[Aweorih]

My company is building a device which collects data from a car while you drive. We wanted to group those in "trips" on a very simple logic. If the device sends any data for the first time, start a trip and if there's none for more than 5 minutes, close the last trip. Problem was that the source of the time is coming from the device which had a lot of bugs (e.g. time was in future, time is from year 1970, time is not in order...). Management also decided that it's too hard to fix them on the device. At the end it took me 3 full weeks +/- to make it work. At the end I was able to convince the management that some bugs were too serious and required fixing

[mod]

> At the end I was able to convince the management that some bugs were too serious and required fixing

This was the hard problem you solved, right? How did you go about it?

[Aweorih]

A guy from the device developers and me talked with them about it. We argued that it's probably far easier and faster to fix the problems in the device code than to make some workarounds on server side. I think the thing that it's faster and we were 2 convinced them since I tried it with the easier part already before. On other parts we decided to not process the data.

[mooreds]

I worked on a similar car trip detection algorithm for a company aiming to stop texting while driving. Not easy at all!