A lot of these points are why I still enjoy programming as a hobby, but less so enjoy it as a profession. It is much easier to program something where you are t

A lot of these points are why I still enjoy programming as a hobby, but less so enjoy it as a profession. It is much easier to program something where you are the only customer. No project manager alternates between asking me increase and decrease the number of story points per task. No one comes with a last minute request to create a throw away demo for some executive who can only understand pointy-clicks things. Directly addressing the title, one thing I still find difficult in programming is implementing an informal parser. Think calling read(2) and parsing an HTTP request. Making something work with partial reads and multiple buffers is tricky. I really should reach for a real parser sooner in these situations is the actual answer and stop trying to work at such a low level of abstraction.