Ask HN: What's a software project that made people's lives better?
What's a software project you've worked on that's had a positive impact in people's lives, or made it better in some way?
They were changing processors and backend CRMs and it was a big project that I handled as the only dev in a small shop.
The transition went well and I didn't disrupt the millions in donations the site takes in each year.
My work was small compared to that of the volunteers in the organization, though. It's cool to see what you can do with code--really some powerful leverage we wield.
The USGS data is hard to read, this makes it easier.
https://doplaces.com After ten years I've learned it's to get people to submit information (even if listings are free) also has been a challenge for this semi-introverted programmer to market it.
Another project (for my employer) we have had a printed community resource directory for decades this helps people find local government/aid resources for families and has got recognition for its handyness in emergencies. I have created a web version - the notable part on this one is putting in a facility so those on mobile can (via cookies) select favorites and write notes associated on those for later reference. https://rr.trcac.org/resdir.htm I guess the other challenge in this area is we are rural and a good portion of the population is not all that well connected or tech savvy. The paper one still currently wins out over the on-line version.
Don't get me wrong, I've tried working on 211 in Washington, DC and experienced the same thing, ultimately: Individual nonprofits creating their own resource and referral systems since 211 was not cutting it and would likely never cut it.
Will see if it has regained any support up here - don't see much advertising for it in this rural area, and looking at the California 211 most of the resources point to the central valley... Thanks for the heads up!
I was part of a team which built a very early telehealth platform. A bunch of the work was open-sourced as rtc.io (though I didn't have much to do with that). The resulting company and tech is used by a few million people a month (I think).
I built an ML system used at a large drop-ship retailer which ingested huge excel spreadsheets of products from suppliers and added them to the retailers database in a consistent manner. This made a painstaking and horrible job for 12 people into a job that was done by 2 people 2 hours per week. Yes, we replaced people in their jobs, and I hope they all went on to get better jobs, because everyone hated that job, and most people only lasted a few months.
I also was founder of Ayvri (3d mapping sports tech for paragliders) - I don't put this in the same category as the others, though it was the most lucrative for me, because though paragliders loved it, as did a few ultramarathoners, etc. I don't think it really had the level of impact.
For the last 4 years the team I worked with in telehealth have returned to our health roots and are working on improving sleep with affectablesleep.com
I used to paraglide, and I remember it as Doarama. It was quite used by paragliders, especially in some videos. Personally I liked it in the beginning, but people started to abuse it, and sometimes the videos would consist mostly on the doarama scene (with a voice over). I would skip those parts of the video, or close the video after some time. It wasn't the same as watching a real video capture from the terrain, which I did prefer..
The company is exploring a ton of cool stuff to help kids beyond their classroom, and really wants to make things better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22650725
We ended up placing I think 40000 tests. Informed Sen Warren’s report and was eventually absorbed into the GISCorps program.
(Speaking for myself only. I don't work there anymore.)
I don't know if the map's made people's lives any better, or just a little more annoying, maybe =/ Personally, I would've preferred a regular paper map on the back of a brochure, which can be both much bigger than a phone screen and not require any learned UI interactions. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be stopped using paper maps during COVID (a decision I tried to fight, unsuccessfully). So our visitors could either use this map on their phones or not have one at all. In that sense, I guess it was better than nothing...?
At the time we built this (a few years ago), indoor mapping (as opposed to the typical outdoor street mapping of Google/Apple/OSM/etc.) was a pretty niche area, and the commercial solutions we saw were all some combination of 1) expensive, 2) slow, 3) clunky, 4) too proprietary, or 5) not mobile-friendly.
So we set out to make our own... with a budget of $0 and a dev team of 1 inexperienced web dev (me). It was the first time I ever worked on a web map, and trying to hack indoor areas and multiple floors onto it was... a challenge! It's got a lot of problems (it's laggy on some phones, editing the geometry is a huge PITA, UI isn't great and has bugs, branding/marketing imposed many restrictions, etc.). Honestly, it's pretty jank code that I wish I could rewrite from scratch. We had a whole roadmap of planned improvements and cleanups, but our team was forced to moved on right after initial release.
But on the plus side:
1) It's free and open-source: https://github.com/arcataroger/openlayers_indoor_map (but it's abandoned and I wouldn't recommend using it unless you really have no other options; check https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Indoor_Mapping first for alternatives)
2) It uses vanilla JS/HTML/CSS. This is a decision I question in hindsight, as it made state and UI management unnecessarily difficult. But it seemed right at the time, given the need to minimize long-term maintenance (i.e. JS framework churn) because of the limited dev resources available in the museum and nonprofit worlds.
3) It's better than nothing :)
I wish I had the time and resources to rewrite this whole thing from scratch, having learned from this experience. I'd fix a ton of bugs, change up the UI, clarify the symbology, and maybe try to push some of the indoor-specific features as proper upstream PRs to OpenLayers & QGIS rather than just hacking them into this app as one-offs.
I think having a "proper" open-source frontend indoor mapping solution would be a great boon to many museums, art galleries, airports, malls, colleges, etc. Google Maps actually does a pretty good job at this for certain places like airports (e.g. SFO: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6164644,-122.3859568,17.78z), but their process for that is totally opaque, and it's never clear to me how an institution can ask for their space to be mapped like that (or submit their own?). Even when I worked at the museum, we could never figure out how to actually get their map of us corrected. It's still missing all the floors and many exhibitions are in the wrong places: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8661273,-87.6169018,20.06z
Maybe I'll pick this up again someday and try to work on it as a side project...