the team wanted to let people track how much a document had changed over time. They pored over Ph.D. theses and complex algorithms. Instead, ace programmer David Hansson worked out a "cheat": software to track the number of characters in each document. ... With that clever solution, 37signals reduced what could have been a months-long programming project to a day's work
This deserves an upmod because that's exactly the essence of software engineering, in my opinion. "How do you sidestep this hard problem in an elegant way?" David is one of the most valuable engineers in the world.
