How long to know ColdFusion well enough to make a MySpace/Youtube clone.

I would say (asuming a natural aptitude towards programming) at least a year of really intense real world experience, maybe 2 before your ready to fully understand what you need to do. and then another two to three years to develop it and work all the bugs out. that's for something exactly like myspace today. If you are a complete genious (IQ over 140) then maybe you could do it a little faster, and if you just to "something like myspace" but not quite as robust and secure you could shave a bit of time off, but there are a LOT of minute things involved with programming an application that big and that heavily trafficed that you wouldn't have to consider until your traffic waranted it.

If you just want something similar (not an exact replica of myspace/you tube), I have built a couple small social networking types of sites in a matter of 3-6 months but I have over 7 years of advanced coldfusion experience.

I guess I should have clarified, what about something like MySpace was at release? I'm sure by now with a half billion sale they have ea lot more developers and have added features that are necessary at this stage. But I'm more curious abotu what it would be like to create something like MySpace and YouTube at release.

Thanks for your feedback :)

Ahh, that second reply was very helpful. I guess I'm taken aback by the steep learning curve you've outlined. I had planned to study Ben Forta's "Web application construction kit" then go to his more advanced book. I guess I'm curious about how the one to two year timeline breaks down.

I'm not refuting the accuracy of what you say, you obviously know much more about this than I do. :) I'm just curious about what's responsible for that time frame.

I would also say 5 years of experience in coldfusion an then to set this project up i think 2 years will do the trick. the newer the version of coldfusion maybe the easyer it will be, like flash video etc. is now more supported than a few versions ago. if you wait a while till version 8 is out and learn cf on that bases you will learn faster and don't need much workarounds for some problems we had in an few versions ago.

but projects like that are never finished so...

Five years of experience? Really?

If your a smart guy you can learn the basics of coldfusion in a few months by reading the Ben Forta books and doing all the examples. But it's real world experience that is going to teach you how to develop a good application. You could probably read the books and then just start right into your social networking site project but you will find that you don't even really know where to begin. You will not yet know enough about to effectively plan our your application and it will end up being something really lame in the end. You will probably build it over again a couple times until you get closer to a production worthy application. I am saying if you are a really smart guy you would need a year or two of real world experience becase that is just  how long it will take to become a competant developer. There are so many factors like troubleshooting skills, development framework strategies, database design capabilities that can't be tought by a book, but come with real world experience and guidance from senior developers.
To put it in perspective, you can go to home depot and get a book that teaches you how to build a tree house. Then you might be able to build a really nice tree house. But if you turn around and decide based on that information you read in your treehouse book and the really cool tree house you built, that you are now capable of building a real house. once you get started you will find that you don't know the first thing about laying a foundation or all the building codes that the city requires you to follow when designing the architecture of your house, and so on and so forth.
Hopefully that helps

Thanks a lot for the feedback SBennett. For someone who isn't doing this for a living, and who plans to self learn, is there any way to get real world experience? I was planning on doing much smaller projects to begin with, and slowly building up from there.

Thanks SBennett, that's a very helpful response. I'll definitely give that a shot.

Your welcome,

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