For form release, I will tell an old story about release agents. My dad was doing an early tilt up in the 1940s (or perhaps just prior to the war) at the old downtown municipal airport. He thought it was the first tilt up in KC but wasn’t sure.
He was having trouble (perhaps due to temperature) with have the slab release for the tilt lift. As he had done a lot of work in the stockyards at that period as well, he went and got a mixture of sheeps’ wool lanolin and tallow. It worked.
Worked the concrete ourselves by hand to work out any air pockets in the pour into the forms. Concrete truck drivers wanted to get out as soon as possible. This forced a faced pace process which you had to be in shape to keep up.
Placed the "J" bolts in the top layer & finish to facilitate bolting the base framework of the house to the concrete foundation. Pre-located the "J" bolt sites on the forms to not interfere with the stud spacings. Lots of planning prior to the pour (pre placement & wiring of the rebar - securing the structure with wedge ties, etc).
The nightmare was from any "blowouts" from a wedge tie failure. We ended up with a 1/4 inch dip in the corner of the house foundation, from a blowout, that we had to frustratingly compensate all the way up in the two story house.
Best humor I've heard came from a siding nail joke... Two guys doing siding. One guy notices a pile of nails on the ground. He looks at his partner above and sees him tossing a nail away every so often... Asks him why.. his partner says the nail is bad since the head of the nail is on the wrong end.... So he tells him, you dummy, don't throw these away, they can be used on the other side of the house... :-)