The Accidental Developer

Strange Projects on the Horizon

On Friday I was approached to work on one of the oddest and probably most ill-conceived projects I have ever encountered, and I might just take it anyway. Basically a company has a very good, very modular framework built for them in C# using .Net by a bunch of Russians who they hired remotely. I can tell by looking at the output that the code is quite modular, if it might be a little unclean. It looks like it would actually be some pretty good code to support.

They have been selling boiler plate instillations of this framework, with just some simple skinning done, and selling them hand over fist, apparently they are making a mint.

So anyway, For some reason they want to hire one of my companies, (and hence me) to do the occasional “special project” for clients who need something that is just slightly more custom than what they have. There are a few basic problems with this.
1) I don’t know C#
2) I don’t know Russian
3) I don’t think I even get access to the code base at all!

It seems that each part of the site that the framework builds can be loaded as a “section” which can easily be included on sites other than the primary site. (that is to say you can throw a little javascript or something into your own website, and have it display, say the friends list from the primary site, and it was built to have this work). For some reason they think it’s a good idea to have me build a second site, in php, that covers their additional functionality, and then have it load each of the bits of the primary site and display them. This seems bizzaro to me, but hey, I’m willing to do it because I bet I can learn something cool and they would still be paying me.

What I’m really hoping is that this is NOT actually what they expect me to do, and that there is a SOAP interface to what the Russians built.

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