I saw a link posted this morning to Steve McConnell's blog about common programming mistakes, and many of them were very applicable to a project I am working on currently.  Programmers being typically helpful people, and wanting to please their customers, I think we often get ourselves into trouble trying to stand up to un-realistic goals and ideals, simply because we dont want to disappoint anyone.  This list really puts into words some of the no-no's to remember when you are gearing up for a large coding project.  Just because the customer wants it in X timeframe does not always mean that it can be done in that time.  I think most of my customers would have rather had a realistic estimate than a 'can do' on the front end, and a pushed deadline near the end!

So check it out: www.stevemcconnel.com - Classic Mistakes Enumerated (from 1996 no less!)

Let me know what you think, I believe he hit the idea's square on the head.

I got detoured off my large project to do a quick financial report, something that pulls in tons of values from a few other reports, has some manually added data, and of course has to match some funky bank-format Excel spreadsheet (I just LOVE those). So, I have a nice list of about 50 fields that have to be populated with data, all according to varying formulas. Well, I hate creating getters / setters and form code, so I whipped something together to loop through the list of field names and generate em both for me. For anyone who has never done anything like this, check out some samples.