The AspectJ project was tasked with achieving real-world impact for aspect-oriented programming. That expectation drove our decision making in all facets of the project – goal setting, team building, language design, implementation, community outreach – everything. In this talk we will review some of the key decisions we made, situating them in the moment of the project, as well as attempting to evaluate how well the individual decisions stood the test of time. We hope the discussion will be interesting and even useful to other projects looking to accelerate bringing programming research to practice.