead for the development side of things and also made myself known as the domain expert. Fun times :)

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

#146

Post by lazyasciiart »

I didn’t even build anything here, just set up an online service. In 2020 I volunteered with a small bail fund serving about 100 clients a year with annual donations of about $40,000 - primarily checks, but increasingly online payments. In May I moved their donation process from an excel spreadsheet manually reconciled with PayPal to a saas donation portal, which managed recurring donors, generated tax receipts, etc. I imported all our existing donor records, set up the option to pay by Square instead, etc, it was great. My notes from choosing the service mention that if we ever hit 12,000 unique donors we would go up a payment level.

Later that month, when George Floyd died and people started protesting, they also donated to bail funds - many of them explicitly to bail out protestors but many plain donations. I think our new donation portal handled over one million donations in two days.

(Our new square account was, for obvious reasons, instantly locked for fraud and we managed to get their support to re-open it within a few hours on a Sunday, they were very responsive! We didn’t keep all the money - there’s a National bail fund coalition and it was very random which funds were shared as donation recommendations, so the massive influx of donations to a few funds was distributed across the country.)

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

#147

Post by jcuenod »

waltbosz wrote: post #102
jcuenod wrote: post #55

In an MA program in biblical studies, I realized that the best way to understand what words mean in context is to see how they're used in similar contexts. To do that, you've got to be able to find similar contexts. I didn't like the solutions available from the major software vendors, but it turns out there's a whole bunch of tagged data that's openly licensed. So I built a webapp that has all the search functionali…

When I was in college I wrote a Windows app to do the side-by-side translations of the bible just like you have on your site. It was commissioned by a multilingual church. Funny thing is, I'm a atheist raised by Catholics. I'm not sure if I would take the job today. I feel it would be unscrupulous for me to facilitate religious studies.

I mean, parabible is really aimed at research. In that sense, hopefully there's something useful about it as a tool for study, irrespective of personal convictions. That said, I'm a Christian and I'm studying the Bible because I believe that's how we know God, and I would be the first to say that there is something different about that kind of research.

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

#149

Post by suprjami »

jasonrojas wrote: post #31

A nodejs closed caption converter. I’m not a developer but can get along just fine for most of my projects. 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. https://github.com/jasonrojas/node-captions

How did you feel about that from a licensing perspective?

Not trying to bait a copyleft vs permissive argument, I'm genuinely interested.

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

#150

Post by domlebo70 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #4

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…

Any more info? This is fascinating.
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