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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?

#81

Post by drelihan »

Building the career fair website for my college while in school. There was a lot to be desired, but thousands of students had accounts and uploaded resumes, hundreds of companies registered and paid over $500k per year through the site for registration fees/sponsorships/etc. I was given a single physical server that was locked in a closet somewhere on campus. It was ~2001, so I had to build pretty much everything from scratch on the LAMP stack ( and keep it running ).

I have since built systems orders of magnitude more complex, but you always keep a special place in your first.

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

#82

Post by FelipeCortez »

Like many many others, I imagine, my main motivation for getting into CS was game development. Now I'm near the end of the degree and I realized I haven't programmed any games, so I challenged myself to recreate Guitar Hero in C++ using OpenGL and small, open-source libraries for audio, MIDI and .obj loading etc: https://github.com/FelipeCortez/grybo

It's not playable yet but it's been very rewarding so far getting the visuals in sync with the music, learning how the GPU can draw things fast, writing basic shaders, finding out how the computer plays sound and being able to manipulate buffers on a sample level etc

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

#83

Post by bobochan »

reimertz wrote: post #62
bobochan wrote: post #19

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 st…

It's inspiring to see how a fairly simple solution can have such an impact. That is why it's so exciting to work as a developer, but on the other hand, lack of real human interactions can also be really devastating after a while. Anyhow, really inspiring story and great job!

Absolutely true. What it really drives home for me though is how we are not following through with the promise of the personal computer revolution and empowering everyone to be able to write code. I remember trying to raise money years ago to try and put an Apple ][ in every classroom, and for years many school students learned bit of Logo, BASIC, and even Pascal.

There was nothing complicated in what I did, but there seems to be such a backlog of worthy projects that just someone that can write some simple loops and conditional statements. There just has to be a way to empower more people to code.

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

#85

Post by thom »

bobochan wrote: post #73
reefoctopus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, MLS clubs are on average more open and clued up to this stuff than other leagues - MLS Cup winners Toronto being a great example, with an analytics department led by ex-Opta analyst Devin Pleuler.

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

#86

Post by thewizardofaus »

KeybInterrupt wrote: post #63

I am currently working on a side project that aims to provide the defunct on-line / multiplayer functionality for an old game. The positive feedback and joy I get back from the community, is really awesome :) Also fiddeling with unknown file Formats and stuff, reveres engineering and re implementing defunct stuff is great fun :D

How awesome is reverse engineering! I absolutely love it.

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

#87

Post by bobochan »

thom wrote: post #85
bobochan wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, MLS clubs are on average more open and clued up to this stuff than other leagues - MLS Cup winners Toronto being a great example, with an analytics department led by ex-Opta analyst Devin Pleuler.

Yeah, but don't rub it in... I'm a Montreal supporter.

Allez, allez allez, allez Montréal!

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

#88

Post by YouKnowBetter »

While not being a job perse, for me it is getting married, moving around Europe while having a bunch of kids around and sticking to our two person contract since 25 years.

I have done some really really cool jobs, met amazing friends, made a bundle, lost a lot but the most rewarding project is and remains the partnership with my SO.

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

#89

Post by bbayer »

I have started to make games. I have teached myself Unity and started making casual games. Most satisfying thing about game development is presenting something fun to people and getting positive feedbacks as return. I have learned a lot in terms of game dev, gamification, monetization, publishing during process.

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

#90

Post by crabasa »

Every day I wake up and talk to engineers who are having trouble getting noticed either because they have untraditional backgrounds (non-STEM degree) or because they just don't understand how to market themselves or network.

The conversations are amazing, sometimes sad, but very motivating because it reinforces how broken hiring is and how much good could be done by helping engineers to better connect to one another.

Finding this mission was important for me because I had worked on purpose-driven teams in the past and I knew that's what made me happy. Best of luck finding yours!

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