I'm easily impressed by: - Huge projects which are still understandable within minutes, - Products which handle special cases, which in turn amaze its users (

I'm easily impressed by: - Huge projects which are still understandable within minutes, - Products which handle special cases, which in turn amaze its users (when the dev has managed to get beyond her own use cases), - and devs who write more elegant code than me (clever use of patterns, readability, yadayada). It's easy to sniff at another dev's code, since nobody's perfect, and code is often a compromise of a conflict of various factors (and each conflict can be solved in various ways). But, this loop which has a workaround for a off-by-one error which is caused elsewhere - has likely been written under time pressure, and I might someday make the same mistake. I think it all boils down to dev compassion.