>A few months ago, we discussed mileage calculation between two points. The
>users here were stalling on mileage look-ups via the web, which usually took
>around 5 minutes or so to get the required information. In my book, that's too
>long, especially when I knew that their had to be a way to just type in the city
>names (locally in the app), click a button, and then the mileage and calculated
>cost would just pop up -- and on to the next entry. That one mod turned 5 minutes
>into 30 seconds.

A tenfold - that's a nice feeling :).

My best one was a costing for a huge farm, under fpd2.6. Whatever I did, couldn't get the recursive calculation to do any better than below three minutes (on the then Pentium II, or was it a I). I delivered as is, and told the customer that I've done my best, it simply can't be pushed any faster. Then, just to feel a bit better, I asked him how long did it take by hand.

"It took about three weeks for three of us to do. Then there'd be two more weeks to fix the errors we made. Then once we got the information out of it and got the cost price of wheat, corn, pork etc, it was useless, because it was already so obsolete."

>>If it's in a daily job, do it if they complain, if it's visibly slow, or if you
>>can see how one hour of your work can save two hours of runtime over a month.
>
>I like your boss :^). From your description, a pragmatist and good, logical programmer.

Another good one from him: he once did a salary and HR app as a side job. He delivered and said it won't work. They were puzzled, so he went to explain that it'll do exactly what they asked for, but therein lies the rub. There were dozens of fields which'll never work, because they'll never be able to have complete data there. Say, "number of children". When someone's child is born, what's the proud father doing first? Asking for a form to correct his data? Hell he is - he's bringing in the booze to get his pals under the table :).

>Eventually, you can't think of anything else to add that would speed things
>up or make the program nicer, and that's when you know that you're done! :^)

My partner and I had different views on end users having games on their machines. Note that these were the simple games of the nineties - versions of tetris, solitaires etc. He figured that most of the games may be coming from floppies which are likely to be infected by viruses and that playing was generally detrimental to the work (stiff neck, wasn't he?). I said we'd better tell them about the virus danger and supply them with a dozen of freebie games from our clean media. And I was happy to see them playing: it meant that my software enabled them to do their job with time to spare.