It's called, "In Demand." Once a campaign closed on Kickstarter, the funding button would redirect to any URL you wanted, generally your website. I knew that campaigns had a long tail in traffic or that sometimes your campaign would get a press hit at the end of the campaign reporting how much money they raised. If you didn't have a Shopify to continue collecting orders, you left money on the table. So basically KS funneled visitors to IGG via Press > Closed KS Campaign > IGG In Demand. The first campaign we did this with was Baubax, it got a press hit from the NY Times 13 days after the campaign was finished on KS. If they didn't do In Demand they would have lost out on $2.4 million.
Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
501–510 of 759 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#502I built a little Golang lambda on top of Unidoc/Unipdf to simply populate form fields on PDFs and return a combined and flattened PDF. Nothing fancy, but it's fast and reliable and replaces a use case we had for DocuSign (very slow), saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#503Looking back, impact-wise:
- the patient privacy protection for a medical intake/assessment tool used for millions of patients would seem to have the most impact on individual lives, particularly in some high profile cases of catching medical record snooping, and have used privacy laws to prevent numerous public services from being used as mass surveillance tools.
- the original intrusion detection infrastructure for a large govt and what they call "cyber" now.
- a security protocol for mesh membership verification and updates for space based assets, and a strategic mission change.
I've done a lot of other very public and prestigious, but ultimately, net-low impact things. However in doing so, I have been an example to others where I've shown them what's possible and I can think of several people who, directly and not, my example gave them the confidence to attempt and achieve some really huge things on their own. As though my role has been, "See, I can do this and even make it look cool, and I'm a deeply and laughably flawed person, but when you challenge it, the bar to these things only looks that high when you percieve it that way."
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#504During a brief stint at a hospital I coded some logic to check for medication interactions with procedures and anticoagulants. Then the head of the pharmacy department showed me a report showing me the number of times that catheter / anticoagulant interactions had been caught because of my code (apparently this is less intuitive to the system than base medication interactions). Was one of those, oh wow, I'm actually helping people moments.
Almost makes up for when some of my software was used to identify a manufacturing problem with a particular facility producing parts for missiles. Sometimes doing a good job helps people, sometimes it helps to harm them. Realizing the larger impact of your code can hit hard both ways.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#505For my kids kindergarten you had to send a very specificly formated SMS if the kid got sick so that it would auto-update the attandance list for the day. I built a webpage that would format the SMS and open the phones SMS app.
First time I had random people come up to me and say thanks.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#506I've been lucky, starting young, early industry, eager to please, and willing to work on interesting over a better salary:
* I was a beta tester and original 3rd party developer for the Mac, in '83, a year before the Mac's release; (Everything was written in assembly at that point.)
* I worked for DeVanney & Mandelbrot on their original Fractal Mathematics publication, the work later became the book Beauty of Fractals.
* Back when the Mac was new and there were many DOS GUIs floating around, before Windows 3.1 became the standard, I wrote the "official" in-house DOS GUI for AT&T internal use. I wrote that in '88, and it was their in-house GUI for about 5 years.
* I co-wrote the video subsystems for both the 3D0 and the original PlayStation. That was a two very different adventures.
* I was on the first Tiger Woods PSX Golf game dev team, the one with the South Park animation (for reals accidentally) left on the published CD. I wrote the front-end using an opinionated framework I made, which went on to be used by several E.A. titles.
* I was director of research for the first Internet Live Video Infrastructure provider. Wrote code that got patented, stewarded the patent process, produced live shows. This was '99.
* Worked in VFX on some milestone films, such as Chronicles of Narnia, both as a digital artist and as a financial analyst. Two Oscars were won during my time at R&H. I was doing an MBA at the same time my later period there. I wrote a production resources forecasting system that would be called a deep learning trained algorithm today, but I wrote it in 2001. Used on 9 major release features.
* I created, patented, and went bankrupt trying to commercialize what are now called deep fakes. I was too early, with a working patented system in '08. Financial crisis plus no one believed the tech was possible at that time, and those that did wanted to do porn, which I & my team refused to produce. That was hard, 'cause it worked, but humans are like cats...
* After that I was principal engineer on a globally leading enterprise FR system. Did that for 7 years to dig out of bankruptcy. That was stressful and I quit 1.5 years ago.
Yeah, I'm both lucky and overly ambitious. I'm currently taking a boatload of DL/ML & Docker/K8 classes, preparing to make something that combines my history and skills.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
You personally made Pokemon GO?
Bits of it. I wrote the code to figure out where on the planet all the pokestops and gyms should go, for example[1]. But there were five other backend engineers by the time we launched, plus a bunch of front end people, artists, etc. [1] To be extra-clear, all code in the game was touched by more than one person, every one of them better engineers than I am.
Your experience needs to be documented for history. Seriously. The people, personalities, the development setups, the day to day creation - all that is of keen interest to millions.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#508I worked on a site that was the most popular real estate search site in my US state for 5+ years. It helped thousands of people every day search for a home. There's so much interesting home data, so we were able to offer many dimensions for folks to search on. Things I built:
* an advanced search widget (using GWT) which let people search across 20+ dimensions
* an integration with a standardized MLS data provider, which allowed us to easily bring on new areas for searching
* replaced the underlying ORM system with hibernate and ehcache to increase performance
Small team, big impact. In addition to helping tons of folks, it was also a key driver of the business (some percentage of people would reach out to the company for help buying a place).
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#509A whole bunch of labor agreements that extended our operations over thousands of new route miles. Got pretty much had what both labor and management really needed, got ratified by membership, worked decently in the real world.
I used Microsoft Word.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#510I saved my company ~$18 million with a 100 line perl script that I wrote in order to learn programming. It parsed a text file containing Jeep parts that needed to be sequenced and printed barcode labels to Zebra printers. One day a construction crew dug up all of our data lines and we lost all comms to Chrysler and our data center. We had to have a rotation of floor supervisors driving to Chrysler to copy/paste order…
I'm so curious.
So the process was:
* supervisor drives to Chrysler, pastes part orders into text file, saves it a floppy
* floppy returns to your company, you open it up and run the perl script, which prints barcode labels
* ... then what?