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The code I'm most proud of is:

by Ratazong (Monsignor)
on Mar 01, 2010 at 10:39 UTC ( [id://825863]=poll: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

Vote on this poll

A small script automating my daily work
[bar] 202/27%
Some production code used in my company
[bar] 215/29%
A CPAN module used by thousands of other programmers
[bar] 20/3%
An elegant implementation of a complicated algorithm
[bar] 58/8%
A really clever obfuscation
[bar] 15/2%
My first Perl program
[bar] 30/4%
A feature deep inside the PerlMonks code
[bar] 2/0%
My contributions to the Perl5/Perl6 core
[bar] 6/1%
My contributions to Parrot
[bar] 5/1%
At least 5 of the above
[bar] 22/3%
Not existent - pride is a sin
[bar] 93/13%
Something else
[bar] 75/10%
743 total votes
Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by vitoco (Hermit) on Mar 01, 2010 at 15:58 UTC

    Two years ago, every person of a working team were processing a bunch of txt files by hand, using excel, against the time (data that would be published at the website). As the deadline was really close, they asked for more monkeys from the rest of the people in the building.

    Instead of doing that in excel, I wrote a small script with some flipflops and regexprs in some minutes and processed my assigned files. Then run over the rest of the files assigned to my team, and finally, run against the whole folder, just to check that the script was OK (and found some errors in files manually generated by others).

    The same requirement would be processed again last year, so they asked for my script. Some days later, I was told that it run without problems, giving the results just in a pair of seconds!!!

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by wfsp (Abbot) on Mar 01, 2010 at 17:26 UTC
    Often the small one offs.

    Last week someone was struggling to merge a few hundred names and addresses into letters. His source was a Word doc containing a two column table. He fought Word but Word won. :-) I was able to knock it into a csv file and within half an hour he was merging with ease. Perl won!

    It was satisfying that everyone told him, "Oh, give it to wfsp he'll sort that out." And he bought me a couple of pints. :-)

    Now, as for the people who think a spreadsheet is squared paper...

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by BioLion (Curate) on Mar 01, 2010 at 13:39 UTC

    In a way, code written by someone else (who i had taught)!

    Just a something something...
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by almut (Canon) on Mar 01, 2010 at 21:35 UTC

    Projects that other people can take over without getting a headache.

    But also - admittedly sometimes at the other end of the maintainability scale - snippets of code which are so compact that people just have to sit back in awe at the magic that can be done with a couple of lines of Perl :)

    The nice thing is that Perl allows me to have both.

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by blue_cowdawg (Monsignor) on Mar 10, 2010 at 18:00 UTC

    Sometime a few jobs ago (seems like a lifetime ago to me) I started a job with a smallish company with a not too sophisticated team of Unix System Administrators. On day #2 of my employment there I noticed one of the "senior guys" there reading an email and manually selecting information from it to create accounts on various systems. What I further noticed was the information he was reading was in a fixed format in fixed columns.

    For the sake of this posting to protect the guilty I'll call this guy "Ben."

    I asked Ben why he hadn't automated this process and his reaction was to stare blankly at me and ask "how can you do that?" I told him that I'd work on the problem and get back to him on that.

    Ben then patiently explained to me that it couldn't be done because there were too many different types of systems involved and blah blah blah blah... He also told me that of a 40 hour work week he was spending 30 of those hours processing these account requests.

    Off to my cubicle I went and opened up an Emacs session and typed the ubiquitous

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict ......
    that many a script of mine had started with. The result was actually four different scripts. One that processed the requests, and three others that acted as "agents" as I called them on the VMS, Solaris and Tru-64 systems that the accounts had to be created on. Each system requrired some customization of the agent scripts and the master script communicated with the agents over a TCP/IP socket and the data going to them was encrypted using GnuPG. The master script was invoked from the same alias that the system administrators (4 of them) go their requests through. (Yeah... I know.. there's a secruity hole there.. best I could do at the time. Later a web application replaced the master)

    What made me proud of all this was the fact that I was saving 120 staff hours a week enabling the 4 SAs to do other things besides data entry. The other thing that I changed in the process was instead of setting default passwords for new accounts as was being done (which never got changed) I now gave the new users random passwords and the script emailed the login and password to the user's manager. On first login the users were required to change their password.

    There were two other side effects to all this. The first of which was I damn near gave Ben a heart attack when he realized that he hadn't gotten a new account request all day the first day I installed the master script. (Oops.. forgot to tell him... there was no change control process in place either...) The other side effect was I was given a quality award (including a very spendable Amex gift card for $100) by my vice president, He was happy over the staff hour savings.


    Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
    Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Mar 01, 2010 at 13:54 UTC

    All the lines of redundant code I haven't written, because I thought about them, and concluded that I was never gonna need them.


    Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
    "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
    In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by chexmix (Hermit) on Mar 01, 2010 at 13:44 UTC
    More like the fact that I can write code at all, when all my (pretty much wasted) education was in the theatrical arts. =^|
      chexmix, as one who also isn't working in their major anymore (I was a chemist, now I'm an engineer), there are tons of things I use from school in my daily gig. I just don't ruin my clothes with acid anymore. :)

      tubaandy
        Yep, the general state of my wardrobe improved mightily after switching to computer science, and I never poisoned myself once after that. (Jenda: not yet, though there have been days where I was close...)
        So far the only application of theater to programming I have found is my ability to be relatively convincing when handwaving: "oh, absolutely! I know what's wrong with this code and how to fix it!"

        UPDATE IN IAMBIC PENTAMETER:

        "'Zounds! What ails this code I can divine --
        and fix it, too, or else I shall resign."

      Gee, I don't feel quite so bad now - I actually got my BA in English and now I work with computers. There's not necessarily a huge difference really. Plus it gives me a good base for creative problem solving and "thinking outside the box" (although it's sometimes hard to think outside the box when you sit in a cube ;-)
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by marto (Cardinal) on Mar 01, 2010 at 10:47 UTC

    DLG2209TVX, the launch code from WarGames.

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by wazoox (Prior) on Mar 01, 2010 at 11:55 UTC
    The code I'll write later :)
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by tbone1 (Monsignor) on Mar 03, 2010 at 15:36 UTC
    It's something I wrote as a stopgap at a former job many many years ago. It's still in production because a) it works, b) the customers use it as well as the company, c) it's platform-independent, and d) it works way better on Windows than anything the VB folks did.

    Plus, it's used in a software package that helps save people's lives, so that doesn't hurt.

    --
    tbone1, YAPS (Yet Another Perl Schlub)
    And remember, if he succeeds, so what.
    - Chick McGee

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by Utilitarian (Vicar) on Mar 01, 2010 at 14:47 UTC
    Little apps that make everyone's life easier at work and a suite of modules which allow us perform performance and other checks on our software in a distributed live environment.

    Work is predominantly a Java shop with lot's of C and CSH heads about but until I arrived no one was comfortable with Perl.

    Now they use it daily, whether they realise it or not ;)

    print "Good ",qw(night morning afternoon evening)[(localtime)[2]/6]," fellow monks."
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by stonecolddevin (Parson) on Mar 01, 2010 at 20:52 UTC

    My reflector! Now I don't have to write form HTML anymore, I can point this at my DBIC schema and have it generate it for me.

    Also, this little Catalyst application I put together to talk to a PHP app and Mosso Cloudfiles' API, it's a HUGE part of this client's system now, thus, I'm very proud :-)

    mtfnpy

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by sweetblood (Prior) on Mar 01, 2010 at 22:37 UTC
    Taking another supposedly more experienced/educated programmer's code that took over 45 hours to run every month and on the same hardware getting it to run in less than an hour. That was fun!

    Sweetblood

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by pajout (Curate) on Mar 03, 2010 at 19:49 UTC
    The CPAN module, which is probably used just by me...
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by McDarren (Abbot) on Mar 01, 2010 at 14:22 UTC

      Well I'm buggered!

      Is that how you do that!

        TMTOWTDI
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by Moriarty (Abbot) on Mar 02, 2010 at 11:19 UTC

    The Code I'm most proud of is the code that I wrote that landed me my current job.

      It seems that I may have been a little quick in writing this as I was retrenched today. It seems that the effect of these things can only last so long.

        Sorry to hear that, it's been said that "Success is fleeting, and failures last forever in man's memory"

        pmonk4ever

        "No trees were harmed in the creation of this node. However, a rather large number of electrons were somewhat inconvenienced."

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by pileofrogs (Priest) on Mar 02, 2010 at 19:48 UTC

    what ever code I just finished writing...

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by alandev (Scribe) on Mar 03, 2010 at 12:16 UTC
    It should be next code i am going to write
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by wjw (Priest) on Mar 24, 2010 at 04:13 UTC
    Not long ago, I visited some folks with whom I had worked at a large Insurance company. My job there was to work as a deployment engineer in a large group of developers. It was good to sit and have a beer and visit with them, as it had been a couple of years. As the beers flowed and the hours dwindled toward bar time, we began to reminisce about tech issues, apps, code, politics...etc.. . I was astounded to hear that the Perl code I wrote to bridge between CVS and an expensive, complex proprietary SCM application was still being used, unchanged!

    This was/is not pretty code! I have seen good code writing, and know very well that what I do would not be described as such. It was never intended to be much more that an interim tool that I and a couple of others could use while the "real" tool was being written in Java, incorporating all sorts of neat things from Maven to God only knows what else.

    As I sat there, beer in hand, mouth hanging open in surprise, my former co-worker explained to me that the "real" tool never did come about, and the goofy ugly code I wrote was and is being used still, everywhere in that company!

    Of that I am proud. It ain't pretty, but it works. And what I am most proud of is that it works for others as well as it did for me. Many who use it are far better programmers than I will ever be. But, By God!... they like it!

    • ...the majority is always wrong, and always the last to know about it...
    • The Spice must flow...
    • ..by my will, and by will alone.. I set my mind in motion
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by dwhite20899 (Friar) on Mar 27, 2010 at 01:14 UTC
    I'm most proud of the code I wrote in 1986 to monitor fish in real time, so they can be used to detect water quality changes. It's still in use.
    http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=HNwfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WNkEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1499%2C696260

    My favorite perl code was a bit of munging I wrote for someone literally halfway around the world, to interpret GPS logs to prove illegal fishing took place.

      I didn't realize that the GPS system could detect baited hooks in the water. Maybe this is an 'undocumented feature' that is only accessible via a CPAN module (in which case, I would be *really* proud of that code)? Oh, wait, you meant the 'Global Phishing System'?

      ok, I'll shut up now

      fnord

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by DrHyde (Prior) on Mar 03, 2010 at 12:01 UTC
    While the code I'm most proud of is a small script automating my daily work, it ain't written in perl. Shell scripting FTW!
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by Illuminatus (Curate) on Mar 09, 2010 at 16:39 UTC
    1. Never Tattle
    2. Always make fun of those different than you
    3. Never say anything, unless you're sure that everybody else thinks the exact same thing
    "The Code of the Schoolyard" -- Homer Simpson

    oh, you meant code *I* wrote. Never mind

    fnord

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by cdarke (Prior) on Mar 03, 2010 at 15:47 UTC
    The code I'm most proud of is:

    ....small yet perfectly formed.
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by Hue-Bond (Priest) on Mar 07, 2010 at 17:09 UTC

    My skel.pl.

    --
    David Serrano

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by Popcorn Dave (Abbot) on Mar 26, 2010 at 08:05 UTC
    I'm proudest of the stuff I've done for work - simple CGI web stuff - but one of my genius office mates claims she can't get it because it's not in Microsoft Office - her words, not mine.

    And yes my head was bloody from banging it in to the wall over that statement. Although in fairness, she's stopped typing business letters in all upper case.


    To disagree, one doesn't have to be disagreeable - Barry Goldwater

Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by technojosh (Priest) on Mar 01, 2010 at 17:27 UTC
Re: The code I'm most proud of is:
by Voronich (Hermit) on Mar 26, 2010 at 15:15 UTC
    It is not an overstatement to say this silly little block of code has changed my life immeasaurably. I keep it running in one window while I work.
    #!/bin/bash while : do make clean echo echo make test echo echo echo "...resting..." echo sleep 5 done
    (Fixed the typo. Thanks ambrus o/)
    http://www.mpwilson.com/

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