Two years ago the startup I work at had an unofficial doorman working the building we occupied in the financial district of SF. A homeless Vietnam Vet who slept on the concrete above a steam pipe for warmth. This gentleman was almost always there when I left work for the evening, sitting on his milk crate or standing around either engaged in deep conversation with someone(s) about whatever or spouting err.. let's just say cat calls to women walking by. I'd always talk to this guy after work as his stories were always entertaining, funny and typically heartfelt.
Last summer he received a Sony Ericsson from a catholic priest in the tenderloin and was placed on her family plan. This was the W580 which, in its hay day, took amazing photographs. I don't remember how it was brought up but at some point I mentioned that he could share these pictures via the web for his adoring fans (of whom he had many) and his eyes lit up. "I'd love that, B!" he told me "I just don't want to be a part of twitter or facebook or anything like that." To which I responded that I could build a site for him.
I was winding down an entire rebuild of the UI for the company I work at. I was responsible for building aspects of everything from django db models to css (SCSS really) and at home that past year I had learned how to get a basic django site hosted on my very own virtual instance. If this guy had a smart phone the job would have been as simple as building a responsive UI and a basic django backend.
The challenge then became hooking now deprecated tech to the web. After considering the problem only one solution came to mind: e-mail. I then went to work attempting and failing to scrape gmail and wound up just installing sendmail on the same server I was serving his django instance from. After a number of late nights and a slew of cursing I got my first end-to-end sendmail to django integration setup and from them created email addresses which acted as api endpoints. I parsed the senders lists to ensure only my or my friends phone numbers had permission to post to the site. I then went to work figuring out how to read, save and resize images emailed to this sendmail server.
By this time my friends small Ericsson had seen better days. The man's hands were so big that his thumb usually pressed 4-5 keys at once and I would typically see him attempting to bang out text messages or dial phone numbers with his pinky. This is understandably frustrating AND he was working on actually cleaning up his drug and alcohol habits at the time so his phone would meet with the wall every so often. Typically I could repair it but eventually it was damaged beyond repair.
From there he ended up getting a cheap go phone with no camera and he was kinda bummed but I recommended a pivot to him. Audio posts powered by twilio. He liked the idea so I went about consuming the twilio api and was able to get a proof of concept working fairly easily. I had also unlocked the secrets of SSL, in order to give users a more secure login experience. I finally got one post from him, just saying hi, but from my cell phone. At this point I gave him a card with a number to call and access code to punch in, but he has asserted that he doesn't want audio only posts, he wants audio and image.
So, I now have a sever for him running django and sendmail which work in concert only for registration (your email address needs to be white listed if you want to register and the only way to do that is to have me or my friend add your email address to the body of a text message we text to a white list email endpoint).
He has also since found out that his liver is essentially fucked and that he has terminal cancer which puts the idea of a website for him on the back burner for both of us.
So I dunno, this was essentially a CRUD type problem, and while the technical challenges weren't as difficult as many of the ones I've read here, I think the creative challenge of giving a semi-tech literate homeless man a means to operate his own website with a decent amount of autonomy was a worthy and fulfilling one. I haven't been in this industry terribly long, but the possibilities I see out there are damn exciting. I made no money from this work but learned a lot I didn't already know and achieved something I feel like most people wouldn't even attempt. If you feel like you're stuck in CRUD land, why not attempt to mix up your customer base a bit? Think of something you could do that will be challenging and fun enough that you could perhaps open yourself up to an entire arena of unpaid work (I know, blasphemy!). It might not sound glamorous.. and well.. it really isn't, but I've found that the connections I can make with people using skills learned in this industry is what really drives me.
So fuck it man, get CRUDDY and build some cool-ass shit for people who aren't looking at some rigid business model. You might find yourself seeing CRUD work in a whole new light.