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Madza
Madza

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What's the most complex project you have ever done or been part of?

Currently I work on a project for a custom CMS for a website and integrated panels for administrative tasks, resource management, shift and leave planning and document archiving.

Although it might seem as nothing extraordinary to some of you, it's still challenging enough to me and I learn a lot.

What's the most complex project you have ever done or been part of?

Top comments (40)

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richardsprins profile image
Richard S Prins Jr.

For me, and I am still pretty junior status, I am working on a project solo for a startup in job matching using a proprietary algorithm, they wanted me to add some features to their app. but their last dev really made a mess of things and I convinced them that it was time for a rebuild. Now I am working on scaffolding out a new application to drop their business logic into, and add from there the features they wanted as core features in the application.

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louislow profile image
Louis Low

Few projects that are consider the most complex to me pass few years:

  • Durian (stinky king fruit) fruit sorting conveyor with image recognition combined with the sensors and cameras. The platform that I used for developing the project is NVIDIA Jetson Xavier controls over collecting and analyzing data from the camera and sensors. TensorFlow for training countless durian images and labeling those images was time-consuming. I developed a program to crawl images from Google Image for the ML. A black color rackmount chassis filled with all modules, including power supply, connectors for sensors, external PLCs (programmable logic controller), ethernets, and 10-inches touch-screen LCD with the cozy cool user interface.
  • Project Sonar.ai is running on the Parallella SoC platform. The object navigates through a 3-Dimensional space with specific frequency several radio wave transmitters as Marker. The object is a Tracer that can be determined by its position in x, y, and z space even the object is moving around in real-time. The object that is implanted with the Tracer module is constantly processing and analyzing the data from the sensors. Using NumPy, Sklearn, and Random Forest Classification for the algorithms.

...and some more.

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louislow profile image
Louis Low

I opensource the image scraper module for the above fruit sorting conveyor project. you can grab the repo here.

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madza profile image
Madza

Damn, by someone who is not familiar with the field, both of these seems pretty narrow in the their respective niches 🎯
You must be well requested for that kind of specific knowledge πŸ”₯πŸ”₯

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louislow profile image
Louis Low • Edited

Hoho... I am flattered and thank you. You can too @madza by start learning modern IoT such as you already knew (Raspberry Pi, BeakerBone, Arduino, etc.) to get a better understanding of the basic SoC world. And you can merge your current software development skills with IoT platform and one day somehow you could mass production yours dreams.

I am coming from the Electronic & Electrical Engineering (plus Computer Science). Too long in that field that makes me feel bored. Then, I decided to enter the world of web development. Which adding more colours into the hardware world. Both combinations are amazing. Somehow, I am falling in love with web development, I creating frameworks and libraries solving the UI that the electronic lack of, you can find them at Github. And then, self study the machine learning myself (I also published my notebooks), then again adding more superpower to the hardware creation. I love what I am doing. My dream has come true, I just maintain the dream.

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madza profile image
Madza

This is just awesome and inspirational! πŸ§™β€β™‚οΈβœ¨
Dreams do come true, if you put enough effort into it πŸŽ―πŸš€πŸ’―

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louislow profile image
Louis Low

If one dream has come true. I can always make a new one.

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madza profile image
Madza

Exactly πŸ˜‰ Never settle πŸš€ That's another key to it πŸ’―

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imthedeveloper profile image
ImTheDeveloper • Edited

Personal project:

Modr8.net which is now running 22 separate services. Built out websites, database designs, microservices and caching layers, database sharding and immense amounts of time servicing over 1.5 million chat users on telegram.

Work projects:
Solo solution architect for a startup bank which has had me working on everything from initial enterprise level design right through to capability mapping, vendor selections, market benchmarking, data architecture and target operating models as well as now into low level designs for the 20+ integrations we will need bringing together business users, project teams and many outsourced providers. No way of really covering how big this is in words now.. it's a CV in itself πŸ˜‚

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madza profile image
Madza

These are awesome 🀩I can feel the time spent in them ⏲
Must be proud of the logic you implemented, if the project has grown on your fundamentals πŸ˜‰

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loki profile image
Loki Le DEV

Well I'm currently working on a medical exoskeleton, so think many processes and threads synchronizing data at 1 KHz rate making complex dynamics calculations, where any bug could literally harm the user.
It is also connected to an android tablet in bluetooth which itself talks to a backend via a rest api.
It's hands down the most complex system I've worked on.

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madza profile image
Madza • Edited

I can already feel the amounts of math involved in it πŸ˜ƒπŸ˜ƒ

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loki profile image
Loki Le DEV

Hehe right! Even though personally I'm less implicated in the math stuff and more in the plumbing.

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scroung720 profile image
scroung720

10 years ago I was programming on a legacy project based on a technology called Microsoft COM which is an ancestor of NET platform. The idea was that you could integrate multiple modules with any programming language. The project was a 3D game engine with 200+!!! modules it was crazy you had modules to program 16 bits games and VR equipment and cell phones and android and windows phone it was crazy stuff and opengl shaders of almost any version and kinect support. There were features with 8-12 years of development lol

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eljayadobe profile image
Eljay-Adobe

Ironically, the .NET platform came from Brian Harry because he so very much disliked COM. When Sun and Microsoft had their dispute over Java and JVM, a pet project that Brian was on had the potential to compete with JVM, and from that C# and .NET were born. And Microsoft had to have interop with COM, so COM was integrated into .NET.

Not so much an ancestor. More of an internal competitor that ultimately got rolled in with COM.

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scroung720 profile image
scroung720

thank u for this information. I didn't know this

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madza profile image
Madza

Projects like these teach us a lot, as you often need to come up with unique solutions πŸ˜‰ I guess you learned a lot from it, tho you would probably never ever want to go back to that codebase πŸ˜ƒπŸ˜ƒ

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scroung720 profile image
scroung720 • Edited

No, it was horrible there was no documentation and sometimes my manager was requesting me to modify a specific module he didn't care if it was C, c++, c#, javascript, VB, objective-c. One occasion I needed to modify a legacy module and I could not figured out what to do. I end up looking for an ex-employee from china that was in another company. He replied to me 2 months later lol it was a bug related to VR head devices. The workflow was super strange they want us to write the code but we didn't test anything you need to email your code snippets to people in Australia, England, France or China. If your code didn't work they gave you a copy of the error output. I hate that job so much. Probably my worst job.

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madza profile image
Madza

Hahah πŸ˜ƒπŸ˜ƒSeems like a really nightmare, I feel you πŸ˜‰

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vaclavhodek profile image
vaclavhodek

Localazy, hands down. Complex back-end, complex front-end, a lot of additional tools, utilities, file format parsers, SDK for mobile platforms, multiplatform CLI, etc.

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raguay profile image
Richard Guay

That would be the Muse Mastering console I helped design and build around 1990 (okay, I’m getting old). It was a 56 systolic array processor system. I designed some of the boards and wrote the software for a 386 computer to control it. I developed the software design system to load programs on each of the 56 processors and debug the programs with a full stepper debugger. I also wrote the communictions software from the processor hub to the console unit using Qnix messaging pool. The console was fully automated by that system. It was a huge, complicated project that was also a lot of fun!

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madza profile image
Madza

Sounds like some low-level stuff.. Just curious, what language did you use back then?

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raguay profile image
Richard Guay

5600 assembly and C. Some low level and some high level. I worked on all ends of it.

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eljayadobe profile image
Eljay-Adobe

I think the most complex was when I was at Microsoft as a developer developing Visual Studio.

The next most complex was at Microsoft working on the developer tools for Internet Explorer 10 and Internet Explorer 11.

My current project is Photoshop at Adobe. The complexity there is largely due to the 30 year old codebase, which brings with it a lot of interesting challenges.

The project that I had the most fun with, which was still quite complex, was at Starkey Hearing Technologies. We used C# on .NET, on the Visual Studio IDE with NUnit, NCrunch, Resharper, and WPF/XAML (an amazing technology from Microsoft in its own right). If you are using C# and doing TDD, I strongly urge you to use NCrunch... it's nothing short of magical.

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madza profile image
Madza

That's a lot of experience, awesome 🀩

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luckierdodge profile image
Ryan D. Lewis

Probably my most complex personal/solo project? The compiler I wrote for my graduate Compilers class last spring, which I spent the entire semester iterating on.

The most complex project I've been involved with? By far and away the codebase for the semiconductor testing company I did my first internship with. They used one massive Visual Studio solution, with >200 projects, that pretty much ran every product the company offered from the actual physical testing all the way to the GUI.

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daviddalbusco profile image
David Dal Busco

Our editor DeckDeckGo might be the most complex project I developed so far.

It is a relatively wide eco-system with many apps, web components, developer kits, backend, cloud etc. and has reached quite a size (currently > 5000 commits).

We try to be as much agnostic as we can, preferring developing our own components (like developing our own WYSIWYG editor or component to drag, drop and resize), which probably adds a bit of complexity ... and fun 😜.

Finally, in terms of UX, the fact that users can enter, to some extension, any content, makes things interesting. I feel like it is a bit less predictable content as any other apps I developed.

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bias profile image
Tobias Nickel

once i build a filesystem on mysql with node.js. wity aweful framework and aweful ORM. The filesystem had files folders, sharing,users, groups, roles, organizations, calculations for cost management, we had mobile and web frontend as well as desktop for syncing directories. the app was build without promises, but node style callbacks. error tracing was a nightmare as well as the orm throw errors, but only with internal stacktrace, same was for the api framework. 'argument' error, but no hint what of our api's was it. To make the app faster we added query DB batching long time before graphql+dataloader made the technique popular.

this app really pushed what is possible with such small team.

building the same app today would take much less time and complex code structures. With todays improvements in JS we can be so much more roductive. Huge shout out to promises +async/await, typescript and destructuring, and template strings, and the with that improved tools on npm. We are today able to build much more complex systems, more complex for creating more business value, and less complex on the code level.

There is an incredible wealth of experience we learn from such huge projects.

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madza profile image
Madza

There is an incredible wealth of experience we learn from such huge projects.

That's exactly what I was gonna to reply, you took my words πŸ˜‰
Learning the hard way is the best way, and that's the beauty of it. πŸ˜‰

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chrkuhn profile image
Christian Kuhn

Programming a 2d/3d renderer and texture mapper in x86 assembler for a demo in the late 90s.

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anders profile image
Anders

A "CRM" of sorts, integrates with many other solutions, has a complex core, 100:s of dialogs, built in calendar, tasks, email.

I've also buit a full multiplayer 3D game on PC, that was also complex, but in a very different way since you had more control of all the parts.

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codinglanguages profile image
Your DevOps Guy

I was part of the team that implemented the Alexa image search functionality: "Alexa, show me pictures of cats".

I'd say this is the most challenging project I have been part of, as well as migrating architectures from on-premises to Google Cloud (after leaving Amazon, naturally).

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madza profile image
Madza

I guess it's awesome feeling to be part of team that develop for great amount of users πŸ˜‰

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Gary Bell

I've got 3 big projects to list (not a lot, I know, but stick with me)

  1. I was part of a team building a vehicle registration system for a global car manufacturer to be able to register their vehicles in Europe. I was only really involved in the document production side during my time there, but that was huge (and business critical)
  2. My first job out of University was at a company which builds a hosted CRM system. It had so many modules and interactions, it was fairly complicated
  3. I'm currently building a bespoke e-commerce solution to fit the needs of the company I work for, and for them to share product information and stock levels between their different IP brands.