I was working at Microsoft Research making a mobile application for the iPhone. For the first month, I didn't even have access to the building. I would always f

I was working at Microsoft Research making a mobile application for the iPhone. For the first month, I didn't even have access to the building. I would always follow someone else in. I also didn't have a Mac. I brought my own. (My manager covered for me.) About a month in, I had finished the first application, and it was ready for app store submission. Oddly, at about the same time, they tried to move someone else into the desk I was using... I didn't even exist in their HR system. While waiting for legal approval for deploying the app, we drew up some screens and user tested/mocked up the next app on paper. A month passed... and we still weren't sure what legal was thinking or whether my mac would be arriving soon. Then we decided to just build everything on my personal pipeline. In a week, the first of two remaining products was finished, and then we finally received legal's response: we couldn't release an app on the app store. I converted the apps to be a native-like HTML5 web apps. Then we found that in certain regions (China!), services we relied on were blocked. I set up proxies to redirect the failing requests. Additionally, GPS data is obfuscated in certain regions (China again...). Then we ran into legal trouble again. Ruby on Rails was not an approved development platform. Fortunately, after a lengthy email argument that my manager, (whom I had taught basic Ruby/Rails skills in order to speed up development), was able to win, legal was convinced that there were no Microsoft products that had the functionality we required. A couple weeks later, we launched the app to a bunch of people under NDA. The part that took the longest was getting them to sign the NDAs. Also, native-like nested list scrolling was a pain.