Could be engineering, interpersonal, strategic, etc. This is purposefully open-ended.
Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
1–10 of 441 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#2One of the hardest challenges I have had in my career is convincing our company to move to Continuous Delivery. 90% of the challenges weren't technical, but emotional. Shipping software comes with lots of feelings, fear, politics, etc. I had to personally work with various leaders across the org to help them through these feelings and perceived blockers.
We aren't 100% there yet, but we are shipping numerous times per day across 20 or so services and quality has gone _up_, not down
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#3One of the hardest challenges I have had in my career is convincing our company to move to Continuous Delivery. 90% of the challenges weren't technical, but emotional. Shipping software comes with lots of feelings, fear, politics, etc. I had to personally work with various leaders across the org to help them through these feelings and perceived blockers. We aren't 100% there yet, but we are shipping numerous times pe…
Facebook transitioned from a weekly release cycle [1] to continuous delivery while I was there. It was a big project. There's a nice writeup here:
https://code.fb.com/web/rapid-release-at-massive-scale/
[1] commits were pushed to employees on commit, that's how we tested, but not to the public
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#4I wrote an inliner once. It might seem like an easy problem, but a proper inliner is a rabid animal you can just barely restrain on a leash.
The simple part is making it work without clashing. The hard part is making inlining always be an optimisation with reasonable code growth with regards to compilation time and cache use.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#5The hardest problem I've ever solved is learning to sit down and collage. Like, where you cut out bits of magazine and paste them onto paper, etc..
My friends do it pretty often. I find it super relaxing, and know I'll be happy I did it, but the engineer / researcher in me wants to always have fingers on a keyboard.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#6To learn to listen to other people, instead of just waiting to talk - that's an ongoing problem.
To understand what "controlling behaviour" means.
To empathise, and see oneself from the eyes of others.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#7Building a profiler for .NET. Learning the .NET profiling APIs is a massive learning curve and extremely complex. But, we figured it out! This is for Stackify, BTW.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#8Learning to throw years of work to thrash with no hard feelings.
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#9Definitely building a design language that had a minimal learning curve, yet the expressiveness to build any website or shop imaginable. The MECE analysis of CSS, the development of a flexible JS framework for users to mix and mash without ever seeing the code. Took a few nights of thinking :)
Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
#10Helped to arquitect and code a MMO game when the only reference was EverQuest ;)