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

Disclaimer: CTO Sense Health here (http://sense-health.com/)

We make apps to help people with depression and have our apps actively used by a small team in the biggest mental health care company in the Netherlands.

It is one of the most fulfilling place I have worked at because I get to meet actual patients and psychologists and get to know how much impact we have on their lives.

One of our patients messaged us one day saying how they would not be alive today had they not found the therapy with our application. I cannot express the feeling this brings in the team.

We are always looking for great tech talent for remote/on-site positions too BTW (specially React and React Native)

I would have to say the time my contracting company got a gig to take over a t1 datacenter after a debacle and make it t2. Working on big, infrastructure level routers and switches, learning all the meeting-room-politics side of such a project, and learning the other intracacies of a datacenter that I "controlled" was extremely satisfying professionally and personally. On both the network engineer side and on the sysadmin side it felt the most raw and pure, close to the internet if that makes any sense.

Finally, I have to say some of the most rewarding personal experience has been working for extremely smart people. While working at a genetics lab I had the opportunity to learn from a pioneer in the sequencing field who got fed up with academia and was going capitalist. While working at an electrical motor company I got the oportunity to learn from one of the best devs I've ever known, a scala dude, and to learn from the what seemed to be the heir to the throne of the business and an extremely accomplished electrical engineer and scientist. I've also learned from and worked with some of the best warriors and leaders on the planet during my time in the Marine Corps.

I consider myself lucky.

A long time ago as a child I decided I knew not everyone was perfect, but you could learn to pickup a persons good habits and try to ignore their bad habits. Learning from the wisdom of other people is the most rewarding thing I can think of!

A coworker and I took 2 weeks to write an Excel add-in that communicated to an AS/400 backend, many years ago.

I was the one to train our first customer (CFO at a carpet manufacturer), who after being shown that they could get fresh data in their spreadsheet each month by copy/pasting a column and updating the period value, physically pushed me away from the keyboard and just went to town. Turns out he was spending 2-3 days each quarter copying data over manually for his reports to the board. The ability to use Excel's charting features meant he could now get it all done in an afternoon.

That little app has now become the focus of the entire business, with versions for Lawson, Oracle Financials, and various other ERP, etc. packages, providing employment for almost 100 people.

I wish I'd negotiated a percentage. ;)

For me, it was working on a solo project for a large charity in the UK. They were releasing a service in 18 months time that hooked up to a bespoke API, and I was very keen to ensure that we built something robust and simple.

It was a lot of hard work, and throughout the project I had felt that things weren't going to go well. The deadline for certain bits was pushed back, and I overheard some moans from one of the junior devs about how things were set up, but we persevered. After spending time with the client, I had the feeling that they had severely underestimated the amount of load they'd receive, so much of the architecture was built around clever caching, and reducing load on the API. I also wanted to keep things really basic, so that anyone could take over the project and build on top of it.

We made the final (hard) deadline, and the site went live. We went to London to meet the client on go-live day, and we sat there watching the usage stats, and initially thought that there was a mistake when we saw 5000 concurrent users on the site over lunch. They were getting millions of users a day, and IIRC the site was paid for after two weeks. There were some issues, and we got a bit scared when they said they had to set up a brand-new call centre to deal with website issues, but at that scale we discovered that this call centre was dealing with less than 0.1% of users, so everyone deemed the project a success.

It was a fairly typical project, but it was great to be able to lead a project from start to finish, and to have everyone happy. Most importantly, it was the first time I actually felt proud of my dev abilities. I could finally claim to have built something that loads of people use and rely on.

fyi, page breaks under firefox latest (mac os x) https://imgur.com/a/hZAsalA