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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?

#211

Post by foxtrottbravo »

A solution for a major retailer for sportswear where I designed a compact Certificate Authority module for our product that can be used to easily generate TLS Certificate for internal services.

The main benefits for the customer is physical security, the device is built to be savely stored in a safe or at a bank vault when not in use.

It is built in a way which give total control over the keys to the customer so that our support teams managing the services never have to touch a private key and is easy enough to be used by a non-technical employee of our customers.

For the same audience I'm working on replacing the traditional multi-hub-and-spoke VPN we've built over the last few years (around 500 Hubs in Germany + Spokes) with a true End to end encrypted Mesh system with around 2000 wireguard nodes.

Lastly this is something I hope to do in the near future, building out the first cloud strategy, team, infrastucture and procedures for said sports retailer.

Oh I built a Powershell Wrapper around some parts of the Dynect API and a mostly complete wrapper around the tailscale API which is not widely used but made an impacton a handful of people.

At the start of the pandemic I ran a couple of Jitsi Meet instances for people to connect with their close-ones which was used by a low five figur number of people.

I started a project where we 3d printed a few thousand earsavers for wearing A FFP2 mask for for our local school. I think we at least got two school fully supplied and about a thousand pieces where donated to the hospital that saved my life.

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

#212

Post by 13of40 »

pmarreck wrote: post #123
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??"

Just a guess, but it might have something to do with whether the brain is able to be saved vs. just the body.

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

#213

Post by GauntletWizard »

I was an SRE (one of a very small team) on Houseparty, a now-shuttered Videochat startup. We saw some good traction, but didn't manage to make the hockey stick continue for long enough and were bought out by Epic Games. I left shortly before them. About a year after that, the pandemic hit, and I was asked to help again as it hyperscaled; Growing 10x our previous peak in the matter of That's definitely my greatest impact, and the part of my career that I'm most proud of.

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

#214

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #109
simonw wrote: post #32

Probably this JavaScript function I posted on my blog in 2003 https://simonwillison.net/2003/Mar/25/getElementsBySelector/

Wow. You were the original querySelector. It's funny how you forget that somebody actually sat down and wrote these things into existence at some point. Thanks!

Even more impressive to me is writing things into existence without the benefit of being able to dig in to the underlying browser tech, and only being able to use the public (at the time) DOM APIs like getElementById, etc.

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

#215

Post by agentq »

I researched & prototyped (in R), and ultimately put into production (C++) a core set of spectral risk analysis analytics that replaced outdated VaR and vol forecasts for an extremely large asset management firm and left immediately afterwards. Technically speaking, guided risk mgmt/investment decisions at the trillion-dollar scale, ran as-is for 8-10 years before being recently re-implemented in some other language.

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

#217

Post by eKIK »

I'm one of the co-founders of Hotjar, so a fair bit of the original code was mine. Most of it has obviously been replaced by others after all these years.

I'm equally, if not more, proud of an extremely bad Dig Dug clone I made in Amos Pro as a kid though :). That's what eventually caused me to pursue a career in software development.

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

#218

Post by mathstuf »

Impactful? Probably CMake policy CMP0053[1]. Improved performance of CMake configures by 30%-50% depending on how intricate the code was.

While not done yet, getting C++20 modules to compile via CMake will probably eclipse that.

[1] https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/policy/CMP0053.html

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

#219

Post by rubyist5eva »

_9za9 wrote: post #2

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.

sleep in ze pod, eat ze bugs

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

#220

Post by DougWebb »

A long time ago I worked for one of the big medical journal publishing firms. (No, the other one.) I was one of the lead software developers, nominally in charge of the web application that served all of our licensed content to medical professionals and librarians all over the world. I was senior enough at that point that I attended regular planning meetings with the CEO and her team.

We were working on a new product, electronic access to textbooks. I'd built the entire system that takes the textbook XML we got from the content side, created indexes used by our search engine, and made it possible to efficiently display in the web application any text fragment from a full chapter down to a single sentence containing a search result.

The CEO called an emergency meeting: many of our library customers were government funded, and their funding required the library to receive a physical object in exchange for the licensing fee. They didn't want to have to store the physical textbooks and we didn't want the overhead of sending them textbooks. So the team starting talking about creating an entire new subdivision dedicated to the production, management, warehousing, and shipping of CD versions of the books, just so the customers could be given something physical.

I interjected: "If a CD is good enough, I can generate that using everything I've built already. I'm already converting the content to HTML for display in the app, so I can render the textbook out to a folder, one HTML page per chapter, with a table of contents and all of the images, and create an ISO image that the librarians can download using a link in the web application. Let them burn it themselves if they want a physical copy. They could also store the ISO locally so they still have that version if they let their license expire." That was a funding requirement as well.

So that's what we did. It took me a couple of days extra to implement that feature, and I saved the company a fortune compared to what they were considering doing.

I believe I got a $25 Starbucks card as a reward.

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