"We have this project," the manager told me excitedly as I handed him my signed offer letter. "It involves making our enterprise web application available via PalmOS 3.5. It's purely a single developer R&D effort at this point, but a huge opportunity for our team and the company. I am planning to assign you to lead it."
There are so many times in life when the impact or significance of a moment is only revealed in hindsight. The above exchange was one of them. It occurred about 12 years ago. Targeting that kind of app for a phone wasn't even on the radar, but there was this promising new version of Java (J2ME) which, when coupled with the leading PDA (personal digital assistant) manufacturer (Palm), suddenly made possible the creation of something really cutting edge.
I didn't have any experience with mobile, but I was willing to take what I did know about software development and see how far I could get with a new and much more (especially back then) restrictive medium.
To say it was difficult would be an understatement. The virtual machine had a memory leak and the only API available was restrictive to the point that I couldn't even reference an image file in the traditional manner (i.e. just pointing to its file on the device via the name). There was the unexpected use of hexadecimal and stress about kilobytes where most desktop programmers weren't sweating wasting megabytes. Object oriented design was sometimes sacrificed for the sake of maintaining the smallest footprint possible.
It was crazy. Looking back at it now, it was completely insane. What a long shot really. Yet we did it. Everything from monochromatic images turned on pixel-by-pixel, to syncing with the desktop (internet via the devices wasn't standard at that time), to efficiently handling large amounts of data. That said, I have seen more difficult challenges since then. We have certainly seen mobile technology advance well beyond what any of us dared dream back in those days.
Which is why, the thing is... It was so great. Being there. Being blind. Pushing the limits. Learning as fast as we could. Days of struggling, then the sweet rush of finally getting it, the solution firmly in hand.
I blame that project for setting the tone of my career. Did I become addicted to that rush? Maybe I did. Seeking out the most challenging projects, the most impossible, in an attempt to get that fix once again? It seems that might be the case. All I know is that the best way to learn anything, to see how far any of us can go, is to just embrace the opportunity to expose ourselves to things never before attempted. It ended up being a good life lesson as well... because if every unknown is only an opportunity to make ourselves better, then we truly have nothing to fear of the unknown.