This was a particularly challenging task for several reasons.

Technically, I had to replace a messy chunk of code which simply couldn’t handle the task and wasn’t easily extensible or maintainable. Also, the problem itself wasn’t simple, and I couldn’t find an immediate and intuitive solution, so I had to do some more fundamental research.

At the same time, things were kind of tense in the team back then, and that didn’t help either…

Nevertheless, this project ended successfully and I believe contributed to the robustness of the rest of the code. 

I also learned a great deal about these subjects from a completely different perspective. For example, I was quite familiar with using state machines in hardware or software, but building a state machine from a regular expression was something quite mysterious to me up to then.

All in all, I enjoyed working on it back then, and I enjoyed un-mothballing and publishing it now.