I'm currently an embedded software developer, but I'm basically the guy you call when you're all out of options regardless of the problem. I've done plenty of debugging paratrooper-style for other teams, but some of my most infamous acts done in a professional capacity are:
- Company network is melting down due to the CI load? Hack together in a hurry a Git proxy cache written in a hundred lines of Bash. It's still in production years after I've left that sysadmin position.
- Company is trying to meld together two dissimilar pieces of software with wildly incompatible message buses and it's going so poorly it's threatening the entire project? Take a few days to improvise a message bus translator with a highly unconventional architecture. I then spend two hours in a design review meeting with the lead architects, who then decide to go along with it because they've failed to prove it couldn't possibly work and had no other option. This singlehandedly brought the project back under control, but it was pure black magic located right in the most load-bearing component possible and they took years to replace my Play-Doh with something saner.
- Company wants to redo the entire CICD? Write a Jenkins plugin that exposes a Debian source repository as an organization folder. With a suitable Jenkinsfile, it essentially turns Jenkins into a bona fide Debian build server, complete with proper dependency tracking. Management decided to go with a more traditional solution (OBS), at the cost of maintaining two different orchestrators and sets of workers.
As for my personal work, most of it is just various open-source contributions and faffing about on random stuff that never sees the light of day, but some of the things that actually ended up in the wild are:
- A Ghidra extension that can export relocatable object files out of a program selection. The simplest way I can explain it is Mad Max, but with program bits instead of car parts.
- Porting the epsilon firmware for the NumWorks calculator to the HP Prime calculator (another calculator manufacturer) and sending a pull request to the epsilon repository.
I should probably make an effort to actually finish more personal projects, release them and write up about them, but being chaos incarnate is somewhat antithetical to that.