I'll start. For me, I think the most impactful thing I've ever built was an internal application for a FX trading desk that eventually went on to handle billions in daily trades.
It didn't use any fancy frameworks, just plain old CRUD on Java.
Readit News
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…
The part I added was built with ASP.NET 2.0 on top of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and was eventually upgraded to 4.0 and 2008 respectively.
The only magic sauce was the use of SQLCLR to embed a few small snippets of C# code into the SQL Server database engine. This allowed the full-text indexing to be specialised for the high level data partitioning. Without this, searches would have taken up to ten seconds. With this custom search the p90 response time was about 15 milliseconds! I believe PostgreSQL is the only other popular database engine out there that allows this level of fine-tuned custom indexing.
it's okay sir, we now know you as jiggawatts
Nice work, but check your ego mate. Seems your growth hacking would have had zero result if those kids couldn't read to start with, so you could share some credit ;-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I love Steve Jobs' metaphor: computers as a bicycle of the mind [0]. Unfortunately, a lot of effort is concentrated on problems that scale to billions of people. There's a lack of attention to problems that would have a big effect for a relatively small number of people. It's a shame, because they're a blast to work on.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L40B08nWoMk
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.
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Have you made more than a typical SWE?
It is one of those traits where a mind clicks and said "this is it and how" and surprisingly gets into the most illusive hyperfocus/high-energy mode (without using any drug).
Slow-path network processing (arguably me) was commercially made in Ascom Timeplex in 1982 and someone else leaked it to Cisco (or ripping AT's patent off). I got that from observing how different river bends (re)connect year-after-year while doing trout fishing trips.
Money-wise, I am disabled, got abled, disabled again in different way, re-enabled, now just coasting with my own ideas: JavaScript Host-Based Intrusion Detection/Protection System, being one of them. And an portable AirPod detector (for home/auto/travel) is another idea. And DNSSEC for within private enterprise is almost done.
Money is not my thing but it does help greatly in the pursuit of my ideals (so many hardwares, so many test equips).
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.
My mom got into adult lego when she took apart my child hood lego and reassembled them to resell.
Now we mail each other sets that the other is done with, and it gives us a great opportunity to connect. We're both anxious people and there's something relaxing about just assembling something where everything has a place.
When she found out there's a lego con in my town, she made plans to come visit me so we can go together and I can show her around the city I just moved to.
My 3 and 6 year old love lego kits. Historically I found myself sitting with them and helping when they got stuck or directing them when I saw they made a mistake. More recently I decided to pick up my own kit and build along side them. I’m currently working on the Saturn V rocket. It’s been a lot more fun for me and a way to bond with my kids.
>At work: the CDN for Megaupload. I was also the guy who had to shut it down when the FBI seized it.
>adult LEGO fan conference
Wow, what a small world. That's what I love about HN. The people that make things you use are on it :)
I wish I had something nearly as impressive. I just have open source stuff that people use. Nothing recognizable though.
Also, I have a project in production at work where a device needs to grab its public IP address. My code has a list of sites that provide that info and I have ip4.me as a fallback in that list, so thank you for building it!
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Maybe worth reaching out to Mozilla. That's the only actual non-profit I can think of who I think would have both the ability and the incentive to keep it online.
Ability? 5M/day for "what's my ip" is not much, and I'd wager most of us on this site would be able to keep it up and alive just fine. As for incentive... in addition to the Mozilla Foundation, orgs like Calyx, NLNet, Quad9 come to mind.
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Datasette, Django, and Lanyrd.
> Locating elements by their class name is a widespread technique popularized by Simon Willison (http://simon.incutio.com) in 2003 and originally written by Andrew Hayward (http://www.mooncalf.me.uk)
[0] Page 91 from "Pro JavaScript Techniques" by John Resig.
My most impactful thing I've done outside of paid work is a website running on Django. I could live without queryBySelector or their descendants, but not without Django.
Thank you, Simon.
(from https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2003/getElementsBySe...)
querySelectorAll wouldn't ever appear without jQuery which got its idea from Simon's idea.
And even then querySelectorAll was so poorly implemented that it didn't even have any useful helper methods.
Then thinking, I suppose you could do it by (exactly the method you used), but never actually doing it because if it were that simple, someone would have already done it.
Actually, seeing the date, I realize this predates me even leaving high-school, which makes it even more atrocious that I never knew of it!
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.
Thank you for creating it!
Eg: Stick a fork in it and see if it's done yet
From one "engineer whose irritation at inefficiency spawned a whole tool" to another (I got sick of staying up overnight to run load tests, so wrote myself an automation and monitoring tool - which got picked up, spun off to its own team, and now is used by >300 teams) - thank you!
> I made it in about 2 weekends on my own time.
[1] https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1109/40.566198
Initially, ignoring the wisdom of the time that said OFDM was no good for indoor channels. The research project was eventually shut down due to lack of commercial interest, but the research leaders had enough faith to immediately start their own company (Radiata). Later, commercial success for Radiata came from being in the right place at the right time.
> Were there any close competitors?
In the research phase, not that I was aware of. In the commercial phase, Atheros. The story I was told after the event was that Cisco had decided to buy whichever company came to market first. Radiata came to market 2 weeks before Atheros and so Radiata was acquired.
> Was infrared close to being the winner?
It could have been, but specular reflection in IR channels causes inter-symbol interference, which limits the data rate. If someone could have solved that problem then IR might have happened instead of WiFi.
> I'm also surprised big enough FPGA was already around.
At the start of the project FPGAs were not big enough, so we had to partition across multiple 3000 series Xilinx parts. Bigger FPGAs had been released by the end of the project, so the transmitter fitted on a single XC4025 FPGA, using manual placement. The 4025s were brand new and Xilinx (as always) were difficult to deal with, so we had to beg for devices and they magnanimously granted us 3 or 4 chips.
At the time there wasn't much sense of occasion, as we were busy doing the work and none of us knew how big it would get.
At the time the collaboration with CSIRO worked quite well, as there were no business development types involved. In 1995 CSIRO was more concerned about science than IP. Since then they have become more money/IP focused. Maybe they got gold fever from the $1 billion in royalties they made from their WiFi patent?
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.
(Including Peter Eckersley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Eckersley_(computer_scie... who passed away earlier this fall at just 43.)