It didn't use any fancy frameworks, just plain old CRUD on Java.
AFAIK it was one of the top five biggest library systems in the world at the time.
I was asked to add some features that would have been too difficult in the old distributed system. Things like reading competitions, recommended reading lists by age, etc…
I watched the effect of these changes — which took me mere days of effort to implement — and the combined result was that students read about a million additional books they would not have otherwise.
I’ve had a far greater effect on the literacy of our state than any educator by orders of magnitude and hardly anyone in the department of education even knows my name!
This was the project that made realise how huge the effort-to-effect ratio that can be when computers are involved…
Designed and deployed credit card readers used in gas pumps back in 1979. (Sold to Gasboy)
Wrote a fine tuner to allow communication between satellites (precursor to TDRSS days). Still used to this day.
Failover of IP in ATM switches (VVRP, PXE, secondary DHCP, secondary DNS, secondary LDAP, secondary NFS). While not invented here, it is still used today as this is a Common setup to this day.
Printer drivers for big, big high-speed Xerox printers on BSD. Still used to this day by big, big high-speed printers.
Also, early IDS products (pre-Snort) at line-speed. Sold to Netscreen.
Easy zero-setup of DSL modem before some BellCore decided to complicate things (thus exploding their field deployment budgets; Southwestern Bell/Qwest enjoyed our profitable zero-setup). Sold to Siemens.
1Gps IDS/IPS before selling it to 3Com/Hewlett-Packard Packard.
Now, I'm dabbling in a few startups (JavaScript HIDS, Silent Connections, replacing the systemd-temp).
Impact? It is more about personal pride but its impacts are still being felt today.
Personal non-code project: The first adult LEGO fan conference in 2000. While I got out of that business years ago it has been replicated by dozens of other annual cons around the world. Back then the LEGO group didn't really understand and was very weary of adult fans. Now there's a whole reality tv show about them with LEGO designers as the judges, and LEGO actively supports cons and clubs.
Open source project: A project I released anonymously ~2010. Several github repos (unrelated to me) keep this project alive (the main one has ~600 stars and ~200 forks) and it's apparently used in several commercial products too.
Website: ip4.me/ip6.me serves 3-5M queries per day. I want to find a good non-profit to take this over to keep it ad and javascript free forever.
I was a fairly fresh college-hire SDE1 at Amazon. And I was annoyed, because I'm lazy. Every time I was oncall, I had to manage the deployment pipeline for my teams software- the UI for the tool used by Pickers inside Amazon Warehouses. On Monday, deploy the latest changes to the China stack (small). On Tuesday, check if anything bad happened, and then deploy to the Japan stack (small-ish). On Wednesday, Europe (big). Thursday, North America (biggest). Repeat each week.
And I thought "why am I doing this? There are APIs for all of this stuff!". So I made an automated workflow that hooked into the pipeline system. You gave a metric to look for, a count of how many times the thing should have happened, and an alarm to monitor. If everything looks good, it approves. I hooked it up for my pipeline, and then it usually finished the entire weekly push before Tuesday afternoon. I made it in about 2 weekends on my own time.
And I left it open for anyone in the company to configure for their own pipelines. A few weeks later I was checking if it was still operating normally and realized there were something like 50 teams using it. Then 100. Then a lot more.
The last I heard, it's considered a best practice for all teams within the company to use it on their pipelines. Before I left in 2021, it was running something like 10,000 approval workflows per day.
I named it after the BBQ/grilling meat thermometer in my kitchen drawer- "RediFork". Given the overlap of "people who read HN" and "devs who worked at Amazon", I probably saved someone reading this an aggregate hour or two of work.
There was a lot of talk about this in the news, and although the software I was working on didn't entirely fix the problem, it allowed the agencies to communicate better. Their data wasn't siloed, and families got separated for only a few days rather than (sometimes) permanently.
I really miss that job. The pay was atrocious and zero WLB, but everyone agreed it was an important problem to solve, and I think the tool we had built really was helping.
During Hurricane Maria most of Puerto Rico was offline. Slowly but surely, some people started having access to some online services. To this day, I don't know how, but I saw frequent posts in social media (Facebook and others) of people saying they could access spotty internet but SMS and making calls wasn't working, and asking people to let their family outside of Puerto Rico know that they were okay.
So I setup a site on glitch.com with real simple 2 field form. One for a phone number and another for a message to send. It was dead simple, no framework, no CSS, just little bits of vanilla HTML and JS, and a bit of backend code connected to Twilio. Some text on the top with instructions too. I was making it intentionally small so that a spotty connection wouldn't have a problem using it.
Any time I saw someone posting in social media asking for someone to reach out to their family, I posted a link. I also shared it in a slack where many from the PR diaspora where trying to contribute ways to help. Before I knew thousands of people were using it. I did some continuous monitoring to make sure nobody was using it for abuse, and making sure it was being used as intended. It would have been EXTREMELY easy for someone to abuse it if they wanted to.
No one abused it. Thousands used it as it was intended. Left it up for weeks, and I kept monitoring it to make sure it wasn't being abused. I eventually saw it had stopped being used entirely for two weeks and spun it down.
I saw some people posting about it afterwards being thankful they were able to receive messages from their family, and I'm happy I rushed through to write very sloppy high impact code.
Ivy sends you a text message introducing herself as a virtual concierge when you check in. She answers FAQs in 1 second using NLP and routes anything more complex to the front desk team for resolution in 2-3 minutes. All in one simple text thread, no apps or UI needed.
Guests often come to the front desk trying to tip Ivy, rave about her in reviews, ask her out on dates, and even drop off hand written thank you notes for her.
One woman texted Ivy in a panic asking about the nearest drug store to buy Benadryl because her son was having a severe allergic reaction. A guest service agent brought Benadryl to her door in 3 minutes at a large Las Vegas property. She called Ivy a life saver.
It wasn't a planned thing. I had recently got injured playing football, so I was stuck at home, not being able to walk or drive. I started checking the #mono IRC channel (it was 2003 and internet was something you did over a 48k modem, when your home phone line was not needed). Some guys, lead by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of Gnome, were implementing a compiler of C# and a bytecode interpreter of .NET IL, and I was very curious about it. I kept downloading, compiling and trying things out.
Then one day Miguel wrote in the channel that it would be nice to have some graphical editor and that somebody could perhaps port SharpDevelop over to Linux, by replacing Windows.Forms by calls to GTK. I said that I'd give it a shot and... well, 10 days later we had a working editor and half a dozen of contributors.
[2] https://www.africakicksoutwildpolio.com/the-top-five-tech-so...
Before post-play, you had to open the episode menu and click on the next episode to play it. We didn't want to do autoplay for a long time because we were afraid people would fall asleep with Netflix playing and it would break the internet. So we included the now infamous "Are you still there?" popup a few minutes into episode 3 with no interaction with the player.
Now it is everywhere - YouTube, Hulu, HBO, etc. And people watch way more TV than they should.
1. Was the intern that coded the mechanism to open/close the LIDAR cover on the Mars Phoenix Lander, so it runs on another planet. I also did circuit work, and other tasks for the CSA’s contribution to that mission. That was also the internship where I (re)met my wife.
2. Was on the Android team that brought video to Instagram back in 2013. We brought gyro stabilization to the iPhone, couldn’t quite get it running reliably on Android via the NDK, but I damned well tried.
3. Wrote the first Android app for Instacart.
4. Currently rolling out our new software platform to handle $15B/year revenue for Anheuser-Busch’s supply chain. We have 1000+ companies relying on us to ensure they can order and fulfill products.
Unsure what’s next, but it’ll likely be high impact and fun too.
That probably had more impact than the Binary Lambda Calculus language I designed [2] or the logical rules of Go I co-formulated [3].
Computing the number of Go positions [4] or approximating the number of Chess positions [5] had little impact beyond satisfying my intellectual curiosity.
[1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo
[2] https://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html
[3] https://tromp.github.io/go.html
People I respected told me I was wasting my time because Internet Explorer was the de-facto standard and the idea of a new browser engine becoming prominent was fantasy.
Then Apple decided they wanted do a browser and looked around at what open source engines were available they could use as a starting point. Thus was born WebKit [1].
I consistently ignore anyone who tells me I shouldn't try something because it's "too hard" or "nobody will use it". Most of the time they turn out to be right. But not always.
[1] https://marc.info/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197104218786&w=2
Edit: Here's an interesting presentation by Lars Knoll and George Staikos on the history of the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tldf1rT0Rn0
My goal was to help volunteers that were in the field in Nepal communicate in English -> Nepali and back. Even though this was somewhat effective, there was still a communication gap because most people in Nepal in remote parts could not even read in Nepali.
I looked around for solutions but couldn't find any Nepali Text To Speech solutions. The builder brain in me fired up and I decided to build a Nepali Text To Speech engine using some of the groundwork that was laid by Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (Big Library in Nepal) which they had abandoned halfway.
I spend all night hacking along to build a web app that let the volunteers paste translated text and have it spoken. The result was https://nepalispeech.com/ and the first iteration of this was built in just 13 ish hours.
I hope the people that got affected by the earthquake are in a better situation now.
Nothing. I haven’t built anything with a significant impact. I’ve made things that made a significant impact on businesses, but in the scheme of things, nothing exciting.
The thing I made which generated the most revenue was easily the most harmful, and likely the most impactful. Unfortunately. It was an ad exchange that did extremely well. The owners went from random guys with a gross idea to multimillionaires in a couple years. They both spend their days buying up startups.
I should have done better by now. I feel like I need to make up for building that exchange. I was young and had no idea what I was getting into until it was too late.
It was among the first text to language models created independently. And it was fully open source.
It also got covered by New York Times in the article covering Dall-E 2 by Cade Metz.
Links:
- GitHub: https://github.com/borisdayma/dalle-mini
- Hugging Face Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/flax-community/dalle-mini
- NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/technology/openai-images-...
___
(I know this is not as much impactful as others in this thread. But I did this after less than 2 years after transitioning to tech from Physics, and at the age of 22.)
I'm also apparently the original inventor of the tracking cookie, which had the implication that no one was able to patent it. It was presented in a patent of mine[2] that was about a collaborative filtering technique for recommending ads; I'd come up with the tracking cookie mechanism to support that technique. So, it didn't attempt to patent the tracking cookie separately; but because it was the first publication describing the method, no one else could patent it either. In 2021 a joint legal brief filed by Google and Twitter together, defending themselves against a patent troll, called it "Robinson's Cookie". My patent is owned by Google now. It contained a lot of details for giving users control of the data derived from tracking; that part was pretty much ignored by people implementing it.
[1] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6467 [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5918014A
While I deserve no credit for its current success, it's been used by millions to:
* catalogue millions of plants and animals around the world
* tagged image data has become critical for computer vision training models
* map species range and impact of various natural changes to biodiversity, with data cited in scientific journals
* new species have been discovered through the app
previous HN thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22442479
I've spent the last 6-7 years making autonomous aircraft that deliver medical supplies in various African countries. Probably a hundred thousand deliveries or so have been for emergency blood transfusions, typically for women that hemorrhaged during labor. So that's got to be quite a few lives/families saved!
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 few years.
It was such a surreal moment to finally leave the office after months of crunch time, walk out into the sunshine for lunch for the first time and see almost every person on the street playing the game.
I've since gotten a degree and written software for a handful of companies.
When I think of how many people are actually _using_ my software, though? Fourteen years later, the mug club software is still live in a production environment, used every day by wait staff who turns over every few months. No doubt hundreds - potentially thousands (it got deployed at a few different bars) - of people have interacted directly with it. That code embarrasses me nowadays, but as far as impact goes: that's probably it.
I've traveled North America photographing native bats. This was born from an obsession with documenting creatures that are not easily observed (this goes far beyond bats).
To accomplish the bat project, I built my own high-speed photo systems, designed specialty gear, and developed a processes for capturing extremely detailed images of bats in flight. Others had done it before me, but never shared the technical process. So I had to build it myself. Then I collaborated with biologists and institutions around the country to learn about behavior and more. It was a hell of a journey.
I'm so proud of the project. This work is very hard recreate these days because of a pandemic amongst bats (WNS) and humans (Covid). I think bats are among the most interesting creatures on the planet.
Working with all of these bat biologists, I learned of the holy grail of bats. Its a species that was once considered one of the rarest species in North America. Up until the 90's only a few specimens have ever been observed or documented.
But if you want to see images of the most spectacular bat in North America - the spotted bat - I am in a rare group who has ever seen one much less photographed them.
Some day I'll have to tell the story of Kentucky cave shrimp and how I traveled to the deepest bowels of Mammoth Cave with a crew of 20 - A combined group from the National Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service to photograph these tiny and rare shrimp.
Don't get me started on my journey to photograph red tree voles (that only live at the top of mature douglas fir trees).
I'm bragging - yes. I never imagined I could make a six figure income from this work. I expected to be poor. I genuinely hope this work has lasting impact.
Coming from a family rooted in poverty, addiction, and early death - this path has been a surprise beyond description.
- In 1996 built and deployed a system to keep track of the removal of landmines in Bosnia. In 2015 I met someone who knew my work as a child in Sarajevo, producing the maps they’d give out to schoolchildren.
- I managed a project with over 30 team members to build a system to help former Soviet Union countries manage their import/export control policies.
- I helped create a system for generating some annual reports for Poland that was a requirememnt for them to join NATO.
We were working on a new product, electronic access to textbooks. I'd built the entire system that takes the textbook XML we got from the content side, created indexes used by our search engine, and made it possible to efficiently display in the web application any text fragment from a full chapter down to a single sentence containing a search result.
The CEO called an emergency meeting: many of our library customers were government funded, and their funding required the library to receive a physical object in exchange for the licensing fee. They didn't want to have to store the physical textbooks and we didn't want the overhead of sending them textbooks. So the team starting talking about creating an entire new subdivision dedicated to the production, management, warehousing, and shipping of CD versions of the books, just so the customers could be given something physical.
I interjected: "If a CD is good enough, I can generate that using everything I've built already. I'm already converting the content to HTML for display in the app, so I can render the textbook out to a folder, one HTML page per chapter, with a table of contents and all of the images, and create an ISO image that the librarians can download using a link in the web application. Let them burn it themselves if they want a physical copy. They could also store the ISO locally so they still have that version if they let their license expire." That was a funding requirement as well.
So that's what we did. It took me a couple of days extra to implement that feature, and I saved the company a fortune compared to what they were considering doing.
I believe I got a $25 Starbucks card as a reward.
Next up is probably scrypt; it would rank higher if cryptocurrencies used it, but instead they use nerfedscrypt which defeats the entire point of scrypt.
Third is probably FreeBSD/EC2. Of course I didn't do all the work for that, but I can certainly claim the status of technical project manager.
My day job, Tarsnap, comes in fourth.
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 orders onto a floppy disk and bring it back to be processed. We kept the line running for about 30 hours, which basically saved our company because our contract with Chrysler stipulated that we would be charged $10,000 per minute if we stopped the line.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/sports/fortnite-world-cup...
I was a programmer working on Fortnite, and I ended up working on the on-site fortnite events, doing everything from the custom cameras and broadcast specific UI, to hooking up the events in-game to the lights in the stadium. It was pretty cool!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=EWANLy9TjRc - I worked on this game (and the demo in this video) for a few years. I wrote much of the code for the asset pipeline for the destruction, lots of the gameplay code for how it interacted with the game and a good chunk of optimisation on the cloud physics side.
Designed/Built/Deployed Meta's backend operating system for the last 7 years
* Made it easier to create a limited liability company in Italy: https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-litt...
* Pro-housing organization here in Bend, Oregon: https://bendyimby.com/
Software wise, I really enjoyed my time working on these devices: https://www.icare-world.com/us/
I'd been involved in OSM since its first few months (2004) but found contributing intensely frustrating. I wanted something where drawing a road was as quick as it was in Illustrator, which I was used to. Previously you had to create nodes, link them into segments, link those into ways, and manually add tags. Potlatch was a Flash app that allowed you to go click-click-click, choose "residential road" from a dropdown, and there it was - you'd added a road.
I wouldn't for a moment claim it was great code - it really wasn't. But it was the right thing at the right time for OSM. By 2013 people with money were starting to sniff around the project, and Mapbox got paid to build something better and more polished. I was frankly relieved because I'd had enough of defending the newbies against the self-described power users. Still, a significant part of OSM being where it is now is thanks to Potlatch, and I'm proud of that.
Apart from word of mouth and the occasional post like this, I don't advertise it, but it's getting about 100 users a day. Many of my users come from the majority world and couldn't afford the software from the major vendors, which is very gratifying.
Eventually Nostalrius forked it, slapped marketing and a website on it, became huge and those guys got to visit Blizzard Entertainment, in the end leading to Blizzard finally giving in an providing World of Warcaft Classic as a service.
Cost me tons of money to keep the project running because we were constantly under attacks from god knows who and in the end burned me out after a decade of doing this.
To this day private servers are using it, and probably six figures of people play on those.
DreamList is free to all participants in the system and I spend a lot of Q4 helping giant drives set up to get just the right gifts to many many thousands of children (some drives support 15-30,000 children in foster care, single parent families, natural disaster situations, or church communities across multiple states, and we support an increasing number of drives). Q1-3 are spent building more functionality to make the next Q4 easier because it is inevitably bigger than the last.
Unfortunately, the founder raised way too much money on unfavourable terms and hired the wrong people, which forced the company to expand at an unsustainable rate and drove all the good people away. The company overextended itself and entered business rescue soon thereafter. The company is now a former shell of itself, but my product handled millions of rands and over 500,000 repairs. What I lost in a pension, I gained in an MBA.
[1] https://github.com/FortySevenEffects/arduino_midi_library
[2] https://diyelectromusic.wordpress.com/2020/09/19/introducing...
It's been a little over 5 years since I started, and I'm still super stoked about my work. I still enjoy doing the research, rewriting guides a dozen times, and answering reader mail. People seem really grateful for it, and it means a lot to me.
It has been used by employees at nearly every airline, including dispatchers, flight attendants, captains, and I've gotten many emails saying it has allowed people to fly again, to take new jobs, and continue relationships because they know what to expect when they fly.
Site: www.turbulenceforecast.com
If you want to know what I actually made by myself that I'm most proud of it would be this: https://graceofgodmovie.com/ (I am referring to the movie, not the web site.)
Homepage: https://fonner.gitlab.io/shared-slides-clicker/
I wrote a blog about some of the trickier parts of building it here: https://jedfonner.com/2020/11/06/shared-slides-clicker/
So even if you made a typo writing something, you’d still get correct search results.
Considering Spotlight is used by millions, I guess that’s super impactful?
My life's work...
I’ve worked on minor stuff that was foundational to Google’s commercial offerings, but I think that isn’t as high impact and probably someone else would have done that as well or better. For the Wikipedia stuff, for good or ill, I owned some of those decisions.
I created the organization, did the design and helped a colleague building the software. We've had more than 4 million visits from 300k+ users (distributed throughout the world, roughly in proportion to the interest in contemporary art in those countries) and continue to grow most months.
[1] https://contemporaryartlibrary.org
[2] forrest -at- contemporaryartlibrary.org
I also wrote quite a few programming books (https://ryanbigg.com/books) and some of the Ruby on Rails guides. These have gone on to teach thousands of people around the world. I really love hearing from those who’ve read my work.
Another impactful project of mine was also a browser extension. Internal tool that started as a lunch time project to make my team's life easier. Can't go in detail on that one, but basically they liked it and start suggesting improvements. So did a department that was working with us. And bit by bit, it became a really useful tool that became standard in these departments. Last I heard, the tool is now deployed company-wide. Crazy to think it started just from some lunch time hacking :-)
https://videohubapp.com/ && https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
What I did that is most impactful is that I've been giving at least 10% of my income to cost-effective charities for over 10 years now (see Giving What We Can - thousands of others do the same). This amounts to almost $100,000 given to charity which translates to thousands of people protected from malaria for many years of their lives.
Then I stopped working on software for ~15 years because I burned out
I'd estimate that the vast majority of the code I've written is not running anywhere at all today.
I left the university and that job exactly one year before COVID-19 hit, and as far as I heard having that system in place saved a lot of butts - lectures seamlessly shifted to fully virtual with teachers recording videos either at home or in empty lecture halls, and pushing it through these video management systems.
We pushed a lot in 2015 to get approval for this whole endeavour, even though the university big-wigs pushed heavily against this, fearing that students would not come to lectures anymore. Turns out: that fear was bullshit, and in the end it helped out a lot of people.
Even though Mil's popularity is pretty typical of my other projects, but seeing it going out to other social media is pretty cool.
- ported numpy/scipy to windows 64 bits, and making sure windows was well supported
- pushing for numpy/scipy to move from svn to git
- wrote a prototype of what would become scikit learn. The project really took off after I stopped contributing though
I do very little coding now, but I had several people I managed go on good careers and thanking me for it. That was maybe in the end the most impactful thing I do, I hope.
- beadm -----> https://github.com/vermaden/beadm
- automount -> https://github.com/vermaden/automount
- lsblk -----> https://github.com/vermaden/lsblk
https://www.versionmuseum.com/
I don't want people to forget our "technology heritage," if that makes sense.
* Before anyone asks, I was not involved in any of the recent JPEG-XL removal choices happening over at Google (I don't work there). I was as surprised as everyone else was. I'll admit I haven't given JPEG-XL as much of a R&D spin as I should, but it seems like it has a lot of cool features and if people prefer it to AVIF, game on. I'm proud of the library, but I'd rather people used their preferred format in any avenue and not be locked into something they dislike. I'd certainly rather that any technology succeed or fail on its own merits than any other possible reason.
We're in a space(payments) where deployment is a tightly managed compliance thing, and people get very touchy about specific assumed behaviour. A lot of support inquiries are literally "you just fixed things and got fully certified to be compliant with a third-party service? But we LIKED the old behaviour!"
Feature flags have lowered the tension. We can put sensitive customers into a penalty box until they're ready to use the updated feature, and if something blows up too badly, we just entirely deactivate the change until it can be properly fixed, with a few clicks. Virtually any significant project has one or more flags, and it's ,mostly been a "alternate Fridays are for side projects" sort of task.
That's incredibly boring though, and I work in sport now. The most _emotionally_ impactful achievement is the first soccer player signed based on my statistical models. He helped win his club their first title in a decade, got his first international callup, and won his country their continental cup (he also made his club a lot of profit when they sold him and my sell-on percentage never materialised).
Also SchoolScape, an internal department tool used by dozens of public servants to plan which schools need to be built or upgraded. I just coded it, with the hard stuff being done by economists. But from the feedback I get, it has made a huge difference to the people who do that work.
As a hobby, opentrees.org. Definitely seems to have caused some ripples in how tree data is seen and used.
Well this was not completely built by me but I got help from 20 odd university students but I overlooked the project and did lot of coding myself. Even though it’s not used now since the pandemic has settled I’m happy what I have done.
Back in 2010, I built the software systems to manage solar-powered microgrids providing prepaid electricity in remote, rural offgrid communities with no internet connectivity. People could pay for the electricity service when they wanted and could, with no minimum amounts required; aside from the tech, we wanted to demonstrate a viable, sustainable business model for scaling so free electricity was not the objective.
Constraints for the software system running at the microgrid included - server hardware should not draw more than an energy-efficient bulb at peak load, cost <$100, little-no internet conn in the regions we deploy but remote access required, little-no technical capacity available locally (made things interesting for debug/updates...), integrate with meters + charge controllers + gsm modules etc each speaking potentially different protocols, allow for meter data collection every 1-3 seconds(!) and utilized in distribution + tariff accounting, etc.
Took about 3-4 months to go from concept note to first field deployment in Mali. Over the course of the next couple of years, increased robustness and features and expanded to over 20 villages in East and West Africa (Mali, Uganda). These were all villages/communities that for the first time had homes with AC-electric outlets that they used then for applications like lighting, cell charging, small fans, etc.
A cookie store handling over 50B transactions/day for over 1T profiles
The London Olympics realtime (online) video analytics able to handle over 3M streams on 10 servers (physical).
The March Madness realtime online video analytics
The first realtime distributed OLAP cube
Sold then built then launched a financing tech service to a large bank. Bootstrapped :) Never had more than 2 engineers including myself. System is still live.
In terms of code, probably some stuff that runs on every Android device (although I don't think any of my original, 2013-2014 code is still in use, but the project itself is very much alive)
That's definitely my greatest impact, and the part of my career that I'm most proud of.
Ten years later my code lives on in a product used by billions of people, meaning it has been executed trillions of times since, far more than the total sum of all the other code I have written in my career.
In all these I was only part of the project, but everyone’s work added up.
We met with focus groups of young people (and separately, clinicians) in developing the app, and I felt a strong affinity for the entire project. It still gets used thousands of times per day, and I'm glad I could help bring it to life.
I'd always loved building software, but this project showed me it's so much more than technology.
While not done yet, getting C++20 modules to compile via CMake will probably eclipse that.
I also implemented 2FA and API tokens for PyPI (and helped/continue to work on lots of other parts of that ecosystem).
In terms of impacting other people, probably the biggest thing was blog posts and sample code. It’s funny how sample code has less “cred” than “real” code, but if you’ve ever been trying to start a new project in a new language or framework you know how invaluable sample code can be.
In terms of impact in general, what I’m working on now has been the most impactful , because it’s improved my health. Im trying to innovate on the concept of a habit tracker. Since I started working on it, I’ve lost 10 pounds, quit drinking, went from about a gram of marijuana use a day to about a gram a month, quit addictive video games, went surfing much more consistently, and been able to put in many more hours of focused work than I ever have before despite working alone and only being accountable to myself.
Generally when Ive gotten feedback about the project, I’ve gotten told it’s too complex, people want simplicity, I should focus on B2B, and I shouldn’t write any code at all unless I’ve validated a problem. I try to communicate to people that I don’t want to sacrifice my own health progress to simplify things. But I am hoping long term I can figure out how to build a bridge between what’s effective for myself and what’s appealing and understandable to everyone else. Lots of work to be done! But I think improving my own life a lot more impact than most of the stuff my employers had me doing :)
[1] Back in 2006, created a web scraper with .Net framework and C# that helped my wife run a home-based scraping business for 2 years. There were no tools / libraries / frameworks for spidering / scraping back then - or at least I wasnt aware of them. Helped her have a replacement income since she had quit her job for maternity. She of course enhanced it and made it better. Was fun while we were the early ones in it.
[2] SAP's Community Network in 2002: Supports a million users today, started with a much smaller user base of 10k, implemented it from scratch as a Java MVC web-app with another colleague.
[3] Amazon Ads in 2015: Contextual commerce ads in review websites and blogs, this single product drove (and still continues to drive) multi-hundred million dollars in incremental revenue for AMZN every year. HN doesnt like the Advertising business, but hey.
We then worked on a baremetal automation system that worked through IPMI to completely automate the burn in process -remotely starting servers as soon as they got their IP registered, PXe booting them to the burn in image, and then kicking off the testing process. We had a way overkill rabbitmq system to collect streaming logs from every server as they ran, and all orchestrated via rethinkdb change feeds. I think it is still the most complex software project I have done. Basically one python file would launch 7 separate python processes, each their own rethinkdb change feed. This predated docker otherwise it probably would have been 7 docker containers haha.
Probably most impactful, I wrote the linux driver for HP's (now PMC Sierra's?) SmartArray RAID controllers, of which many millions were sold, most inside HP servers.
Back in 2009-2012, I built a cyclekart[1] in my driveway, and documented it on youtube[2]. Back then almost nobody was building cyclekarts, apart from the original inventors, the Stevensons. Many people have told me my videos inspired them to build their own cyclekarts, (maybe because I succeeded despite obviously not knowing what the hell I was doing) and today there is a thriving worldwide cyclekart community. I don't know for sure how much difference my videos made, but I like to think I had a hand in popularizing the hobby.
In the hobby software world, I made Space Nerds in Space[3], but I don't think that was very impactful, as nobody plays this game because it's too hard to gather together a crew, but as part of making that game, I made gaseous-giganticus[4], which creates textures for gas-giant planets, and has been used by people creating mods for Kerbal Space Program, and I haven't seen a better gas giant texture generator out there yet, despite that there are some obvious (but difficult) avenues to pursue.
[1] https://cyclekarts.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaNHLvHGONc&list=PLcSUyKz3gf... [3] https://spacenerdsinspace.com [4] https://github.com/smcameron/gaseous-giganticus
There are also thousands of people using a tiling window manager for Windows which I originally built for myself and decided to share publicly for free.[2] I still can't believe how popular it has become.
[1]: https://notado.app
The company did these pdf invoices and the design team would change the design weekly. And there was a junior dev working there and she spent 4 days a week trying to get these new designs into html to generate the invoice and convert to PDF.
She was quite down because she felt like she was missing out on working on stuff she could learn from.
So I went talked to the design team and got them to generate their designs as Adobe forms with named fields.
Then I sat with the dev and we implemented in about 2 hours Adobe form field data and outputting a pdf.
Then each week she got given a new form. Double checked the fields. And then replaced the form.
The weeks that followed she would spend 1 hour a week doing her task and was able to work on the main application and get real work.
Edit: wow people have contributed a lot of awesome stuff. I feel like I haven’t contributed anything now haha. I just picked this particular story because I felt like I helped someone out of a crappy situation.
It was the number one UserVoice request and we were incredibly lucky to have the entire feature ownership to pair develop (with minimal but stellar oversight from the tech lead) and it had a huge multiplier effect on the product offering overall.
I’m very grateful for being in the right place in the right time and it’s contributed a lot to the “valuable code is the code that your users are benefiting from” lesson that constantly reminds me that book-smarts are nothing without a solid understanding of user needs.
The measurable change was a 30-60% increase in the notification CTR and resulted in hundreds of millions of incremental hours watched.
I also ratelimited logging in Linux cifs. Now a spammy log message can't hang or panic a client system.
That's probably technically and commercially more impactful but I like my Minecraft script more personally.
My small contribution - if you live in Sydney and get an Opal card as a student or other concession, my code is in there doing all the checks with various external services. It's not a big thing but nice to know when your software has been used by a large majority of the people you meet.
It was what you'd call a community-run webhost, but at a time when such things weren't common. The main innovation was making it easy for multiple people to administer and hand over websites: we'd noticed that student society websites tended to get lost or rebuilt every year, because they were run under people's personal accounts which stopped working when they graduated.
[0] Just Scream (https://justscream.baby)
The first big project I worked on was to develop a call detail record (CDR) search tool.
This tool was used to help locate a missing family who had been lost in the Nevada wilderness for more than 48 hours: https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/11/us/nevada-family-found-alive/...
Before it was all splunk, everything took ages, and you needed to have a degree in weird regex/SQL syntax to get anything useful.
I started showing off graphite/grafana to a few devs. I put some basic CPU/Memory/HTTP request time metrics in. They started putting it in the expressjs layer they had. This meant that any HTTP call was automatically logged, along with CPU memory and anything else they wanted.
By the time I left, splunk was used to do post mortems, and virtually every team had a grafana dashboard, with the Product/buisness owners setting the SLAs/alerts.
Not just me - big team effort. Engineering manager of both.
On a problem meeting to get better at detecting some SMS fraud, we realized some manual labor the fraud team had to do with Excel. I made a program that automated the checks and presented a resulting ranked list, I saved that team (according to them) around 1 hour a day of boring, stupid work and let them either rest or use that time for better work
I did a small audit on webpage size on my company to see how impactful the changes would be. Approximately 30% to 40% of the page could be reduced. The calculated cost saved was low, $150 to $200 per month, but also around 100kg to 150kg of CO2 released on the atmosphere. If replicated on other pages the total cost saved on both dollars and CO2 could be tripled
While not a lot, I like to think that those small things done everywhere could ne a substantial help on global warming
I built carefulwords, a very fast thesaurus and quote site for inspiration, used by... tens of people a day. Eg: https://carefulwords.com/gift https://carefulwords.com/solitude
I made the site because I was mad that it was hard to type in urls to use thesaurus.com, and because that site fails to focus the cursor in the search box. So I made my own site that did. I mostly made it for myself, me and my wife use it all the time. I am slowly editing down the thesaurus to manageable size.
I built a 12x16 "Goose Palace" barn out of local pine timbers, which taught me timber framing, and taught my tiny baby who turned 2 years old while doing it that this is just the kind of thing that people normally do, build barns in their driveway. Some context: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/the-goose-palace
Some photos of building it with the baby: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1584169368203956225
I designed my house, and have been writing extensively about that. Maybe this is the most impactful, since photos of it are all over Pinterest and other sites, now. The first post on that: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/designing-a-new-old-home-...
I am not sure what is most impactful. Maybe ultimately it is building my family.
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Abel=Limit[Schroeder,{f'[0]->1}]
I first worked on improving the database (adding indexes, reducing redundancy, etc.). Next, I wrote a Python package to make it easier to interact with the database from the command line and Python, and act as a backend package for a frontend Flask API I wrote to serve the data. Finally, I made a simple website [1] where users can query the data.
It was great because I not only got to help out the people working in the group, but I also contributed to making the data available to other physicists around the world.
It blew up. It peaked at around 2600 concurrent players on Christmas. It’s slowed down, but still averages around 70 games/day.
The most amazing party was I run it by donation. I’ve received enough donations to keep it running, and dozens of cards, letters, and long emails thanking me profusely for building the game, and how it kept people connected across the miles and especially during lockdowns.
Rich stories, physical things (letters, puzzles, hair..), and a customized elements are still extremely rare to find in a product offer.
I'm no longer involved (and I didn't get rich), but I'm still proud of the experiences we created for the human bonding that occurred after delivery.
To this day there are people who come up to me saying "You!! I couldn't sleep for a week!" or "You!! My father and I went over your aged documents with a fine tooth comb and they were _REAL_." I'm so proud to have given these people a moment of awe and wonder.
Also lots of strangler pattern iterations! That was fun.
The high-impact part comes from the organization and their mission moreso than my contribution to it, but it was also the most technically challenging work I did (shoehorning previous functionality into places it didn't belong and all the fun that comes with that).
It's been about 9 years and I can see that largely, my backend is still running. The site had a facelift since then, though.
This was a fully custom project, with a pretty standard Rails backend. The complexity was mostly dealing with Convio, the CRM / payment processing system from Salesforce for nonprofits.
In the late 90's, I sold a command-line SMTP e-mailer for Windows. It was easy enough for folks to integrate e-mail transmission into their systems ... even 16-bit systems since spawning a copy of the shell would allow 16-bit systems to invoke my 32-bit mailer. Lots of folks had used these tools for all sorts of things. I got registration checks and cash from around the world before I started taking credit card payments.
I have an open source command-line MP3 player for Windows that folks still use and incorporate into their systems, JS libraries for node.js, ...etc.
They used to spend most of the summer formatting the machines, reinstalling Windows, office, anti-virus etc, doing them manually a classroom at a time.
We replaced it with a system of hidden partitions and a disk image, then the ability to trigger a refresh remotely if pre-requisites were met.
This is common practice nowadays, but it was quite innovative at the time, and we had to write a lot of the code ourselves for remote admin and to make the disk refresh reliably.
We could then click a button and refresh ~500 machines in the space of an hour as opposed to 6 weeks of manual labour.
I've worked on more prestigious stuff, but that was the most satisfying and the most obvious avoidance of manual efforts.
[0] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/tools/grit/+/...
Funniest part was, I open sourced it. Then a few years and an acquisition later the parent company tried to sell us a tool for converting caption files based off my own code.
To be very clear: I can’t take credit for the original idea or spreadsheet. That would be our original founder, Jesse.
It was also the first project were I was the lead for the development side of things and also made myself known as the domain expert. Fun times :)
At least that's the most visible thing I've done.
Personally? I built a heavy duty portable hard drive shredder than can shred a drive down to 1mm pieces in 60 seconds. Overall I sunk about $300k into the business and probably made back maybe $100k. I think we're 10 years ahead of the market, at least in Australia. But, it had huge impact on how I think about business, the customer, and how to pair the two instead of building awesome solutions no one needs (yet)
When I watched this video I was flabbergasted.
Is it - what is the thing I made that the most people use? A core service within AWS. Very insane scale.
Is it - what is the thing I made that I think will be the most intrinsically "beneficial" to society? Probably https://contractrates.fyi I've done a lot of freelancing myself and there really doesn't seem to be any single community or hub for freelancers that isn't trying to squeeze every last dollar out of them. I'm trying to make a thing that is legitimately helpful and completely free.
[1] according to my personal benchmarking/use cases and anecdotal experience, no promises.
Very simple implementation wise: get the media player to push the playlist together with what was being played to a REST API and then have a webapp poll it (websockets weren't standardised at that point).
I spin off https://knapsackpro.com from the knapsack gem and we are helping our customers run fast CI builds.
then it got pulled, shelved and never saw the light of day but this was after our time as contractors and i never heard why. but it's probably my most meaningful development aside some niche detection and warning sensor products
Nothing hits you in the feels than having customers thanking you for improving their quality of life, or a child thanking you for giving a parent more years of life.
We went from 2-4 hours of downtime for every release to sometimes going over a year between order gap-inducing downtimes.
Some trickery with database views to merge multiple transactional databases, scripts, a script execution structure, and a list of fairly straightforward rules to follow were the only technical parts needed.
It was in prod from August 2005 through March 2022 and likely saved 60-100 hours per year of downtime (annoyance for users and revenue loss for the company).
14 years later and it’s still going strong!
Shameless plug: we're hiring :)
Specifically, a general run-through of a test had involved the following steps - Choose the right type of FPGA - Get a right bitstream from design teams - load the bistream onto the FPGA - Connecting the FPGA to your PC physically and then using OpenOCD - Use gdb as the loader to load Linux image - With a telnetd in the init script, remotely execute the test on that linux after the boot by using expect/libexpect bindings.
With the FPGA farm, many FPGAs were connected to a server, and it provides web interface and APIs so that people could login, claim a board, upload bitstream, attach openocd and expose tty through socat. In other words, the first half of the mentioned steps became remotely doable.
My team did a bit fight and advocation, and soon CXOs bought in and people shifted to use the system. Productivity got higher. Also coincidentally, COVID breaked out, this system further rooted in our culture. It changes how engineers do their work and how sales do demo.
Despite the success, I always have wanted to replace the home made architecture with something like OpenStack with modified plugins. The closest thing I know is OpenStack with Ironic, but it requires PXE, which is impossible for our embedded-case FPGAs. Any hints or suggestions?
Originally was for the windows folks participating in ludum dare (48hr game dev competition) so that we could easily make timelapses of the development process ( and so I didn't have to look up the ffmpeg command line arguments every time). These were interesting because all games had to be made from scratch in the 48 hours but windows didn't have an easy one liner for it like our linux friends. It grew some simple bells and whistles like cropping, picture-in-picture (it could take a screenshot AND a webcam capture at the same time), and adding audio.
It is terribly, terribly dated at this point (it didn't look great when I released it!) but folks still use it and I get emails from time to time (and a pull request upgrading to python 3 just recently!). I think there were like 50k downloads on google code before they shut that down. It's totally open source and I never marketed it or anything so it was fun to see it featured in some books on indie game dev and some random sites like lifehacker.
The best part for me was all the people who found and used it for things I had never dreamed of - I was sent timelapses of sunrises, custom engine builds, PhD research growing bacteria, construction projects, a ton of digital art, a custom arcade cabinet build, and one guy's year long journey making on very detailed, very cool cyberpunk scene.
The update was to put all the build steps into source control, decouple all the logic, setup ci/cd to support the changes, and use a series of aws services (greengrass, kinesis, S3, lambda, cognito, systems manager, app sync, Api gateway, cloudfront, dynamo, etc) to facilitate an event driven architecture. Then threw an easy to easy to use gui (nextjs/react) on top of it for the customer support teams to use that was as fail proof as possible with a holistic view of system state and update progress.
Easily saved the company 10s of millions of dollars yearly and update times for the most critical systems went from days to hours. Failure rates went from a problem to a minimal occurrence which we had the observability in place to resolve in future scenarios by adding additional tests for any regression issues found.
Super fun project, learned a lot about AWS. Made a lot of customers happy and hospitals more safe.
The package is of course nothing HN worthy, but I'm proud of having contributed something back to FOSS.
The crunchy bit was parsing form data by introspecting a form schema (then XML, now JSON) which initially nearly made me lose my mind, hence the package name "ruODK"?
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.
Later that month, when George Floyd died and people started protesting, they also donated to bail funds - many of them explicitly to bail out protestors but many plain donations. I think our new donation portal handled over one million donations in two days.
(Our new square account was, for obvious reasons, instantly locked for fraud and we managed to get their support to re-open it within a few hours on a Sunday, they were very responsive! We didn’t keep all the money - there’s a National bail fund coalition and it was very random which funds were shared as donation recommendations, so the massive influx of donations to a few funds was distributed across the country.)
Also I helped publish a Simpsons themed mod for the video game Doom 2. It's got it's own fan wiki page at this point.
I wrote a pretty popular sequential image downloader in the early 2000s. I suspect it may be the reason why websites started randomizing the filenames of their image assets.
#2 Space shuttle launch system programming
The main benefits for the customer is physical security, the device is built to be savely stored in a safe or at a bank vault when not in use.
It is built in a way which give total control over the keys to the customer so that our support teams managing the services never have to touch a private key and is easy enough to be used by a non-technical employee of our customers.
For the same audience I'm working on replacing the traditional multi-hub-and-spoke VPN we've built over the last few years (around 500 Hubs in Germany + Spokes) with a true End to end encrypted Mesh system with around 2000 wireguard nodes.
Lastly this is something I hope to do in the near future, building out the first cloud strategy, team, infrastucture and procedures for said sports retailer.
Oh I built a Powershell Wrapper around some parts of the Dynect API and a mostly complete wrapper around the tailscale API which is not widely used but made an impacton a handful of people.
At the start of the pandemic I ran a couple of Jitsi Meet instances for people to connect with their close-ones which was used by a low five figur number of people.
I started a project where we 3d printed a few thousand earsavers for wearing A FFP2 mask for for our local school. I think we at least got two school fully supplied and about a thousand pieces where donated to the hospital that saved my life.
On my last day a picker came over and hugged me and said I had changed their lives. Proudest moment of my career!
It was a bit of Python and SQL and a lot of thought!
I’m mainly proud of the fact that we kept strict separation between revenue ops and content moderation despite a lot of pressure from billion dollar companies to delete reviews they didn’t like. We left lots of money on the table, but fuck those companies.
15 years on, reviews are woven into most websites in the industry and they’re all pretty biased and controlled by the companies we resisted before selling.
amazingly I once failed an interview at Google, despite my abilities. I think because it takes me a while to think before I get anywhere.
Most of our days on the data migration team were spent tracking down missing connections between entities, inconsistencies in the data that our clients had found, etc. I took a "find a string in every column" stored procedure and rewrote it as a python desktop app. Once the basic functionality was there I multithreaded it to run each query simultaneously. After that, I provided a graph-layout GUI that the users could click through and build their queries dynamically based on existing connections they'd already found.
No idea if it's still a thing anymore but it was amazing for my team. We went from guessing at relationships between entities because we didn't want to wait for the stored proc to run for hours to knowing which entities had what relationships in minutes. Single best thing I've ever written.
About 8 years ago I built (as tech lead) a very simple commenting system that is seen by about a million people a day with several thousand DAUs.
I also made a triple-A cricket video game that was huge in India (batsman and umpire AI, some physics).
Made (as enterprise architect) a mobile banking app for a bank with several million customers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TanDEM-X
We were a tiny team of 2 core people. I was the main software engineer, the other main contributor was a mathematician.
The project was done in C#, but in a very functional style. I had to write my own functional collections library for it. Functional style was a very good fit for this kind of classical optimisation problem. Basically zero cost backtracking.
The planning system was very challenging because the two sats fly in close formation, and some operations can cause permanent damage.
I have since left the European space industry out of frustration that most interesting stuff seems to happen in the US, where I am not allowed to work due to ITAR.
I would like to think that it sparked this new cultural phenomenon and made livestream tipping a normal thing.
I am just amazed that something that started as a weekend project can help others tremendously.
- PyATL (Python Atlanta). Group already existed. Didn’t build it from scratch. Adapting to the pandemic and pivoting to keep the community strong was a challenge. We made it through and now better than ever.
- Worked on ESG software. Helping people invest according to their values. Most people are good. Means the software shifts investments from shitty companies to better ones (IMHO).
- Fixed part of the MCAT registration portal performance a short while back. It went from definitely not able to handle scale to being resilient.
- Worked on Fieldscope. An important scientific app used for environmental research like the Chesapeake Bay cleanup project. Flash in 2018 was a nightmare but made it work.
- All the smaller open source contributions that help remove paper cut level issues from projects. That way maintainers can focus on making the bigger impact.
I know this was rather off topic. We don’t usually get to share this. It’s nice to signal to others that they can make a difference at all levels. You can make the world better right now and right where you are. Go!
https://javarants.com/the-ideal-web-application-templating-s...
Worked on tools for Rock the Vote, vote.org, HelloVote (the first sms voter reg chatbot), and VoteAmerica. It’s a surprisingly tricky problem on the backend, with state specific rules and lots of smaller jurisdictions (most election officials are at the county level). Developed methods to extract a user signature from a photo and include in the generated pdf, so people wouldn’t have to print, sign, and mail the document, and we could do everything digitally.
In 2014 went to Libya to help there after the revolution (but before the civil war), and worked on a team that was helping build tools for that new democracy. They haven’t had another national election since, which goes to show that sometimes politics are more complicated than technology…
If you mean single-handedly, kinda hard to say. I also rewrote chunks of a retail FX app written in Java1/awt -> Java5+/Swing. Right now I'm enjoying using my own HN viewer (hackerer.news). I'd like to make an SQL-oriented library so people don't have to settle for JPQL/Hibernate--started but not done/promoted.
A recent stroke of luck was working on a small team building buy-online-pickup-instore for thousands/millions of merchants, that completed just before the pandemic hit.
https://news.microsoft.com/2000/02/09/microsoft-unveils-digi...
https://news.microsoft.com/2000/06/12/microsofts-new-digital...
While I don't think I had a huge impact compared to other contributions, nor did it scale to billions of users, I like to think that it helped at raise awareness about abuses in a dark corner of the world. It is still in active use.
People did a lot of stuff using those, some even surprised me. So all that work paid very well I think
In terms of sheer amount of people affected it's gotta be all those docs I wrote for Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse, and https://web.dev.
In high school I started a private torrent tracker with open source projects. At the time I was pretty new to programming and was gluing things together and slowly after years I started getting a lot of traffic. I was getting good at programming as well, forked the project multiple features addition, dedicated servers and just doing it all.
It used get a daily 1 million visits with 4-5k unique visits every day and slowly we breached the top 25 websites in our country and somewhere around under ~10k in Alexa ranking. But that's when things started getting a bit heated, I had to be more cautious about my footprint and what started something as hobby consuming a lot of my energy.
I really liked it but the fact that I couldn't talk or share about it to anyone was a bummer. I just had it, made a lot of money while I was in school blew it all up quickly but only a handful of irl people knew.
The most impactful thing I delivered at my previous company was a script that moved all of our team's data from a self-hosted db to something on company cloud that was a lot more stable. The script itself wasn't very complicated (essentially just mongodump and mongorestore), but it made a big impact on ensuring that our team's dataset search tool would continue to be accessible to regulatory compliance folks. In turn, the regulatory people could use the tool to protect the company from getting fined under CCPA, etc.
It made a pretty big impression on me that something incredibly simple like that could make as much financial impact in expectation as that script did. Now when I mentor interns and newer, more junior people, I always tell that story as an example of how high impact can be surprisingly uncomplicated.
I used to write one or two popular Go libraries.
There are (or were?) big McRouter + Memcache clusters behind New Relic. I prototyped that and deployed to prod in ~3 weeks.
I was one of the few engineers that introduced Go to New Relic.
These days I would send small patches to Apache Druid.
Besides Druid work, I can't really say all the cool things I do these days.
Our 10th mission launches next Tuesday on SpaceX-26 cargo Dragon. https://magnitude.io/exolab-10/
Next mission in planning stages Feb 2024.
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).
#257th most starred repository on GitHub, used by millions of developers to ship millions of websites — you've very likely visited websites that are built with it!
I'm equally, if not more, proud of an extremely bad Dig Dug clone I made in Amos Pro as a kid though :). That's what eventually caused me to pursue a career in software development.
It's a big company but I'm really proud to have done my part towards this.
The most difficult but ultimately rewarding was a system that performed checks on people who wanted to work with children or vulnerable adults. I ended up having ultimate responsibility for this being successful which whilst now I can look back on with some pride, I wouldn't attempt again.
Before that I'd rewritten exam appeal systems and been a key developer in the UKs first online student loan offering. I still meet people 20 years on that have to browse my code when reworking those systems/codebase.
Working for banks pays the bills, and I never do subpar work but not something I look back with fondness on, even though I did my share.
My best estimate is many millions of Americans were successfully vaccinated as a result of data we sourced, collated, verified and distributed.
The probable magnitude of the impact is thousands of lives saved.
Our tech stack in the early days was a static site generated with Ruby with search results all in a single JSON file filtered by the client in JS, with the backing data store being Airtable. It got more sophisticated over time.
* 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).
It's actually really hard to deal with.
For professional: Built a large and involved interactive speech application (IVR) from scratch that allowed hospitals, doctors, etc to call and check a person's health insurance status for a Fortune 100 health insurance company. Was used in over two million calls while I was there and was still being used when I had quit a few years later.
This is when the official option afforded by the CDC was a 7 or 9 page, non-fillable PDF that they expected hospitals, clinics, and your primary care office to print, complete, sign, scan, and return to the public health agency you fall under -- who would then transcribe that into a massive CSV for import into one of their immunization data systems.
The application was demoed before multiple PHAs, ultimately becoming the sole solution for an entire state, and one of the largest PHAs in the world. It has since become a showcase project for ongoing data modernization initiatives within these two large PHAs.
Tens of millions of vaccinations were made possible by this effort, and it's still in use today.
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Outside of my career, the persistent browser based game (PBBG) I made when I was 13. Several years before I would enlist in the military myself, I received a message from two players -- brothers, one of which was deployed to Iraq at the time, the other in school stateside -- who were able to maintain a higher degree of connection with one another, given limitations of communication otherwise.
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OP, great thread. I always knew there were amazing folks in this community, but it is incredibly inspiring to see the many other responses in this thread.
Just kidding. I was lead engineer on a login page for an Experian identity monitoring remediation product for a major data breach affecting over 20M government employees. Millions of people interacted with my code, kinda cool but everything about that code was very boring.
Co-produced “Pinball 101”, helping thousands of pinball players up their game: https://youtu.be/_RroLKc4wEQ
Created “Le Dominoux” for a 555 timer contest. Now popular electronics project. https://youtu.be/PQOjkuJtBfM
helps teachers stay organized and helps keeps the students accountable. Its simple, quick and eliminated paper hall passes etc...
it is small and quiet. But the students use and respect it the admin appreciate the simple records it keeps and teachers like the extra time they get avoiding paper sign ins.
It's an online tool for writing, checking and typesetting Fitch-style proofs in first-order logic, using the Twelf proof assistant under the hood. Its main feature is that it follows the notation from the teaching material 1-1 and offers no assistance in terms of proof tactics in order to help tech the fundamentals of doing formal proofs while still providing feedback when you make mistakes.
I built it while TAing a course in logic about 7 years ago, and it is still being used to this day.
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.
Back then Flippa was probably the only dominant online marketplace for digital businesses.
It’s a big claim I know but I’m proud that the marketplace still is thriving and since then there has been dozens of similar marketplaces popped up. Also in the past few years it’s been so much easier for anyone to start online projects with various nocode tools and all.
Can’t say how impactful it has been, but I’m happy how far it has come.
Took ten years of managing it alone, but it’s been in the hands of a pretty capable team, for the last few years.
It was/is a free project, designed to Serve a pretty challenged demographic. It has turned out to be quite successful, for a number of reasons; many of which have little to do with me, as the new team has taken it to the next level.
It is not hyperbole, to say it has saved lives.
I’m leveraging that infrastructure as a component of the app I’m developing, currently.
Individually, nothing much. Maybe an old python2+numpy re-implementation of a slow matlab script for radar, specifically SAR RMA imaging: https://github.com/Jach/radar_sar_rma I still get the occasional ping about it. A handful of other things have over the years been helpful to a handful of other people, like a hacky jira-to-github-issues migration script, or a simple ranked choice voting counter using scraped web data. That's always nice, but nothing super impactful. I don't mind.
But the software I've written that seems to have gotten most use is SDL-Ball and the FinalKey password manager.
Well, I also built a "digital bulletin board" for a youth org back when PHP was in fashion, it's no longer used, but they used it, and bought minor upgrades for almost 15 years, so I like to think it had a positive impact on that org. They ended up primarily using a booking system that we designed together exactly to fit their needs.
Python, C/C++, Perl, Celery, Redis, MySQL, Bare Metal.
[1] https://twitter.com/Nican/status/1592010109202616322 [2] https://graph.bunnypa.ws/
We provided 30+ years of hourly historical weather data for more than 16,000 locations around the world to a popular website that generates free weather files for architects to do energy modelling. Most architects don't know it but if they use any recently updated weather file, there is a very good chance that it came from us.
I feel good about that.
Edit: Typo
I can't remember how freeperiod became a thing that schools paid for. I think some other schools showed an interest and that's when I thought about charging. At that point I sent a letter out to lots of schools which bore some fruit and it grew from there.
There is something special about making something that goes on to shape your life. I still feel to shy to call myself a programmer. Or maybe too ashamed as I am sysadmin at heart ;-)
My advice would be don't assume the obvious. School's have timetables, why would they want a booking system? They want a booking system as historically timetables were for teachers and students, not for rooms.
Apart from that, I built autojump, a command line tool that accelerates navigation in the terminal. This in turn inspired z, zoxide, and other tools.
A funny one is that I asked a few fairly basic questions when SO was still in its infancy. These turned out to have an enormous success. Some are still the authoritative page on the question.
- 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."
https://mikeflynn.github.io/egg.js/
Egg.js is still the most popular public project on my GitHub page.
Country jumped lots of positions in IPv6 adoption
I wrote about it here https://arnon.dk/why-you-should-separate-your-billing-from-e...
* 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.
Tetun is the national language in Timor-Leste, and it's not available on Google Translate. Most of my users are Timorese students translating educational content from English to Tetun.
In 2017 The website was closed.
Overall for a decade I had 10.000 unik visitors / month. Impactfull I would say
The tester took around 3-mths to get to the production verion and used Turbo Pascal with inline assembly, C and quickbasic for the reports.
The y2k was a big issue in the day and glad the tester played a small part in ensuring a smooth transition.
I stand atop mountains and throw pebbles at the snow - I’ve only had 25 years or so of being really active in the world, but I’m satisfied that some of the pebbles I’ve thrown have turned into avalanches - either the thing has been an idea which proved popular, or it has been something which enabled someone else to do something else, or it was the collaborations and partnerships I spawned through the people I put together in my past ventures. Some of the things I flung out into the aether changed the world. For instance, in ‘03, I cheerily introduced SMS based microblogging, along with proof of concept code and the ability for friends to subscribe, and I know, based on who used it, what it went on to spawn.
I rode an avalanche once, and it was hard work - it’s just as satisfying to watch them from afar, and know that you were a key component to making that causal chain occur.
It was chosen as one of the “50 coolest web sites of 2005” by Time Magazine. I did it all from my basement on a 3 meg down 750k up dsl. It’s stil listed on the Time Magazine web site.
The software helps save lives on a daily basis.
It uses recent data from lab tests to show which bacteria is resistant to which antibiotic.
1. The first and only app (I believe) to chat with dolphins using underwater whistles.
2. The structure of the knowledge component of an app that ensures the safe use of extremely poisonous pesticides produced by a large chemical manufacturer.
3. An expert system used to generate the complete source code, including the UI, of 13 operational expert systems for the configuration of telecom equipment.
4. The complete software for the safe transport of extra dimensional loads on a very large train network, the first of its kind in 1973.
5. Flight testing the first commercial autopilot RNAV flight management system, originally for the 747, back in 1974.
The access, implementation and costs of getting security and safety are broken and inefficient. Security involves having standalone security guards and CCTV's that work independently. 56 platform leverages an interconnected network of guards and AI smart cameras to deliver an efficient safety experience to our customers. We’re doing this primarily by developing location services, machine learning and hardware running deep learning models.
Impact: Many residents use the SoS feature in case of an emergency. Apart from giving proactive security, we have successfully averted safety-critical situations such as public nuisance, tracing out missing people in the neighbourhood (the majority of them being dementia patients, pet rescues etc. )
56secure.com
It syncs their various ecommerce channels into a single Google Sheets. I wrote over two weeks during the early days of lockdowns because they had to pivot to ecommerce fast.
I have been making it more efficient since but it is a lot of spaghetti code.
It has saved the business about 20,000 hours.
mov ax,1234
jmp far F000:FFF0
I've also created a question-based card game for social connection that I produced and sold 200 units of. Far less scale, but people tell me weekly about the impact that it had on their lives and the connections that they formed through it. It's really shaped the values of the social community I belong to, so in a ripple effect kind of way, I think it's had a pretty huge impact.
And I've also worked on some widely used web apps for NASA and OpenStreetMap, written a lot of code and shipped some big features but only as a productive IC.
1. My first and the most satisfying impactful work was a small tool to generate spreadsheets from a form and mail to management. I did this to learn React a bit more and this ended up as an important tool for all contractors in the company. It was used by more than 300 employees and literally everyone knew it was my project and thanked me often for saving their time. The management moved it from heroku to their internal domain and its still in use 3 years after I left.
2. The second one is at the current job where I have made a site that has data from JIRA, Github, some automation for frontend tasks and some for backend tasks with simple button clicks. People use this everyday and has become the first page to look at every day. Planning to make this a new tab screen in Chrome next.
A close second was a script I wrote at a collections agency to pull and write off the max amount of debt allowed (per company & partners policy) per day. Would write off medical debt for a few thousand people a week.
We proved that certain subliminal effects for which tight control of presentation times (<30 ms) is necessary, up to then something only reserved for highly controlled lab settings, were also possible to research online, making behavioural experiments an order of magnitude easier to perform. Especially, it seems, in this age of covid.
Unfortunately the method the engine was embedded in was built on a closed platform... and died shortly after the first major re-design of that platform. At least its legacy lives on.
But at the same time, my personal websites and videos have had a pretty big impact too, with a fair few of the latter reaching over a million views, and a few articles on the former getting covered by all kinds of news publications and getting a good number of views there too.
So it's hard to be sure.
It's still relatively small (/early) in terms of rollout/adoption, but I'm always proud to be able to make a real, positive difference for humans in their times of need.
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.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inikworld....
On commercial side, I have been part of founding team of a Sports Startup. This is an underdog team & with the tech product that team won a SuperBowl. Not sure, how impactful this is.
I also designed software for managing auctions, which was in use for 15 years.
Did a similar thing for youth livestock shows which has now been in use for 30 years.
4.3 trillion requests, 108 petabytes transfered, installed on 7 million sites (today its 10mm).
I was also the art director for the Bash logo but BootstrapCDN took the cake in terms of impact.
Private: Spent a few years on building Farseer Physics Engine. Back in 2007 it was used by almost all 2D games for Xbox and Windows Phone. Then Unity took over in 2013.
I used Microsoft Word.
I have code running now at work that gets millions of requests a day and I'm not sure it's more "impactful". I'm not sure how many customers would notice or care if it disappeared, but the slack bot broke once and a couple people messaged me pretty quickly to let me know.
In the online world, I've contributed bits and pieces to open-source here and there as far back as the late 90s. I think my first contribution was to the shadow package, but I've contributed to Apache, Radius, git, random packages that I use that I discover bugs in, etc.
A python script I wrote to allow folks to bypass AT&T's residential gateway was used by more people than I ever expected:
Every week, PA would release a spreadsheet of all places that received vaccines and we would call the places listed to see their availability. We ended up scaling the operation to ~200 volunteers.
There wasn't much on the technical side, though. We had an Airtable where volunteers would update records an a next.js site that displayed the date via Airtable API. We found the Airtable embed to be too complicated/ugly and even though wrangling Airtable API was a huge pain, it was worth
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.
It’s not making me rich but it feels good knowing it’s legitimately helping people run their business.
but the most impactful software is mobile app which i build together with my kids
which they did the voices and selecting the images and over all they felt involved in dady's work . the software was to teach them the Hebrew letters. for them it was cool small game , for me it ment allot .
Open sourced it : https://github.com/meiry/Cocos2d-x-Guessing-Game
It's a way of visualizing time differently - 144 blocks, where each block represents 10 minutes of your day.
In terms of the impact I care about, I try to give aspiring programmers my time and talk to them about how they can improve their hirability by building useful skills that you'd use day to day. I haven't had much success, but the little success I do have was helped in large part by an influential mentor. Those can be hard to come by, and time is expensive.
Eventually the founders realized that Google could be spammed, so I helped build the team at Google that tries to keep Google's rankings from being manipulated.
I was also proud to serve in the U.S. Digital Service, which is the groups of geeks that rescued healthcare.gov. The U.S. Digital Service has done a ton of impactful things for Veterans, immigrants, students, small business owners, and many others.
Most recently, I served as an expert on spam and bots for Twitter in their lawsuit against Elon Musk.
I think a 20 year run for a popular website and application was probably most impactful thing I've done.
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.
While the site has had its ups and downs, and changes of ownership, it is usually the first validating reference for any computer game entry on wikipedia (which it pre-dates by nearly two years).
Built an airline pricing system as the sole developer in 3 months in the early 2000’s. When demoed during late stages of development, it received pre-order guaranteed sales from airlines of $60mn for the next 12 months.
I was paid a paltry $500/day for the contract, and got my marching orders when it was done.
Built whole realtime tech stack in PyPy+Tornado+RehtinkDB for realtime asynchronous message queuing. We avoided websocket and used eventsource , it was a lot easier and easier to scale.
We end up serving millions of users a month and the system became part of Dominican culture
Made some good money from it, was 21 at the time
---
Professionally medical stuff.
It was definitely the thing that I’ve had the most fun building, since I was both product manager and developer, and I had zero other responsibilities at the time.
The application was Dash Board[1] for Newton OS, and it only ran on the final generation of Newton hardware (created by Apple, but spun out as a separate company in its final days, before being killed by Steve Jobs shortly after his return).
It "only" sold a few thousand copies. (But it was during the warez heyday, and I am pretty sure there were also tens of thousands of bootleg copies being used, thanks to the registration code generator by "DocNZ" that was widely shared on Hotline back then.)
But that was really pretty great, since the final MP2000/2100 generation of hardware it required was thought to have only sold about 200,000 devices in total.
I have since had a fairly normal software engineer career, and have worked on apps that shipped far more copies, and today I work on customer facing web applications and API SDKs that have more users, and arguably do stuff that is more "important" (e.g. help companies manage large fleets of machines/robots/IoT stuff) than what Dash Board did — which was basically just improve the user interface of the Newton.
But it's 100% clear to me that the magnitude of user impact of Dash Board was much higher than any other thing I've built. People really loved it — I know because hundreds of them actually wrote to us to let us know. (LOL I mean wrote to me "me" — old habits of pretending the company wasn't just one student in his tiny apartment die hard).
Of course, I made more money later, and worked on things that touched a much larger number of people's lives. But "impact" has both X and Y axes. It was the depth of the users' fondness for Dash Board that makes it eclipse everything since. I don't think there are that many chances to just go for "user delight" as the number one metric.
For me, developer satisfaction is a function of that user delight more than anything else.
[1]: http://www.fivespeedsoftware.com/dashboard
[2]: 15 years later, I open-sourced the code and gave it a proper retrospective: https://github.com/masonmark/Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS
Back in the good old .com days.
There were others, but this is probably still the top one.
- App for our national airline
- EPG and remote recording app for cable company
- MacOCR command line app: https://github.com/schappim/macOCR
Quite a challenge that took ~1 year all alone.
Probably used in a few hundred apps at least, and generating a few thousand PDFs for end users daily.
* reports and delivery tracking to help a meals on wheels program
* app and systems to manage 1000s of traffic cameras
* app to balance billions of dollars worth of bank transactions w POS systems
1) I integrated PayPal into Gap.com
2) I’m currently building a game agnostic game provisioning platform that will serve 10+ DAUs once finished.
Changed my life in many ways that I would never have imagined :~)
Another thing i built which had a bigger impact was a covid "get outside motivation paper" during lockdowns. I had the "form technology" from the previous project and i just adapted it for the covid needs and added a signature for touch displays. You could generate a pdf with all legally required fields and sign it and print/show it to the authorities, on your phone. It had half a million users over a few months, then the government set up their own. I even had a GDPR authority contacting me thinking i'm stealing people's data etc. I actually showed them that the PDF is generated locally, there was no database and once the site loaded, you could even generate it offline. They did not follow up.
Another thing i built, with questionable impact, was a election fraud checker. The government had a API and feeds data every 5 minutes with number of people who voted at all locations. I wanted to see this in real time with a GUI/graph to see who registers more votes per minute than the actual systems allow(tablets). I actually found some locations that had bursts of hundreds of votes in a few minutes, that was physically impossible. Sad to say i did not do anything with the data(although it was public at that time).
Some of the most impactful things i built.
Edit: typos
Used wowza, nginx, python-flask
Tech wise, very early Docker and Docker-related integrations with a bunch of other amazing people.
Looks like the site is miraculously still up though the Cufon is looking a little rough these days: https://rememberme.ushmm.org/
it aggregates contractor rates and has some job listings. the main focus is the rates, but attempting to provide ancillary value to people who visit the site.
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.
Shortly after I left, Dropbox released their Rust-based client. I don't know how they compare.
The big complication in a product like this is the metadata. Things that might not seem like a big deal, like string comparisons, must be super-optimized.