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

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

#71

Post by k1ns »

Definitely my current endeavor, bastions [0]. It's the first side project that I've taken this far and I can't wait to see where I can take it from here. In a sentence, bastions allows website owners to easily and automatically test their website. Think testing out contact forms, sales forms, SSL certificates, functionality, etc, in just a few minutes time. It's been rewarding because I've done it all myself and have learned a lot along the way.

I say go for it when it comes to starting your own thing. It's hard, but it's rewarding.

[0] https://bastions.co

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

#72

Post by paulcole »

There’s a bike valet service at a hospital in Portland. About 300 people use it every day to get to work. I made the web app and a few other tools using Google Apps Scripts that make it easy for the valet attendants and customers to check their bikes in and out, send automated emails and text messages.

It’s fun to have made something that so many people actually use and that I hope makes the world a little bit better. Plus I’m a completely self-taught programmer (my day job is content strategy) and it was rewarding to work on a bigger project than the little scripts/games/etc. I usually make for myself.

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

#73

Post by bobochan »

reefoctopus wrote: post #29
thom wrote: post #21

Recovering from startups, I turned towards football (soccer) analytics for something fun to do with programming/machine learning skills. I eventually got hired to spend a Summer helping out with recruitment at a football club in Europe, and the first player we signed (from a basically unknown team) became a fan favourite, and then got his first national call-up, and he went on to win a major international trophy. Can…

Who was it? Also, where did you get the data? Was it free?

I do not know where thom got data, but I have used soccer data from Opta (optasports.com) and it was pretty amazing to use. They have made some data available at different times, and they seem very helpful to work with if you are doing research. I worked on a project with a small sample of data that caught the interest of an MLS club. They had purchased a license for a much bigger dataset from Opta, so it definitely seems like something that clubs budget for.

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

#74

Post by thom »

reefoctopus wrote: post #29
thom wrote: post #21

Recovering from startups, I turned towards football (soccer) analytics for something fun to do with programming/machine learning skills. I eventually got hired to spend a Summer helping out with recruitment at a football club in Europe, and the first player we signed (from a basically unknown team) became a fan favourite, and then got his first national call-up, and he went on to win a major international trophy. Can…

Who was it? Also, where did you get the data? Was it free?

Opta are the biggest player for event data (on-the-ball actions only). Their data is eye-wateringly expensive, but eminently scrapable if you know where to look. However, they did not cover the particular hipster leagues that lay in our budget range, and other providers exist (InStat, for example).

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

#75

Post by blueatlas »

First job. Writing 6502 assembler for a GTE integrated voice/data PBX system. We cross compiled on some IBM mainframe across the country, burned the ROMs by hand, debugged with in-circuit emulators and a forgotten real-time backtrace device from, I think, Tektronics.

The lessons learned still apply today - machine level thinking, memory management, writing efficient code, etc. And it was the only time I actually had a mentor - actually, a bunch of them. Oh, and the best manager I've ever had. Smart people that were willing to give of their time. They understood that if you were going to build a product, you also have to build the people.

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

#76

Post by baud147258 »

A few project comes to mind:

First in my internship in an investment company. I was working on a tool used by the traders, I had to work on the support and monitoring system, which was used by the technical support of the application. Since this system was low-priority, so I was the only one working on it while I was there. The few feature I developped, like reporting which user were connected, states of the servers and less lags in the reporting, were well-received and helped those who did the technical support.

In another company I also worked on a system to generate reports from Jira. The work I've done lowered the time necessary to generate a report (from 2h to 10 min) and added some information to the report.

Last it was for daily email notification, which were sent by hand, from an excel list, which contained dates & email adress which had to receive the mail that day. I wrote a small java program which opened the file, found the email adresses for that day, connected to the email server and sent the emails. Cut a daily task of a friend from 10 min to 30s.

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

#77

Post by dkhenry »

Two years ago I joined the USDS and started working with the VA. One of my projects was to help fix the system Veterans use to schedule online appointments. The problems were many and ranged from poor technical solutions up to senior managers not wanting to green light a small release without a few months of meetings. Over two months of some of the most intense work I have ever done ( most of it non technical ) we released seven times and drove traffic on the system from 100 interactions a month to 15,000 a month. The system is still pretty bad, but people can use it, which means Veterans can schedule a mental health appointment on their phone. That may have just been the thing to save their life.

Now every time I am having a hard day I pull up the Google Analytics of that system and look how many people have scheduled an appointment today. I might not have fixed everything, but just knowing we made something better has been the most rewarding thing I have ever done

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

#78

Post by maxxxxx »

I worked for 2 years in a project in the 90s where we wanted to adapt the Apple Newton for a particular market. We were closely connected to the devs at Apole and it was a lot of fun to see how a technology develops and to shape something out of a wide open space. I probably learned more during that time than in my other 20 years of work.

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

#79

Post by deaps »

My worthwhile project was when I really stepped outside of my comfort zone to lead a complete redesign / overhaul of a datacenter over the course of 9 months.

I had the knowledge, and the desire, but probably lacked confidence in my ability to be the lead design engineer for such a large project. I had always worked in a NOC/operations role where I excelled at any task that was put in front of me, but I had a lot of questions, always.

Fast forward a few years - I took a leap and went for it. I got hired on for a 9 month contract to replace racks and racks of networking equipment, an entire replacement of everything layer3 and layer2 in this datacenter, complete with remote monitoring/management facilities.

I went full bore - I didn't sleep much. I ran the systems I was working on at home in my lab, virtually, and basically taught myself Juniper and Arista from the ground up - having only worked on Cisco devices previously.

Long story short, the conversion was finished ahead of schedule...but the contract had me there for a while longer, so I got tasked with a bunch of crazy 'stuff' - things that I've never touched. Load balancers, traffic shapers, linux servers (that actually did 'stuff') - just a ton of stuff to learn, understand, plan, and implement. Around this time is when I also got my introduction to the Python language (but that's more of a way to make things simpler to me, rather than what actually pays the bills).

It was through those 9 months, that I became so confident in myself and my abilities. I no longer doubted myself. I no longer thought that my questions were stupid. Because of that, I flourished. I've been in a senior network engineering role ever since...and finally feel like myself. It's great. Literally changed my outlook on life.

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