1. Google Search - before Google came out, it was wading through Alta-vista and Yahoo's hand picked pages and ignoring the 50% adult content spam, or using a physical 'phone book' of web pages
2. Google Email - when it game out, the fact that it had gigabytes of storage was astounding
3. Wikipedia - this became one of the first resources for most queries that weren't highly specialized and, even, then, sometimes Wikipedia would come through
4. Stack Overflow - hours or days of debugging are reduced to a search with an occasional copy/paste
5. Arduino - suddenly electronics became within reach and was reduced, for the most part, to software, all for a fraction of the cost microcontrollers and electronics were just a decade previously
6. Amazon, Aliexpress, Ebay - to a certain extent. Each provided a trove of sellers with access to items that were previously very difficult and expensive to find, sometimes with a 10x difference in price or accessibility. They've all kind of normalized out now but there was a time when they were more differentiated.
7. Raspberry Pi - A full linux box with a Ghz processor for $20-$50. There was a time when we were talking about the $100 laptop as the great white whale
8. Archive.org - one of the few resources that has an astounding amount of public domain work that can be searched, sorted and downloaded
9. Github - the amount of free/libre/open source software that can be accessed and used is at least an order of magnitude larger than it's closest competitor (Gitlab? Sourceforge?). It's not just investing in Git's source management model, it's also providing a clean interface to search code and present projects cleanly
Maybe these are all obvious but you did ask...
Here are some software projects that I think give me a "10x" boost or I think have large potential:
* Bootstrap - Before bootstrap, I could barely cobble a website together that didn't look like it came out of the 90s
* Clipperlib - When you need to do 2d polygon boolean operations, in a programmatic way, Angus Johnson's clipperlib is it
* WebAudio - I'm still playing with this but this provides an entry point to music creation that was orders of magnitude more painful before. Currently I'm playing with Gibber (gibber.cc)
* Face Recognition - This is now a Python package that you can use to find faces in images. This used to be bleeding edge technology just a decade ago
* Mozilla's DeepSpeech - though it still has it's problems, for someone who has a mind to, they could theoretically make (an offline and FOSS) competitor to Google's Dot and Amazon's Alexa
Unix/Linux in general provides many orders of magnitude more productivity than any other environment I've worked in (at least for me) so I'm not sure it's worth going into all the tools, "classic" and recent, that help me build software, analyze data, do data wrangling or any of the other myriad of tasks that I do.
Good call on Arduino. The ability to write LED blinky embedded software on a microcontroller using a simple IDE and a USB cable was definitely 10x from what came before. The barriers to entry in terms of knowledge, tools (compilers), and dev boards was immense before Arduino.
came to say Arduino; I cut my teeth on Basic Stamps in school but today they still cost over $150 just to get all the hardware you need to started. And forget about leaving just the brains in a home monitoring gadget or clock project, they cost over $50 each!
Arduino MCUs can literally be removed from the developer board and function stand-alone with a few cents of external hardware, and the chip itself can be replaced with a blank for a few dollars.
You mean getting a oscillator, caps, breadboard, MCU, avr-gcc, and a JTAG interface was too much work to get a LED to blink? :)
Arduino changed the game, wish I had it in college. Honorable mention to Microchip's PIC line - they had a arduino like kit that made a lot of those things easier too.
1. Google Search - before Google came out, it was wading through Alta-vista and Yahoo's hand picked pages and ignoring the 50% adult content spam, or using a physical 'phone book' of web pages
2. Google Email - when it game out, the fact that it had gigabytes of storage was astounding
3. Wikipedia - this became one of the first resources for most queries that weren't highly specialized and, even, then, sometimes Wikipedia would come through
4. Stack Overflow - hours or days of debugging are reduced to a search with an occasional copy/paste
5. Arduino - suddenly electronics became within reach and was reduced, for the most part, to software, all for a fraction of the cost microcontrollers and electronics were just a decade previously
6. Amazon, Aliexpress, Ebay - to a certain extent. Each provided a trove of sellers with access to items that were previously very difficult and expensive to find, sometimes with a 10x difference in price or accessibility. They've all kind of normalized out now but there was a time when they were more differentiated.
7. Raspberry Pi - A full linux box with a Ghz processor for $20-$50. There was a time when we were talking about the $100 laptop as the great white whale
8. Archive.org - one of the few resources that has an astounding amount of public domain work that can be searched, sorted and downloaded
9. Github - the amount of free/libre/open source software that can be accessed and used is at least an order of magnitude larger than it's closest competitor (Gitlab? Sourceforge?). It's not just investing in Git's source management model, it's also providing a clean interface to search code and present projects cleanly
Maybe these are all obvious but you did ask...
Here are some software projects that I think give me a "10x" boost or I think have large potential:
* Bootstrap - Before bootstrap, I could barely cobble a website together that didn't look like it came out of the 90s
* Clipperlib - When you need to do 2d polygon boolean operations, in a programmatic way, Angus Johnson's clipperlib is it
* WebAudio - I'm still playing with this but this provides an entry point to music creation that was orders of magnitude more painful before. Currently I'm playing with Gibber (gibber.cc)
* Face Recognition - This is now a Python package that you can use to find faces in images. This used to be bleeding edge technology just a decade ago
* Mozilla's DeepSpeech - though it still has it's problems, for someone who has a mind to, they could theoretically make (an offline and FOSS) competitor to Google's Dot and Amazon's Alexa
Unix/Linux in general provides many orders of magnitude more productivity than any other environment I've worked in (at least for me) so I'm not sure it's worth going into all the tools, "classic" and recent, that help me build software, analyze data, do data wrangling or any of the other myriad of tasks that I do.
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