[danielvf]

Well, there's the day I knew I was a real programmer.

In a 24 period, I saved a customer's hundred thousand dollar sale by redoing a hand written assembly function synchronized between three cores. I ended up with something single core and 10,000x faster.

Before that day, I'd never touched assembly language, the customer's hardware, the processor family, the problem space, an oscilloscope, nor anything embedded outside an Arduino.

Story here, forgive the writing style: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637859#14639134