My Cool Projects

I’ve decided to start a meme. We’ll see how far it goes, but I want to know what the coolest projects you’ve ever worked on are and why. I think that the coolness factor says a lot about who we are because it is so subjective. The projects don’t have to be technical. Maybe you built a house with Habitat for Humanity. I think that would be cool. Maybe you taught your dog to bring you a beer. (If you let this information out you may find a lot of dog training gigs coming your way.) Regardless, cool is about who we are at our core and I think it would be much more revealing then the "five things you don’t know about me" meme.

• I started a recreational women’s softball division for the Hotlanta softball league. Zero to thirteen teams in four years. What a ride.

• I wrote a product that was used at the Nagano Olympics and a Super Bowl, I mentioned it here. Besides where it was used, I also got to play around with live broadcast feed, did the entire product myself (that includes documentation), supported multithreading, and generated code. Did I mention it was used at the Olympics?

• There are two things I love to do as an engineer. Work down in the bits and bytes and pull-off the impossible. I’ve had the chance to do this for a casino gaming system (embedded system! proprietary operating system! EPROM! Yea, that’s the ticket!) and for a content aggregation server that was ported from a stand-alone app (I did NOT design that thing but I certainly helped fix it. Can you say more multithreading bugs than stars in the sky?). Now that was cool.

• As an athlete I’ve had moments when my teammates and I have just gelled. It was if we were one unit. Every pass was perfect. Those moments are why I play. And when I think about the coolest moments in my life...I always see those plays and remember the feeling of absolute completion and wholeness. In martial arts they talk about giving up your ego, but I don’t think that is exactly what happens. I think it is a combination of truly accepting what is happening and being open to the moment. Anyway...it’s definitely a safe clean high.

• And to finish off my list...I organized an informational event at one company I worked at. The problem was that there were a lot of folks in the company who didn’t really understand what we were selling or how it worked. I sent out an email asking for questions, lined up the speakers, and we spent a day on the top topics. The event was very well attended and received. This was cool for me because I love to help people, I got a lot of ego strokes from the attendees, and I can’t help but think that it helped our company be more successful...and that is just cool.

Since I want this meme to spread I’m not going to tag anyone specifically. I ask that after you’ve put up your post that you add a comment here with a link to it and tag folks from your blog. That will be my tagging.

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