My marriage.
But for real, the first full-time programming gig I had was at a place that displayed huge tables of stock prices or something like that - I don't recall the exact data or why we were providing it, but I do remember the problem that I was assigned to solving: the tables of data were so large that on modest computers and those newfangled smartphones, system performance would drag to a crawl.
I was tasked with solving this problem, but not tasked with solving it in a particular way. This would have been around 2007, so IE 6 was the primary target, and if jQuery was out yet, it wasn't widely used yet.
After a good deal of experimentation, the solution I came up with was kind of ridiculous - the page would load the table, then remove all but the first two screen-heights of rows and replace it with a single row with a CSS height parameter set to the sum of all the other rows in the table. As the user scrolled through the table, rows of data were added below the existing rows while the footer "megarow" was shrunk, while a header "megarow" was created and set to the height of rows of data that were removed. The experience was flawless if you didn't scroll too fast or use the home/end keys, but even if you did you just saw a flash of an empty table row before the correct rows were loaded into place. It worked really well.
Anyway, that took up the bulk of my first three weeks working there before some higher-up took a look at the books and decided they needed to start laying people off in reverse order that they were fired - which I guess makes sense if you don't want to be bothered to do an evaluation of someone's skill, but still, it was pretty offputting to lose my first real dev job that way. To this day I have no idea if that code ever saw production - the product was an expensive subscription service so I had no way of checking up on it inexpensively.
Fortunately I was able to rebound and get another dev gig through a friend of my stepfather, and I've continued to hack away ever since.