[jiggawatts]

I learned a lesson early on in my career: never show a functional but ugly demo.

I once worked for months on a modern front-end for an incredibly old legacy system. This was so technically challenging that we weren’t sure if it could be done at all, so a functioning demo was a huge achievement.

What the customer saw was that it was ugly: black and white, plain text, no CSS, no styling of any kind.

They completely ignored the technical milestone and spent an hour asking if we could rearrange the buttons and change the colours. Bike shedding, in other words.

Since then I would much rather show something that’s very pretty but completely broken.