Ask HN: What's the code you've written of which you are the most proud? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the code you've written of which you are the most proud?

8 pointscperciva7 comments

A few hours ago mc42 asked for the most elegant piece of code people had seen (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11005003) but I'm sure many of us write code which doesn't get widely noticed; and there are other reasons beyond elegance why someone might be particularly proud of some code.

So what piece of code have you written which you are most proud of?

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I guess this https://github.com/shi-yan/Pillow .

back then, coding was my hobby. I could sit there for long hours and never felt tired. this is a project I made during that time. I'm proud of it because I dared to make something I have no basic knowledge about and I could solve the problems piece by piece.

I'm a better programmer now, but the excitement of programming is long gone. programming is a boring career now.

I worked on an electronic health record system. Many customers complained that they couldn't use it effectively with the keyboard. It was web based. New large customers reported queues in the waiting rooms because of the UI. The company didn't take it seriously. But then we each got two days to work on anything we wanted, as a creative experiment. I made a new widget with a hot key that brought up a HUD. It let you navigate to other pages extremely quickly using Ctrl-P style abbreviation. And a clever type of nested menu, with special support for accessing the most common tasks on patients, etc. And it scraped the current DOM in a pragmatic way to provide quick links to things shown on the current page. This led to unplanned features that came up in my demo. It was such an effective solution to a very real problem—and it could be dropped in as a JAR file without even modifying the rest of the software. I left the company not long after and I don't think they used it.

I wrote some stuff in the early nineties that still gets spun up once in awhile for testing purposes. Probably the only thing I've written in the past that still runs, or even exists on a disk. So that's cool.

To tweak the question a bit, the things I've written recently that I'm most happy with are personal productivity/automation tools that I use all day, every day. I often need to do "a thing" between tasks. These "things" are not really part of the task, they're just needed to get to the next task, and they're disruptive enough in time and focus that I feel I've gotten off the train and then back on again. Now I really don't think about them, and my involvement with these things is only as long as it takes to type out the command.

3 come to mind...

First, as the lead on a team of 3 I wrote a web app in 2 months that caused the cancellation of a $30+M contract that had been given to a competitor. The team decided to try out Ruby on Rails for the first time (this was 2007 iirc) and it was such a delight I haven't stopped being primarily a ruby/rails developer since.

Second, at the last place I worked I was the primary developer on a team of 2 that wrote an iphone app that was on the end of the year top apps on the itunes store as an honorable mention. The app is not available anymore unfortunately.

Third, at my current gig I wrote a kick ass custom CRM for our sales team that enabled our team to 3-4x their productivity.

Probably the toy compiler I wrote for a c like language: https://github.com/claassen/CmC and the parser generator it uses to parse source code: https://github.com/claassen/ParserGenerator

Does it handle left recursion? If so, how?

Some drawing app with HTML5 Canvas API https://github.com/nkudo/canvas-project Really enjoyed every single minute I spent coding this app, pure bliss.

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