Anytime I want to feel like an awesome programmer, I whip out SLOCCount and see what the cost estimate is. For instance, the wiki gives these results:
Totals grouped by language (dominant language first): python: 3623 (100.00%) Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 3,623 Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 0.77 (9.27) (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05)) Schedule Estimate, Years (Months) = 0.49 (5.83) (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38)) Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule) = 1.59 Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 104,391 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).
For all sorts of reasons that's totally inaccurate. I have no overhead. There are no requirements, meetings, or communication in this project. This isn't deployment-quality code. Who knows what else. But SLOCCount is still always good for a quick ego boost.
Heh. Sloccount is fun.
I also like having a big unit test suite that runs fairly fast. Whenever I need an ego boost I run it just to see the "Zero Failures, Zero Errors" message. :)