I actually got into software/systems engineering working on internal software for "minor" player groups in EVE. The level of integration[0] those orgs had 10+ years ago outranks 80% of my current real-world clients in terms of discoverability, documentation and depth.
I mean that's what you get from a bunch of eve-playing nerds committing to a labor of love. Best projects I've ever had.
[0] Real time updating mining & trading boards by location, 100bn+ ISK inventory tracking down to the cent across many corps, characters, inventories & contracts, ... Killboard & market data feeds, risk evaluation, resource allocation optimisers... Absolutely impeccable archives & backups going back 5+ years, on top of postgres & flask iirc.
edit: And audit logs EVERYWHERE. Seriously, I've seen better CYA/KYC/chain of responsabilities from eve recruitment corps than some actual for profit entities.
Also, the combination of (mostly) player-run economy + substantial no-consequence PvP zones + large player organizations seems to attract a different sort of person.
There are still your average gamers, but EVE had a much more adept playerbase (in terms of real world skills) than any other MMORPG I've played.
As the saying goes: “When an Eve Player quits Eve and moves to Wow, the average IQ of both games goes up”. Incredible game, took up far to much of my time.
In around 2005 I had a pleasure of visiting a central office of a shipment company, and could see their setup for the whole country involved: 1. a hacked ISDN connection "borrowed" from the neighbor one floor below; 2. an entire shipment tracking done from a single Excel file kept on a Windows shared drive and edited simultaneously by different people. My respect for whatever dark magic Excel did back then was instilled deep into me, along with unending wonder about how didn't it all blow up spectacularly yet.
I think the most tangibly fun bit of tooling was a forum plugin that generated a unique, slightly reworded version of sensitive forum posts that, if screenshotted and shared by a spy, could be traced back to the forum user.
EVE released an update today (as it does most Tuesdays, and also often the next day or two in the week if there are issues). Part of that update included significant changes to a number of blueprints, which are the plans needed to manufacture items in game. Blueprints come in two varieties: originals and copies, and you can perform various activities on them (manufacturing, research to improve efficiency, copying of originals to make copies, etc.). I wrote a tool which imports the game's Static Data Export (SDE) and makes various calculations about all of blueprints in the game (profitability, etc.), so I ran it on the SDE from the new update. Each 'activity' has a set of fields, like what it outputs, etc. But, the 'copying' activity is hard-coded to output blueprint copies. There is a field to say what it outputs (and that field is sometimes present in the data), but the value is always empty. Except today it was not always empty. A relatively obscure blueprint for a Taipan (a kind of upgraded rookie ship given away as a one-off in a past special event) apparently had the information for its 'manufacturing' activity listed as 'copying' instead. So now it claims that if you copy an original, you get the actual manufactured ship, and not a blueprint copy. This broke my tool, because I had put in a check to see if this field was ever non-empty, because if it was it might mean the game had changed in a way that meant something in my tool needed to be updated.
If you look at the information for the blueprint in game, it still claims that the copying activity outputs a blueprint copy. They hard-coded it, too. It now takes as input all of the materials required to manufacture the ship, though. In this case, there are no blueprint originals for a Taipan (if there were you could make an infinite supply of these one-off event items), and any copies that might exist can no longer produce the ship, because you cannot copy a copy. The only valid activites for a copy are 'manufacturing' and 'invention', except a Taipan blueprint no longer has a manufacturing activity and never had an invention one. So I updated my check to ignore this type, and moved on. Needless to say, this change was unrelated to any of the actual announced changes for the update, not mentioned in patch notes, etc. Just another Tuesday in EVE.
I don't know if this is true, but it would tell a lot about this world we are living in.