Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built? • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by Jach » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 12:36 AM UTC

As part of a team at my last job, I worked on some core features of https://www.salesforce.com/products/experience-cloud/overvie... -- if I'm tricked into a bragging mood I like to say a book got written about it https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Salesforce-Communitie... The product is still useful to thousands of businesses and transitively their customers, so it's probably the most impact I've made even if it's a shared impact with many others.

Individually, nothing much. Maybe an old python2+numpy re-implementation of a slow matlab script for radar, specifically SAR RMA imaging: https://github.com/Jach/radar_sar_rma I still get the occasional ping about it. A handful of other things have over the years been helpful to a handful of other people, like a hacky jira-to-github-issues migration script, or a simple ranked choice voting counter using scraped web data. That's always nice, but nothing super impactful. I don't mind.

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

#232

Post by vermaden » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 12:37 AM UTC

Three things.

    - beadm -----> https://github.com/vermaden/beadm
    - automount -> https://github.com/vermaden/automount
    - lsblk -----> https://github.com/vermaden/lsblk

All of them for FreeBSD system.

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

#233

Post by helsontaveras18 » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 12:38 AM UTC

Bhurn00985 wrote: post #170

The security architecture for a new aircraft.

Can you elaborate?

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

#234

Post by awslattery » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 12:39 AM UTC

In my career to date, a web application developed at breakneck speed (3 weeks for functional demo to stakeholders, which included members of CDC on Operation Warp Speed advisory committee) by myself and the CTO at the time to facilitate applications to receive and distribute COVID-19 vaccine in late 2020.

This is when the official option afforded by the CDC was a 7 or 9 page, non-fillable PDF that they expected hospitals, clinics, and your primary care office to print, complete, sign, scan, and return to the public health agency you fall under -- who would then transcribe that into a massive CSV for import into one of their immunization data systems.

The application was demoed before multiple PHAs, ultimately becoming the sole solution for an entire state, and one of the largest PHAs in the world. It has since become a showcase project for ongoing data modernization initiatives within these two large PHAs.

Tens of millions of vaccinations were made possible by this effort, and it's still in use today.

--

Outside of my career, the persistent browser based game (PBBG) I made when I was 13. Several years before I would enlist in the military myself, I received a message from two players -- brothers, one of which was deployed to Iraq at the time, the other in school stateside -- who were able to maintain a higher degree of connection with one another, given limitations of communication otherwise.

--

OP, great thread. I always knew there were amazing folks in this community, but it is incredibly inspiring to see the many other responses in this thread.

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

#235

Post by a_square_peg » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

htts://oikolab.com - it's essentially a weather data api but catering more to anlaysts who need historical data for planning and evaluation.

We provided 30+ years of hourly historical weather data for more than 16,000 locations around the world to a popular website that generates free weather files for architects to do energy modelling. Most architects don't know it but if they use any recently updated weather file, there is a very good chance that it came from us.

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

#236

Post by meltyness » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 12:45 AM UTC

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 prototyped this as a Java Robots in like 2011 so I could fall asleep to Futurama. I guessed Netflix would take steps to ban it, but later they embraced it.

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

#237

Post by mystickphoenix » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 12:48 AM UTC

One of my first developer projects. Was working for a GIS company reverse engineering ancient geospatial databases (and our own). Nothing had foreign keys, there was a "global connection table" that provided many-many-joins, primary keys were strings, etc. Hundreds of tables and thousands of columns.

Most of our days on the data migration team were spent tracking down missing connections between entities, inconsistencies in the data that our clients had found, etc. I took a "find a string in every column" stored procedure and rewrote it as a python desktop app. Once the basic functionality was there I multithreaded it to run each query simultaneously. After that, I provided a graph-layout GUI that the users could click through and build their queries dynamically based on existing connections they'd already found.

No idea if it's still a thing anymore but it was amazing for my team. We went from guessing at relationships between entities because we didn't want to wait for the stored proc to run for hours to knowing which entities had what relationships in minutes. Single best thing I've ever written.

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

#238

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 12:49 AM UTC

Our zero-downtime release process (brainstormed and built with one other dev).

We went from 2-4 hours of downtime for every release to sometimes going over a year between order gap-inducing downtimes.

Some trickery with database views to merge multiple transactional databases, scripts, a script execution structure, and a list of fairly straightforward rules to follow were the only technical parts needed.

It was in prod from August 2005 through March 2022 and likely saved 60-100 hours per year of downtime (annoyance for users and revenue loss for the company).

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

#239

Post by DarkContinent » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 12:50 AM UTC

I'm a fairly junior engineer at a subsidiary of one of the big 4. Before that, I was at a well-known big box store working on a few different projects.

The most impactful thing I delivered at my previous company was a script that moved all of our team's data from a self-hosted db to something on company cloud that was a lot more stable. The script itself wasn't very complicated (essentially just mongodump and mongorestore), but it made a big impact on ensuring that our team's dataset search tool would continue to be accessible to regulatory compliance folks. In turn, the regulatory people could use the tool to protect the company from getting fined under CCPA, etc.

It made a pretty big impression on me that something incredibly simple like that could make as much financial impact in expectation as that script did. Now when I mentor interns and newer, more junior people, I always tell that story as an example of how high impact can be surprisingly uncomplicated.

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

#240

Post by mabbo » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 12:51 AM UTC

A pipeline approval tool (internal at Amazon) that counts metrics.

I was a fairly fresh college-hire SDE1 at Amazon. And I was annoyed, because I'm lazy. Every time I was oncall, I had to manage the deployment pipeline for my teams software- the UI for the tool used by Pickers inside Amazon Warehouses. On Monday, deploy the latest changes to the China stack (small). On Tuesday, check if anything bad happened, and then deploy to the Japan stack (small-ish). On Wednesday, Europe (big). Thursday, North America (biggest). Repeat each week.

And I thought "why am I doing this? There are APIs for all of this stuff!". So I made an automated workflow that hooked into the pipeline system. You gave a metric to look for, a count of how many times the thing should have happened, and an alarm to monitor. If everything looks good, it approves. I hooked it up for my pipeline, and then it usually finished the entire weekly push before Tuesday afternoon. I made it in about 2 weekends on my own time.

And I left it open for anyone in the company to configure for their own pipelines. A few weeks later I was checking if it was still operating normally and realized there were something like 50 teams using it. Then 100. Then a lot more.

The last I heard, it's considered a best practice for all teams within the company to use it on their pipelines. Before I left in 2021, it was running something like 10,000 approval workflows per day.

I named it after the BBQ/grilling meat thermometer in my kitchen drawer- "RediFork". Given the overlap of "people who read HN" and "devs who worked at Amazon", I probably saved someone reading this an aggregate hour or two of work.