Programming Triumphs
I've been asking this question during interviews – tell me about one of your favorite programming triumphs. This wouldn't necessarily be work related; in fact, the most interesting ones probably aren't work related. Maybe you spent hours, days or weeks, chipping away at some problem; a pet project; a crazy idea you had, that you need to see through to the end. Eventually, through perseverance and perhaps stubbornness, you prevailed and saw this thing actually work.
A number immediately come to mind for me. Exclusively, they're all personal projects.
I remember back in maybe 2001 (or so), I was working for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (a newspaper). All of my music (MP3s) were sitting on a Linux server, but I wanted to play them in iTunes. iTunes could recognize other iTunes instances, and access those libraries. I was cobbling together a C program to run on my Linux server (or a Mac) that would pretend to be iTunes. I remember the first time I ran the program and my fake iTunes server actually showed up in the sidebar in iTunes; and later, clicking on a song, and it played. Truly magical.
Years later, I was playing with SDRs – still a topic near and dear to me. I detail the highlights here. In short, I wanted to decode this AM radio station in software. I learned so much working on this, all to duplicate (poorly) the performance of any $5 radio. It was pure magic though when I heard the talkshow host (or whatever it was) playing through my computer speakers.
Curtis Jones
It is a little amazing to me how few programmers I run into who can't immediately start talking my ear off about something like this. A bygone era perhaps?