Be it a historical project, a brilliantly built npm package, an application, etc. What has struck you as an incredible feat of software development?
It doesn't have to be massive in scope, it could just be one awesomely thought out class, but if you've ever been incredibly impressed, let's hear about it.
Oldest comments (91)
For me, it is going to be the VS Code Editor. It is an incredible piece of software. There are tons and tons of features baked into it but still its very simple to use.
The VS code dev team is phenomenal, they keep adding new features to it every month. Given how big and complex the application is, it is no easy feat to add major features every month.
This is an excellent answer! VS Code has a je ne sais quoi about it that makes it so wonderful to work with!
Vscode always reminds me of the early iPhone adverts "there's an app for that" catchphrase.
I've actually said, "oh, there's an extension for that" at work before ๐คฃ
Agreed. One of the most insane part of VS Code for me is how quickly it went from being a laughing stock to the de-facto editor.
Low-key shout out to Satya Nadella.
Hey
The wow factor was so clear for early adoptors of VSCode and that was what really got my attention in the first place. It wasn't any one feature, it was the observation that people just loved it.
Wrote a bit about that way back.
Why I switched from Atom to Visual Studio Code
Ben Halpern ใป Jul 11 '17 ใป 2 min read
Coming from Atom, I was pretty confident that making a modern, reliable and fast IDE based on Electron was basically impossible, if not even the creators of Electron could do it.
Glad I've been proven wrong.
one could say the same thing about GitHub Desktop which is woefully lacking - thankfully GitKraken is pretty great
Heck yes, especially for those who prefer to see the graph.
I found a bug in it. From the command line, if a filename could be interpreted as a number, it would be. For me, it was 2551.e12456872, which, as it turns out, is scientific notation.
Once I reported it, they pegged it as a Minimist issue, and the fix came out in ... < 2 weeks?
Which raises my opinion of the program and the team. +1.
Thats redux-thunk for me. Never thought 14 lines could cause so much confusion to so many people.
Most recently tagmeme a cool implementation of tagged-unions in plain javascript.
How the first necessary leaps to create the web we use now happened (and as it is being discussed rn by some of the people who did it).
twitter.com/wiumlie/status/1151458...
twitter.com/dance2die/status/11512...
twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/115...
(I dunno how to use twitter so three links).
Honestly, Rails. When I first learned it about a year ago now, I thought it was a cool product that made my life easier but didn't really understand how.
Fast forward to 2 months ago when I was given a coding challenge to create a Ruby API without using Rails...holy cow did I realize how much is done behind the scenes that I wasn't aware of. It made me appreciate and understand Rails so much more.
What did you use in the end?
I ended up using Sequel as my ORM instead of Active Record, Sinatra as my framework, and Grape.
The most ๐คฏ I've ever felt was working through Ali's Vue intro guide for the first time:
A Complete Beginner's Guide to Vue
Ali Spittel ใป Mar 20 ใป 8 min read
I've been all in on Vue since working through this and every time I do something new with it I think "Holy Wow! That was magic!"
Agree, vue is really mind blowing for his kind. SPA in general also, such a wonderful tech!
Bellwoods is a generative arts game created by Matt DesLauriers
Every time I think of it .. the colors and music makes me go "wow" ๐
Hey where are the list of the game? I can't access it :(
Heyy .. It was a part of this competition .. Here's the link to the entry, hope this one works for ya js13kgames.com/entries/bellwoods
This one's kind of specific, but the one thing that's stuck in my head for so long is the Bank of Canada's Landing page for their new $10 note.
More specifically, just how fluid and smooth the animation on flipping the bill around, the way the edges twist depending on how fast you turn it, the reflective parts reflecting, all of it.
I stumbled across it in some non-programming Reddit thread on my old (super slow) phone, and that blew my mind even more.
Wow! This is the first time I saw this. ๐คฏ
Anything that @devdevcharlie builds blows my mind.
Controlling devices with my mind was the stuff of my dreams. It's now a reality!
One step closer to being a wizard.
Wow how do I get the hardware for that!
Really amazing stuff. The front-end integration is neat but the face-reading and brain-reading is happening on the backend with Emotiv's tooling
JAM stack technology which I'm still amazed on how you can built a website.
That is fast, uses API & markdown to build a duct tape website with little to affordable hosting.
The original wow for me was cross-env because up until Kent C Dodds made that libary, it was almost impossible to write NodeJS on a windows machine.
Or at least you couldn't write a NodeJS app that followed 12 Factor Apps' config rule
You know, I'd been seeing cross-env in codebases I use, but never really paid much attention to it. I just checked out the repo because of your comment. Thanks for bringing it up.