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

I think making sure that the broadest/most diverse range of people have the digital skills they're going to need to create the best future for us all is really essential, too, and micro:bit is really starting to contribute to that.

Additionally, since we launched the foundation, being able to focus on the needs of our audience and building a sustainable organisation rather than something that looks glitzy and investible (we're a UK-based not-for-profit) also contributes a huge amount to the sense of fulfilment.

(We're going to be hiring a number of people over the next few months, so if you like the sound of that - https://micro-bit-educational-foundation.workable.com/ )

In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t have many users, but it’s always nice to hear from someone when it makes their day a bit easier.

The first was at a fastener wholesaler. There was a sales report that would be built once a month by a sales person. It pulled data from a backend ERP system, combined it with some other data sources, and generated some trend graphs and summaries. The whole process took about five days of manual labor. It used to be done once a month, by a sales person. I've built a set of tools to do this which would take an operator about 10 minutes to run. It ended up being run daily, weekly, and quarterly. Everyone was aligned and on the same page!

The second was at a financial firm back office. One of the side responsibilities was generating reports for clients. These contained mundane things like trades summaries of various kinds. They were delivered in CSV or plain text format via FTP or email. It used to take a couple hours of work to build a new one, and output options were limited. I've built a reporting framework that added a bunch of output options, including beautifully formatted Excel files, and cut the config time down to about 10 minutes. By the time I left, we had over a thousand such reports being run daily.

Both projects opened up my eyes to how much value good software can bring to an organization, and how much impact a single developer can have.

I recently decided to package up some of that experience into a package and offer it for sale. I run https://goodgrids.com, which allows companies to automatically convert CSV files to nicely formatted Excel files. This project is fairly new, but it is very personally rewarding.

Try to go some meetups not developer related and hear the people’s problems at hand.

Then you can chime in with your developer perspective, which other people do not have.

And from this, both sides can mutually share their experiences and benefit from each other. And maybe this is where your future might be.