Oh I just thought of another one. I was working at a client and it was going pretty well until we did a demo to a pretty quantitively aware person and he asked

Oh I just thought of another one. I was working at a client and it was going pretty well until we did a demo to a pretty quantitively aware person and he asked whether our thing (a time-series analysis and reporting tool basically) did linear algebra. Well it didn’t, and he was pretty sarcastic about that. So I went back to my hotel room, put on some coffee and spent most of the night writing a bunch of boilerplate code wiring in various methods in apache commons math. The next day I had another meeting with him to discuss something. I chose as an example a function we had quickly knocked up that did a bunch of matrix math. “I thought you said it didn’t do linear algebra?” He said. Felt pretty good to say “Yeah that was yesterday. I just added it”.