For me it's when I get to be totally myself, writing about things that actually happened and wrapping them in the usual cynicism and (attempted) humor so that readers don't quite know if I'm being serious or not.

Fellow software engineers, however, know the truth and it's so very heartwarming when I get comments saying "you know what, the very same thing happened to me!"

Here's one example that I very much enjoyed writing recently,

https://medium.com/data-driven-fiction/the-loneliness-of-the-long-distance-coder-8a281e581264