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

1

Video Hub App

#Video #File Manager #Video & Movies 21 social mentions

2

GoJS

I built GoJS, which is one of the most popular commercial JS diagramming libraries: https://gojs.net 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 mostly made it for myself, me and my wife use it all the time. I am slowly editing down the thesaurus to managable 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-curiosity I am not sure what is most impactful. Maybe ultimately it is building my family.

#Flowcharts #Org Charts #BPMN 11 social mentions

3

Rectangles

Https://rectangles.app It's a way of visualizing time differently - 144 blocks, where each block represents 10 minutes of your day.

#Time Tracking #Side Project #Data Visualization 3 social mentions

4

Web.dev by Google

Though-provoking Q! 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.

#Online Services #Tool #SEO Tools 126 social mentions

5

Knapsack Pro

I've created a knapsack ruby gem for CI parallelisation that has over 122 million downloads. Primarily due to the fact, Gitlab is using it. I spin off https://knapsackpro.com from the knapsack gem and we are helping our customers run fast CI builds.

#Automated Testing #Browser Testing #Continuous Integration 3 social mentions

6

Chrome Remote Desktop

It never saw the light of day, but I developed a really cool prototype with WebRTC that allowed our customers to remotely log into another machine. It was basically what google has in this product https://remotedesktop.google.com/. It was one of the few things I worked on where I was genuinely excited to code it up.

#Remote Desktop #Remote PC Access #Remote Control 94 social mentions

7

Label LIVE

Over the last 4 years I built a label design and print app using Electron/React. It has 5000+ desktop users and will reach 7 figures in revenue in the next year. I recently launched a new thermal label printer brand named mydpi. Right now I'm selling a 300 DPI direct-thermal version to compete with DYMO and low-end Zebra. In a month I'll launch a thermal-transfer version with bundled ribbon/labels. I never thought I'd play in the "label printer" niche, because honestly, I hate printing labels... But my app makes it possible to easily achieve impressive results. I'm also working on a cloud-based renderer that will make user's designs available as an API that returns a rasterized image or the specific-printer-language to print that label. My life's work... https://label.live and https://mydpi.com.

#Design Tools #Office & Productivity #Mac 15 social mentions

8

SideProjectors

I started an indie side project marketplace in 2014 called SideProjectors. https://sideprojectors.com 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.

#Buy Websites #Web App #Tech 4 social mentions

9

DALL·E mini

Co-created Dall-E Mini (now named Craiyon, and I am not involved anymore). 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-dall-e.html ___.

#Design Tools #AI #Image Editing 29 social mentions

10

Wash Your Lyrics

During COVID-19: https://washyourlyrics.com Changed my life in many ways that I would never have imagined :~).

#Emergency Communications #Education #SaaS 4 social mentions

11

40 Hadiths

Helped over 400,000 users & answered 7,00,000 Queries in their child growth & development tracking. So far, it is completely free. We were able to help parents from India, Bangladesh, Kenya & multiple countries who have limited access to child healthcare. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inikworld.growthbook&hl=en_IN&gl=IN 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.

#Mobile Apps #Religion #Web Search 1191 social mentions

12

Opencast

Setting up an automated lecture capture system at my university, based around the open-source https://opencast.org software. We did everything from buying hardware components to build machines that were specifically tuned to encode videos on the fly with the least space/noise possible to be put into lecture halls, writing the software to run on that, to running the video management system with opencast, integrating it with e-learning suites, setting up livestreams, etc. 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.

#Video #Video Platform #Video Converter 1 social mentions