My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
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Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#2I think the only other team who has made such a feature is Wordpress contributors, Wordpress offers a way to copy paste word documents in their Text box, and it formats correctly.
Perhaps you can launch commercial license for your library, and license it to famous CMSs, such as Umbraco or Craft. That way you can make a living on it too.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#3I think many devs have that feeling...
But often simple things have a very big effect - in my first job I made some simple scripts which imported data from machines into an ERP System.
I also made some bigger projects with feature rich GUIs at my first job.
The simple scripts probably sill import data every workday and automate a task previously made by humans since multiple years, some of the GUIs weren't even used daily before I left that job...
So I feel like the simple scripts will be there for a long time and save many work hours while some of the feature rich GUIs probably weren't necessary...
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#4have you tried working in public sector? i’m proud my software runs in our hospitals and saves hours for doctors, they now spend treating more patients!
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#5Converting Word documents to HTML and fixing layout and formatting issues afterwards is a huge pain of mine. I usually end up pasting content from Word (or more recently, from LibreOffice Writer) to CKEditor, cleaning extra formatting, like fonts and only then moving content to CMS.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#6I think the only other team who has made such a feature is Wordpress contributors, Wordpress offers a way to copy paste word documents in their Text box, and it formats correctly. Perhaps you can launch commercial license for your library, and license it to famous CMSs, such as Umbraco or Craft. That way you can make a living on it too.
They mention docx so I guess it takes the file as input (as opposed to clipboard contents for web JS editors).
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#7Isn't the statement a bit obvious? Most of the tech companies out there were not born to make an impact on society, they were born to make money (which is totally fine). Only a handful of companies can be proud of making money while actually having an impact (good or bad) on society (e.g., Apple). Most of us (us != HN crowd) work for companies in the first group.
On the other hand, the vast majority of side projects have a very different: to have fun and/or being useful. Things that are useful usually make an impact on the society.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#8> Sometimes I wonder whether it'd be possible to earn a living off mammoth. Although there's an option to donate - I currently get a grand total of £1.15 a week from regular donations - it's not something I push very hard.
There's no shame in making the source available but using a license that requires payment for commercial use, like the Prosperity [1] license.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#9I think many devs have that feeling... But often simple things have a very big effect - in my first job I made some simple scripts which imported data from machines into an ERP System. I also made some bigger projects with feature rich GUIs at my first job. The simple scripts probably sill import data every workday and automate a task previously made by humans since multiple years, some of the GUIs weren't even used…
It’s crazy how much time little scripts can save.
10 years ago at my current job I created a script to automate the job of checking a certain website for new data each day. It used to be done by a person who would spend maybe 20-30 minutes checking the site and circulating the info each day. Others would also check the site on their own periodically for faster updates.
The script just checks the site multiple times a day and circulates the results.
Over the course of 10 years, I’d guess that my little script I wrote in maybe 5-10 hours (including some tweaks over time as the site format changed) probably saved in the ballpark of half a million dollars in time spent, based on billing rates.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#10Quite a few years ago as a (very) junior FE dev I used mammoth.js to automate the generation of a biennial report. Three months had been earmarked for the task as this is what it had taken in previous years (due to bad tools and lack of expertise). I had it done in less than a week by using mammoth. Mike was also very accommodating with questions I'm pleased I cant remember as I'm sure they were embarrassingly simple.
The project still took three months as it was one of those special type of organisations, but it wasn't due to the HTML generation :)
Thank you for mammoth.js!