Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

I have to say, my current (and first, fwiw) job is quite rewarding. I work for a company that does telemetrics and analytics in a sector of the automotive industry. We're pretty small, and we do a lot, but it means I never get bored.

I started as an iOS dev 7 years ago, and on the job I've gotten back-end Java experience, learned everything I know about SQL, and gotten my hands dirty in firmware development, and learned a ton about EE in general. We design all our hardware in house, and between the 3D printers we use for building cases and housings, and my boss being an EE, we've done the cycle of:

Customer idea -> Prototype Board -> Firmware Development -> Customer Testing in the field

in under 3 weeks. It obviously comes with the occasional stress, but honestly when the alternative in my area is writing Insurance or Healthcare software, I'll take this any day. We're a mature company that has startup tendencies and a startup size. I'm not afraid to make mistakes, I'm not afraid to suggest new idea/technologies, and we're constantly evolving. We rarely say no (within reason), and we'll always give an idea a shot.

Maybe you need to find situation like mine? I know others exist, just dig into a niche, especially ones that are in an industry where others aren't using technology to the fullest potential.

BA/Project Manager to a startup in the EDU market. I had the chance to work in a very heterogeneous team composed of psychologists, lawyers and software engineers.

The set of products were quite visionary and "ahead of their time". I came to see equivalent products years later when I moved to a global company, so that gave me a special feeling that, back then, I was working on something really futuristic, and that is in some way rewarding.

I worked from home, and it was just when my first kid was borne. Work-life balance was great, and I have no doubt it helped me stay motivated and productive.

So far mine has been to bootstrap my own company. It has been my goal for a while now and I tried different projects while doing freelancing work on the side. The project that finally stuck is a digital signage service (https://info-beamer.com) now. For a long time I didn't even know I was doing digital signage: I just wrote the software to show info on a projector for a local hacker conference since I didn't find anything that satisfied my requirements.

Later I ported it to the Raspberry Pi and added a price tag. Surprisingly people started purchasing the software and I slowly build a complete hosted service around it. Today it's a real company and profitable. Why is it rewarding: It's fully boot-strapped and as such there there's no need to rush new feature in the hope of finding a working business model eventually. Instead I can focus on quality and that alone is fun already. The other aspect is that it requires a vast range of different technologies properly working together: From the custom built Linux distribution for the Pi, the visual software that controls the output (written in C/Lua) up to the Website/Service/Cloud stuff. And of course building custom solutions based on the platform together with customers and see those running in production. I'll never get bored as a result and always learn something new.

I made a frontend for nntp. Even if usenet is long dead.

I was following a group (it.comp.console) at the time using thunderbird but I didn't like google groups so I wrote my own nntp web frontent to follow the group on my smartphone. I contacted some usenet server admins and asked them if I could peer with them (one here on hn), so I set up an nntp server (inn2) and wrote a node/express/js app to read and post to the group.

I make zero money from it, but people liked it and started using it, and now i have about 100 users on the website. I made it mainly for myself as a hobby, but I like that some people like what I made.

https://fcku.it/comp.misc

I work at a university and most of the time I am either doing research or teaching, but once in a while I get a call from a medical school or hospital asking if I can volunteer programming time for a project. I wrote some very simple code about 15 years ago to generate some charts so that care teams at hospitals across the country can see how they are doing compared to teams at other centers.

The charts had a very steep slope the first time that I ran them with a large gap between the best and worst centers. The top centers keep improving every year, but there has been a huge improvement at the other end of the graph and the slope is almost a flat line at this point.

Obviously the care teams deserve 100% of the credit for the hard work to improve the medical care they are providing, but I can't help but smile every time I see one of those charts online or in a report.