Ask HN: "a piece of code you're proud of" - what does it mean?

23 points

16 years ago

I'm looking for a job, and sometimes during the application process, companies ask you to copy+paste a piece of code you're really proud of. I can only imagine they want something incredibly mind-blowing, like the Fast Inverse Square-Root [1].

But I don't have such code. I've been programming for years, and there's no singular piece of a couple of lines that stands out. It's mostly boring, readable, well designed code that is maintainable. There's nothing sexy about that.

Sure, I'm proud of some large pieces of code. Thousands of lines that span an MVC architecture and three different platforms, for example. But the interviewer can't possible take the time to read it all and understand why I'm proud of it.

Should I whip up something incredibly complex, using the most esoteric syntax elements possible for optimal premature optimization, a nightmare to maintain, just to appease interviewers in this situation? What do you do HN?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overview_of_the_code

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