Pokemon GO.
It was such a surreal moment to finally leave the office after months of crunch time, walk out into the sunshine for lunch for the first time and see almost every person on the street playing the game.
Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
321–330 of 759 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#322Probably the thing I feel best about is the museum I made with my son that educates people about how older versions of websites, operating systems, and apps used to look:
https://www.versionmuseum.com/
I don't want people to forget our "technology heritage," if that makes sense.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#323I built the national covid health information system (NCHIS) for my country that helped to mitigate the pandemic. It streamlined the sample collection to issuing reports and aggregated data nationwide and generated reports for government to make decisions on lockdowns and track the pandemic progress.
Well this was not completely built by me but I got help from 20 odd university students but I overlooked the project and did lot of coding myself. Even though it’s not used now since the pandemic has settled I’m happy what I have done.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#324Let's Encrypt (along with the coauthors of https://abetterinternet.net/documents/letsencryptCCS2019.pdf and many other contributors). Now the world's largest public certificate authority!
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#325A 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 the…
I had always wondered why it was called "RediFork"... thought it might have been using Redis or something. Thank you for creating it!
Literally stole it from this: https://www.amazon.com/Maverick-RediFork-Rapid-Matrix-Thermo...
Eg: Stick a fork in it and see if it's done yet
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#326I built the national covid health information system (NCHIS) for my country that helped to mitigate the pandemic. It streamlined the sample collection to issuing reports and aggregated data nationwide and generated reports for government to make decisions on lockdowns and track the pandemic progress. Well this was not completely built by me but I got help from 20 odd university students but I overlooked the project a…
> I overlooked the project
May I suggest "oversaw"?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oversee
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/overlook
Even though both words have older meanings that are somewhat opposite of their current meanings, "oversee" is normally used today to mean "supervise" or "superintend" (in fact, I suspect "oversee" could be a calque of "supervise"), while "overlook" is normally used to mean "ignore" or "fail to perceive".
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#327First implementation of CAPTCHA circa 1997
Ironically, there are people here bragging about popular scraping software they wrote back in the day
Though not every use of CAPTCHA intends to prevent or limit scraping -- some sites let you read everything with no CAPTCHA, but apply one if you want to write something (or take an action that affects the outside world somehow).
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#328I wrote a slack bot for a college club that liked to share music recommendations. We only had the free tier of Slack and were losing old recommendations as the messages were deleted and there wasn't an easy way to listen to all of them at once. I added a bot so that any spotify link sent to the channel is automatically added to a running playlist I own.
I have code running now at work that gets millions of requests a day and I'm not sure it's more "impactful". I'm not sure how many customers would notice or care if it disappeared, but the slack bot broke once and a couple people messaged me pretty quickly to let me know.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#329Myself. Came from a dysfunctional family, enormous debt and have survived lots of trauma to reach a decent position + decent net worth.
Well done!
Be proud of yourself.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#330I designed and implemented the whole graphic system for the World Cup '98 (working 100h weeks for months). Billions of people have watched in real-time the result of my work and I earned absolutely nothing from it :) (there's a fun story to write about this, the tremendous amount of work, setting up the WAN connecting the SGI machines together, building the remote control hardware, etc).
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