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Discussion on: What's the most interesting software development you've ever done?

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Michiel Hendriks

I think, academically, combining prolog with graph transformation. My work has been acknowledge in a couple of papers. Most notably Knowledge-based Graph Exploration Analysis.
This was a really interesting thing. I embedded GNU Prolog for Java with Groove, which is an academic graph based verification tool. Besides extending Groove with Prolog, I also improved GNU Prolog for Java to pass the Prolog test suite.
So this made quite a few people happy. It's an interesting things because in general academic software is not made to work, just to prove a paper. I was employed to make working software supporting the PhD student's work.

I have a bunch of other interesting things since then, but I cannot boast about it as it's quite behind closed doors. I've always seen myself as a tool builder. I've always tried to create a tool shed for people to apply. At my previous job it took me quite some effort to introduce a new tool suite. It is quite complicated, but extremely powerful. My intention was to introduce a less complicated solution (read: syntactic sugar). I knew I was doing the right thing, even though upper management didn't see it. But eventually I received multiple accolades from colleagues about the tooling I provided for them.