[thelist] Worst Dev Project Of The Year Contest

Evoltigans,

Most of this is venting... but I am gonna try to bring it on-topic at the
end.

Here's the situation: September of last year, I get approached by this guy
who has subcontracted stuff to me before. We haved a pretty good business
relationship. He wants me to build a very small-scale e-commerce system for
a client (he was building the design side of things). I said great. I built
the schema and started on the admin section while waiting for the client to
conjur content so the design guy can do his stuff and hand it over to me to
do my stuff. Well, (counting in head...) about 8 months later, the content
is delivered. I tell my man that I can get the cart system complete and
tested in four weekends (I have a "real" job too). He says "great" and sets
the deadline for four weeks from that day. Since he set it from that day, I
assumed that the design was almost complete. Nope. I bugged him and bugged
him... eventually I got a notification that his stuff was done TODAY. This
gives me less than one week to build and test this system. Since I really
only have time to work on it on the weekends... I really only have a little
over two days. Kick-ass! That's what coffee's for, right? Bah! The QA guy in
me told me to email him saying that I wouldn't be able to get it fully built
and tested for 3 weeks (remember, my original requirement was four weeks).
Get this. After waiting 8 months for initial movement, then another 3 weeks
of MY DEVELOPMENT TIME for the design, they won't budge on the current
deadline!

So, now I'm really stuck. I have two choices, as I see it:
a. build a shitty system in one day and test it the next, or
b. give them a hand gesture, drop the project, break a business
relationship, and gain really bad kharma

Seems like a lose-lose for me. If it wasn't for the kharma and the loss of a
business relationship (and a good one, at that), I'd go with b. Plus, I have
been given an up-front payment, so I'd have to return that as well (even
though I've already built the DB and imported the data). What do y'all
think?

Also, if you'd like to share a worse experience (possibly offlist so this
doesn't get out-of-hand) to make me feel better, I wouldn't complain.

<tip type="trusting instincts">
If you have a bad feeling about something, at least make your reservations
known. That way, you can go back and quote what you said... then, you have a
little more weight to throw around (not to mention the I-told-you-so
factor).
</tip>

<tip type="ASP String Concatenation Problems">
According to ASPToday's first ASP performance article, this is good:
<%
for x=1 to 1000
    mystr = mystr & "moo"
next
response.write mystr
%>

But, ASPToday's second performance article retracts this. ASP has to
re-allocate the storage space in the string variable, and this causes
problems. If you're familiar with Java, this is comparable to appending to a
StringBuffer rather than concatenating String objects.
</tip>

<tip type="more than just thelist">
Evolt's community interaction goes further than a mailing list. Check out
http://evolt.org. Share your wealth of knowledge by subitting an article.
Gain fame and fortune by commenting on existing articles. Evolt is only as
good as you make it.
</tip>

<tip type="Mandrake Linux 7.0 Deluxe">
Setting up ML7D as a second OD? Do yourself a favor and create partitions
using a program on your existing OS. I have had terrible problems with the
setup program's "partitioning tool". In fact, I can't get past that part in
the installation. Create the partitions using your existing OS (using its
filesystem if necessary), then convert the filesystem in the setup program.
</tip>

--
mattwarden
mattwarden.com