A few weeks ago I was having a meeting with a client. At the beginning of the meeting he was telling me about his recent efforts in home renovation as well as the fact that he’s been doing the buy/fix/sell thing for quite a while. He pointed out that he was in the throws of the hard work, the work that nobody notices that you did including the clean-up, structural modifications, electric, and plumbing. He intimated that it’s a bit difficult to have done months of back-breaking work on that aspect of the renovations when all that anyone will notice will be the pendent lamp that you hung in the kitchen. 
Well, it just so happened that Kris and I had built Dale a great application the previous year that was founded on sound coding principals and using scalable technology so that we could easily deploy to mobile applications just as soon as we were ready for that part of the work. It took a bit longer this way, and certainly required more effort, than if we had gone an easier route. It is always important to us to get the back end right, even if it isn’t “seen” by the client. I pointed out the parallel to Dale:
Just as in home renovation, where the real structural, back-breaking work often goes unseen and unappreciated, so it goes in mapping and programming: while it’s absolutely crucial to the success of the project, in the end, your critics will question you not on the month of data gathering and database wrangling that you put in, but on whether or not you should have used fuchsia instead of the salmon color.
The lesson? Always state clearly the amount of effort put forth, the reasons for that effort, the benefits of doing it the “hard way”. If you don’t, they’ll never know.
One of Dale’s projects:
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