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

I started teaching myself programming when I was a systems admin. I worked at a "Just in Time" part sequencing company that sequenced and delivered parts to the Jeep plant. Our contract with Jeep stipulated that we would be charged $10,000 per minute if we were responsible for shutting down the line. We had a custom application that printed labels from Zebra printers (about 50 of them) that were then scanned by handheld scanners and told the warehouse workers which part to pick next.

The dependencies for this was our phone lines, which were used to receive the "broadcast" from Jeep, our corporate WAN/LAN, a local Oracle database and a few other local servers. Our custom application had various processes built-in for emergency situations like losing connectivity, the database failing etc... Over the years, we had a few outages where the database was corrupted or our phone lines were down and it was a mess but we survived.

I wanted to learn programming and decided to write a Perl script that we could use to print labels and manually sequence parts with nothing but the "broadcast" file from Jeep. No WAN, LAN, phone lines, database or custom application required. Basically replacing a multi-million dollar system with a Perl script in case of a catastrophic failure that would likely never occur. This was not in my job description and definitely wasn't supported by corporate.

So, one day while we were in the middle of a problem with the database, unbeknownst to us, the local utility company was doing some work outside of our offices and severed our data lines with a backhoe. No WAN. No LAN because all traffic was routed through remote corporate servers. No "broadcast" from Jeep. And the Oracle database was still down.

We ran production for 17 hours using the first program I ever wrote, a floppy disk hand-delivered from Jeep containing the broadcast data, a Dell laptop and a single Zebra printer. This theoretically saved my company $10.2 million.

"So now I just tell people to read the book and take the test from a management perspective and people look at me like I am crazy, because the test is so hard."

Can you elaborate more on that? I'm interested.

Started an open source project Miranda IM. Even though I didn't work on it long, it's cool to see the project is still active 18 years later. I continued to use it for a long time, but I no longer use any instant messaging which is kind of sad in itself.

Working for my wife in her startup.

I made a port of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup to Android on a whim, mostly because I just wanted to play it on my phone.

I didn't really know how to do it at first, but I'd seen similar games had been ported to Android (Nethack, Angband) so I figured it was theoretically possible.

There was a lot of trial and error, and I learned a lot about the NDK in the process. Lots of interesting technical challenges. I remember the first time I successfully ran the binary - I'd replaced all the output calls with just logging calls to check that the compiled binary was running properly, so I could see the logs spelling out the title screen of the game. It was a real "It's alive!!" moment.

There were lots of other challenges involved in getting the display up and running efficiently, but once I had a decent application running I felt so accomplished. I felt like I could make just about anything, solve any problem, with software.

The app has about 6000 active users at the moment, and has been downloaded over 100 000 times. It's all open-source, of course. I update it every now and then to keep it up to date with the releases. I get the odd email thanking me for the port, requesting features, or even offering me money to thank me. I've accepted a couple of PRs as well.

It's not hugely popular and it's just a little game, but it's a little reminder of what I can accomplish if I put my mind to it.

https://github.com/michaelbarlow7/dungeon-crawl-android