331–340 of 759 posts
We end up serving millions of users a month and the system became part of Dominican culture
Made some good money from it, was 21 at the time
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you find all these product market fits? Have you made more than a typical SWE?
It was actually a wandering hyperactive/ADHD mind that often said "why isn't there one" and follows through doggedly to the very end. It is one of those traits where a mind clicks and said "this is it and how" and surprisingly gets into the most illusive hyperfocus/high-energy mode (without using any drug). Slow-path network processing (arguably me) was commercially made in Ascom Timeplex in 1982 and someone else lea…
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…
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…
> had a far greater effect on the literacy of our state than any educator by orders of magnitude Nice work, but check your ego mate. Seems your growth hacking would have had zero result if those kids couldn't read to start with, so you could share some credit ;-)
Back then Flippa was probably the only dominant online marketplace for digital businesses.
It’s a big claim I know but I’m proud that the marketplace still is thriving and since then there has been dozens of similar marketplaces popped up. Also in the past few years it’s been so much easier for anyone to start online projects with various nocode tools and all.
Can’t say how impactful it has been, but I’m happy how far it has come.
We're in a space(payments) where deployment is a tightly managed compliance thing, and people get very touchy about specific assumed behaviour. A lot of support inquiries are literally "you just fixed things and got fully certified to be compliant with a third-party service? But we LIKED the old behaviour!"
Feature flags have lowered the tension. We can put sensitive customers into a penalty box until they're ready to use the updated feature, and if something blows up too badly, we just entirely deactivate the change until it can be properly fixed, with a few clicks. Virtually any significant project has one or more flags, and it's ,mostly been a "alternate Fridays are for side projects" sort of task.
For 10 years until recently a statistics research system that was the primary tool for keeping granular measurements on the health of the US economy.
Honestly, I have built nothing impactful in an 30+ year career. It's mostly been working on my own or other people's ideas that didn't pan out or that I got disillusioned with, or building internal systems that a few dozen people use. I'd estimate that the vast majority of the code I've written is not running anywhere at all today.
why not find something that you would find rewarding to work on, even if it's on the side? the things i've done that feel impactful are little tools i've made to help the people i know
Just kidding. I was lead engineer on a login page for an Experian identity monitoring remediation product for a major data breach affecting over 20M government employees. Millions of people interacted with my code, kinda cool but everything about that code was very boring.