You joke, but I have literally never had as great of a success at work as that one time my team didn't end up building the software.
We had great ideas about scheduling and caching and task priorities...
...and then we asked the customer what they wanted, and they wanted none of it.
So we built none of it, and produced a solution that just did the stupidest thing, and did it without any edge cases, without ever crashing, reliably, as a cronjob, once on Sunday night.
Some people would be disappointed that they couldn't put this on their CV because it didn't involve FancyTech #413, but damn it, I am still proud of that stupid thing.
I interviewed a (junior) candidate once that had tried and failed at a hackathon to build an Rails system that connected restaurants and shops with excess food to charities that gave food away to those that needed it.
I asked him what he’d done to work around the technical difficulties, and it turned out that he’d set up a Wordpress site with a phone number of the guy running the scheme, and a Google sheet to manage contact details.
We had great ideas about scheduling and caching and task priorities...
...and then we asked the customer what they wanted, and they wanted none of it.
So we built none of it, and produced a solution that just did the stupidest thing, and did it without any edge cases, without ever crashing, reliably, as a cronjob, once on Sunday night.
Some people would be disappointed that they couldn't put this on their CV because it didn't involve FancyTech #413, but damn it, I am still proud of that stupid thing.