Ask HN: What is your greatest success story?

In 1997, I had just started my consulting company (wasn't really a 'company'..it was just me). I was asked to provide technical project management help on a web site rewrite bmgmusicservice.com. Kind of a lame ecommerce site, written mostly in client side javascript (which now would be cool, but it was pretty hacked up then). Anyway, we worked with a company Boston (ATG), who had this new thing called a 'java application server' called 'Dynamo'. At that point, the category didn't even exist.. you had to pay for JDBC drivers from Weblogic (because that's what they made back then).. things like that. These guys from MIT invented this cool technology called a 'servlet', which was a completely different use of Java than most had seen before and incredibly useful for developing web applications. It was one of the coolest technologies I had ever used, written by some really brilliant guys that became very rich in the process. None of us really had any idea what we were doing, but we figured it out as we went along. We launched the site and it became the 6th most trafficked site on the Web within 6 months. It launched a category, an IPO, and has been the cornerstone of my career (still going over 15 years later).

ATG Dynamo, even now, is still one of the most brilliantly conceived, elegant pieces of software I've ever used.

Summer before I started college last year-

I spent a straight week hacking together a website that organizes Starcraft 2 streams. Gets 25-50 hits a day. Not revolutionary, but it was/is a big deal to me.

I wrote it in PHP, now I'm re-writing it in Rails.

I ran a website similar to TorrentButler, made a quick million from advertising revenue and affiliate revenue.

I've been trying to do it again for a few years, but it's not as easy to build an internet business when you stay clear of what I call "the easy 3" sex, drugs, and pirating. I've been driven to make it happen again, except in a legitimate industry. It would have been extremely hard to stay motivated all of these years without having tasted success early on.