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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?

#591

Post by alasdair_ »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #588
alasdair_ wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll write it up.

The OpenStreetMap community would be absolutely fascinated to learn what you were doing with OSM data, without a doubt.

I have so much to say here, especially when it comes to OSM vs Google Maps (given that the whole project was originally an offshoot of Google's Geo division) but I also have an NDA that I need to go read carefully. It's definitely not my intent to accidentally break confidentiality.

I do want to say how amazing OSM was. There are SO MANY weird laws in different countries and OSM was a fantastic source of data in many of them. One example is South Korea - there were laws from decades ago that made it very difficult legally to have detailed maps of many parts of south korea - the OSM maps there were far superior to anything else available.

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

#592

Post by lloydatkinson »

alasdair_ wrote: post #396
Jamie9912 wrote: post #380

Earlier 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.

Very cool! Feels like many organisations now have dozens of teams all working on parts of a badly made CRUD app but you guys wrote something people actually want to use that is scaled well enough for people all over the world to play.

That seems a million miles away from everyday agile and crud stuff...

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

#593

Post by lloydatkinson »

zadjii wrote: post #299

The Windows Terminal. It was a long journey to get the console code fairly modernized and maintainable. Another long journey to build a whole new application that could be compatible with the old. And years now of iterating of that original prototype, out in the open. It's not a perfect application, by any means. But the bar was _so_ low, that I can't help but think of how much we've helped users just over the last f…

Nice! Thanks for working on it, the "command prompt" is absolutely miserable. I read all the blog posts explaining Windows and its different terminal/shell layers before the new one was added.

I hope it ships with Windows by default one day.

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

#594

Post by lloydatkinson »

pixelbeat__ wrote: post #451

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

> Meta's backend operating system for the last 7 years

Sounds interesting, I had no idea Facebook had their own OS - presumably a Debian derivative?

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

#595

Post by lloydatkinson »

kaveh808 wrote: post #542
nickkell wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know unix?

I've worked with a number of Unix variants over the years. This animation code was developed on SGI IRIX.

It was a joke reference to a scene in the film...

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

#598

Post by pixelbeat__ »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #594
pixelbeat__ wrote: post #451

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

> Meta's backend operating system for the last 7 years Sounds interesting, I had no idea Facebook had their own OS - presumably a Debian derivative?

No, it's completely built from source, and finely tuned to the vast/quite homogeneous hardware, and deployment model. Though yes it is Linux based.

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

#599

Post by oblib »

The most impactful thing I've worked on was vehicle driving systems for quadriplegics. I worked with 4 others and the owner of the business on that for about 12 years back in the 70s-80s.

We basically took new Ford Vans and modified them and installed what we called a "Zero effort driving system" and then trained the user how to drive it. At the time there was no other vehicle they could drive. We shipped our vans all over the world.

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