Maybe I should design some lawnmower parts
This always makes me laugh.
I'm a programmer for a company that makes industrial lawn mowers. So I get an email from an engineer this morning... he wants to create a simple application that he thinks he needs a database for. And he wants to create it on his own because he wants to learn how to work with databases. He was just asking for the database from a demo I did for a project that was abandoned, because he thought it'd be good to learn from. Oh, and can he have the web pages from the demo, too, because he wants a web-based front end.
Now, how do you think he'd react if I called him up and said that I wanted to design a better bumper for one of our lawn mowers, because I wanted to learn a little mechanical engineering on the job and thought that the bumper could be improved, and would he provide me with the current blue prints and give me access to the CAD software? Heck no, mechanical engineering is his job... why am I trying to learn to do his job instead of doing my own!?
So why is it okay to call up the programmer and ask him to help you learn to do the programmer's job? Granted, we've been doing some major projects and a lot of smaller projects have been back-burnered until we can get to them... which means if he asked us to write this simple application, he'd be told to submit it to the steering committee and maybe we'd get to it in about six months or so.
So I get that he could probably learn to write a simple DB app and deploy it long before we'd get around to doing it... but he'd probably spend a full month on it, where I'd do it in less than a week. It wouldn't be as nice as what I'd develop, but it'd get done. Theoretically... I don't think he realizes what kind of programming it takes to build a web-based application.
Based on his brief description of what he wants to do, I can't figure out why he needs a database anyway. I think he wants to use a database just so he can learn how on the job. He's one of those guys that thinks he's a computer geek, and knows just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to really understand how much he doesn't know.