What's the coolest thing you've ever coded?

I made a tool for creating animated sprites that snaps a bunch of images from an animated 3d model, then would convert each image to a byte[] array, loop through each pixel and set pixels matching a color profile to have an alpha value of 0, then it would combine all the "frames" in sequence into a single image atlas.

When I was into gaming I had created autohotkey scripts that used pixelsearch() and imageserach() to make bots (in 3d environment) or for PVP to not fire if aiming at an ally, and auto release fire if pointed at an enemy. It also had all the spells/actions with a cooldown manager that would only dish up spells/actions that are off cooldown based on a grading scale for priority.

I made a system for tracking anonymous players of a game by grabbing the mac address of the NIC, and storing all IP's used to connect from that NIC in mysql. The second part a framework to grab a bunch of image ads from a mysql db and use them as textures on items in a game game world, and track how many times a user interacted with them, how many times they viewed it, etc and if they "click" the add they get a random prize in game and open their browser to the ads target url. Then you swap out the ads to every game already out there, at will, using a back-end form to edit a "current sponsor" mysql table.

I wrote some dx11 compute shaders to draw millions of points as pointclouds based on the depth and body index frame of the kinect 2 for windows. It basically converts each frame from video feeds into a giant array, cross references with which pixels are currently tracked as a user, isolates only the points that are of a tracked person, and draws them using the GPU directly at more than 60fps.
 


I've been hacking code together for over 10 years now so built a few things I consider "cool" although it might just be the geek in me.

Lets see off the top of my head.

I got my start making money online selling game-servers in the UK back in 2002, I mainly rented out counter-strike servers.

I coded up a control panel for the entire business, it would take gameserver orders on the website then connect out to one of our dedicated servers and setup the game server, once that was done it would email the user with the details.

It also handled billing each month and had clan pay features allowing individual clan members to contribute towards a pot each month that would be billed against come renewal time.

It was a fun business to be in but a fuck ton of work, most of my customers were kids so they complained a lot, these servers rented out for anywhere between £20 and £60 a month I would probably stick 4-5 servers on each machine and as we had our own racks in a datacentre with our own hardware it would cost us around £50-£70 a month for each machine.

That business did about £8k turnover with maybe 3-4k per month and was a 3 person enterprise, it was a shit ton of work for little reward, after finally getting out of that business I promised myself never to run business to consumer again.

Thinking about the way I built that system back then it was probably insecure as fuck but its how I taught myself to code or (hack together code).

Moving on from that I found out about a program called Traffic Equalizer - you can find that here Traffic Equalizer: A First-Hand Review, with Step-By-Step Action Guide it seems really simple now but back then it was fucking awesome, I was a cheap arse so I didn’t buy the software I coded up my own version of it, mind you this was about 10 years ago so although it doesn’t sound that great now back then it was brilliant, lots of easy money to be made I just wish I had of exploited it more.

Basically what my version did, which was very similar to traffic equalizer, you would feed it a list of keywords, it would then build a html page for each keyword, all it did was connect to google search API and pull in snippets, it would then display them in a very similar way to google, you could build a 30,000 page keyword rich site in a few minutes with this.

I expanded on it quite a bit by also pulling in images and using markov to mash up the text a bit.

These were called scraper sites back then, I remember uploading my first one to the domain I ran my old game server business website on, google and msn indexed it pretty quickly.

That single site started pulling in $1000 a day in adsense revenue within a week of launching, it lasted about 6 weeks before google banned it, I made about $50k from it in pure profit, that got me started in blackhat seo and all that shit, I was about 20 back then and I used the money to put a deposit down on a house, pretty cool buying your own house at 20 but thinking back I should of just bought a fucking sports car and enjoyed myself more.

I expanded on the system and kept on building it for a few years, it got the point where all you would do is give it a keyword and it would go out and register a domain name, build the site and upload it to a hosting company.

Couple of things I also built that expanded on the above system, I built one of the first gustbook spamming tools, it would search google for guestbook footprints then stick them in a database to be spammed with links later on, this was a long time ago and it worked really well back then.

I think it was around this time I first got chatting to Smaxor, back when he was a dirty black hat.

I coded up a tool that searched for wordpress multi user blogs, registered an account then auto built a feeder site/spam network on them.

One of my favourite tools I coded was an archive.org scraper, I think I got the idea from Eli @ bluehatseo.

It would search godaddy domain auctions for high pr domain name names that had lots of indexed links in google. I would then buy the domain name from the auctions and as the domains never actually dropped at godaddy they kept all there link juice , each good domain name would cost me anywhere from $500 to $5000.

My tool would then go to archive.org and scrape all the sites old content, rebuild it and upload it to my hosting account, I used these to provide high qulity links to my feeder site network, I would embed only a few links onto the sites and kept it as clean looking as possible. That network got me a number 1 ranking on google for the term “buy phentermine” and I also got number 1 ranking in australia for a few major casino keywords.

It was at that point I got recruited to be an SEO (Jason/Smaxor actually helped me write my CV for this) for a major online casino, I moved out to Gibraltar and we basically built all those blackhat SEO tools in house, the casino industry is crazy, we had rankings for keywords that got 10 visitors per day but those 10 visitors would make an average of $1000 a day over the account lifetime.

I stayed working for the casino for a couple of years but I also worked on my own stuff at the same time I got into the whole acai thing back in 2008/9 thanks to Smaxor pointing it out to me.

I didn’t just run flogs though, I coded up an entire control panel system for it, I still use an enhanced version of it now, it would split test offers automatically, it integrated with the network API’s, it had google API adwords integration and could launch campaigns from the interface, It could track every tiny detail of the campaign, It also had pretty cool cloaking integrated into it which I had learnt back in my BH SEO days, I managed to keep accounts active on adwords for quite a long time, I won't give out $ figures but those who ran that shit on adwords back in the day 2008-2009 will know, you could do some serious volume.

I have what is called Coders disease, I often spend too much time building really neat shit instead of concentrating on making money.

Being able to hack code together is a really fucking awesome skill to have but it needs to be a tool in a well rounded toolbox of skills.

***For TLDR crowd***
I coded some shit and made a few £.
 
One of my favourite tools I coded was an archive.org scraper, I think I got the idea from Eli @ bluehatseo.

It would search godaddy domain auctions for high pr domain name names that had lots of indexed links in google. I would then buy the domain name from the auctions and as the domains never actually dropped at godaddy they kept all there link juice , each good domain name would cost me anywhere from $500 to $5000.

My tool would then go to archive.org and scrape all the sites old content, rebuild it and upload it to my hosting account, I used these to provide high qulity links to my feeder site network, I would embed only a few links onto the sites and kept it as clean looking as possible.

I coded the exact same tool for archive.org scraping. But I grabbed dropped .ie domains, my tool first checking PR, Majestic rankings, etc. I barely used the tool, would have been better off doing it manually. Which follows into your next point below...

I have what is called Coders disease, I often spend too much time building really neat shit instead of concentrating on making money.

Being able to hack code together is a really fucking awesome skill to have but it needs to be a tool in a well rounded toolbox of skills.

It definitely needs to be checked. I think it was kingofsp who said something similiar before. The urge to automate is too much, sometimes it's more cost/time effective to do it manually or hire out to an Indian.
 
I always wanted to learn how to code so I can do some evil science experiments like stated above... but when the proposition of spending years building shit that can be better done manually or that you can outsource to someone who already has years of experience doing, the value proposition of becoming a master coder starts to look a bit sketchy.

Cool stories nonetheless.
 
I always wanted to learn how to code so I can do some evil science experiments like stated above... but when the proposition of spending years building shit that can be better done manually or that you can outsource to someone who already has years of experience doing, the value proposition of becoming a master coder starts to look a bit sketchy.

Cool stories nonetheless.

You don't need to program I am a terrible programmer. If I want a tool/app created I just hit up my programmer on Odesk. I can have a bot created in a few days. Also for really advanced apps you need to outsource anyway unless you know a ton of different languages.