My first actual real life project was building a data analytics platform while keeping the budget to a minimum. With some clever parallelism and aggressive memory usage optimisation I made it work on a single lowest-tier Azure VM, costing like $50 to run monthly, while the measurable savings for the business from using the platform are now measured in the millions.

Don Knuth didn't write all those volumes on how software is an art for you to use fucking Node.JS you rubes, you absolute clowns