There's one particular piece of code I'm especially proud of, coming from a side project. It's a non-trivial amount of code, and it's not the cleanest code, and it has bugs and missing functionality. However, as a library it hits the sweet spot of:
1. Zero dependencies
2. Lightweight abstraction
3. API enforces correctness in usage
4. API covers the problem space well enough that the API hasn't changed since a couple months after initial release (it's been 3-4 years)
5. Library does something all of the individual pieces of software using it couldn't have done individually - not easily anyway.
When I first started working on the code, I guessed (correctly, in retrospect) that for technical reasons changing the API after version 1.0 would be a struggle, so I reached out to 3 of the more prolific developers in the space who needed what I was working on and collaborated with them early to rapidly iterate on the API. I declared 1.0 a couple weeks later once it felt like we were all pretty happy with the product.
I wasn't the only person working on that specific problem. In fact IIRC my solution was the third "to market". However, by really pushing to get through multiple iteration cycles in collaboration with my intended users, the bunch of us managed to converge onto a simple and durable design which ended up becoming the de facto standard.
It's not my most elegant code, but it solved a specific in-demand problem and did a clean job of it.
1. Zero dependencies
2. Lightweight abstraction
3. API enforces correctness in usage
4. API covers the problem space well enough that the API hasn't changed since a couple months after initial release (it's been 3-4 years)
5. Library does something all of the individual pieces of software using it couldn't have done individually - not easily anyway.
When I first started working on the code, I guessed (correctly, in retrospect) that for technical reasons changing the API after version 1.0 would be a struggle, so I reached out to 3 of the more prolific developers in the space who needed what I was working on and collaborated with them early to rapidly iterate on the API. I declared 1.0 a couple weeks later once it felt like we were all pretty happy with the product.
I wasn't the only person working on that specific problem. In fact IIRC my solution was the third "to market". However, by really pushing to get through multiple iteration cycles in collaboration with my intended users, the bunch of us managed to converge onto a simple and durable design which ended up becoming the de facto standard.
It's not my most elegant code, but it solved a specific in-demand problem and did a clean job of it.