-k.

The project I’ve put my heart and soul into for the last two years has been cancelled.

I’d pretty much had enough of the project a few months back (see Time to move on?) but my manager, someone I respect, convinced me that things would change, well they did. The business is a fit of senseless stupidity and corporate political maneuvering killed the project. Not officially of course, that wont happen until July (next financial year)
. The official line is that it’s being “re-scoped”. All the contractors and many of the senior staff (one person in the entire team is remaining with the company) are being released to pursue other opportunities. I left on Friday.

The hardest thing about leaving the project is leaving the team. If you work in a corporate environment you often end up working with a large number of “also rans”. Our team wasn’t like that. It was filled with smart, energetic, committed people. We took everything that was thrown at us and turned it into a success (at least from a technical perspective). When problems arose we worked through to find the correct rather than the easiest solution. It paid off countless times and although discussions were at times heated everyone respected everyone else.

The final debriefs were hard. I sat in one meeting that involved the development manager from a downstream system. I have little time for fools and this team (with one or two exceptions) is full of them and the development manager is one of the nastiest pieces of work I’ve ever had the misfortune to work with, she a true obstructionist. Unfortunately she leads development for the public facing on-line sites so is able to use fear as a lever on the business. Anyway at one point our project manager was talking about the re-use of some of our work, and praised the development team for the quality of our output. She smirked, humphed and asked if there was any hardware she could steal from the project. When she was told no, she got up and left. I nearly lost it.

I’m proud of the work the team did, it’s a shame the system never made it to production.

• We built content storage system that was tested with 24.5 million pieces of content ranging from single lines of text to multi-megabyte image files
• We developed a method for streaming content to and from the repository that provided a predictable level of performance and memory usage
• We provided a sophisticated validation system that supported complex business rules with real-time (in editor) performance
• We created a event driven content distribution system
• We provided notification hooks for work-flow and other systems interested in repository changes and events

I’m now looking for my next challenge. I’ve spoken with old colleagues who have exciting things on the boil. The future is bright.

As a final ironic twist one of the external vendors (who was effectively part of the political power play that bought us down) has spoken to one or two people from the project about integrating our ideas into their product.