Yes, I did just that. Actually I would guess it was more like 2%.
This was the 90s, and the client was a big corporate programming consulting company. They wrote software for big corporations or the government. They couldn't get a website done internally.
The spec meeting was memorable, because they'd say "We want a form on the website that sends emails," and I'd say "Okay," and then they would look at each other, baffled. I realized later they expected pushback on every single item in the spec. We were just agreeing to everything without even thinking about it – their demands seemed modest to us.
So, we whipped up something that worked reasonably well with good old HTML and Perl, and even had some CMS-like features. It didn't take more than a few weeks.
I later met that internal team that was continuing to work on their ill-fated website project.
They were too elite to use something like Perl. They were working on a web server. From scratch. In C. They proudly showed me how their web server could serve a web page. They had even worked out how they could show a preformatted table of numbers, by printing it inside a textarea.
This was the 90s, and the client was a big corporate programming consulting company. They wrote software for big corporations or the government. They couldn't get a website done internally.
The spec meeting was memorable, because they'd say "We want a form on the website that sends emails," and I'd say "Okay," and then they would look at each other, baffled. I realized later they expected pushback on every single item in the spec. We were just agreeing to everything without even thinking about it – their demands seemed modest to us.
So, we whipped up something that worked reasonably well with good old HTML and Perl, and even had some CMS-like features. It didn't take more than a few weeks.
I later met that internal team that was continuing to work on their ill-fated website project.
They were too elite to use something like Perl. They were working on a web server. From scratch. In C. They proudly showed me how their web server could serve a web page. They had even worked out how they could show a preformatted table of numbers, by printing it inside a textarea.