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

For some people the most impactful thing they have done in life is create something that makes obscene amounts of money. I designed and built nanoshelters.com to help homeless people secure uninterrupted sleep. I should be worth more than most of you 'money is god' programmers but we live in a world that values how you much money you make rather than how you treat other humans.

I guess my most impactful project was a microprocessor-based weather station for siting wind energy systems and fruit frost prediction in the early 1980s. Turned out that one of my stations, being used by a frost predictor, was across the street from a rural drainage ditch in which a young child was discovered face down in the water. The frost predictor faxed temperature profiles for the previous several hours to the hospital, where doctors determined the child could be revived. She was.

During a centralisation of public school local servers to a data centre, I created a consolidated library enquiry system. It served over 2,000 libraries, had 330 million titles, and had about a million users. It was efficient enough to run off my laptop, if need be.

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…

Most of the most consequential changes to the reddit feeds a few years ago I was involved in or directly came up with. The most visible was probably the one that started putting discussion-heavy posts on the front page (things like legaladvice, amitheasshole, askreddit, unpopularopinion, etc). It’s weird to think about the resulting butterfly effects that are completely beyond my knowledge and comprehension.

Impactful?

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.

  user: egberts1
  created: May 5, 2015
  karma: 1337

This: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Farmer%27s_Market . Helped a few thousand people get their meds before we all got arrested. No regrets.

I built https://topstonks.com, it was one of the early sources of information during the meme stock craze, and a primary source for several major news outlets.

The 2nd most used analysis tool on NSANet in response to the 9/11 commission report that the agencies weren't sharing data. https://twitter.com/masonrothman/status/1521407937985404928

Hmm oddly probably my first “real” full time job is where I had the most impact - I was one of two programmers hired for a summer to redesign a stress testing suite for a server hardware vendor, prime95, cuda-burn, etc. integrated into one single python application to collect the data. I stayed there during the school year part time and the next summer I got to hire another dev (my counterpart left to facebook).

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.

I've worked on numerous medical devices, many startups. From treating cancer, kidney disease, or providing tools for reconstructive surgery.

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.

Depends how we want to define impact.

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.

Definitely All About Berlin. A few years ago, I started documenting how to deal with German bureaucracy as a foreigner. The website grew and grew until it became a well-known resource for immigrants. It has become my full-time job at some point in 2020.

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.

The second generation Web UI of a Series A startup in 2011 that went on to be acquired for $1B in 2020. I have another promising personal project in the works I'm hoping overtakes it.

For 10 years until recently a statistics research system that was the primary tool for keeping granular measurements on the health of the US economy.

Myself. Came from a dysfunctional family, enormous debt and have survived lots of trauma to reach a decent position + decent net worth.

I worked on the epitaxy for vcsels that go into iphones for the facial recognition. Not that impactful but cool to know that the stuff I worked on is in use all around me.

Built Video Hub App that almost 5,000 people have purchased. I was a math teacher, became a web dev 6 years ago, built this 5 years ago. Most proceeds go to charity. Very minor by comparison to others, but I'm just starting out ;)

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.

I built a blog in 1999, very small impact, but it was the most impactful thing I've built. I wanted to build a website to be Slashdot for librarians, and it was quite popular for years. I ended up starting my own webhosting business, and changed my entire career path. So it mostly impacted me, but I think there were some small ripple effects.

Worked on software used in cash registers owned by Target, Walmart, the US Postal Service, and various large European and Asian equivalents. Comparing the previous model's UI to the new one was similar to the jump from command line UIs to GUIs, in that they were easier to understand without having to know a bunch of obscure commands. The company did a lot of work to ensure they were also fast to use like the old text-based ones. It really made the obscure cases easier for cashiers with little training to handle.

I like to write personal open source projects to learn a language / learn a statistical concept to its core. To learn Python, I build a missing-value imputation package. This one hit it (to my standards) pretty big. 500k downloads so far, but as someone who uses it daily, I’m most proud of the fact that it’s still the best at what it does[1]: https://github.com/AnotherSamWilson/miceforest

[1] according to my personal benchmarking/use cases and anecdotal experience, no promises.

Nothing groundbreaking. But during my few years in game dev I built a relaxing game that had a spiritual component to it. Was one of my first games so.. plenty of flaws from a game design perspective. But one day I got an email from a player thanking me because the game helped immensely during a difficult time. Made my day... actually, I still think about once in a while. So, I guess you can say it was impactful for one ;)

Did a lot of work on Wikipedia with media, usability, and internationalization. As with all such things that merely facilitate volunteers, it’s hard to say what’s mine or put dollar values on it. But it’s touched at least a billion lives, and facilitated a large fraction of a media library that will likely outlive me.

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.

About 25 years ago, with a group of friends: https://www.srcf.net/

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.

A nodejs closed caption converter. I’m not a developer but can get along just fine for most of my projects.

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.

https://github.com/jasonrojas/node-captions

Probably this JavaScript function I posted on my blog in 2003 https://simonwillison.net/2003/Mar/25/getElementsBySelector/

   /* That revolting regular expression explained 
   /^(\w+)\[(\w+)([=~\|\^\$\*]?)=?"?([^\]"]*)"?\]$/
     \---/  \---/\-------------/    \-------/
       |      |         |               |
       |      |         |           The value
       |      |    ~,|,^,$,* or =
       |   Attribute 
      Tag
   */