[brianwillis]

The morale boost you’ll get will be incredible. After months of toiling away, the feeling you get from seeing real-world people actually start using your product is the best feeling you will ever get as a software programmer in your professional life. These are the great moments that make it all worthwhile. We made something. People used it. It matters.

Ain't that the truth. I shipped some code last week, and then spent some time at a customer's site demoing the new features and doing one-on-one training. It's a real buzz to see people use the stuff you made. It's easy to lose sight of that feeling when sitting in your air-conditioned beige office, divorced and detached from the realities that your users face, but when someone hugs you because of all the time and energy the code you just wrote will save them, it really validates what we do.