When a customer says that he has a smaller project than the one I just did, don't pay attention, and think about the quote, rather than simply estimating the time as less than the previous project.

Yesterday, I did a project for a friend (one who let me have better access than average to the real estate listings) and it took an hour and a half and was 107 lines of code.  He wanted to pay for that one, but I thought it was a fair exchange for getting the real estate listing access.

Today, I did a "smaller" project, that was 367 lines of code, and it took 3.5 hours. Hrm.

On a related topic, I never understand the estimates that say coders can only do 10 lines of working code a day or whatever they claim.  These projects have 1.1 and 1.8 lines per minute, and they have been reasonably tested with a couple thousand lines of input.

I don't really think it is just that I am some great programmer, but presumably there is reason behind the logic that says coders can't code that fast.

These projects were in PHP, but I have noted similar things in the past in C and when writing assembly language.