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Ben Halpern Subscriber for CodeNewbie

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What Is the Most Challenging Project You've Worked on So Far, and What Did You Learn from It?

Have you ever faced a coding challenge that made you question your abilities? Share your experience with us!

Tell us about the most challenging project you've worked on so far and what you learned from it. Did it push you out of your comfort zone? Did you learn new skills or approaches that you now use regularly? What would you do differently if you could do it again?

Let's inspire each other with our experiences and encourage each other to take on new challenges!

Top comments (10)

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Helene Voyer • Edited

It was in CEGEP (technical school), as a final project to get our diploma. The project was done over 2 semesters. We were 4, myself and 3 guys. We develop a learning system for future nurses to learn how to give meds through syringes or drips. I've coded 2D animations in Visual Basic 4 (syringes that were filling up, hand holding a syringe at an angle moving toward an arm).

It was used for several years in nursing classes.

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Matt Eland

I was given the job of cloning the major features of Microsoft Project in about 3 or 4 months as a brand-new senior developer. I told the organization that I could get it done fast, but not without bugs or issues. They agreed. They forgot this conversation and blamed me for the bugs and issues and treated it like a failure when one person was able to accomplish this on time and on budget.

I learned to say no to the unreasonable.

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Maciek Fitzner • Edited

Does it have to be webdev-related? Because before that I dabbled in gamedev, making retro point&click adventure games in a C++ based game engine called Adventure Game Studio. At some point I decided I preferred making cutscenes more than the gamey bits - and so I went on to develop music videos, coding them in-engine as I would the games.
This took me 7 months:

and drove me to insanity, and then a few blocks down.

Things it taught me - which carried over to my approach to webdev:

  • perseverance in seeking workarounds for obstacles - especially restructuring the code - and making compromises if I couldn't find one
  • to drop PNG where speed/performance is key
  • understanding the whole as layers rather than a single plane, and utilizing the layered nature (more so in graphics than code at the time, but on a general level it still applies)
  • realizing I'm incurably crazy: I love making pretty, useless things centered around basic geometric shapes, and especially with code and exactly because it's not what it was meant for.

Case in point: I went on to make a few more vids that way. Then I got into webdev - and more than making websites I got into pure CSS spheres, and music videos in just SVG (a whole story in itself).

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Aaron Reese

2 submissions, both in MSSQL.
1) I worked for a company that had 10 different ways to price their products. Before I started, they had a twice yearly bulk update of the main pricing structure which had to be run overnight. When I had finished I could recalculate all 10 pricing methods across 10.4million price points in 15 minutes
2) recently developed some code that will take an unknown SQL View and an unknown html template (varchar(max)) with vue-like interpolation placeholders and allow the user to create an XML map that tells the system when to start a new email, and within the email html body, how to iterate through multiple (unknown) nested levels of data and replace the placeholders with the correct data from the view. Under the hood it uses the map XML to create a dynamic SQL statement with sub-queries for nested elements and then passes the resultant XML to a parser procedure that constructs the html template in a temp table and keeps track of inner iterations of the template loops and maps them back to the correct XML nodes.

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Leandro RR

THIS LOOKS LIKE HELL

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Aaron Reese

it does, but I am quite proud it works.

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Code of Relevancy

Last year, I worked with Aggero ltd to build an NFT Marketplace Project on Near Blockchain. It was a challenging project for me. I had zero knowledge of Crypto and NFT when I joined the Aggero.

But I did my best to built it from Scratch using Laravel + MySQL and Rust.
I learned about Crypto and NFT space, Rust toolchain, NEAR Blockchain, MoonPay integration etc..

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Bad Request 400 • Edited

Preamble:

I wasnt tasked with it, i basically did it on my own accorrd bc. the workload before was too high and i wanted to do my job and not run sql scripts manually on those db's.

Topic

Find a performant way to duplicate reports (sql scripts) across 400 DB's and then merge the resultset into a "Sales Friendly" Excel or PDF File. Also make it so that Users have a nice Web Based UI (the later one now bites me in my behind). Also make it schedulable (ie: Sales Team Member can schedule Report A to run on all DB's over the weekend so he has the needed Files on Monday).

Was without a doubt the biggest thing i took on.
A lot of Coding a lot of Architectural (ie. how to design the Service with all the containers needed in the first place).

so long

so long

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Anthony Fung

The actual work wasn't difficult if you understood the technologies, but I once had to work on a web app built with React/Redux and LESS. I didn't even have a functional knowledge of JavaScript/HTML/CSS at the time - I knew roughly what they looked like, just not how to use them.

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NLxDoDge

Still working on the project, but working for a complete ingestion and connected platform for a bank that intakes XML/JSON/Files from people who want to do payments, we then enrich and validate the payments with 100's of business rules (government mandates etc.) we then send the authentication request to the user though another API, then call another API to do the actual transaction. And all this needs to be stored in a database to be queried for at least 2 years.

Needless to say I am learning new things every day since I started working here.