Ask HN: What are some “trivial” achievements you feel satisfied about?
19 comments
My son is a ventilator patient as of recently, and his ventilator has a usb port on the back that can be used to export the data. According to the manufacturer, the exported files can only be viewed using their proprietary software, which they only distribute to trained medical professionals.
Long story short, with a little digging I found the spec for the file format and was able to write my own parser.
Long story short, with a little digging I found the spec for the file format and was able to write my own parser.
Wishing you and your son the best, and FWIW I wouldn't consider this a trivial achievement.
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What type of file was the export? Did it include one or multiple tables of data? What tools did you use to analyze it? Just asking out of random curiosity.
Almost 20 years ago, I used the book 'Teach yourself PHP and MySQL in 24 hours' learn PHP so I could build a web application for a VoIP telephony service. I built the whole v1 in that 24 hours, and then went to sleep. I had never used PHP or MySQL before.
I'm about to finish the second year of my Masters degree in Robotics Engineering, ending on a particularly difficult mathematics heavy course (which was my biggest fear and weakness going into the Master's program).
I had graduated in 2009 with a robotics engineering degree and found not a soul hiring due to the economic collapse. After years of building a software engineering career (which was hard in it's own right) I can't find anyone who will take me on for a robotics oriented software position; most require tons of experience I wasn't granted the option to earn and/or advanced degrees.
...So I bit the bullet two years ago and started my Master's at night after work. It's exhausting but I'm inching closer to an advanced degree and, hopefully, a job working on software directly controlling robots in some way.
Decade+ career switches are hard
I had graduated in 2009 with a robotics engineering degree and found not a soul hiring due to the economic collapse. After years of building a software engineering career (which was hard in it's own right) I can't find anyone who will take me on for a robotics oriented software position; most require tons of experience I wasn't granted the option to earn and/or advanced degrees.
...So I bit the bullet two years ago and started my Master's at night after work. It's exhausting but I'm inching closer to an advanced degree and, hopefully, a job working on software directly controlling robots in some way.
Decade+ career switches are hard
> Decade+ career switches are hard
Oh god I’ve been on the verge of one for a couple years now but my stomach just turns when I think about what I’ll have missed out on by the time I make it out the other side. It’s not just money, I can replace money but I can’t replace time.
Oh god I’ve been on the verge of one for a couple years now but my stomach just turns when I think about what I’ll have missed out on by the time I make it out the other side. It’s not just money, I can replace money but I can’t replace time.
I was back and forth for years with that line of thinking until I realized that I had been worrying about the "it'll take years" problem longer than it would have to just go get the degree.
So I finally bit the bullet. If nothing else I get to work on cool stuff and prove to myself I could do it. Hopefully there will be some gainful employment on the other side.
Feel free to hit me up if you ever want to discuss.
So I finally bit the bullet. If nothing else I get to work on cool stuff and prove to myself I could do it. Hopefully there will be some gainful employment on the other side.
Feel free to hit me up if you ever want to discuss.
This completely pointless device: http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard
That's not trivial. It's pure graybeard wizardry. Fantastic writeup!
Figuring out that one of the services i was maintaining needed http connection pooling for calls to an external service to get within acceptable levels of performance. Spent a fair bit of time and effort to reach the conclusion and should have probably known to use it from the start, with it being a best practice followed in some other services already. Still, the whole process of finding/fixing the bottleneck left me very pleased.
One fine day this last summer, I was standing outside a store finishing my smoke, when a voice behind me said, "Beautiful day". I turned to see the person sitting at a table and said "it sure is".
About a minute later, with no trace of irony, they said "But then every day I wake up is a beautiful day." I'm happy to remember that simple share.
About a minute later, with no trace of irony, they said "But then every day I wake up is a beautiful day." I'm happy to remember that simple share.
I made my writing app dark mode by default and so many reviews praised the dark background as easier on the eye. even though all the writing apps out there have customizable colors, the small gesture of making dark the default helped a lot of people
When they released the COVID vaccine for under-5s, my wife got my son the first appointment she could find, which was 2.5 months away and after preschool started.
I looked at the appointment site the hospital used, and saw that the way it populated its appointment calendar was to load an endpoint that accepted a date range and just returned a JSON array of appointments. I built a quick bash script and pointed it at Pushover, and a day or two later my phone notified me that there was an appointment available for the very next day.
He ended up getting COVID shortly after starting school and it was ultra-mild, so I'm doubly grateful that a little script might have saved him some suffering as well as freeing us to go out in the world earlier.
I looked at the appointment site the hospital used, and saw that the way it populated its appointment calendar was to load an endpoint that accepted a date range and just returned a JSON array of appointments. I built a quick bash script and pointed it at Pushover, and a day or two later my phone notified me that there was an appointment available for the very next day.
He ended up getting COVID shortly after starting school and it was ultra-mild, so I'm doubly grateful that a little script might have saved him some suffering as well as freeing us to go out in the world earlier.
I built pure CSS tooltips to show currency conversions on a blog. I was one of those problems that wasn't terribly complex, but the solution called for a nice mix of skills that I was proud to have.
None of it was groundbreaking, but the ease with which I built it gave me a rare feeling of mastery.
I wrote about my approach because of it: https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/currency-tooltips
None of it was groundbreaking, but the ease with which I built it gave me a rare feeling of mastery.
I wrote about my approach because of it: https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/currency-tooltips
This one time, I doubled the speed of our bulk mailing app by reading the template in, setting as a variable, and using that instead of reading the template inside the loop each time. Biggest bang for buck change ever :)
Maintaining my goal weight long enough to consider tattoo designs.
I wouldn’t say that’s trivial by any means. Well done mate and keep at it.
Learning some Haskell and Elm. making a few small programs from them
I named the message broker microservice of a big application "Lepus" (rabbit in Latin, because we were using rabbitMQ). Seems trivial but this happened years ago and I'm still happy about it.
What are yours?