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by onion2k 3973 days ago
This is exceptionally hard to answer because for every problem I solve I tend to end up looking at my solution and thinking "That wasn't so hard. Why did it take me so long? Am I bad at this stuff?"

To answer the question though, I think probably writing a robust web scraper to search events listings and turn them in to a sharable calendar. It'd be trivial these days but I did it in 1999 in Perl with regexs.

1 comments

> "That wasn't so hard. Why did it take me so long? Am I bad at this stuff?"

Hah. Always. Hindsight bias and impostor syndrome are a fun mix! I remember writing a blog suite (with comments!) in Perl in the late 90s; back then, without S.O. and other knowledge-sharing beyond some Usenet forums, inventing the wheels as we went along... it was all hard.

I coded the same thing (actually an online magazine with comments on articles, a forum, and a form for signing up for email updates), around the same time. I used classic ASP. I shudder to think of all the security holes I must have had.