One was to dig through a system that was built a decade ago and modernize it. I just wrapped that up. The end result has eliminated multiple points of failure and unnecessary process, and has enabled my team to completely own the solution end to end.
The other task is to dig into and modernize a system that was originally started over 2 decades ago. I've got some other, minor tasks to get through this month and next and am excited to get onto this next task around August.
I'm ~20 years into this career and I am have more fun in the job today than I ever have before.
It was live history working in my hands and in a usable way after Euclid and Newton.
No need to buy hardware and materials to do technical stuff, a computer was enough. And not even a good one. My cwm+tmux setup would still work in a Pentium 2.
>>> The Programmer-Archaeologist churns through this maddening nest of ancient languages and hidden/forgotten tools to repair existing programs or to find odd things that can be turned to unanticipated uses. - lambda-the-ultimate.org
At the time, I was a freshman in college studying "Classics" - dead languages and history, like Latin and Ancient Greek.
I dropped out that same year, flabbergasted and excited that I could experience the same archeological thrill on a much shorter time scale. All I needed to learn was some system engineering...
So I did that. Been here ever since, loving every day that I got to make some beautiful jank soup of software work for another epoch.
P.S. I was on the IRC server trying to pirate some music and textbooks I couldn't afford to buy. Wound up gainfully employed throughout my 20s, able to retire in my 30s (programmer / data archeology pays well)