511–520 of 759 posts
To be very clear: I can’t take credit for the original idea or spreadsheet. That would be our original founder, Jesse.
A 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.
I 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…
In 1995 I (and a few others) designed and built the first WiFi node [1]. At the time there was only one WiFi unit in the world, and it was the one on our bench. It now has about 20 billion descendants. [1] https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1109/40.566198
Back in the days I was not fully aware of what we were building (we were a team of 3 engineers working for a "reputable" London based bank), but there were subtle cues in the requirements like the options given by the software to base the SPEs (the company that issues the repackaged bonds) in places like Bermuda, Cayman Islands, etc.
In hindsight, watching "The Big Short" for the first time was a big come to Jesus moment to me.
Wrote del.icio.us and invented tagging. Echoes of my original design are still around (notably account urls being web.site/userid)
Working now at a bigco, the most impactful thing I do these days is in guiding projects away from building the first thing they think will solve a problem. People don't spend much time doing thought experiments of how changes will evolve in the future or with adjacent scopes. After thinking in that mode for a while you realize that there are concepts here that could and should be separated. A small tweak here and the…
> I'd like to make an SQL-oriented library so people don't have to settle for JPQL/Hibernate--started but not done/promoted. I'm sure I'm asking this on behalf of many people - any chance of a sneak preview?
I suspect I'm mostly driven by the unknown and as I get close to practically solving a problem start to lose the curious itch.
Twenty years between various agencies and contract terms, I've worked countless projects, and the ones which improved business processes, where end users lives were made much easier, were the most rewarding. Conversely, most of the 'fun' projects were almost immediately obviated (I'm looking at you, Silverlight).