
Ask HN: What’s the coolest technology you worked on? - mraza007
Throughout your programming career what was the most coolest technology did you work on ? 
And how did it helped you progress in your career
======
sloaken
Coolest in several ways.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/AAR-47_Missile_Approach_War...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/AAR-47_Missile_Approach_Warning_System)
I cannot talk about the tech. Which was cool. But I can talk about an event.

A military guy visited our place to give us a plaque of appreciation. He also
had a picture. At the base, they asked people whose lives had been saved by
our product, to come out for a quick picture. They had over 100 people show
up. Being a part of a product that clearly saved all of those lives, plus many
more, filled me with pride.

Hard to beat that for compensation, not all salaries are measured in cash.

------
karmakaze
Early in my career (as a co-op student) learning C on the job, I had to
implement the HP PCL interpreter for a printer. The trick was it had so little
memory (no page frame buffer) that you had to be very efficient and render
into a short-height band across the page as the laser beam is rastering over
the moving paper. Luckily I had hobby experience doing similar things on the
Atari 8-bit. Some other student did the macros. A magazine did a benchmark
test of a bunch of HP and compatible printers. Ours won most benchmarks except
for storage efficiency for user-uploaded fonts which HP did better. They may
have used more advanced compression. Partway through the project they took the
hardware blitter out of spec to save like $12 so I had to replace it all in
software including 0.25x,0.33x,0.5x,2x,3x,4x scaling which was also fun.

------
_448
Not the coolest, but the one I enjoyed working on was a project to port Mortal
Kombat: Dead Alliance game from GBA to a puny(but interesting) linux mobile
phone. The linux phone had no graphics hardware acceleration where as GBA has.
And I am no graphics expert, I am a generalist software engineer and there was
no support or documentation* of the original source code and platform so it
was super fun ;)

* Don't ask me why, there were some business reasons.

------
runjake
\- Stealth aircraft

\- Ground Moving Target Indicator:
[https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/sys...](https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/systems/gmti.htm)

\- Synthetic aperture radar (think ultra-high resolution radar that looks akin
to HQ video)

\- GPS (when it was originally in development by the military)

~~~
mraza007
Omg really how was your experience working on stealth aircraft

------
throw51319
Nothing - I work at a bank it's boring af.

~~~
mraza007
Hahah i can relate to you But there are some interesting projects at the bank
too

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quickthrower2
Nothing that cool but did stuff interfacing with hand readers and touch
devices in 2002 when that was a new thing.

~~~
mraza007
True But now tech has changed alot

