Things Done
It’s been more than 15 years doing IT by now and today I got a great question. What’s the thing you’ve done that you’re the most proud of. It’s a quite standard question, but it’s been such a long time since I considered such things. I couldn’t really find a good answer. I started searching for things that I’ve done in my most recent positions, but honestly that’s mostly been about iterating on products. After thinking for a while I’ve come up with some things though.
News Article Matching
In my first full time job I created a system that could analyze texts from news articles and managed to match which ones were related to each other. This was the good old time when RSS was open and existed at all news pages. It was easy to crawl news pages for articles. Also these articles were not hidden behind pay walls.
The system would first stem words to find the roots. Then it would remove “stop words” such as “a” or “it” etc. Then it would identify which words were keywords for an article. By finding keywords it would then match them to see what other articles contain the same keyword. It also had a feature with finding quotes and match them. It could even handle if the quotes were almost the same.
Startup in Winforms
Before the web was the omnipresent way of doing applications winforms was a thing. In winforms you had to create your graphical components on the UI-thread. To speed up startup in our application that had a lot of components I had to find a way where as much work as possible could be done in background threads to get a quick startup. I basically managed to get every drop of work that didn’t have to be on the UI thread to run in a background thread. The startup time was awesome.
Business Entry
This was a simple application that could define schemas for generic SQL tables and then write data into it. This was an awesome way to for example join in data that couldn’t be added to strict enterprise DBs. For example that “43” means Berlin. The basic idea was brilliant. It had to be realized with as little resources as possible. I wrote it in raw javascript being served from an ASPX page. I had endpoints in the ASPX page that could do CRUD on the data.
The application was written in a short time, and it was stable. It was a really lightweight application and I’m proud of it.