Maintained/released the GNU coreutils for the last 10 years
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commits?author=pixelb
Designed/Built/Deployed Meta's backend operating system for the last 7 years
Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
451–460 of 759 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#452A data dictionary of 200+ business metrics used in a large water utility company, listing clear explanations, pseudo SQL and source data lineage.
Before this there were 5 different ways to calculate specific things like “minimum night flow”.
Plus we then built the data product which calculates all that stuff and serves it to the business in a self-serve query interface.
But by far the most impactful was bringing together different teams to align on how actually to calculate core business terms.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This was the project that made realise how huge the effort-to-effect ratio that can be when computers are involved I love Steve Jobs' metaphor: computers as a bicycle of the mind [0]. Unfortunately, a lot of effort is concentrated on problems that scale to billions of people. There's a lack of attention to problems that would have a big effect for a relatively small number of people. It's a shame, because they're a…
I have a bunch of small scale ideas that I want to implement. Not necessarily for profit. Any ideas on how to execute?
Pick one that scratches one of your itches, and get started. Release early, keep iterations small. It's easier to keep working on something you actively use.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#454Although I did not build it as in "I've coded it myself", I've designed and supervised the implementation of all the digital systems of the COVID vaccination campaign in France (supply management, logistics, side effects monitoring, vaccination certificate generation, open data…).
It was hectic, I knew nothing about the health industry beforehand and the deadlines kept shortening, but we delivered products that worked, on time and had no major incidents.
10/10 would never ever do it again.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#455I created Tiny Flashlight for Android 12 years ago. It's been downloaded almost 500m times. Back then every hardware vendor implemented the camera API in their own way and it wasn't easy to start the camera led. I had to purchase many different devices from different carriers from all around the world just to find out a way to start the camera LED. It was very helpful when the vendor published the kernel source code…
How many Android phones does it take to turn on a lightbulb ...sorry.
Around 200 ;)
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#456I wrote what was most likely the very first real time internet auction with browser front end some time I think in 94. For backend I just wrote a little native webserver that along with handling http also implemented all business rules. It was business to business and replaced dial-in phone based system working on mainframe.
Not sure about impact, most likely miniscule and I have designed and implemented much bigger software systems later on but for some unknown reason I feel particularly warm about that auction thingy.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#457During my junior year of college i developed a chrome extension called 'stackinspector' which displays the best matching answer from stack overflow in the right hand side of google search results (best match based on your search). To this day it still speeds up the development iterations of me and my friends/coworkers - but more importantly i know of at least one of the teachers at my college which now uses this project as an example to inspire other students.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#458My guess, over the long run, is that it'll be Cryptopals. Which is funny, because it's just a blog post that we chopped up into email challenges because I didn't want to give [redacted] a bunch of new terminology to use against me in stupid Twitter slapfights. Dumb reason, good outcome. https://cryptopals.com/
Aha! Fascinating backstory (:
Cryptopals are freaking awesome. I had so much fun trying to solve those challenges.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#459I've build tennis platform. It's maybe not so significant but it solves problem in the tennis clubs. It's used by cca 300 users per day, which I found pretty good without any marketing.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#460Let'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!
Just to say thank you for Let's Encrypt - it's saved my bacon on at least a dozen times in the past six months alone.