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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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What software projects made you "wow" 🤯

Be it a historical project, a brilliantly built npm package, an application, etc. What has struck you as an incredible feat of software development?

It doesn't have to be massive in scope, it could just be one awesomely thought out class, but if you've ever been incredibly impressed, let's hear about it.

Latest comments (91)

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saikumar profile image
Sai Kumar

Svelte.js .. I think its gonna change the landscape of web development.

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adegbengaagoro profile image
Agoro, Adegbenga. B

I will go with AdonisJS. This NodeJS framework basically facilitated my transition from PHP to JavaScript & Node development

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triptych profile image
Andrew Wooldridge

I would have to say the new Blender 2.8 ( blender.org/download/releases/2-80/ ). I've always felt that Blender was super amazing, but was hampered by an obscure user interface. They've done a lot to fix that in the latest release, and it's simply a brilliant piece of software. It's like having a spellbook from a powerful mage, and in the right hands, it can do magic.

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jamesmh profile image
James Hickey

Laravel 💯

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lewiscowles1986 profile image
Lewis Cowles

Games

  • 90's point & click engines
  • Dark Reign & Dark Reign 2
  • World of Warcraft
  • Spore
  • No mans sky
  • Fallout 3, NV, 4

OS's

  • Windows 98
  • BeOS
  • Minix
  • Linux
  • BSD

IDE's

  • Visual Basic 5 & 6
  • Visual Studio
  • SharpDevelop
  • Netbeans
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Macromedia Flash 4-8

Text Editors

  • GEdit
  • Hesky Data Software Pad
  • Helios Software Solutions - TextPad

Debuggers

  • Visual Studio
  • PDB (with pdbpp)

Project management & Productivity

  • Trello
  • WeKan

Creative & Design

  • PlantUML
  • Graphviz
  • flowmapp
  • Sony DVD & VCD creator (90's / 00's software)
  • Adobe InDesign & Macromedia / Adobe Fireworks

Any emulator that exists and works
WINE (because it's not an emulator)
linux/unix mount

Repeatability / IaC

  • Docker (specifically with compose)
  • VirtualBox
  • Ansible
  • Vagrant

Misc

  • The old tabbed CD browsers
  • Microsoft 1990's interactive CD-ROM's like Dangerous Creatures
  • SSH
  • Open source cryptography (OpenSSH, FreeTLS etc)
  • CURL (many other haxx.se projects)
  • postman

Programming

  • PHP
  • Python
  • Golang
  • C & C++ standards communities
  • Rust

Databases

  • MySQL, Sqlite, postgres
  • Redis
  • MongoDB
  • Neo4J
  • Elasticsearch

Web Servers

  • Nginx (from apache & IIS, it kicks ass)

Content Generation

  • Jekyll
  • WordPress
  • Various automatic documentation generators

Media

  • YouTube
  • Netflix
  • VLC
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doug profile image
Doug

Lucene - it brought Google quality querying to the masses. I worked with an early C# port and it made my terrible website with an access database backend feel incredibly smart!

As amazing as it is, it was the excellent blog post and code from Tom White for his "Did you mean" that really blew me away (now only available via Wayback Machine, thanks for nothing, Oracle!).

I remember I adapted his spell index to use our own content rather than a dictionary to avoid suggesting words to users that weren't in our index, only to find spelling mistakes being suggested thanks to less diligent authors!

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erikthered profile image
Erik Nelson • Edited

It has to be Docker for me. Vagrant was decently impressive when it first came out, but Docker and Docker Compose really crushed it with being able to spin up a whole stack with just a few lines of yml (and the similarly succinct Dockerfile).

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mateus_vahl profile image
Mateus Vahl
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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

❤️

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brieucp profile image
brieucp

First love : Firefox.
First mariage : Open street map !
First mistress : rust
Second mistress : docker.

And for the js part, anything by @webreflexion, especially heresy and heresy-ssr !

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abraham profile image
Abraham Williams

Chrome and Firefox. The web is so ridiculously complex I'm amazed anything works.