John Timmer tells us "Ten years on: why a complete human genome mattered," from the perspective first of a bench scientist, then later as a science writer:
The results of the human genome project first made my life easier; now they make it more interesting.
An aside -- you'll often hear people say that the Human Genome Project didn't really deliver on its promises, it didn't crack the secrets of human diseases, or it could have been done more cheaply later. I get very tired of this. Without the draft genome, most of the computational tricks that make today's sequencing methods cheap simply would not work.
