It never saw the light of day, but I developed a really cool prototype with WebRTC that allowed our customers to remotely log into another machine. It was basically what google has in this product https://remotedesktop.google.com/. It was one of the few things I worked on where I was genuinely excited to code it up.
Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
221–230 of 759 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#222A while back I made a mod for fallout new Vegas that has around 50k downloads now https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/56786/
Recently while watching YouTube I came across the firearms expert reacts guy reacting to fallout new Vegas mods guns. I was surprised to see the mine on a stick made it into that video https://youtu.be/xBMgQH9I8is
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#223I was working on a suite of projects to compose briefing packages for pilots. Before pandemic the result of this work was present in ~1/7 cockpits around the planet. I cannot count how many millions of passengers impacted by this, in a positive way of thinking of course. I was not alone, these software products are joint efforts of many-many smart people. The funny thing about that impact is that there should not be impact on crew and passengers - everyone love safe flights performed on time.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#224Most impactful? Wrote a Slack chatbot that allowed on-call operations engineers to leave their laptops in their cars. The bot could help investigate, diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve issues ranging from single-site slowness to service outages. It talked to databases, CDNs, caching layers, logging infrastructure, servers, load-balancers, and routers. Access was controlled using a tree permission scheme with user and group permissions. Informational commands were generally left open to all engineers and actions were tightly controlled.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#225NowPublic, while being a citizenship journalism site had a Katrina missing persons board which was much, much more popular than the site itself ever was.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#226#1 Computer simulation of automobile emissions testing, that proved more stringent emission standards could be implemented in the state of California.
#2 Space shuttle launch system programming
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#227Sadly I never/rarely get to see the impact of my code and a lot of the time
my contribution is to the team who delivered, so more like a bee colony making the honey. That said I think back to making systems for fire stations and hospitals to help roster their staff. These systems should have gave the staff an easier time swapping shifts and suchlike. I hope it was good for them!
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#228I wrote Forth/2, a native code direct threaded Forth for OS/2. Brian Matthewson wrote an excellent manual for it.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#229At work: the CDN for Megaupload. I was also the guy who had to shut it down when the FBI seized it. Personal non-code project: The first adult LEGO fan conference in 2000. While I got out of that business years ago it has been replicated by dozens of other annual cons around the world. Back then the LEGO group didn't really understand and was very weary of adult fans. Now there's a whole reality tv show about them wi…
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Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#230Despite being in the industry a long time, I think most of what I worked on had little to no impact. In terms of impacting other people, probably the biggest thing was blog posts and sample code. It’s funny how sample code has less “cred” than “real” code, but if you’ve ever been trying to start a new project in a new language or framework you know how invaluable sample code can be. In terms of impact in general, wha…
>Despite being in the industry a long time, I think most of what I worked on had little to no impact.
This is kinda what drove me out of tech a few years back... I could point to tens of millions (at minimum) of people who had used my work. I could point to hundreds of millions in net revenue / cost savings for my employers and clients. But was it "impactful"? IE: was any major world problem solved, or were lives actually made better by my work? Even worse, the three coolest projects I worked on - seriously cool tech, highly scalable, etc - I'm not sure ever really saw the light of day because they were killed by changing business goals. Hard to feel motivated when you know you are doing good work but its all ephemeral.