Whats the hardest problem you've solved with Programming?

[Cogman]

I thought this might be fun to see what kinds of problems you guys have tackled. I am still in school, so my problems have been on the order of "Count the number of words in a book and total them up" or "generate a Huffman code for a text document".

So whats your pride (nightmare) programming achievement? And if NDAs, copyright, or desire to not share don't get in the way, how did you do it?

 

[jdjbuffalo]

Hello World

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

http://vixenhill.com/shutterdesigner.htm

Practically a years work of solo work there. There are other parts to that, though they're not for public consumption. The main thing I've learned is that when dealing with real world problems, be looking for the exceptions from the get go.

 

[Crusty]

I've written a real time equity trading system from the bottom up in C#, from the data to the trading to the GUI. The problem was that when I was handed the project I had never written a line of .NET code as well as never touching anything to do with real time trading. Lucky for me there was a prototype(written in Access + VBA... *shudder*) that I had which had a lot of the leg work algorithms done, it was my job to port it to C# and have a fully multi-threaded application that could be fully automated from the direct GUI or via .NET remoting.

Unfortunately that's all I can really say about it

 

[The J]

I only recently started a new job where I'm doing embedded programming, so I might be back with something else later. For now, here's a bit of self-promotion. =P

The biggest personal project I've done was writing an Oblivion plugin to add EAX to the game (using another system that lets extra commands be written for the scripting language). I've never done anything with the DirectSound or EAX SDKs before, so it definately took a while. But it was worth it when I loaded up the game, set the "cave" environment, and heard the goblins' echoes through the cave. It's completely open-source so anyone who want to look it up can do so. I don't know if linking to my thread in a different forum is allowed, so I won't do that at the moment.

 

[Kromis]

Originally posted by: The J
I only recently started a new job where I'm doing embedded programming, so I might be back with something else later. For now, here's a bit of self-promotion. =P

The biggest personal project I've done was writing an Oblivion plugin to add EAX to the game (using another system that lets extra commands be written for the scripting language). I've never done anything with the DirectSound or EAX SDKs before, so it definately took a while. But it was worth it when I loaded up the game, set the "cave" environment, and heard the goblins' echoes through the cave. It's completely open-source so anyone who want to look it up can do so. I don't know if linking to my thread in a different forum is allowed, so I won't do that at the moment.

Holy shit! That is bad ass!

 

[SamurAchzar]

Doing my own GPS device. I wrote everything from scratch, on an ARM7 processor. More than 100K lines of C code, including:

Graphics library
USB Mass Storage Device
FAT32 filesystem
GPS data handling (took some examples from the net, these geographical formats are tough)
XML SAX-type parser (support for .gpx files - both playback and recording of routes)

And of course all the low-level driver work, as well as the application itself.

It had no support for maps, and the LCD was monochrome, but it had many cool features. I remember how fun it was when I connected it with USB to my computer, copied a .gpx file into it, then went and saw my route calculated, all the waypoints loaded, etc.

It took me around 1.5 years, of off-time work (in parallel to my day job). It should have been a commerical product, for a very specific market. I had a partner dealing with the other aspect of the product (mainly mechanical design), and eventually he just didn't have what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

So the project was cased, but parts of it still live in my startup - and I learned so much doing it I don't regret a moment.

 

[clamum]

Probably the most complicated thing I worked on and was involved with the most was a networked Java game that was similar to Worms to Scorched Earth. A person could start a new network game, others joined, then the game was launched and started. The terrain was randomly generated but there was only a single "weapon" that you could use but the angle/power was able to be customized. This was for a software design class I had in school and I worked with three others on it.

At my job I've worked on way more complicated software but only to add features and maintain existing ones, and while the program I was working on was much more complicated, what I actually did wasn't that much so.

 

[BoberFett]

I worked for a company back in the mid to late 90s that was a small player in the digital legal publishing business. I wrote the bulk of the main system including it's seamless online interface (for searching the latest opinions until the next months CD came out) plus a document viewer for an SGML/HTML-esque format that included special markup for legal documents. That would have been easy nowadays just by extending an existing browser and XML, but back then the tools weren't readily available. The part I'm most proud of was the relevance ranking system that used a lot of different metrics to give pretty accurate results when searching on particular legal concepts.

Last time I talked to the president of that company my software was still in service for the CD based customers, but lots of people have since moved to their web based product.

 

[deveraux]

By comparison to the last 3 posters above me, I feel like I've not done anything

My final year project in uni involved an adaptive mesh refinement project. I wrote the bulk of the code from "scratch" including a simplistic 3D engine to help display the progress/result of the refinement in various modes e.g. wire-frame, triangles, quads etc depending on the mesh loaded. The program could also load a 3D object from a file and then refine the initial mesh however many times I need.

I managed to generate over a million triangles from a basic 5k model of a cow which looked alright and then eventually extended that into 3D refinement. Unfortunately, that took up most of my time in my final year (yes, I'm lazy -- I could have done more if I wasn't perpetually spending nearly all my free time in WoW). It would have been nice to integrate some simplistic finite element analysis into that program.