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These frameworks are the future of speed internet. But I can't find any benchmark or feature comparison of them on google. What framework in which situation would be better for example for building highload online shop? For building stackoverflow clone?
Maybe some basic memory management and request handling differences explanation, please?
Though the official documentation links to techempower, ChicagoBoss is not mentioned anywhere. Looking closely at ChicagoBoss it seems to be targeted mostly at Erlang developers, which is not the most popular language out there. I'm a fanatical about Phalcon, but I feel that ChicagoBoss would be faster and more resource efficient out of the box. But… writing your entire app in binary code right away would be even better in that sense.
Phalcon in less than two years achieved bigger popularity and reputation than ChicagoBoss did in five. There is significantly more information and support out there for Phalcon given all standard PHP rules and information apply to it as well. Phalcon next big release is under active development and looks very promising.
What framework in which situation would be better for example for
building highload online shop? For building stackoverflow clone?
I'm certain that neither Amazon or SO use either of them but both rely on a lot of caching and infrastructure optimisation to get where they are – the job for a different type framework.
Phalcon is a great lightweight tool for building unique projects with focus on high performance. It behaves very nicely with PhpStorm and the development / debugging is a pleasure most of the time. But be sure, it will give a lot of headache (there are a few bugs and some information is hard to come by) – isn't the best choice for enterprise software, you will spend a lot of time figuring out how things work and how to fix some of them.
I have been developing websites for quite some time and I am not so good in designing websites? My Boss is refering me to take some lessons on it.
But I really want to stick to development rather than designing?
You don't need to be a designer. But I would highly recommend you understand the process and some of the techniques used. Having that knowledge will assist in both working with designers and providing better back ends.
I'd do the course, but make it clear to my boss that it's not what I want to do as a main job.
Answer yourself these questions:
What is your objective, the dream? developer or designer?
What are you best with?
Will I be able to justify with my design requirements?
It this common that a developer should be a designer too?
Will you be able to to concentrate on both, the ever changing trends and techs.
Having said that, I have seen such people having both skills but still they don't weigh equal in both parts.
Developer as well as designer:
Chris Coyier of css-tricks.com
Pekka
It depends on what you want to be in the future. Actually, designing and programming are two different skills. Obviously, for websites two things are both required. As a developer, if you have some basic knowledge about design, it would help you and also the designer to make the website much easier to maintain. But personally, I do not thinking you have to dive into design.
a good developer knows a lot about design, but dont have to be good at designing something.
i've seen to many developers building up a given design and making so much mistakes, because they don't see the little intricacies that are enormously important for a well designed website.
One particular design aspect I find many developers (good ones) are not necessarily extremely strong at is understanding of colors harmony. Even though it seems like easy thing to do, find the right combination of colors on a page, it is not always that easy. That course may be helpful in that regard.
I started of as a developer and then progressed into being a Developer/Designer.
You start to understand design aspects, UX aspects and the likes.
So i believe a good developer should also have a good understanding of design aspects as well
The bottom line is your boss thinks you'd benefit from a bit of immersion in design, and you probably will.
It doesn't sound like he wants you to become a designer, just get a feel for it. He's not asking for a career change.
There's always benefits in learning something new. And if your boss is backing you taking some time to do it got for it.
As a developer you should know something about usability and software ergonomics. You should know the basic structure of a website. And you should be able to implement a given design.
I think it is not the job of a developer to create a design.
Try to answer: "Why does your boss want you to improve skills in design? "
Your team is too expensive and boss is going to fire designer. He is wondering is it possible.
Your designer complains to boss that developers constantly ask him to refactor insignificant details interrupting from common tasks. So your boss wants to delegate small design decision to developers.
If it's so, I think nothing is a bad to improve design skills if your boss doesn't want you to convert to designer.
I also agree with all those people, who state: Developer and designer are two different roles.
Well, if developing is the field you are comfortable with, stick with it.
But learning is never bad. Try to gain knowledge first, after taking the classes, you can answer this question yourself
Wow, I'm actually in the exact opposite of your situation. I'm a designer just crossing the line of web development. But in my case, it was my own decision and it wasn't imposed by anyone.
It's always a plus if you have web development skills on top of design skills. I guess it holds true if you're a web developer and have design skills as well.
It never hurts to learn the basic, like others have mentioned, but keep in mind to stick on what you're good at and master it. Its better to be a master of something rather than being a jack of all trades. With so much competition out there, you really have to excel at your craft.
Learn both, but master one, I'd say. I personally see myself as a developer foremost, but I do know a thing or two about design - and, more specifically, implementing it (think CSS and the like).
However, I gratuitously admit that I am not good at making a design that looks good. A functional one, maybe, but not good. You could say something like that to your boss - that yes, you are capable of learning to design, however that you will never be as good as a real designer. Likewise, a designer learning to program will never be as good as a dedicated developer.
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I am taking over a lot of the ColdFusion stuff that is lingering at our shop and they are insistent it stay on ColdFusion and that new projects in this area MUST be done in CF - basically this part is non-negotiable. I am not very experienced in CF (haven't touched it since 2003) so most of my development has been in .Net, MVC, C#, Linq-to-SQL in the past 4-5 years.
I was doing some looking around for a MVC framework that I could relate my Asp.Net MVC experience to and hopefully an integrated ORM (I am stuck using CF 8 at least for a while). I have found a few like Model-and-glue, Mach II and Coldbox etc. but I don't really know where to start and wanted to get some opinions on the advantages, disadvantages, etc. of each of them from people who use them.
I know that I will need to do an extensive brushing-up (pretty much re-learning) of CFML, so I don't need to be told that - I am looking into the future here.
Could you please share any information you have on CF MVC Frameworks to help me choose which one will be best for me? Thank you.
Seeing you are NEW to ColdFusion what I would do is pick ONE FRAMEWORK and stick to it. At first it will be hard you will have problems and you will be tempted to drop the Framework you have chosen but don't do it. After you have mastered one framework then you can learn the others.
CF Wheels
ColdBox * * * (Nice Documentation)
FarCry
Framework/1 * * (simple LIGHT framework)
FuseBox
ModelGlue
Mach-II
Most of these you can add
ColdSpring
Reactor
Transfer
An introduction to ColdFusion frameworks at Adobe.com
Most important is to remember we all have our opinions but there is NO real proof what is best. You can even NOT use a actual framework and just code carefully in MVC.
The stuff you are currently maintaining
I would pick ColdBox, ModelGlue or Framework/1.
ColdBox provides a little Code Generation and Framework/1 is very light so less to learn.
I've been using CFWheels for a couple of years and I've not found a better framework. It's inspired by Ruby on Rails and is very easy to learn with great docs and a very active community.
www.cfwheels.org
I teach a course in ColdFusion and use Sean Corfield's Framework/1 in the classroom. It's lightweight and has a very gentle learning curve, which makes it especially good for transitioning existing codebases. But at the same time, it's easy for a team of developers to work with and can scale to large apps. It's the framework that feels least like a framework and most like natural code, to me anyway.
http://github.com/seancorfield/fw1/
I wanted to give a +1 for cfwheels.
Since 2003, I've used Mach II, ColdBox, Fusebox, and Model-Glue for various projects. All had their pros and cons (Fusebox is the only one I'd avoid now) but, with a recent project, I decided to try CFWheels.
Using Wheels has been a blast. I've had a great time developing a site for some friends in my small town who own and operate an Ice Climbing and Guiding site ([www.ourayclimbing.com]). Nice SES URLs, runs great on Adobe CF and Railo, the admin was insanely easy to get going with the Scaffolding plugin, convention over configuration (which I love :)), etc.
In any case, if you stick with the major players (ColdBox, CFWheels, Mach II or Model-Glue), I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at what CF can offer you.
It has to be coldbox really.
It has excellent documentation on the site, and also has a book which has been brilliantly written to cover many aspects about object orientated programming, amongst other topics. Honestly, really impressed by the book, more than I was expecting.
What I like about the framework is that it uses coldfusion code in its handlers, when I picked it up I think the other frameworks where using xml...not sure if this has changed.
The framework is easy to pick up if you are knowledgeable on CFCs, and has several useful features for building sites. PLugins, Debug toolbar, URL rooting for "pretty URLS"..
I cant speak highly enough of the framework..
Theres also a really helpful community here who respond to all my questions really promptly.
I'd suggest checking out Mach-II. It's used on numerous extremely high-profile, high-traffic sites and has been for years. This blog post is a bit old at this point but still has some great info in it in terms of Mach-II in general as well as who uses Mach-II.
It's under very active development (don't let the lower version numbers compared with other frameworks fool you) with version 1.9 just around the corner and big plans for 2.0.
Big features of Mach-II include sophisticated caching and logging functionality, a very nice dashboard for helping with development and monitoring of your applications, a rich form tag library complete with data binding, and tons more.
I'd go with either CFWheels or FW/1. Both are very easy to use for those new to CF frameworks (I still count myself in that group) and don't have nearly as steep a learning curve as some others. Coldbox looks amazingly powerful, but I had a hard time getting my head around it.
You might also like my SOS and COOP frameworks. We are in the process of creating better public docs. It will likely be more like the code you are used to than other options.
You could also look at ColdBox. http://www.coldbox.org/
Loads of documentation and loads of features.
There's also Farcry Core Framework http://www.farcrycore.org/
It has to be said that you'll need to make your own mind up which framework you like best or whether to build one of your own. It really depends on what you want out of the framework.
In terms of ORM for ColdFusion 8 you have Transfer ORM (http://www.transfer-orm.com) and Reactor (http://www.reactorframework.org/)
Though, given that ColdFusion is java application on top of a java server, there is no reason why you couldn't go ahead and use Hibernate (http://www.hibernate.org/) ColdFusion 9 does make using hibernate much easier, but you're stuck on 8 for the moment.
Everything is negotiable. Rewriting the CF apps in Rails 3 would be the strongest approach.
Languages and frameworks built on principles - Ruby/Rails 3 (and other Ruby frameworks), Python/Django 1.2 (and other Python frameworks), ASP.NET MVC 2 - are generally speaking the best thing to use.
ColdFusion and ColdFusion frameworks do not compare because ColdFusion as a language and as a library is hacked together at random and the ColdFusion frameworks (ColdBox, FW/1, Model-Glue, CFWheels, Mach II) can only do so much to smooth that over. For example: CF scopes, lack of closures, lack of loadable classes/components (you can instantiate a component, but not load the component as such), awkward arguments handling, mappings, lack of real applications, lack of delegates and closures, and convenient but non-rigorous approaches to most aspects of the language and library. In comparison, the other languages listed offer rigor plus sugar atop the rigor.
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I was recently working with a team to develop an online system. We had worked for several months and were making good progress when the project got canned. We all felt strongly that the projects completion was important and that it would have great outcomes on our consumers productivity. After being frustrated for a while I thought I should ask some people with more experience.
What is the best way to deal with the frustration of a canned project and move forward so that it doesn't hold future possibilities back?
On a well designed project, some of the code you developed can be reused in future projects, making it worthwhile. Even if you can't use any of it however, you and your team probably gained valuable experience that will help in the future as well. Think of it as an expensive team exercise.
Don't put your heart and soul into someone else's project?
I do a lot of work for different people and while some projects are more interesting than others they're not my projects so I wouldn't be too broken up if they got canned. I've got my own stuff I'm working on. No one can terminate those projects but me.
Grieve. Such a loss will produce a grief reaction. Not one as strong as though you had lost a loved one, but it's a grief reaction nonetheless, complete with all those stages of grief.
Failure is the best (and sometimes only) way to learn new things, even if the failure is not your fault. There are many different angles by which you can salvage useful information from this:
Code that is reusable
New technologies or skills garnered from the project
Lessons about project management based on how the failure was handled (maybe the project should have been canceled much sooner, before the team bought into it)
Non-technical ideas that you can reuse in other projects for the company or even in your own endeavors.
I highly recommend doing a postmortem, but don't dwell. Most projects get canned at some point in their cycle and if you let it affect your morale, it becomes a downward spiral from which it's hard to recover. You may become oversensitive to even slight requirements changes.
Attack every project as though it were your own. By this I don't mean invest all of your emotions (as stated here already by Spencer Ruport). But write all your code and organize all your code in a manner that you can easily pull out tools that you might need in the future. You never know if you will need it...but odds are you will. If you write an account manager app...do it in a modular reuseable fashion. If you write an image uploader...write it in a way that it can be ported to any other project you have. Write helper functions around all of your major features to make it more user friendly down the road.
This of course requires some planning prior to losing the gig! No worries. It rarely is because of you that you (the whole team) loses the gig. Some financial decision or business decision is usually at play. In this case most likely the economy is what killed you. In the case that you don't have any physical benefits to the failed project...look at it as a learning experience. Inevitably...no matter how good you are...you probably had something that you did that you don't or no longer agree with. Learn from that. You most likely also did something very cool that you loved. BLOG ABOUT IT! This serves two purposes..you just created something tangible from the project...and you put it somewhere that you won't forget about it.
Sucks all the way around. But at least there is a great market out there right now! Contact me directly if you want my headhunter list (80 technical recruiters in CA and the US).
Two things:
Your Investment in the Project & Code: The fact your team had such strong feelings for the project & were so frustrated on it being canned is a good sign - it means you are a true developer/programmer and are not just doing a half-job for full-pay. So to deal with the project being canned: know you & your team are committed to your work & while that project may not have panned out, you guys sound like a real credit to that project & any other you may work on. It sounds like you just need to find a project/opportunity that has the legs.
My Experience: Projects get canned for all sorts of reasons - budget, lack of confidence from stakeholders, too late to market, changed scope etc. I would enquiry/investigate why your project was canned. If it is budget or lack of stakeholder confidence then it is really good news. It means an opportunity has just presented itself to you & your team. Consider pursuing it!
Either way your team will have grown from the experience: both technically & from a business perspective.
cash the paycheck - that always helps ;-)
ask if you can have the rights to the canned project, since they don't want it, then open-source or commercialize it yourself if you think it's worthy
it's good to care about your work; it's not so good to obsess over it.
there will be other projects even better than that one in the future; they might also get canned, for any number of reasons both rational and irrational
Good example: I once worked with a lady who spent 2 years on a document-imaging project that was canned a few days before it was supposed to go live; it was canned because the new manager did not like the old manager, and the project was his "pet". This lady's reaction: "I'm looking forward to learning something new!"
This can be used to bring your team closer together, if you have the right sort of people. There is nothing quite like working hard on something you believe in and then having it canned. It can depress, but it can also motivate people to want to prove next time that they can do the job, that they had the right idea.
It helps to galvanize the team; we were there, we worked hard, and it was taken from us.
Of course, it's better not to be in that situation to start with, but when you find yourself there use it to build the team.
Sunk cost cannot be used as a reason for the continuance of a project. If the leaders have made a business decision then I'm sure that it is well motivated, however upsetting.
I'd console yourself in that big swings should be celebrated in business, big companies do not win every bid and complete every project they start. So console yourself in having lost once, maybe you might be able to change the way things were done, or focus more on the project stakeholders as well to make sure they understand why your project is worth completing compared to the other projects and business initiatives at the company.
I'll finish with my favourite saying:
"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."
Learn from it!
Watch a Rocky movie (the last one was good) and have a few beers. There's no way not to put yourself into a project, there's no way to not feel bad about a project being terminated or failing, there's no way not to feel negative about the company. What makes a good programmer better is taking all the emotions, anger, etc. and being able to release it and move on with the same focus and dedication that was there with the first project. All part of life and all part of working in IT.
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Skunk Works Project: A project carried out by one part of a company without the knowledge of the remainder of the company.
Looking for stories about any skunk works projects you've worked on or initiated:
Was it successful?
Were you found out?
Were you punished or rewarded?
How did you fund it?
How did you staff it?
How long did it take to finish, compared to above-ground projects?
What was the cost, compared to above-ground projects?
Was it formally adopted?
Excellent question. Very important question.
Geoffrey Moore (Inside the Tornado, Crossing the Chasm, etc.) has written that, as he lectured around the world, he had one question he would ask every client (including those like GE, Motorola, etc.)
The question was:
"Can you give me even one example of a truly ground-breaking, paradigm shifting innovation that has ever come out of your company's research or product development process?"
At least at the point where I read the quote, not one example had been identified. And in most cases, such products or services had been conceived, designed, and largely developed by small groups of people who at best were ignored, but were often actively opposed by R&D.
Not sure if this qualifies as a "skunk works" project, but here's a great story from This American Life. It's Act Two of this March 2005 episode.
Amy O'Leary tells the story of a
software writer at Apple Computer
whose job contract ends, but he
refuses to go away. He continues to
show up at work every day, sneaking in
the front door, hiding out in empty
offices, and putting in long hours on
a project the company cancelled. There
were no meetings, no office politics,
no managers interfering with his work.
Soon, he had written a perfect piece
of software. His final problem is
figuring out how to secretly install
it in Apple's new computers without
anyone noticing. (12 minutes)
Great listening for anyone, but especially programmers in this case.
I have actually done a number of these "Secret" project type situations. Were they are not fully supported when started, and kept very secret. I'll discuss on of these along the lines of your questions.
Was it successful?
Yes, the system developed was put into place 3 years ago, and has been functioning ever since.
Were you found out?
Yes, it was discovered, and it was part of the overall plan.
Were you punished or rewarded?
With a working prototype we were rewarded, given the extra resources needed, and eventually the system was put into place for the entire company to use.
How did you fund it?
It was a development activity that was simply completed in down-time and personal time by various people.
How did you staff it?
See the above.
How long did it take to finish, compared to above-ground projects?
We did the entire thing in about 4 months, with dedicated resources a single person could have done it in about 2 months, or a team in about 3-4 weeks.
What was the cost compared to above-ground projects?
No cost, using down-time that was already "wasted" to be put to effective use. All existing infrastructure for the final incarnation was already there.
Was it formally adopted?
Yes, it is a solid part of the business plan now, and has been for over 3 years.
We are currently in this situation, although, admittedly, the project will not have high visibility aspects - even though everyone will be eventually using it.
As part of a preparation to rebuild most of our enterprise applications, we have started developing an application framework that will be the basis for all of the replacement applications. We already have "bench projects" and "proof of concept" time that everyone is aware that we use to evaluate concepts. How it is different this time, though, is that we are actively developing a full project.
Was it successful? - We have not rolled out the full framework yet, but since it is modular, have been rolling out pieces in the legacy applications. Most of these are focused on stability and reporting/logging concerns. So far, they have exceeded expectations, allowing us to react to issues more rapidly, as well as eliminating some previously recurring ones.
Were you found out? - Well, this project has become one of the worst kept secrets I have ever seen. While there are quite a few people who have heard the name of the project thrown around a bit, I don't think anyone outside of a few of my developers and the testing team really know what it is about.
Were you punished or rewarded? - We haven't considered either side of this, yet. Unless the framework would cause negative effects, I doubt we would be punished for it. However, even if it is a success, the reward will be that no one notices anything other than improved applications.
How did you fund it? - Like mentioned before, bench time between other projects and inclusion in "proof of concept" work. I have also been putting some of my own personal time into it on my commute, since it will lay the groundwork for how all of my developers interact with the applications in the future.
How did you staff it? - I started with a series of small proof of concepts within the legacy codebase as part of "maintaining" the applications. Going in and fixing a defect often involved analytical steps on what could be done to prevent things from happening or improve the experience in the future. These were eventually extracted and refactored in their own assemblies, which became the beginning of the framework. We are now placing "covert" projects into our iterations that help flesh out these ideas through my developers, and we are now extracting and refactoring their efforts based upon the success of the implementation.
How long did it take to finish, compared to above-ground projects? - Yet to be determined. Since this is not an official project, so far it has really cost nothing. Bench time and "proof of concept" work is standard inclusion. The fact that we are essentially creating something from this time instead of throwing it away is gravy.
What was the cost, compared to above-ground projects? - Once again, yet to be determined. I imagine that the up-front cost will be relatively small compared to larger projects. Considering that this is a framework to contain commonly used extensions and improve the ability and quality of the developer to work efficiently, it will probably pay for itself before it is finished due to time-saving, improved practices, and reduction in defects.
Was it formally adopted? - The developers have embraced the concept. My immediate management is chomping at the bit. My management peers are excited, if not a little confused on what it will do. The measurement will be the success of the applications that are built off of the framework - which is some ways away still.
I built a tool to validate schema changes to the target DB at work. prior to my tool we did it all by hand with fugly scripts that DBA's at client sites had to run. my tool started tracking the structure of the database to know if certain things would work out. I got frustrated with having to hand check all this stuff or suffer from the errors inevtiable in doing things by hand so I built my validator and here is its story...
Was it successful?
Yes
Were you found out?
yes. Part of the aspect of a skunk works project is that it has to surface eventually.
Were you punished or rewarded?
Punished initially - why not work on mainstream activities. But rewarded once the benefit was made evident and product errors were reduced. Then it was heralded- everyone loves a winner.
How did you fund it?
For the love of coding it up and making my life easier - so no direct funds needed. Unless was part of managements plan to have a secret project i cannot see how this would be otherwise.
How did you staff it?
I coded alone as a lone developer on a grassy knoll with my laptop.
How long did it take to finish, compared to above-ground projects?
Not comparable. my skunksworks effort was maybe a year of tinkering. If we had set out to do it directly i cant imagine it would have taken less than 2 months directly but I do not know since thats not how it morphed. Downtime to think and plan may have made it faster in the end compared direct planning upfront.
What was the cost, compared to above-ground projects?
Undetermined - As I mentioned, given that I had down time to think and plan it was able to evovle in the direction I wanted without schedule/result pressures. In a shorter or more resource involved project we probably would have made some mistakes in rushin to get to some M1, M2 etc. Besides if it didnt work out, its would have been as if it had never happened as I could have folded up the tents and gone quietly into the night.
Was it formally adopted?
My project is a key part of the product build at my work so I would say its entrenched.
Hmm... I did one of these today actually.
We've got no real backup system in place. At present I get the highly enjoyable task of backing up 100GB of SVN repositories using svn hotcopy and .tar.gz files, while trying to juggle them across two or three NFS shares with limited disk space to get to the server with the backup disk. That's in the best case - i.e. when I can be bothered to babysit the process for 2 hours.
Since that's bound to end in catastrophe sooner or later I did a git svn clone on the largest one straight onto the backup server, then cloned that to my own machine and kicked out the svn working copy I was using. I've gained about 1GB of free space on my machine, given the most important backups some redundancy, and reduced a 15 minute svn st to a 30 second git status. And will I get complained at for it? Probably...
Generally the answers here have been success stories, so I thought I'd share my recent experience sitting just outside such a project that did not go so well.
How did you fund it?
How did you staff it?
The project started when my manager identified a potential employee, lets call him Fred, who had a pet project in our field. We don't pay well, and they they agreed that Fred would be hired and would work almost full time on the project, which they would eventually introduce to the business.
So Fred's started work on the project, known only to Fred's team but not to management or other parts of the business. Fred is a developer, and the work was more-or-less pure development, plus contributions to an underlying open-source project.
Was it successful?
Not really. Fred was working on it alone, and I think would have spent 12-18 months on it. Progress reports to the team consisted of describing whatever bug he was fixing that week. Occasional attempts were made to interest one or two higher-ups in the organization, but they never really went anywhere. Fred was supposed to put together a plan to finish and roll out the project so it could be introduced to the organization, but there always seemed to be some reason it was never done.
Were you found out?
Word slowly filtered out as Fred an the manager tried to interest more people in what they were doing.
Eventually we got restructured, and our new director wanted to know what everyone was working on, and the project was revealed to him. However, it was apparently not explained very well, since the new director wound up asking me (and others in our team I am sure) what exactly Fred's project was?
Were you punished or rewarded?
Eventually the new director froze all funding for the project and Fred was reassigned to work on other projects. That's the current status as far as I know.
How long did it take to finish, compared to above-ground projects?
Was it formally adopted?
It was not finished and it was not adopted.
What was the cost, compared to above-ground projects?
The ostensible cost was Fred's time.
However, there were other costs.
First, Fred and his project became a it of a joke in our team, and later in the teams we work with. What was he doing? Why was he doing it? Why was there no progress? Fred's reputation suffered. "Fred's project" became an in-joke for a project that was going nowhere.
Second, the eventual revelation of such a long-running but hidden project reflected poorly on our manager, and by extension on our whole team.
Third, resentment grew. Why was this guy working on his pet project when there was so much real work to be done? We are a small but busy team and we could have used a developer on any number of other projects.
In the end, I think this project has had consequences for our team's standing and dynamic. I occasionally talk it over with team members, when we're away from the office. Initially (and at the time) we were very critical of Fred, who can be an irritating guy, and who does not take criticism well, and who promised something he couldn't deliver. More recently, we've been critical of our boss. This was not a good way to run a project, and it was obvious from very early on that Fred did not have the skillset to do this work on his own and he would not seek or take advice. It was unfair to Fred that he was put in that position and left in it for so long. Lately I have wondered if I should have raised my concerns more forcefully. Though we did push Fred and our manager on what the project was and where it was going, we did not take it any further than our team. Having said that, I cannot imagine a good outcome even if we had.
Finally, I'd like to say that Fred is a smart guy and the project was not a bad one. It could have been successful (some parts have since come out in competing projects -- inferior competitors that actually delivered).
If this project had been done above board, and Fred had been working with a decent project manager and had a good communicator on the team, it could well have found a champion and delivered something great. Either that or it could have been killed a lot sooner.
I did one of these. It's actually how I ended up programming.
I was responsible for maintaining a legacy, er... "database". I won't go into gory details but it was the usual evil application. The company pretty much ran on it, it would sometimes go down for days. At the time the IS director (a friend) was actively looking for replacements, talking to large consulting organizations, etc.etc. but management was committted/emotionally invested in the existing system. I volunteered (to the IS director) to try to rewrite is (well, more like he asked if anyone was interested in trying to deal with this mess and I volunteered because I was bored). We had no real programmers on staff, and I'd only written a few small ad-hoc things. I had no idea how little I knew.
Finished the thing in about 8 months or maybe a year (this was a while ago, don't remember exactly).
Was it successful?
yes, worked as advertised.
Were you found out?
It initially started as a sort of super-secret, cloak and dagger thing. Kind of silly in retrospect, but it made it more fun. About halfway through it just started to become more obvious that that was what I was doing, and as it turned out the idea was supported. Writing this thing eventually became my job.
Were you punished or rewarded?
Rewarded
How did you fund it? / How did you staff it?
The success of it was pretty much due to the support of my boss, who made sure I had the time and resources I needed to do it.
Was it formally adopted?
Yes, we eventually ran the company on it.