[debo_]

In my third year of university, we had a professor give us an assignment where writing a quine was the final exercise.

For 3 hours, I was cursing his name. Then I got it and I loved him for it. It was such a great feeling!

A quine was something I never would have come up with on my own, and transitioning from "that must be impossible" to "oh, ok it's just ugly" (I did it in Perl iirc) to seeing some elegant ones from classmates was terrific experience.