When I first joined my current company, they let me and another junior kinda have free reign because they didn’t know what to do with us.
Another team wanted to automate a tedious task so we volunteered and dove in. I learned a lot about PKI and the tool was going to be useful in a lot of places in the company. The other engineer and I thought we were on our way to a patent lol.
After presenting our work to an eager manager, we were given the green light to implement it. When the various design, network, and security engineers saw what we were planning on doing they nearly shit themselves lol.
We had basically created a bespoke package manager and CA and were crossing every network boundary out company had. I did get a gift card though so that was nice 🤷♀️
Not inaccurate lol