
Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why? - greatatuin
Looking for some inspriration and ideas!<p>What has been your most fulfilling job&#x2F;project and why?<p>I&#x27;ve been looking to make a change away from typical enterprise development (full stack web developer) as it&#x27;s not just about the paycheck any more. Recent events have given me a different perspective. Perhaps looking to join a team of great people doing something worthwhile or start my own consultancy helping people solve problems in a sector I can feel good about. Just not sure what that service looks like yet.<p>The best bit about being a developer I&#x27;ve found is when working directly with the customer who is in some distress and the look on their face when you solve the problem and make their life easier, even if it was easy to solve. I&#x27;d love to find something where every day was like that!
======
calummurray
I've been working for almost 4 years on the on-board flight software for the
European Space Agency's Mars Rover to look for signs of water and life on
Mars: "ExoMars". It is due to be launched in 2020.

Due to the embedded real-time, mission-critical aspect of the software, the
strictness of the process and focus on documentation can be frustrating. The
space industry typically doesn't keep pace with new technologies, so we're
often stuck using "tried and tested" tools that can feel antiquated. I
sometimes feel jealous of developers at agile startups keeping pace with the
most new technologies and frameworks that are desirable.

But the knowledge that I will have a significant amount of code that will
(hopefully) run on another planet in the search for extraterrestrial life -
something I can consider one of the most important thing our species should be
doing - is extremely rewarding and motivating.

~~~
nlh
That is so deeply awesome. Can you tell us a bit more detail about the systems
and how they work? C? Assembly?

~~~
calummurray
We have a little bit of assembly for processor-specific startup housekeeping,
but that's mostly reused with small modifications for different boards. The
rest of the code base is entirely C, managing functions such as ground
communications, mobility (locomotion, navigation and control), thermal
management, power management, fault detection and recovery, payload (e.g.
science instrument) management and mission planning.

We need 100% branch code coverage at unit test level, and have function
validation tests written in Java that validate the software against the
requirements, running on simulated hardware. Similar tests are run against
simulators with progressively more hardware-in-the-loop for more confidence.

~~~
rubicon33
Are there any helpful frameworks or tools for unit testing firmware projects
written in C?

I'd really love to know what you guys are doing!

~~~
8_hours_ago
I am also interested in what ESA is using... I have used VectorCAST to
generate MC/DC coverage reports for C programs. The interface is a pain to
deal with and it crashed regularly, but it did the job.

~~~
calummurray
Hate to disappoint you, but we also use VectorCAST for unit test code
coverage.

------
Liquix
Not quite startup or hobby project material, but some of the most gratifying
work is making non-critical, easy to implement changes in your business's
workflow!

Sometimes users will have minor (or major) issues with the way a tool works -
database takes 30 seconds to retrieve a certain type of information, there's
no clear path from point A to point B in a frequently used business tool,
certain jobs take 2x as long as they should, etc.

These issues don't have much of an impact on management or the bottom line, so
they won't be assigned to anyone to fix. But if you spend two hours speeding
up that tool or streamlining a frequently used process, the 'work done' to
'that look on their face when you make their life easier' ratio is incredible.

~~~
lostcolony
I would contend those fixes -do- add to the bottom line.

Making a user's job take less time frees them to do other things. Those other
things may have value; that value is only captured because of the time saved
due to your effort.

Even if that time becomes effectively 'free' time for the user, that increase
in happiness and morale makes them more likely to be more productive in other
areas, less likely to leave the company (however small an effect), etc.

Don't dismiss something that makes someone's life easier as having no monetary
value just because you can't easily quantify it.

~~~
harlanji
Sounds theoretical. Salary is fixed and if there’s a supply of alternative
workers and resource scarcity mentality then allowing employees free time
makes them more valuable to and easier to engage by competitors. Qualatative
arguments go out the window when the shoe strings tighten in my experience.

My ideals agree and I’ve banged my head trying to maintain boundaries with my
managers, now 5 jobs in. Experience is with VC in Bay Area... work life in
Minneapolis was pretty chill tho, 2 longer jobs there with good people.

~~~
zrobotics
Alternatively, the time saved allows them to move onto other tasks and
accomplish more in a day. Saving 30 seconds on a database query can add up to
years of time in a large company. It's not that uncommon for hardware
engineers to be issued a company credit card, simply for the time saved vs
bugging a manager for a purchase order for a $5.00 digikey order.

~~~
Hextinium
So much this, if an engineer is paid $50 a hour and it takes 30 seconds to
load a prompt. Loading the promt just cost the company 40 cents. If they have
to run that promt 3 times a day then it's $500 a year that can be saved by
just optimization.

~~~
ihattendorf
It doesn't work that way though. The company didn't spend an extra $500 that
year because an engineer spent 90 seconds each day opening a few prompts. They
paid that engineer the same salary as the other case. Maybe the engineer just
spent 90 seconds less each day on their phone, or stayed until 5:01:30 that
day instead. Or took a shorter lunch. Or only had 6-7 hours of work each day
anyway so it didn't make a difference.

------
dkhenry
Two years ago I joined the USDS and started working with the VA. One of my
projects was to help fix the system Veterans use to schedule online
appointments. The problems were many and ranged from poor technical solutions
up to senior managers not wanting to green light a small release without a few
months of meetings. Over two months of some of the most intense work I have
ever done ( most of it non technical ) we released seven times and drove
traffic on the system from 100 interactions a month to 15,000 a month. The
system is still pretty bad, but people can use it, which means Veterans can
schedule a mental health appointment on their phone. That may have just been
the thing to save their life.

Now every time I am having a hard day I pull up the Google Analytics of that
system and look how many people have scheduled an appointment today. I might
not have fixed everything, but just knowing we made something better has been
the most rewarding thing I have ever done

~~~
oddlyaromatic
> which means Veterans can schedule a mental health appointment on their
> phone.

It all comes down to this. Well done. It's so easy to get stuck in the weeds
and forget the real goal.

------
bobochan
I work at a university and most of the time I am either doing research or
teaching, but once in a while I get a call from a medical school or hospital
asking if I can volunteer programming time for a project. I wrote some very
simple code about 15 years ago to generate some charts so that care teams at
hospitals across the country can see how they are doing compared to teams at
other centers.

The charts had a very steep slope the first time that I ran them with a large
gap between the best and worst centers. The top centers keep improving every
year, but there has been a huge improvement at the other end of the graph and
the slope is almost a flat line at this point.

Obviously the care teams deserve 100% of the credit for the hard work to
improve the medical care they are providing, but I can't help but smile every
time I see one of those charts online or in a report.

~~~
reimertz
It's inspiring to see how a fairly simple solution can have such an impact.
That is why it's so exciting to work as a developer, but on the other hand,
lack of real human interactions can also be really devastating after a while.

Anyhow, really inspiring story and great job!

~~~
bobochan
Absolutely true. What it really drives home for me though is how we are not
following through with the promise of the personal computer revolution and
empowering everyone to be able to write code. I remember trying to raise money
years ago to try and put an Apple ][ in every classroom, and for years many
school students learned bit of Logo, BASIC, and even Pascal.

There was nothing complicated in what I did, but there seems to be such a
backlog of worthy projects that just someone that can write some simple loops
and conditional statements. There just has to be a way to empower more people
to code.

~~~
Zak
Remember Hypercard? I remember Hypercard.

It was a heavily graphical development tool and runtime with a very
approachable scripting language. At one point, Apple included it with new
Macs. At another point, they tried to charge money for it, which I think
pretty much ruined it.

Nothing I've seen since really filled the role it did. There were, of course
significant limits, but it was universal (if you had a Mac at a certain point
in time) and had an amazingly low barrier to entry.

------
dividuum
So far mine has been to bootstrap my own company. It has been my goal for a
while now and I tried different projects while doing freelancing work on the
side. The project that finally stuck is a digital signage service
([https://info-beamer.com](https://info-beamer.com)) now. For a long time I
didn't even know I was doing digital signage: I just wrote the software to
show info on a projector for a local hacker conference since I didn't find
anything that satisfied my requirements.

Later I ported it to the Raspberry Pi and added a price tag. Surprisingly
people started purchasing the software and I slowly build a complete hosted
service around it. Today it's a real company and profitable. Why is it
rewarding: It's fully boot-strapped and as such there there's no need to rush
new feature in the hope of finding a working business model eventually.
Instead I can focus on quality and that alone is fun already. The other aspect
is that it requires a vast range of different technologies properly working
together: From the custom built Linux distribution for the Pi, the visual
software that controls the output (written in C/Lua) up to the
Website/Service/Cloud stuff. And of course building custom solutions based on
the platform together with customers and see those running in production. I'll
never get bored as a result and always learn something new.

~~~
severine
Wow, info-beamer looks amazing, congratulations+thanks!

------
elvirs
I live in New York running my own wholesale business that doesnt consume a lot
of time, makes decent money and has very little headache but I can say the
most mentally (and financially) rewarding part was driving through places like
western washington state, oregon, alabama and southern georgia to visit local
shopping malls to see if any of the store owners would like to start
purchasing from me. Just buying a ticket, reserving a rental car, mapping out
a route on google maps and just driving from one mall to another along
sometimes empty country roads and checking into a motel in the middle of
nowhere just to get enough rest and wake up in the morning, grab coffee (big
win if they have dunkin donuts or starbucks in town) and start driving towards
my next target. Nothing special about it but easily best thing I did during my
4-5 years of running the business.

~~~
jqbx_jason
I've had to do something similar for an eCommerce business (my wife runs an
online toystore). 100% agree having a reason to go to places you would
otherwise never go to is amazing. The random connections/experiences has
changed me into a better person and are incredibly rewarding.

Having written this I think the take away is you don't necessarily need a
reason to go places- just go!

------
quantumhobbit
This is a weird answer. But it was probably the project that almost ruined my
career.

I once started a project to add in A/B testing to a legacy platform that
really wasn’t supportive of any such changes. The project was a technical
success but a political disaster. The aftermath made it very clear that my
manager was hoping I would fail so that he would have an excuse to manage me
out. When it didn’t fail he became a lot more obvious in his attempts to get
rid of me. I also suspect that some of the issues that happened during the
project were setups, but I can’t prove it.

Why am I proud of that clusterfuck? Because it proves that I can still succeed
even when powerful people dont want me too. The problems I had at that job
were political and not due to a lack of ability on my part. I’m not saying
that I am without fault in allowing my relationship with my manager to degrade
to tgat point. But I gained a lot of confidence from delivering a working
product despite adversity. That confidence led me to a much better job.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
Hard question to answer since I've enjoyed all my jobs... at some point anyway
:-)

I spent 15+ years in the Medical Device industry and that's probably been the
most fulfilling job.

Why?

Medical Device software is extremely process-heavy, progress is slow and
methodical and it can be absolutely soul-crushing if you look at it the wrong
way. But:

Sometimes you hear from an ex-patient how you saved her life.

Sometimes you get to fix a problem that affected your own child.

Sometimes you take pride during a doctor visit in knowing your blood is going
to be analyzed on a machine you designed and coded for.

Sometimes you simply enjoy the fact that you're putting out a very well-
engineered and solid product.

And it's fun: most of my software career has been controlling things that
move. When I hit Start on the debugger and several dozen motors spring to life
at once, clicking and whirring in their orchestrated sets of motions, it's an
amazing feeling.

~~~
NGxyzThrowaway
Im a new grad with a couple years of experience via internships/co-op jobs. If
i was interested in applying to programming jobs in the medical device
industry where would i start looking?

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
I'd get a list of device companies nearby or where ever you wanted to live and
start doing some research into what applications their products are for. If
you apply to a company making, e.g., dialysis machines, then having even a
_basic_ knowledge of what a kidney does and how it fails will immediately set
you apart from most of the applicants.

Look at their websites and see what types of positions are available and what
type of work seems interesting.

You could also call recruiters working in that area and see what open
positions they know of. Aerotek is in that field and I always liked working
with them.

------
imjustabill
I've spent the last four years helping produce a IMAX/Giant Screen film
featuring 7.5 million images from Cassini, Hubble, and SDSS with no CGI/VFX.

[http://insaturnsrings.com/](http://insaturnsrings.com/)

I spent most of that time writing the software that downloaded images from the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey, located the galaxies in them, cut them out, and
placed them with the correct location & scale in the animation software. The
best part for me has been getting to work on a project I really believed in,
even though I had absolutely no experience with films or astronomical imaging.
I just jumped into the deep end and had to learn as I went.

Writing code that puts things on a 6 story tall movie screen is such a
different experience than pushing code to an app server to serve up banking
apps. Hopefully the work I did here will go on to inspire someone else to have
the same love for space that I do.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
[https://www.insaturnsrings.com/trailer](https://www.insaturnsrings.com/trailer)

Wow. Just Wow.

I have already emailed the link pleading for a London release.

------
_sdegutis
I've found working on [http://editfight.com](http://editfight.com) to be
extremely enjoyable. It's an online collaborative pixel art app with a fixed
size grid. I made it for fun, and a few really talented pixel artists came and
have made some awesome things. But the best part is that they have constantly
given me feedback on what would improve their experience, and I've been able
to add the features they're asking for within the hour, and it's been a really
enjoyable cycle of that for probably 2-3 weeks now. It's so incredibly
gratifying to see them appreciating and finding useful all the new features I
keep adding for them. It's kind of addicting to keep improving the site for
them and watching them use the improvements to make more and more amazing
things. One of the biggest examples of this has been the "create a gif from
the time-lapse of everyone drawing" feature which someone else suggested, and
surprisingly only took about an hour to implement. It's pretty niche, but the
few people who find the site and like it, they come back to it like every day
and keep making incredible artwork in it.

------
markshiz
It's been painfully obvious to me through various recent health scares that my
(only) lasting legacy will be my children. I hope to spend enough time with
them on this crazy floating rock to enable them to have the emotional security
and vision to help make the world a better place after I'm gone --two things I
feel like I could've benefited from much earlier in life.

Career-wise, I've stressed myself out way too much over small wins, but there
are two projects that I was happy to have the fortune to be involved with.

1\. I relocated my family across they country for a year to work at an Obama
White House Champion of Change startup. I helped create an app that is used by
thousands of students and public transit users to have a safe, cheap, eco-
friendly ride home through Microtransit. The safe ride capability has been
used by enough university students by now that I hope it has kept drunk
drivers off the street and possibly saved someone's life.

[https://transloc.com/microtransit-ondemand-
software/](https://transloc.com/microtransit-ondemand-software/)

2\. About 5 years ago, I worked on the consumer facing apps for a competitor
to Nest, called Sensi. The thermostat was recently ranked to have the highest
customer satisfaction in its class by J.D. Power and Associates. Last I heard
it was in over 100,000 homes, and has kept a lot of coal from being burned by
power plants in America.

[http://sensicomfort.com](http://sensicomfort.com)

If I were to do it all over again, I would've been way less concerned about
money, and probably entered a field other than software development. I'm
thinking of getting LEED certified and going into green building design and/or
solar installations in my second career.

------
sacheendra
For me, the satisfaction from a project is approximately 50% process, 25%
recognition and 25% cool factor.

Cool factor is just working on cutting edge stuff or with some tech I'm super
excited about.

Recognition comes from the community your are doing the project for (team,
manager, etc.) recognizing its importance. This typically only happens if you
pick projects which solve a business need and communicate that. Preferably
lead to higher revenue.

Process is the end to end process of systematic identification of the problem
via concrete quantitative metrics, formulating a solution using a scientific
process, building the system following sound design principles, etc. It's kind
of difficult to concretely define. What it is not is putting out fire after
fire everyday.

This is the recipe of successful project I enjoy nowadays.

The recipe changes from person to person and time to time. The way to figure
out your recipe is to introspect. Cut out the noise of FOMO, hyped tech, etc.

A good article I have read recently about deciding what you want is
[https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-
career.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html). This will
explain how to introspect in great detail.

------
FelipeCortez
Like many many others, I imagine, my main motivation for getting into CS was
game development. Now I'm near the end of the degree and I realized I haven't
programmed any games, so I challenged myself to recreate Guitar Hero in C++
using OpenGL and small, open-source libraries for audio, MIDI and .obj loading
etc:
[https://github.com/FelipeCortez/grybo](https://github.com/FelipeCortez/grybo)

It's not playable yet but it's been very rewarding so far getting the visuals
in sync with the music, learning how the GPU can draw things fast, writing
basic shaders, finding out how the computer plays sound and being able to
manipulate buffers on a sample level etc

------
koliber
Two projects come to mind. Both were reporting tools. They helped companies
improve the efficiency of a process 100x - 1000x. This resulted in the process
being run more often and delivered multitudes more value in the form of better
communication and knowledge transfer. They were fun to build and delivered
tremendous value.

The first was at a fastener wholesaler. There was a sales report that would be
built once a month by a sales person. It pulled data from a backend ERP
system, combined it with some other data sources, and generated some trend
graphs and summaries. The whole process took about five days of manual labor.
It used to be done once a month, by a sales person. I've built a set of tools
to do this which would take an operator about 10 minutes to run. It ended up
being run daily, weekly, and quarterly. Everyone was aligned and on the same
page!

The second was at a financial firm back office. One of the side
responsibilities was generating reports for clients. These contained mundane
things like trades summaries of various kinds. They were delivered in CSV or
plain text format via FTP or email. It used to take a couple hours of work to
build a new one, and output options were limited. I've built a reporting
framework that added a bunch of output options, including beautifully
formatted Excel files, and cut the config time down to about 10 minutes. By
the time I left, we had over a thousand such reports being run daily.

Both projects opened up my eyes to how much value good software can bring to
an organization, and how much impact a single developer can have.

I recently decided to package up some of that experience into a package and
offer it for sale. I run [https://goodgrids.com](https://goodgrids.com), which
allows companies to automatically convert CSV files to nicely formatted Excel
files. This project is fairly new, but it is very personally rewarding.

------
neilk
The formula for me seems to be: high impact combined with how ingenious I
personally judge the project that be. I guess I want to be a wizard, casting
benevolent spells for a grateful public.

I’ve been lucky enough to have been paid to write open source code on multiple
occasions. That’s a great shortcut to having a big impact on the world. The
best stuff I ever did was something other engineers told me was impossible -
but I did it and it was good enough that other people went and built
businesses around it. Or, in one case, a project that my manager told me I was
doing too much for became the foundation for an entire community’s work.

However, probably the best for me was an algorithmic art project in the early
days of social media. I was in between jobs and when I had the idea, I barely
slept for a week. The code was terrible although the idea was interesting.
Once the work was released, it was a modest sensation, and people were talking
about it around the globe. One commenter even said it made her cry. I am still
enough of an engineer that I had this “NAILED IT” moment. I remember looking
at clubgoers on a Friday night, people I’d normally have felt irritated
with/envious of, and thinking they had no idea how to _really_ have fun.

Lately though, I’ve found a slightly different source of satisfaction. In my
last job, I started to manage some people and found it extremely satisfying to
help people with their careers, particularly young engineers. I also led
projects to reduce hiring bias.

(You might notice that few of these high satisfaction projects had to do with
how much money I was paid or whether it was something my manager wanted me to
do. Still looking to square that circle.)

~~~
cake_42
Curious, can you share a link to the OS project and the algorithmic art
project?

------
Sumaso
When I was a new grad I was hired at a company that did QA consulting. I was
put on a team with 5 other people to create a integration test framework for a
insurance company, who was rolling out a brand new software stack. It's
probably one of the few times in my career that I had:

A) The whole team was responsible for the project, if the framework broke we
took the blame as a team rather than crapping on individuals

B) PRs got seriously reviewed, there were strict rules about what was a
quality PR and our team lead ensured that they were enforced. At the start of
the project I lost several days of work because my PRs weren't of sufficient
quality.

C) We got a start a project with no legacy code, building everything from the
ground up. We had architecture meetings, everyone's input was vetted and
valued.

Since then I haven't worked on a team where I felt that things were as
cohesive. People make shitty design decisions and are not receptive to
criticism. Lots of rubber stamping "approve" on PRs without actually reviewing
the code, or accepting PRs without unit tests. Inheriting legacy code which
was written poorly, but still has to be maintained. Nothing quite has the same
feeling as that first project.

~~~
kzisme
On the flip side - I've been at two companies who don't use branches to
develop software, and I've never been a part of a PR process unless I was
doing it on my own time :/

------
austincheney
Security auditor in 2009/2010\. In that job I was traveling the countryside of
Afghanistan and visited the major US Army bases to provide information
security assessments and write reports. I got to see some of the exotic
landscape and talk to many different interesting people. I also got to go on
flying adventures that aren't allowed by passenger carriers in the US. This
was incredibly rewarding for the reasons not related to the technical
qualities of the job.

At the end of my tour I read the ISC2 course book for the CISSP and passed the
test on the first attempt. So now I just tell people to read the book and take
the test from a management perspective and people look at me like I am crazy,
because the test is so hard.

My most rewarding job for purely the software angle was being the A/B test
engineer at Travelocity from 2010 to 2012. I learned to master walking the
DOM. Some of our tests were extremely ambitious to the point of wildly
defacing large areas of complex pages on the site. Your code had to be defect
free and execute before the regular areas of the page displayed to the user.
Some of our experiments comprised multiple various pages and required altering
the browser history and moving people around the site in non-standard ways.

I learned to master my JavaScript browser interaction skills doing this job.
You could not wait for framework or library code like jQuery, because it
loaded too slowly and would bias the experiment. You simply had to learn to do
the job against the actual web technologies. You also had to learn to execute
quickly, because there were always more experiments demanding attention than
we could ever get to which means potential lost revenue. It was always
challenging and always rewarding. This job is what elevated me to a senior
developer.

~~~
jlelonm
"So now I just tell people to read the book and take the test from a
management perspective and people look at me like I am crazy, because the test
is so hard."

Can you elaborate more on that? I'm interested.

~~~
austincheney
The CISSP exam is a bit easier now that there are only 8 domains of knowledge
and those domains are a bit more focused. When I took the test there were 10
domains of knowledge tested.

In short the CISSP is the most respected certification for information
security management even though the ISC2 organization offers more advanced
certifications above the CISSP. I believe the SANS certifications are more
respected technician certifications now, but they cost something like $4000
and you have to travel to their location to certify (or so the rumors claim).

The CISSP exam is vendor agnostic. You have to apply and be approved to take
the exam and it costs just shy of $700. Even with that price tag it only has
about a 60% pass rate.

When I took the test back in 2010 it was 250 questions and you had up to 6
hours to take it. Many of the questions had more than one correct answer so
you had to read it carefully to pick the most correct answer. Many of the
people who failed it, those that I knew, failed it for tactical reasons. It is
a senior management test so I always tell people to remember on each and every
question managers document and then they delegate. They don't do the real
work, so if you answer any question with putting fingers on a keyboard you are
likely wrong.

The test wore me out as I took 5.5 out of the 6 available hours. Some of the
questions were rather long like a page out of a textbook.

------
rschneid
Nonprofits are relatively underserved by tech workers. I've tried to get many
of my friends to join me but the allure of bigco paychecks is simply too much.
This is a pretty general answer but so's your question :)

I think if you pick a nonprofit with a mission that you feel passionate enough
about to really give it your all then there's a good chance for you to quickly
become a double-digit percentage of global technical productivity in a
particular charitable domain.

For me it's been developing tools (mobile app and website) to help people with
substance abuse issues communicate with their loved ones, themselves, and
medical professionals.

~~~
Vinnl
I'm very interested in pursuing a path like that, but I have two reservations
about it:

1\. Colleagues. The fact that non-profits are underserved by tech works, also
means that you're less likely to have talented colleagues to learn from. 2\.
When they're not tech organisations. There might be a lack of understanding of
both the opportunities and challenges for tech in their specific area, and I'm
not sure I'd have some influence in helping with that. I really don't want to
be the person who maintains a Wordpress site for a non-profit, and don't think
I'd actually be that effective in contributing to their mission that way
either.

What are your reflections on that?

------
deaps
My worthwhile project was when I really stepped outside of my comfort zone to
lead a complete redesign / overhaul of a datacenter over the course of 9
months.

I had the knowledge, and the desire, but probably lacked confidence in my
ability to be the lead design engineer for such a large project. I had always
worked in a NOC/operations role where I excelled at any task that was put in
front of me, but I had a lot of questions, always.

Fast forward a few years - I took a leap and went for it. I got hired on for a
9 month contract to replace racks and racks of networking equipment, an entire
replacement of everything layer3 and layer2 in this datacenter, complete with
remote monitoring/management facilities.

I went full bore - I didn't sleep much. I ran the systems I was working on at
home in my lab, virtually, and basically taught myself Juniper and Arista from
the ground up - having only worked on Cisco devices previously.

Long story short, the conversion was finished ahead of schedule...but the
contract had me there for a while longer, so I got tasked with a bunch of
crazy 'stuff' \- things that I've never touched. Load balancers, traffic
shapers, linux servers (that actually did 'stuff') - just a ton of stuff to
learn, understand, plan, and implement. Around this time is when I also got my
introduction to the Python language (but that's more of a way to make things
simpler to me, rather than what actually pays the bills).

It was through those 9 months, that I became so confident in myself and my
abilities. I no longer doubted myself. I no longer thought that my questions
were stupid. Because of that, I flourished. I've been in a senior network
engineering role ever since...and finally feel like myself. It's great.
Literally changed my outlook on life.

------
DamnInteresting
Although it has been a source of occasional stress, my science-and-history
site DamnInteresting.com (2005-) is the project that has brought me the most
personal satisfaction. It scratches many of my creative itches, from writing
to coding to design and beyond. And we have had the very good fortune of
cultivating an intelligent, engaged readership (and listenership since we
launched our podcast).

Sadly, if I tried to launch the site today I don't think it would succeed.
It's too hard for a stand-alone site to get attention nowadays, especially
with the domination of Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps one day the quirky
organic web will return, but I am skeptical.

------
weitzj
A nice thought somebody brought up the other day:

Try to go some meetups not developer related and hear the people’s problems at
hand.

Then you can chime in with your developer perspective, which other people do
not have.

And from this, both sides can mutually share their experiences and benefit
from each other. And maybe this is where your future might be.

------
kroltan
I work in a small webdev shop, mostly maintaining existing projects, and work
can be quite "menial" (as far as front-end can be) sometimes.

What I do find incredibly rewarding is game development. I participate in game
jams [1][2] - and the sheer enthusiasm of players with regards to your game is
worth every hour of a stressful crunching weekend.

I also maintain a restoration project for a deceased game [3][4], and while
the community is small, sometimes we get new people who stumble upon their
erstwhile favorite, and there are similar reactions.

So yeah, I think game development can be quite rewarding when you are in touch
with your community.

[1]:
[https://whalesandgames.itch.io/wizsnooks](https://whalesandgames.itch.io/wizsnooks)

[2]:
[https://ldjam.com/users/kroltan/games](https://ldjam.com/users/kroltan/games)

[3]: [http://atmosphir.com/](http://atmosphir.com/)

[4]:
[https://github.com/Troposphir/troposphir](https://github.com/Troposphir/troposphir)

------
pgsandstrom
My most rewarding project was as a consultant for a big client that trusted my
team completely. It really came down to just that, combined with my team
consisting of really, really good people. So we could make any tech choice,
work with any equipment and work from remote whenever we wanted. We delivered
really good work, but whenever we did miss a deadline the client still
believed in us. It was a very inspiring environment.

------
chiph
A coworker and I took 2 weeks to write an Excel add-in that communicated to an
AS/400 backend, many years ago.

I was the one to train our first customer (CFO at a carpet manufacturer), who
after being shown that they could get fresh data in their spreadsheet each
month by copy/pasting a column and updating the period value, physically
pushed me away from the keyboard and just went to town. Turns out he was
spending 2-3 days each quarter copying data over manually for his reports to
the board. The ability to use Excel's charting features meant he could now get
it all done in an afternoon.

That little app has now become the focus of the entire business, with versions
for Lawson, Oracle Financials, and various other ERP, etc. packages, providing
employment for almost 100 people.

I wish I'd negotiated a percentage. ;)

------
fecak
My current job is incredibly fulfilling on many levels, because I make a
direct and positive impact on individuals on a daily basis, meet lots of
interesting people from all over the world, and get to do it all from home. I
have two daughters with autism and having freedom to pitch in at home during
the day has been great as they grow up.

I'm a former tech recruiter and now I'm a resume writer and career consultant,
and I've written for many here on HN as well as clients all over the world.
Most of my work over the years has been with tech professionals, but right now
my clients include a mobile developer in Australia, an engineer in Japan, an
entertainment professional in LA, a product manager in SF, a nurse in Seattle,
and about a dozen software engineers. I've written in the past few months for
award-winning human rights advocates, film directors, journalists, doctors,
and countless other professions.

I make a good living and at least a few times a week I get a note from a past
client saying they got an interview at their dream company or just landed a
job they really wanted. Getting paid to help people and make a measurable
impact on their lives is a big difference from how I felt about recruiting, as
there is no conflicting alignment of incentives as a writer. The opportunity
to meet people around the world and learn about different jobs is a bonus.

------
y0ghur7_xxx
I made a frontend for nntp. Even if usenet is long dead.

I was following a group (it.comp.console) at the time using thunderbird but I
didn't like google groups so I wrote my own nntp web frontent to follow the
group on my smartphone. I contacted some usenet server admins and asked them
if I could peer with them (one here on hn), so I set up an nntp server (inn2)
and wrote a node/express/js app to read and post to the group.

I make zero money from it, but people liked it and started using it, and now i
have about 100 users on the website. I made it mainly for myself as a hobby,
but I like that some people like what I made.

[https://fcku.it/comp.misc](https://fcku.it/comp.misc)

------
Foxboron
A few things.

Open-source projects like Hylang and Arch Linux that super satisfying when you
contribute parts like code, packages or projects that supplements the
ecosystem.

Working as a volunteer on one of the largest dataparties called The Gathering.
Helping to create a creative environment for participants of all ages in the
form of mentors that help you learn new skills in programming, digital paining
and music. Lectures with interesting speakers, and workshops that gives you
hands-on experience on a broad array of topics with experienced people.

This also turned into helping create events for IT students in Bergen where
you can socialize with other students across colleges and program.

It's just great honestly. And i really love doing this kind of work.

------
jaustin
Working on the BBC micro:bit project - first in Arm and then in the Micro:bit
Educational Foundation! ([http://microbit.org/](http://microbit.org/)). The
combination of nice hard technical problems, a really collaborative group of
companies, universities and communities delivering it together, and the look
of joy on kids faces when they first make something of their own with the
micro:bit.

I think making sure that the broadest/most diverse range of people have the
digital skills they're going to need to create the best future for us all is
really essential, too, and micro:bit is really starting to contribute to that.

Additionally, since we launched the foundation, being able to focus on the
needs of our audience and building a sustainable organisation rather than
something that looks glitzy and investible (we're a UK-based not-for-profit)
also contributes a huge amount to the sense of fulfilment.

(We're going to be hiring a number of people over the next few months, so if
you like the sound of that - [https://micro-bit-educational-
foundation.workable.com/](https://micro-bit-educational-
foundation.workable.com/) )

------
brightball
Honestly, I tend to be pretty satisfied by just about any job where I'm
trusted to do what needs to be done.

The work where I've been frustrated has tended to be in places where there are
hard responsibility walls between what needs to be fixed and who's allowed to
fix it - which is an especially big deal if you've been a student of project
management for about 14 years but your "role" is a developer.

------
Mc_Big_G
I started teaching myself programming when I was a systems admin. I worked at
a "Just in Time" part sequencing company that sequenced and delivered parts to
the Jeep plant. Our contract with Jeep stipulated that we would be charged
$10,000 per minute if we were responsible for shutting down the line. We had a
custom application that printed labels from Zebra printers (about 50 of them)
that were then scanned by handheld scanners and told the warehouse workers
which part to pick next.

The dependencies for this was our phone lines, which were used to receive the
"broadcast" from Jeep, our corporate WAN/LAN, a local Oracle database and a
few other local servers. Our custom application had various processes built-in
for emergency situations like losing connectivity, the database failing etc...
Over the years, we had a few outages where the database was corrupted or our
phone lines were down and it was a mess but we survived.

I wanted to learn programming and decided to write a Perl script that we could
use to print labels and manually sequence parts with nothing but the
"broadcast" file from Jeep. No WAN, LAN, phone lines, database or custom
application required. Basically replacing a multi-million dollar system with a
Perl script in case of a catastrophic failure that would likely never occur.
This was not in my job description and definitely wasn't supported by
corporate.

So, one day while we were in the middle of a problem with the database,
unbeknownst to us, the local utility company was doing some work outside of
our offices and severed our data lines with a backhoe. No WAN. No LAN because
all traffic was routed through remote corporate servers. No "broadcast" from
Jeep. And the Oracle database was still down.

We ran production for 17 hours using the first program I ever wrote, a floppy
disk hand-delivered from Jeep containing the broadcast data, a Dell laptop and
a single Zebra printer. This theoretically saved my company $10.2 million.

------
soneca
Not sure it will help with your decision, but mine has been a website for my
mom to sell her handcraft goods.

It is a simple, ugly (I'm not a good designer) website that showcase her
products (dolls, purses, patchwork, etc), so she can show people.

She is 70+ years old and getting a lot of joy of her handcrafting, this helped
her hobby even more important for her and added a lot to her general well-
being.

------
dwdf11
Contributing to big open source projects like the Linux kernel since one
learns a ton of new things from the code every day and it's run everywhere in
the world, which is a nice reward that ones contributions can make an impact.

------
paulcole
There’s a bike valet service at a hospital in Portland. About 300 people use
it every day to get to work. I made the web app and a few other tools using
Google Apps Scripts that make it easy for the valet attendants and customers
to check their bikes in and out, send automated emails and text messages.

It’s fun to have made something that so many people actually use and that I
hope makes the world a little bit better. Plus I’m a completely self-taught
programmer (my day job is content strategy) and it was rewarding to work on a
bigger project than the little scripts/games/etc. I usually make for myself.

~~~
oddlyaromatic
Google Apps Script is great for tools like this: I have used some at work for
a while to manage gig listings for a musician... just the tiny bit of
automation happening at midnight let's them add shows via a Google form and
forget all about them, knowing that geocoding, and removing of old shows, and
other funny business, will all happen without them needing to maintain it. BUT
if they ever do need to modify a show, they are dealing with a google sheet,
which they understand.

~~~
paulcole
Yep that’s pretty much exactly why they wanted it built around a spreadsheet.
Before they had an app somebody built and never maintained. It was buggy and
the data was more or less inaccessible.

Now with the spreadsheet they not only have access to the data when/if they
want it, it’s also super easy to roll back if something goes haywire.

------
thom
Recovering from startups, I turned towards football (soccer) analytics for
something fun to do with programming/machine learning skills. I eventually got
hired to spend a Summer helping out with recruitment at a football club in
Europe, and the first player we signed (from a basically unknown team) became
a fan favourite, and then got his first national call-up, and he went on to
win a major international trophy. Can't really take credit for his
achievements, but that final was the most satisfying moment of my career to
date.

~~~
reefoctopus
Who was it?

Also, where did you get the data? Was it free?

~~~
bobochan
I do not know where thom got data, but I have used soccer data from Opta
(optasports.com) and it was pretty amazing to use. They have made some data
available at different times, and they seem very helpful to work with if you
are doing research. I worked on a project with a small sample of data that
caught the interest of an MLS club. They had purchased a license for a much
bigger dataset from Opta, so it definitely seems like something that clubs
budget for.

~~~
thom
Yeah, MLS clubs are on average more open and clued up to this stuff than other
leagues - MLS Cup winners Toronto being a great example, with an analytics
department led by ex-Opta analyst Devin Pleuler.

~~~
bobochan
Yeah, but don't rub it in... I'm a Montreal supporter.

Allez, allez allez, allez Montréal!

------
arca_vorago
I would have to say the time my contracting company got a gig to take over a
t1 datacenter after a debacle and make it t2. Working on big, infrastructure
level routers and switches, learning all the meeting-room-politics side of
such a project, and learning the other intracacies of a datacenter that I
"controlled" was extremely satisfying professionally and personally. On both
the network engineer side and on the sysadmin side it felt the most raw and
pure, close to the internet if that makes any sense.

Finally, I have to say some of the most rewarding personal experience has been
working for extremely smart people. While working at a genetics lab I had the
opportunity to learn from a pioneer in the sequencing field who got fed up
with academia and was going capitalist. While working at an electrical motor
company I got the oportunity to learn from one of the best devs I've ever
known, a scala dude, and to learn from the what seemed to be the _heir to the
throne_ of the business and an extremely accomplished electrical engineer and
scientist. I've also learned from and worked with some of the best warriors
and leaders on the planet during my time in the Marine Corps.

I consider myself lucky.

A long time ago as a child I decided I knew not everyone was perfect, but you
could learn to pickup a persons good habits and try to ignore their bad
habits. Learning from the wisdom of other people is the most rewarding thing I
can think of!

------
auto
I have to say, my current (and first, fwiw) job is quite rewarding. I work for
a company that does telemetrics and analytics in a sector of the automotive
industry. We're pretty small, and we do a lot, but it means I never get bored.

I started as an iOS dev 7 years ago, and on the job I've gotten back-end Java
experience, learned everything I know about SQL, and gotten my hands dirty in
firmware development, and learned a ton about EE in general. We design all our
hardware in house, and between the 3D printers we use for building cases and
housings, and my boss being an EE, we've done the cycle of:

Customer idea -> Prototype Board -> Firmware Development -> Customer Testing
in the field

in under 3 weeks. It obviously comes with the occasional stress, but honestly
when the alternative in my area is writing Insurance or Healthcare software,
I'll take this any day. We're a mature company that has startup tendencies and
a startup size. I'm not afraid to make mistakes, I'm not afraid to suggest new
idea/technologies, and we're constantly evolving. We rarely say no (within
reason), and we'll always give an idea a shot.

Maybe you need to find situation like mine? I know others exist, just dig into
a niche, especially ones that are in an industry where others aren't using
technology to the fullest potential.

------
Beltiras
I live in Iceland. It's a small country, only about 350.000 people live there.
Close to 250.000 are eligible to vote. The most satisfying software project I
did was a Voter Assistance Application that got used by around 70k users
before the 2013 parliamentary elections.

I am currently working on a program that predicts Alzheimer's progression from
the data of a standard EEG. I am quite sure that it will change the lives of
many people. I still think wistfully about 2013 thou......

------
oddlyaromatic
Last year I lead a project called Paratransit Pal to enter AT&T's Civic Coding
Challenge in Atlanta ... the project was all about improving accessibility and
clarity of information about trips for users with cognitive disabilities. But
it was still basically a hackathon project, which doesn't help many people
unless we actually roll out a full production version. (We're working on
that!). The twist is that we won the competition, and the whole team had
agreed in advance to donate any winnings. So our prototype app for people with
developmental disabilities generated $34,000 in donations to organizations in
our area who DIRECTLY HELP those people (and another $6,000 towards
programming tuition in Mexico, where one of our team members was from).

We have written this up here: [https://medium.com/paratransit-pal/paratransit-
pal-won-40-00...](https://medium.com/paratransit-pal/paratransit-pal-
won-40-000-at-at-ts-atlanta-civic-coding-challenge-and-gave-it-all-to-
charity-30bba157d92d)

Right now we are trying to find our niche and cater specifically to those who
are left out of UI solutions that target the general user. But even if, like
most projects, this does end up fizzling out, it has already done some good
and not just been a dead end.

>The best bit about being a developer I've found is when working directly with
the customer who is in some distress and the look on their face when you solve
the problem and make their life easier, even if it was easy to solve. I'd love
to find something where every day was like that!

AGREED!

------
barbs
I made a port of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup to Android on a whim, mostly
because I just wanted to play it on my phone.

I didn't really know how to do it at first, but I'd seen similar games had
been ported to Android (Nethack, Angband) so I figured it was theoretically
possible.

There was a lot of trial and error, and I learned a lot about the NDK in the
process. Lots of interesting technical challenges. I remember the first time I
successfully ran the binary - I'd replaced all the output calls with just
logging calls to check that the compiled binary was running properly, so I
could see the logs spelling out the title screen of the game. It was a real
"It's alive!!" moment.

There were lots of other challenges involved in getting the display up and
running efficiently, but once I had a decent application running I felt so
accomplished. I felt like I could make just about anything, solve any problem,
with software.

The app has about 6000 active users at the moment, and has been downloaded
over 100 000 times. It's all open-source, of course. I update it every now and
then to keep it up to date with the releases. I get the odd email thanking me
for the port, requesting features, or even offering me money to thank me. I've
accepted a couple of PRs as well.

It's not hugely popular and it's just a little game, but it's a little
reminder of what I can accomplish if I put my mind to it.

[https://github.com/michaelbarlow7/dungeon-crawl-
android](https://github.com/michaelbarlow7/dungeon-crawl-android)

------
mjfern
KidBright USA at [https://kidbrightusa.org](https://kidbrightusa.org). There's
a significant hunger problem in America's public schools. KidBright USA seeks
to end hunger in the classroom so all children can learn and succeed. We
launched a healthy snack program back in August and are currently serving
snacks to 22 classrooms and 450 children. We're gearing up to expand further
in the fall.

------
simplyinfinity
One of the most rewarding things i've done recently is transfer my knowledge
about devops obtained while at a mid sized company (~600ppl) and setting up
the entire ci & cd pipeline for a small startup ( <10 ppl).

Also, to my observation what has a huge impact on my statisfaction, is seeing
what you made in the wild or just a recognition from colleagues/clients by
saying "thank you for the good work".

------
clemlais
Sadly just my blog at [https://blog.claisne.io](https://blog.claisne.io). It's
not much but seeing users visiting on google analytics is quite rewarding !

~~~
oddlyaromatic
Wow I like your blog! The landing page is really nice. I did, though, get very
distracted by the text-shadow on the headings and links. It makes me feel like
I have something on my glasses or something. Everything else looks beautiful
to me and the projects look awesome.

~~~
clemlais
Thanks for the kind words. Makes me want to write another entry. I'm sorry for
the text-shadow, I tend to overuse them! The code is available here
[https://github.com/claisne/claisne.io](https://github.com/claisne/claisne.io)
if any of you is interested.

------
o1lab
Xmysql: One command to generate REST APIs for any MySql database.

[https://github.com/o1lab/xmysql](https://github.com/o1lab/xmysql)

This has been a fun project that I worked on last year. I started to learn
backend but felt the process of creating rest apis can be improved. And I
started to work on Xmysql. It is written in nodejs.

------
stestagg
[https://pythonjobs.github.io/](https://pythonjobs.github.io/)

It was surprisingly simple to set up, cost basically nothing (github handle
hosting & process, and like the concept).

Possibly helps people out :). Although it was built to fill the gap of the
python.org job board that is now working, so we're not promoting it actively

------
robbiethegeek
I joined the USDS 2 years ago and the first team I joined was at the
Department of Veterans Affairs and we worked on digitizing the 1010EZ form.
This form is how veterans apply for health care benefits and we were able to
successfully launch this form and use this project as an example. We continue
to work on how veterans interacted with the VA digitally. Since it was
launched there have been over 340,000+ submissions this is the most rewarding
thing I have worked on in my career. President Obama talked about this project
to the Disabled Veterans of America in 2016
[https://youtu.be/vAmRl0Pzrkg?t=38m43s](https://youtu.be/vAmRl0Pzrkg?t=38m43s)
and that was super humbling. Think about joining us!
[https://www.usds.gov/join](https://www.usds.gov/join)

------
sailfast
Writing and implementing software that helps save lives (including hands-on
training / usage).

Simple upgrades / techniques can really improve crisis response, mission
comms, common operating picture, and real-time situational awareness for
decisionmaking.

Helping larger organizations that perform these actions work in faster ways
can also be painful as hell, but the end result is definitely rewarding.

You could do this for a non-profit to help with rescue efforts. However,
Department of Defense activities and other first responder-type organizations
are especially rewarding if you're closer to the mission end of things and you
can see clear results. Defense Digital Service is doing some of this work I
believe.

Outside of that, working in/with government to build software that help
citizens and improves governance is a really excellent way to spend one's time
and is quite rewarding.

------
kevinconroy
Switching to the nonprofit sector where, surprisingly, there's a lot of
interesting use of technology. Knowing that my efforts have resulted in poor
kids going to school, refugees getting hot meals, and hundreds of other
similar outcomes has keep me blissfully happy with my job for 11 years now
(longer than I'd ever thought I'd say at one place).

If you are interested in making a similar switch, here are some resources:

* [https://www.idealist.org/](https://www.idealist.org/) * Look at career pages for any nonprofit listed here: [https://www.ctosforgood.org/](https://www.ctosforgood.org/)

(Disclaimer: I work at GlobalGiving.org, but we're not hiring. I'm just keen
to get more talented people in the nonprofit sector! AMA!)

------
FigBug
Started an open source project Miranda IM. Even though I didn't work on it
long, it's cool to see the project is still active 18 years later. I continued
to use it for a long time, but I no longer use any instant messaging which is
kind of sad in itself.

~~~
adaszko
It was a superb piece of software back when I used it. Huge kudos!

------
scandox
For me longevity is the key. When I see systems that still do their thing
after a long time. I had a backend EPOS system that ran for 11 years, a
pensions system that is still being built upon 17 years on (though that could
have an element of a Ship of Theseus[1] about it) and genealogical search
system that is running still after 13 years at a library.

The last one I didn't even know about except someone mentioned to me they'd
gone to the library and done a search and so I had a sneaky visit myself and
saw it was the same old dog of a local network PHP website...

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus)

------
kqr
Personal tutoring.

\- [X] Away from typical enterprise development

\- [X] Doing something worthwhile

\- [X] Helping people solve problems

\- [X] Their face when _they solve their own problems_

\- [X] Make their life easier

Personal tutoring is hands-down the most rewarding job I have had. The job is
free coffee, chatting with cool people about physics/maths/computing science
and generally just having a good time. And they are seriously frickin'
grateful for it, because for some weird reason their performance starts
magically going through the roof.

The only major drawback is that at least where I know, there are no programs
offering personal tutoring to the less fortunate, so you end up in a bunch of
fancy families with pretty houses. Maybe not the people who need tutoring the
most.

------
tyingq
Building an 8 billion+ dollar revenue website in the early nineties. It was
the wild west, and we invented our own sort of FastCGI equivalent using NSAPI
to serve millions of users on just 4 modest Solaris/Sparc boxes.

Mostly everyone else was doing old school CGI, one process per request, with
the obvious cost and performance issues. Corba based, and antiquted looking
now, but it was impressive back then.

We had our warts, but the revenue/cost ratio was crazy. It was nice to be a
hero for a couple of years.

I've been lucky a few times over since then to be on interesting projects, but
that was the last time I felt like I was on a world-leading team.

Big thanks to Netscape for NSAPI. Very prescient.

------
blueatlas
First job. Writing 6502 assembler for a GTE integrated voice/data PBX system.
We cross compiled on some IBM mainframe across the country, burned the ROMs by
hand, debugged with in-circuit emulators and a forgotten real-time backtrace
device from, I think, Tektronics.

The lessons learned still apply today - machine level thinking, memory
management, writing efficient code, etc. And it was the only time I actually
had a mentor - actually, a bunch of them. Oh, and the best manager I've ever
had. Smart people that were willing to give of their time. They understood
that if you were going to build a product, you also have to build the people.

------
k1ns
Definitely my current endeavor, bastions [0]. It's the first side project that
I've taken this far and I can't wait to see where I can take it from here. In
a sentence, bastions allows website owners to easily and automatically test
their website. Think testing out contact forms, sales forms, SSL certificates,
functionality, etc, in just a few minutes time. It's been rewarding because
I've done it all myself and have learned a lot along the way.

I say go for it when it comes to starting your own thing. It's hard, but it's
rewarding.

[0] [https://bastions.co](https://bastions.co)

------
rodolphoarruda
BA/Project Manager to a startup in the EDU market. I had the chance to work in
a very heterogeneous team composed of psychologists, lawyers and software
engineers.

The set of products were quite visionary and "ahead of their time". I came to
see equivalent products years later when I moved to a global company, so that
gave me a special feeling that, back then, I was working on something really
futuristic, and that is in some way rewarding.

I worked from home, and it was just when my first kid was borne. Work-life
balance was great, and I have no doubt it helped me stay motivated and
productive.

------
edpichler
Once, I did a small change on a security software, including a new feature,
then I went to update servers in loco, on our clients office.

I went there, and the people of security (my users), once they discovered why
I was there, they got very very happy, their eyes were brightening, and
started to make calls to their colleagues to tell the great news.

The feature I included on that version was very easy, did not took more than 2
hours to me to develop, but for them, it had a great value.

That day was the first time I remember that I was doing a meaningful work,
literally my software was improving people lives.

------
christophilus
But yeah. One of the most satisfying jobs I had was one that allowed me to re-
write a product suite from scratch. The old one was just... unbearable. A
friend of mine and I sat down and rewrote a suite of credit union products
(teller, loan, home-banking, audio-banking, etc). Took us a few months to get
the first product out the door, and a couple of years to get the entire suite
done.

When our customers (and prospective customers) saw the new products, they said
things like, "Oh, thank God!" It was pretty rewarding, to say the least.

------
xenophonf
I didn't really start to feel a sense of job satisfaction or team spirit until
I began working in the healthcare, biosciences, and educational sectors. Sure,
I'm just the IT guy. I'm not actually arms-deep in some kid's guts, trying to
save their life, but the work I do acts as a catalyst, a force multiplier for
the doctors and nurses and scientists and technicians who do directly care for
people. I personally find great meaning in being part of their work.

------
Random_Person
I recently adopted a codebase that (of course) was a mess... I can confidently
make that statement as the end users were extremely frustrated with the lack
of usability. The front end was just as bad as the back end.

So, I spent 2 months repairing features, rebuilding a few, refactoring quite a
bit and on launch day of my updates I received an email from an end user that
said:

"You are the best and this is the smoothest it's ever been"

I printed that email and hung it above my whiteboard. Felt AWESOME.

------
lostmsu
Stack window manager
([https://losttech.software/stack.html](https://losttech.software/stack.html))
- which I launched on HN about a year ago.

I've always wanted to have a customizable tiling window manager for Windows,
but the ones I found were outdated and did not cover all needs. I used to
install GridMove the first thing on any new Windows installation, until it
started failing me due to lack of HiDPI support.

I had some experience with WPF and XAML, which is a .NET's layout language. It
is very flexible. Grids, lists, stacks, expandable containers, input driven
animations, two-way data bindings - you name it. Also, many Windows-based
desktop developers are already familiar with XAML. So it became the natural
choice for my window manager's layout definition language. I just added
grouping windows into tabs, and autostacking to the latest version.

The reason I mention it here is that I receive a lot of very positive feedback
about it from various people. I've got some really inspiring mail (totally
unexpected). One person even excused himself for not speaking my native
language - so he could have expressed his happiness about the new superpower
to tidy his desktop better.

------
SatvikBeri
This is a bit trivial compared to others, but it was building a simple
compiler for my friends who were working on a video game. They'd written up
the scenes in great detail in a structured format, and I built the compiler to
turn those scenes into code. It was super fun because I was working with
people I knew, on a project with very little pressure, learning something I'd
never worked with before (my background is in Data Science.)

------
juliansamarjiev
Finally pulling the trigger and starting my own business
([https://weardulo.com](https://weardulo.com)).

We launched 6 months ago after 1 year in product development and I've been
enjoying every bit of it. All the disciplince and sacrifices that it takes,
gives me the feeling that finally my ambitions are being mapped by my actions
of actually doing and building.

Every small success and every obstacle is welcomed and maximised.

------
EnderMB
For me, it was working on a solo project for a large charity in the UK. They
were releasing a service in 18 months time that hooked up to a bespoke API,
and I was very keen to ensure that we built something robust and simple.

It was a lot of hard work, and throughout the project I had felt that things
weren't going to go well. The deadline for certain bits was pushed back, and I
overheard some moans from one of the junior devs about how things were set up,
but we persevered. After spending time with the client, I had the feeling that
they had severely underestimated the amount of load they'd receive, so much of
the architecture was built around clever caching, and reducing load on the
API. I also wanted to keep things really basic, so that anyone could take over
the project and build on top of it.

We made the final (hard) deadline, and the site went live. We went to London
to meet the client on go-live day, and we sat there watching the usage stats,
and initially thought that there was a mistake when we saw 5000 concurrent
users on the site over lunch. They were getting millions of users a day, and
IIRC the site was paid for after two weeks. There were some issues, and we got
a bit scared when they said they had to set up a brand-new call centre to deal
with website issues, but at that scale we discovered that this call centre was
dealing with less than 0.1% of users, so everyone deemed the project a
success.

It was a fairly typical project, but it was great to be able to lead a project
from start to finish, and to have everyone happy. Most importantly, it was the
first time I actually felt proud of my dev abilities. I could finally claim to
have built something that loads of people use and rely on.

------
royalghost
In my experience, consulting work of about ~ 1 year duration has been the most
fulfilling project I have ever worked. It's not that I did not enjoy doing my
own startup, but you have to give too much of your personal time and energy.

I had the opportunity to work with one of the government agencies, where I
joined as a Lead Consultant and had to curve out the architecture, technology
stacks, write boilerplate codes as platform, hired 2 Developers, work with the
client to develop mockup, convert business into technical requirements, do
hands-on development, make presentation to the clients for each iteration,
rollout product, give training to end users and finally give credit to the
team to have accomplished all these.

So, essentially it's like building a product but you will be doing all these
while someone is paying you and without having to go through the financial
stress. I have found this to be a great advantage over the startup.

I often envy the life of high end consulting hands-on architect who go to
conferences for training, speaking, write Proof of Concept projects on new
architectures/technologies, write books for various publishers and I am sure
they must be earning more than any startup including equity!

------
studenttt
When I quit a programming job in industry to work as a lab programmer at a
university. Loved it so much I am now pursuing a PhD in hopes that I can
always find work in research.

Reasons: \- more flexible work hours than industry \- more flexible work
topics, basically work on what you find interesting at the moment \- it's nice
to be surrounded by the young and curious rather than the business-
savvy/practically-minded grown-ups of the world

------
kentf
Raising kids.

Giving them the chance to think and develop ideas, based on my foundation is
the most exciting and important thing to me. I can't wait to see what they do.

------
jayfk
The best thing for me was starting [https://pyup.io](https://pyup.io)

Working with developers is such a refreshing thing to do!

------
2474
Nothing like building on-board flight software but...

A small application built on headless Drupal with a React front-end that
allows us to build pared down versions's of our College's websites to be used
on touch screens at various events.

While not totally exciting it was my first opportunity in higher-ed to be able
to lead my own project, build a React application from scratch using various
tools like Webpack, Babel, PostCSS, etc.

------
gwbas1c
Before I answer the question: My most fun job was when I tried starting a
company. Unfortunately, the company was a disaster and I never made any money.
Thus, it wasn't fullfilling.

My most fulfilling / rewarding job is my current. I'm the desktop client
architect for Syncplicity. We do enterprise grade file synchronization.

In 2011, I went looking for a good alternative to Dropbox and I found the
industry, as a whole, immature. I decided the only way I'd use such a product
was if I worked on the product itself, this way I could personally fix the
kinds of bugs that I anticipated such a product would have.

There were ups and downs, but life is never perfect. Overall, I genuinely
enjoy working on the product, and the people I work with are great. I've been
able to find new challenges within the role, both technical and social. Unlike
when I ran a startup, I'm actually getting paid!

IMO, my advice is: find a kind of product that you want to use, but where the
product space is very immature. Join a company (or start a company) where you
can make a tangible impact on the product itself so that it suits your needs.

------
baud147258
A few project comes to mind:

First in my internship in an investment company. I was working on a tool used
by the traders, I had to work on the support and monitoring system, which was
used by the technical support of the application. Since this system was low-
priority, so I was the only one working on it while I was there. The few
feature I developped, like reporting which user were connected, states of the
servers and less lags in the reporting, were well-received and helped those
who did the technical support.

In another company I also worked on a system to generate reports from Jira.
The work I've done lowered the time necessary to generate a report (from 2h to
10 min) and added some information to the report.

Last it was for daily email notification, which were sent by hand, from an
excel list, which contained dates & email adress which had to receive the mail
that day. I wrote a small java program which opened the file, found the email
adresses for that day, connected to the email server and sent the emails. Cut
a daily task of a friend from 10 min to 30s.

------
jqbx_jason
Great question! I was in a rut with my old job also when I started working on
JQBX ([https://www.jqbx.fm](https://www.jqbx.fm)). It's a platform for sharing
music in real time with others via Spotify. The reason I started was that the
"real time" technical challenges were new to me and fun to solve.

But more importantly as time went on I got to rediscover my love of music and
start a really cool community. Most of the people I meet on there tell me they
have been looking for something like this for years and that because of JQBX
they've been able to reconnect with some of their past music buddies. So
that's pretty rewarding.

That being said I've tried starting some other fun projects that didn't flesh
out- but it's always worth the experience IMO. So if I were you I'd ask "what
do I really like" and then "how can I apply my knowledge to enter that space
somehow" and then start hacking away. Goodluck w/ the new projects :)

------
vbezhenar
Our company wanted to defend their database. It was shipped as part of product
(something like dictionary), so without further protection it was extremely
easy to dump the database. I decided to encrypt the database. But obviously
smart enough person could just disassemble the encryption and extract the key.
So I implemented my own simple JavaScript-like programming language, built a
compiler for that language which compiles it to some complicated bytecode,
implemented a VM for this bytecode and implemented encryption routines using
that language. Now to reverse-engineer encryption cracker must write his own
disassembler and I tried hard to defend against hacker just calling the blob
as a whole (though probably it was the best attack vector if you ask me).
While this defense wasn't perfect, AFAIK it worked and this compiler and VM
project was very interesting for me, especially because I used Scala for
compiler and it turned out as a perfect language for this task.

------
wilsonnb
The very first program I wrote was a game for the TI-83+ graphing calculator
where the calculator picked a random number and the player had to guess the
number. After each guess, the calculator would tell you if you were too high
or too low.

I've never had a more enjoyable experience writing a program than that. There
were no rules or good practices to follow. I didn't even know what most of the
TI-BASIC commands did.

There was no version control, no documentation, no compiler, no wondering if I
was using the appropriate framework, and no real goal in mind. It was,
possibly, the only time I've ever played with a computer in the sense that a
child plays with things.

I didn't write another program until I switched from an unrelated major to
computer science during my second year of college and at first, some of that
magic was still there.

It's now entirely gone. I'm not sure if I will ever enjoy programming a
computer again. Luckily, I'm still young so there is time for me to do
something else with my life.

------
mindcrime
In many ways I'd say it was my time as a volunteer firefighter. I spent about
a decade (basically 1992-2002) volunteering with Civietown VFD and/or Supply
VFD in Brunswick County, NC, and with New Hope VFD in Orange County, NC.

Over the course of that time I held every position from "probie" to acting
Fire Chief, responded to hundreds (maybe thousands, not sure) of calls ranging
from motor vehicle accidents, to brush fires, structure fires, medical
emergencies, and WAY too many false automatic alarm activations - plus an
array of miscellaneous calls. I had the opportunity to become an NC Fire &
Rescue Comission certified Instructor with qualifications to teach Firefighter
I & II certification classes, LP Gas Firefighting, and Incident Command. I was
almost killed (or at least badly injured) on a few occasions - once when the
brakes went out on an engine I was driving while responding to a call, and a
couple of near misses with flashovers while doing interior attacks.

There were some crazy adventures in there, some really good days, some not so
good days, but I've always loved the fire service and I don't regret any of
the time I spent doing that stuff, even though there was zero financial reward
for it. And more importantly, I'd like to think we were able to help some
people here and there. Out there, somewhere, is a family that is living in
their home today, because of the job we did.

Years later I wrote a Quora answer that become my highest upvoted answer and
eventually wound up being published on Forbes.com. Anybody interested in fire
fighting and fire engines might find this interesting.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/08/15/what-do-all-
th...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/08/15/what-do-all-the-controls-
on-a-fire-engine-truck-do/)

------
donmatito
I have been blessed that the last 3 projects I worked on (roughly past 3
years) were the most rewarding of my professional life.

\- a simple hack to connect two Slack teams, just to learn the Slack API,
turned into my first solo project to go from ideation, MVP, scaling, pricing
(oh god pricing is hard), marketing etc

\- helping an education activist spread her new approach to kindergarten
education. Not hard technically (built a static page website, a Discourse
forum, and organized a few conferences). But judging by the educators'
community feedback, it's the most useful I've been in my life per unit work

\- joining an early stage startup as CTO, to provide great insurance coverage
to freelancers. A project that is at a trifecta of great team, business
opportunity, and real social impact to help the "future of work" go in the
right direction

------
Schwolop
The two instances that are equal rank of the most fulfilling work I've ever
done have three key things in common - a small cross-functional team,
emotional investment in the outcome, writing software that makes hardware do
something interesting. The next closest instance missed that emotional
investment (it was _just_ work) and even though everything else was great, it
wasn't fulfilling enough.

The first was my Ph.D. writing path planning algorithms for autonomous
vehicles. We drove robots autonomously across an entire farm. We ran trials
combining data from ground and aerial vehicles in real-time. I flew in a
helicopter telling the pilot where to go based on instructions from a GUI I
wrote that was receiving data from the ground vehicle running my path planning
code, sending its data back up to me via a datagram I specified and a
threading and networking library I designed. It was a great team of people,
and the core group of five of us is still in touch and sporadically working
together a decade later.

The second was the early years of my company, Cubescape, which makes Escape
Rooms that run without a human game-master. I spent my thirtieth birthday
crouched in a pile of dust debugging why a DMX controlled light wasn't
properly flashing out a morse-code sequence, and why one particular Raspberry
Pi would reboot after our strobe light kicked in. (Nope, not current draw -
turns out if you hit the right chip with the right frequency of light, the
photoelectric effect can cause a voltage drop. We covered it up with duct
tape...) These days I've mostly automated myself out of a job so even though
it's my baby, it's still less fulfilling than those early periods.

Everything else I've ever done in (work) life has been less fulfilling than
these journeys, and it's really only through a recent period of deep
introspection that I've managed to connect the dots and nail down those three
key requirements. I'm now looking for what might be next, and using those as a
filter on the opportunities - if you think your company fits, please reach
out!

------
geonnave
I Co-created a free MOOC for teaching IoT to non-technical people¹.

It was a _lot_ of work, specially trying to use an accessible language (our
target audience was students from 10yo onwards, although most enrolled people
were college students from non-STEM areas), but it absolutely paid off.

The most rewarding part was receiving the feedback from students after the
course's ending. They said things like "I can't believe I'm understanding
this", and "Weeks ago, I never imagined that such a thing [IoT] even existed,
and now I understand how it works".

So, for me, education is one of the most rewarding experiences.

¹[http://codeiot.org.br](http://codeiot.org.br). The course is in Portuguese,
but versions with Spanish and English subtitles will be available in next
semester.

------
viiralvx
I recently launched Seeker ([https://seeker.company](https://seeker.company)).
It's amazing to see people launching their own job boards and getting paid for
it, I love it. Also, made it all by myself and launched it solo, it's felt
great.

------
mherrmann
I'm cloning patio11's appointmentreminder.org in Austria. Doctors pay me to
send SMS reminders to patients. Most rewarding was when a doctor told me that
my reminders made two patients take a checkup exam in which colon cancer was
found just in time for effective treatment.

------
kzisme
How important is it that you have a fulfilling day job? I see many replies
about things outside of work being fulfilling, but doesn't work give you the
freedom to have the time/money to do the things that give you substance?

Asking since I find some things I work on are very unfulfilling.

~~~
2474
That's a personal question that you'd have to answer for yourself. Work
doesn't give you time but it does give you money. Money can assist in
providing you opportunities to do things that give you substance but it most
definitely isn't the only tool that provides that opportunity.

If you would like your work to provide fulfillment you should look for other
job opportunities. No harm from that.

If it isn't necessary then find work opportunities that allow you more
freedom, such as, flexible schedule or working remotely.

~~~
kzisme
Makes sense - I actually do work remote right now and I think that is part of
the issue for a handful of reasons.

------
evanagon
Professionally: We designed and built a program that keeps patients with
congestive heart failure out of the hospital. We had a ton of autonomy and
figured out how to get old, sick people to do new things every day. Then we
built an online tool for nurses to track their patients. This ended up
reducing days spent in the hospital and saved a ton of lives.

I’ll never go back to a less impactful job.

Personally: Working through a brutal custody battle that lasted for years and
cost as much as a college education. Never wavered from what I thought was
best for my kid, never attacked the other party, and ended up with an
imperfect but fair agreement. Kid is doing great.

Going through something this difficult ended up being the major inflection
point of my life.

------
umarniz
Disclaimer: CTO Sense Health here ([http://sense-health.com/](http://sense-
health.com/))

We make apps to help people with depression and have our apps actively used by
a small team in the biggest mental health care company in the Netherlands.

It is one of the most fulfilling place I have worked at because I get to meet
actual patients and psychologists and get to know how much impact we have on
their lives.

One of our patients messaged us one day saying how they would not be alive
today had they not found the therapy with our application. I cannot express
the feeling this brings in the team.

We are always looking for great tech talent for remote/on-site positions too
BTW (specially React and React Native)

~~~
nsgf
fyi, page breaks under firefox latest (mac os x)
[https://imgur.com/a/hZAsalA](https://imgur.com/a/hZAsalA)

~~~
umarniz
Thanks for the report! Having difficulty reproducing this on my machine but
will be running more tests on the website to spot issues :)

------
anotherevan
One from 1997, lifted off my resume:

Developed an application assisting State Revenue Office customers to produce
correct Pay-roll Annual Adjustment forms and thereby reducing the high rate of
errors that SRO customers experienced in filling out these forms. I was
responsible for the technical design and development of an MS-Windows (3.1x,
Win95, WinNT) application with a "wizard-like" interface. The application was
developed in Delphi to ensure reliability on thousands of different computers
around the state and nationally. Diskettes were distributed to 16,000 SRO
customers and 3,000 CPAs. The SRO received numerous letters of praise for
providing a service that greatly simplified a complex process.

------
crispyporkbites
I built a freestanding bookcase out of scaffolding boards and scaffold tubes
this week, first time doing anything with woodwork since high school and it's
been immensely rewarding.

It's particularly hard to work in the real world where there is no undo button
or source control. Ordering replacement parts takes a couple of days so all my
screw ups have consequences beyond wasting my time.

The end result is a bit wobbly due to some design defects/inaccuracies in
drilling, so now I need to figure out how to adapt it. Overall it's saved me
about £500 over getting a real carpenter to build me something, and I'd say
I've spent about a day on it total, so I'm probably breaking even overall.

------
georgewsinger
The most fulfilling project I've worked on: SimulaVR (a 3D Linux window
manager meant to eventually run on standalone VR/AR headsets).

[https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula](https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula)

The development has been slow and winding, but the possibility of a successful
outcome makes the work very fulfilling. In addition, the other people working
on Simula are not only extremely smart, but very open-minded about all sorts
of interesting technologies (functional programming, AR/VR, BCIs, etc). The
project itself sits at the intersection of lots of things bleeding edge in
open-source: Godot, Wayland, Haskell, etc.

------
dankohn1
After having to stay late at work to rotate our certificates after Heartbleed,
I co-founded the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative [0] to help
improve the security of OpenSSL and other open source projects. That, and
conceiving and helping build the Best Practices BadgeApp [1], were immensely
satisfying.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Infrastructure_Initiative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Infrastructure_Initiative)

[1]
[https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/en](https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/en)

------
davedx
Working for a small but growing renewable energy company. Good atmosphere,
colleagues and inpact. Not the craziest software problems to solve but
interesting enough to stay motivating. Best job out of a almost 20 year
career.

------
laurieg
Teaching math to young interested people (9-14).

It was different every lesson. The content was easy so I never had any
confusion about what I was actually teaching. There was a lot of freedom to
teach how I wanted, so I could be creative with what I taught. Also, the hours
were short so I was always fresh when teaching.

I contrast this with teaching languages. Language teaching is a hard slog.
There is so much more you need to know when it comes to speaking a second
language. Progress is incredibly slow compared to math, and people often move
backward. Lack of progress is demotivating to students and teachers alike.

------
kureikain
I was working on an weather app. My wife use that app personally to track her
health.

The app has some fun social activity and itself is very rewarding to use. The
app itself maybe simple and the social interaction and a focus community make
it very fun to use.

Beside that, I was trusted by the founders and given time to do many
experiment: I have implement some really cool stuff in Go/Elixir.

It also open my mind. I used to hate MongoDB but through repeatedly learning I
discover MongoDB was a way different in 2011.

In the end, I think the freedom of technologies decision, trust, and see the
work you do affect your close relative are very rewarding.

------
disease
By far the most fulfilling work I've done is the seven games I've created for
the Ludum Dare game jam. I love creating the art and music for these even if
I'm not very good at it. I also love the period after the jam where you can
play everyone elses games while people play and comment on your game as well.

I'd love to pursue this hobby further but usually come home from my enterprise
dev job feeling exhausted. I've considered getting a job in game development
but it would likely result in a serious decrease in salary as well as a
significant increase in time spent at work.

------
drelihan
Building the career fair website for my college while in school. There was a
lot to be desired, but thousands of students had accounts and uploaded
resumes, hundreds of companies registered and paid over $500k per year through
the site for registration fees/sponsorships/etc. I was given a single physical
server that was locked in a closet somewhere on campus. It was ~2001, so I had
to build pretty much everything from scratch on the LAMP stack ( and keep it
running ).

I have since built systems orders of magnitude more complex, but you always
keep a special place in your first.

------
thenipper
I built a coordination site for NGO/volunteer orgs in Puerto Rico who are
responding Hurricane Maria. The goal was to replace paper records and tracking
with something a bit more modern. The project was fun, had a direct impact on
the ground and really helped me develop some new skill sets. Plus it ended up
getting me a promotion in the end which doesn't hurt...

Besides that when I can write an R or Python script that automates a process
for someone the look on their face is always amazing. What can take them half
a day can then be accomplished in a minute or two...

------
crabasa
Every day I wake up and talk to engineers who are having trouble getting
noticed either because they have untraditional backgrounds (non-STEM degree)
or because they just don't understand how to market themselves or network.

The conversations are amazing, sometimes sad, but very motivating because it
reinforces how broken hiring is and how much good could be done by helping
engineers to better connect to one another.

Finding this mission was important for me because I had worked on purpose-
driven teams in the past and I knew that's what made me happy. Best of luck
finding yours!

------
LoSboccacc
Small web game: increstellar.com - tge game is okish, the technical aspect
probably on the side of bery naive, but I finished it and player interacted
actively, which was incredibly novel experience to me. Ideas I tought were fun
were shot down, while the community provided an endless stream of
possibilities to improve areas that I never have considered.

For the simple incremental structure it has I got quite the engagement, with a
thousand of players and an average session of 20minutes it was far beyond my
expectations.

I also got back a ton of knowledge on the topic, which is nice.

------
fruzz
I created/deployed a system to track a fleet of aircraft in real-time, that
then messaged individuals when anomalous conditions (plane crash) was
detected. It was inexpensive to run and reliable.

In terms of what's most gratifying though, honestly, giving workshops or
volunteering in a way that empowers others. I give workshops to trans and
gender diverse individuals. I've volunteered with Technovation to get young
women into tech. I've done one-on-one mentorship. That's the stuff that makes
me feel better and none of that is paid work.

------
IAmEveryone
Organising a two-week student event, over New Year's, for about a thousand
students.

Got about two hours of sleep per night (admittedly caused in part by my
refusal to skip the parties). Had to carry heavy equipment during the day,
then suddenly write a major speech to defuse an ugly situation.

Complete mental and physical exhaustion. Great team. When we meet now, it
feels like a Veteran's reunion. Everyone on that team has been looking for
something comparable in their day jobs since.

------
raybb
For me it would be a small tool I made called easy Gmail scheduler
([https://github.com/RayBB/easy-gmail-
scheduler](https://github.com/RayBB/easy-gmail-scheduler)). In retrospect it
wasn't that complicated but it was my first fully completed project. When
others started making pull requests I knew that I had made something that was
actually useful to people and that was exciting for me!

------
clementmas
I really enjoyed organising non-profit bike expeditions (Berlin to Copenhagen
and Copenhagen to Oslo) to help people take the first step out of their
comfort zone. Planning to do more of this.

IT-wise, I stopped contract work and built TravelMap. It's not going to save
the world but I find it really fulfilling.
[https://travelmap.net/blog/travelmap-
story](https://travelmap.net/blog/travelmap-story)

------
mettamage
My most serious and rewarding job was freelancing for the New York Code +
Design Academy. It's a coding school. It paid a freelance fee to me, since
that is how they do projects and I really liked it. Teaching comes quite
natural to me.

It did set my graduation back by a year since I was there full-time and didn't
focus on my study program anymore. But now they don't operate in The
Netherlands anymore, so I can go back to my studies and finish it.

------
Method-X
I've been working for about a year and a half on
[https://edabit.com](https://edabit.com) which started as a side project for
me to learn React. Not only did I end up learning a bunch of new frameworks /
libraries, but seeing the application help thousands of people learn a
programming language has been the most rewarding experience of all.

------
hellojebus
Definitely would be automating monthly reports at our company. Prior to
building the system, it would take a week or two to collate all the data for
our 200+ clients.

The system integrated with all our third-party analytics platforms that could
handle all of our reports with a client of a button. Went from 1-2 weeks to
1-2 seconds.

Now we keep adding more and more integrations, and even our competitors want
to use it.

------
pvaldes
A complex question with many layers. I'm very satisfied of a lot of small
steps that does not mean a dime for other people, or each time I can find an
unorthodox solution for a small problem. Digging holes and putting things on
them is very rewarding :-).

But the feeling of having modestly helped to save a few lifes, would score
very high in the list. It plays in a different league.

------
savrajsingh
Getting people a product they love is a great feeling — my current gig is
super interesting because customers love our product, and it’s also one of the
easiest products for everyone around me (my friends and family) to understand
and experience: fresh, healthy food, convenience without compromise! It also
has a broad appeal — everyone on earth will at least try it.

------
vaszev
A jutalom nem lehet csupán az anyagiakra vonatkozó elismerés. Jutalom a
fejlődés, tapasztalat és a kompetenciák kiterjesztése. Ezek szerint minden
munka jutalom. Természetesen vannak emlékezetesebbek is, amelyek már-már az
ember részévé válnak. Utóbbiak közé tartozik a kezdetben FMK néven induló
projekt is, melyben együtt örülünk és sírunk, ugye David? ;-)

------
twooclock
Was working for un, eu, many "big" national companies. Most rewarding? Just
finished touch ordering food display (kind like mcDonalds) for a friend. Node,
html, works on win and linux. Had many obstacles on the way, solved all for
free. Sure I earned a beer. Priceless. There's no money to be paid if you like
what you're working on. :-)

------
jlg23
I have been working for a non-profit in the health sector for 12 years now and
only occasionally do gigs in enterprisey environments for serious money.

For me, going to bed each night, knowing lifes have been saved, has been
enough reward. That and the fact that my work is 100% remote - I am writing
this with a scotch in front of me at a North African beach ;)

------
maxxxxx
I worked for 2 years in a project in the 90s where we wanted to adapt the
Apple Newton for a particular market. We were closely connected to the devs at
Apole and it was a lot of fun to see how a technology develops and to shape
something out of a wide open space. I probably learned more during that time
than in my other 20 years of work.

------
nraynaud
I developed a project (
[https://github.com/nraynaud/webgcode](https://github.com/nraynaud/webgcode) )
and got a hundred stars, and 3 or 4 contacts for some work. It’s was good to
have some external validation. I always feel a bit useless in software
development.

------
YouKnowBetter
While not being a job perse, for me it is getting married, moving around
Europe while having a bunch of kids around and sticking to our two person
contract since 25 years.

I have done some really really cool jobs, met amazing friends, made a bundle,
lost a lot but the most rewarding project is and remains the partnership with
my SO.

------
bbayer
I have started to make games. I have teached myself Unity and started making
casual games. Most satisfying thing about game development is presenting
something fun to people and getting positive feedbacks as return. I have
learned a lot in terms of game dev, gamification, monetization, publishing
during process.

------
chrisbuc
There have been a few posts on this thread about not for profits. Anyone
interested in not-for-profit startups should look at
[https://www.nominettrust.org.uk/](https://www.nominettrust.org.uk/) whose
strapline is 'We transform lives with tech"

------
pradn
I recently realized that not only do I want to do challenging, high-impact
work, I want to be thanked for it! Knowing you made a small improvement to a
million people is one thing. But if someone says it was great to you in
person, it's really a good feeling. Satisfaction = impact + fuzzy feelings

------
KeybInterrupt
I am currently working on a side project that aims to provide the defunct on-
line / multiplayer functionality for an old game.

The positive feedback and joy I get back from the community, is really awesome
:)

Also fiddeling with unknown file Formats and stuff, reveres engineering and re
implementing defunct stuff is great fun :D

~~~
thewizardofaus
How awesome is reverse engineering! I absolutely love it.

------
tplick
My chess training tool:
[https://new.amecy.com/main/checkmate](https://new.amecy.com/main/checkmate)
There are other tools that work similarly, but I never found one that worked
just the way I wanted. So I started making my own.

------
akbarnama
Educo, a charity, were struggling to setup their website in joomla for 2
months. They had a windows hosting space and were facing issues. Helped them
to setup a wordpress installation and move them to a new linux hosting space.
Finished the work in 4 days.

------
westonplatter0
Helped an academic build out
[http://www.humantraffickingdata.org/](http://www.humantraffickingdata.org/)
to store research data related to human trafficking, supported group of 10 RAs
doing analysis.

------
overcast
Running a local food and cocktail promotion side gig. It's got me out of the
house, meeting tons of new people, chefs, bartenders, going to events. Helping
them grow their businesses and my skills in photography.

------
kenbolton
I worked summers in college as a garbage man and laborer for my town
department of public works.

My current side-hustle is guiding kayak trips with local outfitters. I am
looking forward to retiring into that.

------
rogem002
I wrote a small chrome extension to reload assets as they change.

In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t have many users, but it’s always nice
to hear from someone when it makes their day a bit easier.

------
atomical
I like helping coworkers with problems that they encounter. I point them in
the right direction and give them the reasoning behind why we should go one
route instead of another.

------
Maven911
Anyone work on something strategic that not only encompasses technology but a
shift in how the business operates, does business with it's customers etc

------
brian_herman
Ebay because I ran the business by myself I have over 200 confirmed trades and
20,000 dollars recovered in 60 days I made 5000 once.

------
michaelmwangi
Hitting the gym has been the best project I have done for the past one year..
I am now more productive and waay more confident!

------
haylem
Teaching, academic research and OSS.

------
hydandata
Creating iOS games for my daughter - hugely satisfying, moderately complex and
insanely fun.

------
krapsna
For me it was teaching African refugees how to program Java Script.

------
beamatronic
This is the interview question I ask every candidate

~~~
baud147258
How would you answer it?

------
_Codemonkeyism
Working for my wife in her startup.

~~~
swyx
how do you separate work from the relationship? in the startup she's the boss,
in marriage you are ideally equals.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
After some 'challenges' in the beginning for being together 24/7 it works
really well now for some years.

I make the technical decisions, she makes the sales decicisions and we both
compromise on product with her with the final decision.

------
mobarokaslam
Mobarokaslam@gmail.com

------
scarecrowbob
Raising my son.

Playing music with my friends.

Building a home and relationships with my partners.

Building my body and mind through long term studies of various branches of
philosophical and intellectual inquiry.

Caring for specific peoples' specific needs.

That all might sound hippy-dippy or unrealistic, but because of the history of
our economy we tend to value only monetarily compensated public labor as
"work", when in fact the domestic labor that recreates ourselves across time
(like building homes and raising children) is far more intimate and important
to our lives.

That is just my limited experience; I'm open to being wrong about that in
other people.

And that's maybe a tough set of priorities if you're working 60 hours a week
(including commute and the domestic labor that goes into maintaining yourself
for the sole purposes of being able to do paid labor).

So, as I recognized that, I optimized my for-pay labor (I'm a web dev) into a
30-hour-a-week salaried 100% remote deal with a person who is a fantastic
sales person. The work is fun and interesting, but more importantly it can be
"just about the paycheck" because the meaningful work in my life gets enough
time and attention for me to feel good about that work and see the results.

I dunno if that would work for other people, but it's been working well for
me.

~~~
dreta
How is any of this relevant to the question?

~~~
throwaway5752
I'm with you. The context was explicit and obviously intended to be work-
oriented. Obviously friends and family should rate higher than work. But this
detracts from the intended discussion.

My most rewarding professional experience have come from 1) working with a
respectful and high-standards team 2) solving a real world problem that is
either new or inadequately address by current solutions 3) where I have a
really clear idea of the value I add and see how I contribute.

~~~
scarecrowbob
I agree with you about the context.

I don't agree that many people draw the same obvious conclusion that family
and friends rate higher that paid work-- note that in your response you
explicitly draw a distinction between them that isn't necessary.

So while I understand you have an implicit bias towards saying that domestic
labor isn't work, and while I understand that this bias permeates not only the
question but our culture at large, I disagree that this bias is necessary.

And I feel like challenging that implicit bias is a worthwhile use of my time,
so thank you for allowing me to make this specific and tiny project a little
more explicit in my own mind.

~~~
throwaway5752
_So while I understand you have an implicit bias towards saying that domestic
labor isn 't work, and while I understand that this bias permeates not only
the question but our culture at large, I disagree that this bias is
necessary._

Yeah, no. I think we do all sorts of things and they are all "real work". But
it falls into different areas. This particular area was about _professional_
projects & jobs. In case this is an English language thing, it is common
vernacular to call one's paid employment "work" without making a value
judgement on other activities.

I think domestic work is extremely important and real work (and frankly,
resent the heck out of your implication otherwise). You didn't mention self-
improvement and education or charity, either, but I wouldn't be rude enough to
imply you don't value those by not including them.

------
spcial
I'm a master's degree graduate and working for around 3-4 years in different
positions, mostly consulting, engineering and some devops (so very mixed).
Actually there wasn't one project which was really inspirational (but I hope
at least that is due to the lack of experience and only working for a few
years)

Nevertheless the most inspiring project was a private project which I did with
a friend some years ago. We thought about an Android App where people could
post incidents (like terror attacks, fights or whatever) on an app and all the
people around get a push notification as well as could see on a heatmap which
areas have a high density of crimes. This was at a time where the "refugee
crisis" started and there was a public attention in terms of terror attacks
etc.

If you are interested, you can look at it here: *
[https://www.riskahead.net/](https://www.riskahead.net/) or directly on the
google app store: *
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.deke.risk....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.deke.risk.riskahead)

The project was not succesful but I learned A LOT. It was my first android app
so I did not only learn to build an App from scratch on Android but also *
Setting and maintaining a web-server with own hosted e-mail server *
Implementing a rest-api with PHP and SLIM-framework * Running Apache and a
MySQL-Server * Hosting and creating a web-site with WordPress, doing some SEO
* Little bit or marketing (while not very succesful) * tons of more lessons
learned

I finsihed my work, went home and started programming. Had a high workloard
for around half a year but it was very inspirational and I learned a lot.
Probably because I normally focus on a specific topic @work but for this
project I had to do everything on my own (in terms of technical development
and maintainance).

Would definetely do it again. But no good idea so far :-)

------
nomy99
I am a bit concerned that this post is run by a russian/chinese agency that
wants to capture project confessions. This would be an ideal intelligence
gathering post. Maybe I should tone down on the paranoia ?

~~~
gdy
Also tone down your TV

