My favorite was this project because it really shouldn’t be possible, it requires some unusual problem solving (kinda like code golf), but the best part is seeing people’s horrified expression when they realize
- The monstrosity works
- There’s no real alternative
(I’m working on a video that explains it, but until then the readme and stack overflow post will have to do.)
A decade ago I reverse engineered the Macventure game engine, allowing you to play Shadowgate and Deja Vu etc on modern oses. The current copyright holder then paid me to iron out the rough edges and create the official ports currently on steam.
That’s baller
I wrote a DNS server that did global software load balancing. Essentially it just has a health checking component and a sort and uses that to determine the closest healthy endpoint to return.
Mostly used for cluster failover or in cloud terms it can keep traffic within a zone if possible, otherwise within a region, otherwise closest region.
The reason it was my favorite project is because I was unqualified, but nobody else on my team was a DNS expert. So I got to drink from the firehose and learn. I had a really good testing feedback pipeline where basically visitors to our website did a couple extra background requests on their first page load and we used the web performance timing API to track DNS lookup times and TCP/HTTP times. So I every time I made a change I had millions of performance reports. I could see the impact of my changes in about 60 seconds in grafana.
Between learning something totally new and tying it to a short feedback loop with beautiful graphs I had a great time. Plus that product literally allowed my company to start using the cloud and build multi cloud systems.
This sounds like an interesting project, what programming language did you use? Was the endpoint relative to the person making the query, how was the data stored?
A while ago I wrote an extensible dummy data generator for Java.
I needed to fake some scientific data for a project at work and wasn’t satisfied with how closed for modification existing data generation solutions were, so I decided to tackle writing a library on my own.
It was my first major contribution to open source and had some architectural challenges which were fun to solve, not to mention the learning experience :)
Wrote a basic primality checker library, it’s not by far my most interesting or complex project but I like that I accomplished all my initial goals in a timely fashion.
