I think my fave story isn't particularly technical but had incredible value. I was at a retail Forex company working on the main trading client program. We woul

I think my fave story isn't particularly technical but had incredible value. I was at a retail Forex company working on the main trading client program. We would always get issues about a trade not executing at the price that was quoted. I knew we had a client-side log that support could get the user to open and read a part out of. I was trying to think of how to make it so that it was tamper-proof some kind of line-digest that the average user wouldn't know to replicate. Anyway I put that idea off, and started playing with other parts. An interesting idea was trying to recreate the custom-drawn home-grown widget set using Java Swing JPanel's in the ASCII log file. I naively started down the path and got text labels, entry fields, radio buttons, checkboxes. One tricky bit was knowing when to insert a line or not if the baselines were close enough and there was no overwriting of characters. Anyway it worked surprisingly well. I also logged the currency pair and price immediately before sending the order to the server in simple text. When we got support calls about an order not executing at the quoted price, the user would be asked to open the log and they'd see an ASCII version of their order dialog as well as the same data sent to the server. The number of these calls dropped dramatically. I was shocked by how much authority a crude picture had for the user--it's no different than text lines that capture the same info but showing it in the same layout makes them believe it's true, even if it weren't the case.