Most impactful code I've written

Recently, I was asked by a fresh grad, “What’s the most impactful code that you’ve written?” It’s a funny question, because there are many ways to evaluate the impact of “code”. Here’s my top 4:

1. Number of users (DAU): If absolute # of users is a measure, then it must be the code I wrote and deployed in Google Search. It was holdback code, which launch-guarded a feature that was being rolled out globally. I only wrote this code to give engineers some slack, and learn how to ship features on Search. In the week of the launch, my code path was accessed by over 2bn users who did NOT see my new feature.

2. Revenue: The code I wrote for my startup muHive was the most impactful in terms of revenue. It got us over 50 customers globally and helped our startup make our first SaaS dollars online.

3. Recognition: This has to be Big Kahuna, which helped us win Google’s Product Prodigy competition in 2009. It got us some seed money and established our team’s engineering chops in Bangalore. This eventually led to us getting funded and much more.

4. Personal: My favorite here has to be the first big solo project in college. I got my first computer in 2003, and immediately installed Linux on it . For the next 11 years, I used OSS for everything, including building our startup.

   Believe it or not, my first big project was to build a text editor in Unix using C and the NCurses library. I didn’t have internet, and there was no one to tell me this would be extra-hard. My text editor could do all file operations, including cut, copy, and paste, and shipped with a menubar and features like Search and Format.

I’m able to list these out is because I’ve been maintaining a list of all the projects I’ve worked on since 2003. It’s my way of archiving my life, and work, and a great way to reflect. I highly recommend every engineer to do the same.