Question: Can you give me an example of a recent challenge you have overcome in your job and how you have overcome it.

Neil Barnby answered on 31 May 2024:

Recently I got a note about one of my previous projects, which was having trouble with some software. This was a prison coding workshop and as they have no access to the internet, resources like W3Schools, that you can normally access on the internet had to be set up on a local network server. this was no longer working and after going into the prison to try to fix it I found the server was no longer working properly and would need to be rebuilt. I don’t have time to do that as I cannot spend the time in the prison required, as it takes me from my everyday work.
I had to look for an alternative. I could not find anything readily available and so was stuck.
A couple of days later, while collecting my emails I had a reminder from an organisation called Docker about reviewing my security on there system. Docker is a containerisation software, which allows you to build an app on a server and get it working as required and then you create a Docker container, which basically creates a package of software and server all in one that can be sent to a PC and run like an app. This gave me the idea to build W3Schools on an internet server then convert it to a Docker container and send it to the prison workshop to run on a local PC.
This solved the problem and all this came from a reminder in an email, that had nothing to do with the original problem. It just shows how solutions can come from unlikely places.