What was the funnest programming challenge you were ever tasked with?

Question

The funnest thing I ever got paid to do was a compete in a competition. I the "Unix Guy" was tasked with using C# and .NET to build a client/server database application. Our resident "Windows Guy" was given the same specification and tasked with building the same application on Linux with Trolltech QT toolkit. I had NO .NET experience and he had zero Linux experience... I had the app done in 2 days. At two weeks, the boss called the competition done even though my competition wasn't complete yet. This was all done so my boss could prove to the higher ups that .NET was the way to go.

What fun programming tasks have you been paid to complete?

Answer 1

Well, my current job is getting the production, sales and what not data for a toy company in order. I get to play with toys both physically and digitally. :) You should see my desk. ;)

Answer 2

A charity website, where fairies were sent to other people. I wrote

select ID from fairies

which I've never written before!

Answer 3

Your attitude sucks. Coding is a serious business.

If you're having fun, you're doing it wrong. :-p

Ok, so one time I had to make a decision support screen for a particular high up manager. He wanted some very specific UI touches on his screen.

By the time I was finished, it had multicolored buttons, sliders, combos, pictureboxes, a media control (!), and should have required the user to wear a welder's mask.

He was delighted. :-D

Answer 4

I had to write some PalmOS code for beaming things between devices.

I got to go out and buy (at the company's expense) about 5 different Palm Pilots with different specs to play with.

Answer 5

Testing a GPS locator and tracking software for a company - it involved cycling from sweden to norway over a week :)

Answer 6

When working on a car site, we had to get all convertibles available for sale:

GetToplessModel();

If only that worked in real life ;)

Answer 7

I took a semester-long class that was involved with doing the CONLL Shared Task for Dependency Parsing and Argument Selection. Those were basically two mutually informing tasks that really kind of leaned on one another. It was basically a really good excuse to work on code in a team, read a lot of intense papers on the subject, and get the same kind of gentle pushing from a professor you'd expect from a boss.

Answer 8

I did a charity website for a support organization. Where you could buy certificates of donations they would give to a 3rd world country.

It was mostly people buying small gifts like school supplies for a few bucks up to a house for a thousand dollars.

The interface was a textfield with the certificate in the background and then a PHP GD library tool would create a sample image of what you would write. People usually wrote like on a gift card, standard text. Then after the payment process you would be emailed a printable PDF version of the certificate.

I even showed this to a friend of mine and he bought a box of condoms for the 3rd world and gave his brother for christmas with the text "At least they are having sex!"

Answer 9

A function to exchange child nodes of a tree:

Childsexchange()

Answer 10

Generic programming to create an [almost] unbeatable noughts and crosses game.

(that's tic tac toe to the yanks)

Answer 11

I was assigned to create a serial device driver on a pc that mimicked the behavior of an existing driver running on a Z-80 based computer, for which we had no source code.

I hacked together a serial monitor so I could see how the device was being driven by the existing machine. The, analyzing the way the existing driver converted data I was able to build my own driver.

Answer 12

Well, there was the time when a friend asked me to help her design a website where she could sell naked pictures of herself.

Answer 13

This is cheating a bit since I gave the assignment to myself, but it was from a user request. I run a website for community theater in NJ (www.njtheater.com). On the forums, people were often discussing who'd they worked with on shows, so I decided to add a "six degrees of separation" feature to the site.

Some of the wickedest SQL coding I'd ever done. (starting with one person, creating a list of all the shows they'd been in, then creating a list of all the people who's been in those shows with them, then repeating for all those people, removing duplicates, and keeping track of distance and path)

Answer 14

Not exactly funny ha-ha this one.

I once worked for a large, well known, financial company in the general support team. This was back in the days of non-relational databases so scanning data wasn't as easy as it is now. One morning I got an urgent request to scan and modify one of the customer databases as at least one clerk had not been taught to use the 'deceased' flag on the system and had recently been writing (dead) after the clients names - i.e Joe Doe (dead). With the customer database numbering in the hundreds of thousands this was a fair few people.

And we were just receiving some rather irate responses to our last mailshot.

Answer 15

I crunched code an application over 2 days...it let users to leave comments depending on their GPS location. I called it GeoComment. Later, I found out that a group of Berkeley students made the same app with same name. Sigh :( It was fun seeing my friend leaving comments and seeing where they are/were during the day.

I took a map of our campus and made a similar app. However, this time, users were allowed to leave comments on any part of the map. Unless other users choose the comment as "top comment", the comment got deleted after 30 min. It was fun seeing people comment about a lot of stuffs that were happening on the campus.

Answer 16

The funniest thing I was paid to code was actually not something they asked me to do, but I still did it - and on paid time - so I guess it still counts. I was writing software for a vending machine system and during testing of various sensors I figured I could make a timing system for our miniature radio controlled cars. It had red, yellow and green LED lights for starting us off, lap counting, split times, cheat detection (!) and a high-score list. Racing around with tiny cars on your desk has never been more fun.

The rumor was that this software made it to the official builds and if you knew how to enable it you could use your vending machine for miniature RC racing. I never denied this even if it only existed in debug builds :)