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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?

#431
I was nominally the lead engineer on the first release of AdWords, though most of the actual code was written by Jeremy Chau. AdWords pretty much changed the world, though not, I think, for the better. :-(

If you want to know what I actually made by myself that I'm most proud of it would be this: https://graceofgodmovie.com/ (I am referring to the movie, not the web site.)

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

#432
Looking back, and filtering for things I built from scratch, probably GRIT [0], the Google Resource and Internationalization Tool. I originally wrote the tool when I had enough of 3-way merges of resource files for Google Desktop, and it ended up being one of a couple of key technologies that enabled Google Chrome to launch from day one in 43 languages, which I think was probably quite impactful to the adoption of that browser.

[0] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/tools/grit/+/...

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

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate a little bit more about how you partitioned it?

I simply added the "library id" as a prefix to almost every table's primary key. Every lookup specified it with an equality filter, so essentially it was thousands of standalone libraries in a single schema. One hiccup was that when the query cardinality estimator got confused, it would occasionally ignore the partition prefix and do a full scan somewhere, bloating the results by a factor of 2000x! This would cause d…

This makes the performance a lot more understandable if you're only searching in a single library. I assume that cuts out >99.9% of those 330 million documents.

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

#435
Actually a few. First VRS systems under ms-dos, a at-pc could handle 60 lines per machine, later we were able to connect them though Lan networks (5Mb). We did handle over 500k calls a day. Data collection for utility, gas, water, electricity. No more physical meter readings, we occupied 85% of the Dutch market.

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

#437
https://boxprover.utr.dk

It's an online tool for writing, checking and typesetting Fitch-style proofs in first-order logic, using the Twelf proof assistant under the hood. Its main feature is that it follows the notation from the teaching material 1-1 and offers no assistance in terms of proof tactics in order to help tech the fundamentals of doing formal proofs while still providing feedback when you make mistakes.

I built it while TAing a course in logic about 7 years ago, and it is still being used to this day.

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

#438
With my wife, I built two kids both in college now. That's definitely the most impactful.

In the online world, I've contributed bits and pieces to open-source here and there as far back as the late 90s. I think my first contribution was to the shadow package, but I've contributed to Apache, Radius, git, random packages that I use that I discover bugs in, etc.

A python script I wrote to allow folks to bypass AT&T's residential gateway was used by more people than I ever expected:

https://github.com/jaysoffian/eap_proxy

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

#440

I guess, my internship project at Apple: I added approximate string search to Spotlight. So even if you made a typo writing something, you’d still get correct search results. Considering Spotlight is used by millions, I guess that’s super impactful?

Adding approximate string search anywhere is super impactful, it should be the default.
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