If you think software engineering is boring or you are sick of hearing about the Timeport 2way pager stop reading now.
Recently there was a thread on Joel about how in the client's eyes, user interface is everything, and I'm learning that this is true. Last friday was the release date for the Timeport email client and some other stuff. There were two major fixes in that release: 1) UI improvement to the "Compose Message" screen designed and implemented by me and 2) Huge improvements in memory management that makes the app 100x more stable. I won't go into the details of the UI improvement, but basically they asked for a certain change that was actually a pretty bad idea, so instead of doing that I did something better. Everyone in the office thought it was better. We shipped it to them, and they FREAKED OUT. So we stay here late Monday and ship a version that contains their stupid UI change.
Now the point of this story is not that you should give the customer what they ask for even if you don't agree with it. The real point is that they did not even mention/notice the huge other improvements in the application under the surface. The one thing they scream about is this little insignificant UI thing that was not done in exactly the brain-dead way they wanted it. I'm not cynical, it's just funny to see these things in the real world.
11:57:28 AM 
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