Ask HN: Most difficult programming challenge you solved in 2014? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Most difficult programming challenge you solved in 2014?

6 pointshaidrali6 comments

What is your most difficult programming or software engineering challenge you done in 2014? Be it any Algorithm, Project Deadline or anything related to Software. Mine is setting up Apache Nutch along with Apache Solr and Hbase for large crawling project.

Thanks

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Of everything done, doing nothing about something "so that I can be home at night" still places highest in my list of challenges with software engineering.

Correlate real time online banking traffic (5,000,000 hits a day) with multiple threat intelligence feeds fraud data to deliver real time security alerts within 10 seconds of suspicious online activity.

What's the next step after a security alert is delivered (i.e. does it go to a person first? does it get written down somewhere? are these bells constantly ringing?)? I promise I'm not a bad guy :)

The special care is taken to avoid alert blindness (i.e. too many similar alerts inevitably cause ignorance syndrome). I made a human study to make sure the timing of alert is enough to keep centinel's attention sharp, yet no important information event is missed.

The big picture - the action is taken to protect possibly compromised client's bank account.

The most difficult project I have solved (just finishing up the implementation) is developing a monitoring solution for a bunch of legacy telephone PBX's.

Essentially, the bureaucratic overhead for getting a bunch of companies to open their firewalls to us was unfeasible. Long story short, I ended up hijacking the SSL/VPN generated by a running JVM to forward a bunch of SNMP/OSSI-polling traffic to our api.

At the end, after implementing the above, I found out about a service port for outgoing only traffic offered to business partners. That was much easier to use, only requiring nginx to split off a certain sub-path of SSL traffic + business partner status.

I am still proud of the original hack, although brittle and ugly it was very exciting to get working.

I wrote a automation script which keep track of server process and recover them on failure

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