> It depends on whether you're the one paying for someone's learning curve. When I was consulting, I would occasionally make a time box deal with the client. O

> It depends on whether you're the one paying for someone's learning curve. When I was consulting, I would occasionally make a time box deal with the client. One project sticks out to me: I thought their project was perfectly suited to Rails at the time, but the majority of my projects had been done in Django. “I’m going to try building this in Rails. When I hit a 40h timebox, I’m going to stop, look at progress so far with a critical eye, and assess whether we’re getting value from this or not. If I don’t think so, I’ll abandon the Rails project and start over for free with Django.” As it turned out, the whole thing was done in about 30h with Rails and we didn’t need to have the rest of that conversation.