Good times: What was your most fun programming gig and why?

Question

In the umpteen years I've been in IT I come to the conclusion that most of the time management did not add a lot of value to my job as a programmer. I even dare to say that most of them lacked vision, enthousiasm and a sense of direction. All but one.

One manager I worked for had a vision and knew how to motivate a team. We bypassed all protocol and secretly developed a system which he thought was lacking in our company. We took a chance (and we could have all lost our jobs) but in the end it worked out nicely for all of us. The tool we created (in a couple of months time) was well received and we got years of funding to improve the system. Nobody even mentioned the fact that we wasted a lot of company resources and took a big risk.

That would be the most exiting programming gig for me. What's yours?

Answer 1

Created an MRP system for International Space Station. The gentleman in charge was one of the first creators of a working space suit. Talk about having a direct line to historical information about the US Space Program. It was a fantastic project and this gentleman was easily the best stakeholder / manager I have ever had the pleasure to work with.

Answer 2

It only ended six months ago, but I was on a project where I was the only programmer for a brand new multi-user system. I believe it was quite a formative and enjoyable experience to make all of the big decisions, and all of the small ones, and to be there from cradle to grave.

Answer 3

Designing and implementing a new language in flex++ and bison that was used to verify a network processor that never shipped.

Answer 4

Creating award winning combat flight simulators for PC's back in the 90's. Small team, dedicated staff, visionary leader, great market, massive success. Alas, it did not last...

Answer 5

What I do now is probably the best gig I've ever had. It's completely research oriented and I have complete freedom over the design and implementation of the problem. Some of software has been quite large. The research is also not economically driven, so there is no rush to market.

Answer 6

My current gig is wonderful. Some highlights:

• agile team in a public war room where unit testing is expected
• no divas and an atmosphere where people are comfortable asking questions
• strong, relevant technology choices and a spirit of meritocracy
• the app is very good, and inspiring in terms of morality (medical device)
• the surrounding staff is excellent and passionate. I once saw a domain expert 'high-five' someone because he was so excited to see the realization of a new feature (it was a simple drop-down list)

In short: a team with intellectual honesty and passion; and a feeling that I can contribute. That's all anyone can really ask for, IMHO.

Answer 7

Many years ago... starting my own medical device company with a single partner. I did the technology (design and programming) and he did just about all of the business side. The best time was when we had no employees and no customers. That only lasted a few months, but I still remember it as being nirvana. It was all downhill (employees and customers) from there...

Answer 8

writing my first object-oriented programming language was exciting, because we were on the cutting edge, we got to do things our way, the technology was well-received, and I got a free trip to amsterdam to talk about it at a conference... then a much larger company bought it and buried it, which wasn't so much fun.

Answer 9

Creating the third most visited website in 1999 - toysrus.com. Back then, we used ColdFusion and had to develop our tool ecosystem from scratch.

Answer 10

Our first computer was Commodore 64. It was to be unveiled to the family at Christmas but there was zilch software. For the month of December, my office was filled with strange noises over the lunch hour as I wrote a program that would play music entered as BASIC data statements. On Xmas day, it played "I Love Trash", and a number of other things.

Answer 11

Converting the technical portion of a business from Hong Kong to our U.S. processing facility.

This was my first multi-national project and introduced a whole new way of communicating.

The biggest 'Wow!' moment was when we discovered that Foo in our shop did NOT mean Foo to them. We spent over a year designing the system before either company realized there were significant differences in key areas. They spoke English but had different meanings than us for some common business terms.

This was not apparent initially because the specs said something like (Foo + Bar = Answer), but our Foo was not their Foo. Nor was Bar. It surfaced during the first testing phase and our results didn't match up to what they expected.

They were owned and supervised by the British (at the time). I was working side by side with people from Hong Kong, India, Britain, U.S. and a few others during this time and it was a really great eye opener to the 'world' of programming.

A LOT of stress, but a LOT of fun!

Answer 12

Writing an LMS at a time when e-learning standards will only just solidifying - real feel of energy, the possibility of genuinely cutting new turf, being sent to conferences and being in the world of academia again, and having a manager who for one reason or another gave me the freedom to design a system from the ground up with the tools of my choice.

All fell apart when the lead on the project turned into the de facto PM and the other coder on the project turned into an insane prima donna. One good year though.

C'est la vie.

Oh and while I think of it: the 6 months I got to spend on a good contract in Vancouver. Best city on earth. sigh...

Answer 13

Did the authentication for a large music festival using barcodes and scanners. I was onsite too so I even fixed a bug we found while sitting in a field with my laptop.

I was a real shoe-string job, the specs were vague and non-existent and the time-scale was very short. If I had my "professional" hat on, I would have turned down the work but it sounded really cool and I don't get to do a lot of real-time data processing stuff.

About 5 days before the event I was terrified because the performance wasn't good enough so I denormalised the data made a few design changes and managed to get up the system to the capacity of 20,000 per hour (which was 1/3 of the expected attendance and a 1000% + performance improvement).

Very scary to see about 6,000+ people lined up at the main gates at the start of the day and not being 100% sure everything was going to work perfectly with the main head of the event standing next to me. We had some scares with access points going down but after about 10 minutes everything was fine and continued to work throughout the whole festival.

That was a really cool experience, I didn't get to see any of the bands play though!