[andrewingram]

Generally speaking, someone's ability to recall things is very dependent on how they're feeling. If you're happy, it's easy to recall positive things, if you're depressed it's practically impossible.

A lot of developers also have imposter syndrome. After I've solved an interesting problem, within a few days i'll probably have dismissed it as not being a big deal and started to forget about it.

These kind of questions are useful, but candidates should be preparing their talking points, because the risk of forgetting the story that's going to get you hired is too high

[mdpopescu]

Yes. I read about this idea a few years ago (tell a story about a project you liked) so I had to make an effort to focus on ONE story and tell it well. I've been doing it a couple dozen times so far (I'm a contractor who likes small projects, six months is starting to get too long) and I've had significant success with it.

(When I think about the problem "objectively", all I did was use SSDT to simplify deploying database changes from QA to production without having to shut down either. No big deal. However, it was something that the company had been doing manually for years, spending three error-prone days each month, and they were extremely happy with my solution.)