Be it a historical project, a brilliantly built npm package, an application, etc. What has struck you as an incredible feat of software development?
It doesn't have to be massive in scope, it could just be one awesomely thought out class, but if you've ever been incredibly impressed, let's hear about it.
Top comments (91)
For me, it is going to be the VS Code Editor. It is an incredible piece of software. There are tons and tons of features baked into it but still its very simple to use.
The VS code dev team is phenomenal, they keep adding new features to it every month. Given how big and complex the application is, it is no easy feat to add major features every month.
Coming from Atom, I was pretty confident that making a modern, reliable and fast IDE based on Electron was basically impossible, if not even the creators of Electron could do it.
Glad I've been proven wrong.
one could say the same thing about GitHub Desktop which is woefully lacking - thankfully GitKraken is pretty great
Heck yes, especially for those who prefer to see the graph.
The wow factor was so clear for early adoptors of VSCode and that was what really got my attention in the first place. It wasn't any one feature, it was the observation that people just loved it.
Wrote a bit about that way back.
Why I switched from Atom to Visual Studio Code
Ben Halpern ・ Jul 11 '17 ・ 2 min read
Agreed. One of the most insane part of VS Code for me is how quickly it went from being a laughing stock to the de-facto editor.
Low-key shout out to Satya Nadella.
Hey
I found a bug in it. From the command line, if a filename could be interpreted as a number, it would be. For me, it was 2551.e12456872, which, as it turns out, is scientific notation.
Once I reported it, they pegged it as a Minimist issue, and the fix came out in ... < 2 weeks?
Which raises my opinion of the program and the team. +1.
This is an excellent answer! VS Code has a je ne sais quoi about it that makes it so wonderful to work with!
Vscode always reminds me of the early iPhone adverts "there's an app for that" catchphrase.
I've actually said, "oh, there's an extension for that" at work before 🤣
Anything that @devdevcharlie builds blows my mind.
Controlling devices with my mind was the stuff of my dreams. It's now a reality!
One step closer to being a wizard.
Really amazing stuff. The front-end integration is neat but the face-reading and brain-reading is happening on the backend with Emotiv's tooling
Wow how do I get the hardware for that!
The Linux Kernel Project without a doubt! It is both a historical project and has tremendous historical importance because it got the ball rolling in the early nineties that led to innumerable innovations in open source and free software world!
GNU was just an alpha experimental prior to that. If Linus hadn't started that thing, it was pretty much impossible to have an alternative working operating system today, be it for desktops or web servers. I doubt we'd be even using the word "open source" today, were it not for Linux.
Git.
The small helper utility that was never actually meant for anyone but linux team basically became our industry's no-brainer.
And it also can shred huge amounts of data without fancy stuff, just plain old C.
Honestly, Rails. When I first learned it about a year ago now, I thought it was a cool product that made my life easier but didn't really understand how.
Fast forward to 2 months ago when I was given a coding challenge to create a Ruby API without using Rails...holy cow did I realize how much is done behind the scenes that I wasn't aware of. It made me appreciate and understand Rails so much more.
What did you use in the end?
I ended up using Sequel as my ORM instead of Active Record, Sinatra as my framework, and Grape.
Even though people complain about it a lot, the Electron project is pretty impressive and enabled a whole slew of apps to be developed by leveraging people's web skills.
:electron: Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on Node.js and Chromium and is used by the Atom editor and many other apps.
Follow @ElectronJS on Twitter for important announcements.
This project adheres to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to coc@electronjs.org.
Installation
To install prebuilt Electron binaries, use npm The preferred method is to install Electron as a development dependency in your app:
The
--save-exactflag is recommended for Electron prior to version 2, as it does not follow semantic versioning. As of version 2.0.0, Electron follows semver, so…Electron itself is great. Electron apps aren't.
I think, all Electron apps should share a common engine runtime, or even use the runtime of system Chrome/Chromium for a fast boot up.
Just wonder how VSCode so light (~70MB) vs other electron apps (just hello-word apps already ~200MB).
I was blown away by stackblitz.
Basically VSCode in your browser that can do the following:
I found out the entire system works by using PWA apis to basically run a lot of nodejs features for vscode in your browser. (which is why it works offline) So there isn't some container running your application somewhere, its all "local" which is why its so fast.
Pretty magical if you ask me :D
Thats redux-thunk for me. Never thought 14 lines could cause so much confusion to so many people.
Most recently tagmeme a cool implementation of tagged-unions in plain javascript.
When CSS was invented my mind was blown.
How can style code live in a SEPARATE FILE from your HTML?
Up until that point, we'd been using tag attributes for styling!
I can remember calling a friend in NYC to try to figure it out together.
Is this something a couple browsers implemented at the same time?
Or did you have to bundle some sort of compiler in with your website code to have the CSS actually style your HTML?
No compilers were required!
The two browsers, as I recall, that supported it at the beginning were IE and Netscape Navigator.
It was a simpler time. Haha!
Timely answer: apolloinrealtime.org/11/
Specifically the "Mission Control Audio" button and the dozens of isolated station channels you can listen to.
I especially enjoyed hearing either Glynn Lunney or Chris Kraft ask his secretary to bring him a hamburger and fries during TLI
Kotlin coroutines.
It's incredible how simple and intuitive they make async programming. Getting comfortable with these makes me realize that Rx, async-await, promises, and all those other patterns/libraries are really just band-aids over the core problem. Coroutines actually fix that core issue, and the solution is so elegant and well-executed. It's really hard to explain well, you just have to try it out and be amazed for yourself.
You should definitely look into Scheme 😉
This one's kind of specific, but the one thing that's stuck in my head for so long is the Bank of Canada's Landing page for their new $10 note.
More specifically, just how fluid and smooth the animation on flipping the bill around, the way the edges twist depending on how fast you turn it, the reflective parts reflecting, all of it.
I stumbled across it in some non-programming Reddit thread on my old (super slow) phone, and that blew my mind even more.
Wow! This is the first time I saw this. 🤯
The most 🤯 I've ever felt was working through Ali's Vue intro guide for the first time:
A Complete Beginner's Guide to Vue
Ali Spittel ・ Mar 20 ・ 8 min read
I've been all in on Vue since working through this and every time I do something new with it I think "Holy Wow! That was magic!"
Agree, vue is really mind blowing for his kind. SPA in general also, such a wonderful tech!
Because VS Code has already been mentioned, I have to mention Discord. Their engineering team is nutty. Making everything Just Work™ and at a mind-blowing scale.
Bellwoods is a generative arts game created by Matt DesLauriers
Every time I think of it .. the colors and music makes me go "wow" 😍
Hey where are the list of the game? I can't access it :(
Heyy .. It was a part of this competition .. Here's the link to the entry, hope this one works for ya js13kgames.com/entries/bellwoods