In 2015, I wrote the backend for a registration/ticketing/admission system for our (the company I work for) non-profit. They put on yearly galas in a far-off US state. The system utilized QR codes from printed and electronic tickets. The system was used once and royally failed due to connectivity issues. We relied on the venue's wi-fi and had cellular backup. It worked during on-site testing but failed once the crowds formed. Attendee's couldn't load their e-tickets and we couldn't get a response from the servers as tickets were scanned.
Everything sounds so simple until we try to explain it.
If the emulation is contained inside the universe being emulated, do you think the emulated universe includes the emulation contained within it? Does the emulation now contain another emulation? If so, now many emulations?
Circa 2018, I went deep into investigating ADHD and whether I had it or not. I ended up "interviewing" a rather diverse group of people, from authors, teachers, and ADHD coaches to psychologists and other doctors. During this time, I was reaching out to many people, managing schedules and appointments, and eventually publish the interviews. The "reach out" to "interview" ratio was something like 100:1 and took a lot of management.
This was my part-time hobby, I guess. My full-time gig is a software engineer at a bio-tech company.
So, I wrote some basic web software (PHP/Symfony) to manage and track the whole process. It took around 3 months to write the code, though there was no set beginning and no set end. The code was started when I became overwhelmed with the manual aspect of tracking everything. The code was done when I figured I had done enough to manage and automate the process.
Talking with a few people after the fact indicated very high interest in the software I had written. And thus began the journey to convert it to multi-user.
I started on the multi-user conversion and, maybe because I tried to make it do everything and then some, have not since finished it. The code is on my private GitHub, partially converted to multi-user, slowly rotting away (needs library and core updates).
What does it do? Manage the process of cold lead acquisition, follow-up interactions and onboarding, and eventual publishing of the resulting interviews.
How did I make it? PHP/Symfony.
How much time spent making? About 3 months in my spare time.