A client - server implementation of a file synchronization tool.
A monster project, created by countless tears, sweat and paranoia. A project that sapped almost a year out of my life, lead by an ambitious mentor, who I really liked, that pushed my ignorant ass to deliver something good. Details of the project are irrelevant. The quality of Xariot is not something to write about. It is bad, slow, full of garbage code and buggy. But I have to say, I learned more doing this project than the entirety of my academic years. The reason being, that I got someone (and myself mostly) to push me to do something all the way and believe that I can actually do something no matter how hard it appears at a first glance. Learning included:
During this period maintaining and constantly working on a huge project that kept becoming bigger by the day and more confusing and badly written by each line of code, caused me to have a spiritual awakening. Perhaps, spiritual awakening is a heavy term, but I consider to have experienced the same thing as that guy that understood depth of field for the first time in his life after watching a 3D movie at his 50s. One specific night that I was debugging a bug for the past 3 days I went to bed and dreamt of code. Like a lot of it. My point of view was like a sea of crystals, and inbetween each crystal there was code, red words, blue words plain text all travelling from left to right like rivers. It was surreal, because it was the first time that I felt that code was understandable, granted of course that feelings in a dream are not exactly logical. I saw a lot in that dream, that of course I cannot remember, but when I woke up I felt as if a lot of things about programming suddenly clicked. Then, I got up the next morning, and solved that bug.
The name represents The Chariot (VII) from the Major Arcana. Regarding this project, its the symbol of victory. Even if it is a shallow, temporary, wheel turning but not smashing victory, it is something that I rarely got to experience throughout my life. The chariot felt like an important propagation of my spirit. A propagation that culminated into me becoming confident about my skills and I am not refering to programming only.