I recently had to do this for an embedded processor. 1920 bytes to fit some controller code in. It was a ton of fun, to the point where one of my cow-orkers found himself compelled to help out. I think we're at around 20 bytes free right now.
"I managed to save three bytes here."
"My God, you're a sick person. I love it."
Then I went back to my "day job" data mining a couple dozen terabytes of stuff in a database.
This is called "code golf". You try to get the final program with the minimum of "shots" (bytes, lines, tokens or characters). It's amusingly addictive.
And I really hope you misplaced that hyphen in "cow-orkers".
"I managed to save three bytes here."
"My God, you're a sick person. I love it."
Then I went back to my "day job" data mining a couple dozen terabytes of stuff in a database.
I love working with computers.