What’s a piece of software you built that changed the way you think about engineering? What did you learn from building it?
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Early on, I built a small CLI tool that parsed deployment logs and alerted us when database migrations stalled.
Before that project, I spent most of my time trying to build feature-heavy web apps and assumed bigger architectures were always better. That script had fewer than two hundred lines of Python, but the whole team relied on it daily because it prevented broken releases from sitting unnoticed.
It taught me to focus on real bottlenecks in day-to-day work and solve them with simple, maintainable tools rather than overengineering things.
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For me, it was a small automation tool I built to handle a repetitive task I used to do manually. I initially thought the main challenge would be writing the code, but I quickly realised understanding the problem was more important. It changed how I approach engineering: I now spend more time thinking about simplicity, edge cases, and how the solution will hold up in real-world use.
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when i started programming i made small automation scripts to do simple tasks. for example i made a small bash script that uses curl and wget to download the latest xkcd comic. for the most part programming for me is making stuff that is useful to you.
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