Software Craftsmanship

As Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror says, "In software development, execution is staying on top of all the tiny details that make up your app. If you're not constantly obsessing over every aspect of your application, relentlessly polishing and improving every little part of it -- no matter how trivial -- you're not executing."

A small example of this is how Google tends to treat text pasted into text boxes. For instance, when searching in Google Maps, it is very common to wish to paste in address, scraped from some other web page. Addresses, however, typically have at least two and often three lines--with carraige returns embedded, of course. Most apps just choke on that--they typically truncate everything starting with the first carraige return. Google, on the other hand, elegantly parses the text, and strips out the carraige returns. And it all just work, for the user.