

Show HN: Codacy, delegate your programming tasks. - jaimefjorge
http://www.codacy.com/
Thinking about code you have to do, but you are busy with something else?<p>What if you could delegate your problems to someone ready to take it off your shoulders?
That is what we are all about: doing small programming tasks for you, so that you can focus in what is really important.<p>Already thinking in a perfect example of something you could delegate right now?<p>Perfect!
Send it to us: http://www.codacy.com/submitProblem
======
igul222
Suggestions:

\- Add some examples of reasonable programming tasks and prices. I have no
idea of what size tasks I should give Codacy and how much I should expect to
pay for them.

\- Let users do other users' tasks and take a percentage cut off the
transaction. I'd enjoy spending an evening working through little problems and
getting paid for it.

~~~
jaimefjorge
Cool ideas. Seriously considering them. Thank you!

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mrchess
It's too bad many of the toughest problems in companies are more typically on
the integration level, which requires domain knowledge and context of the
project itself. To solve these problems don't require brains, but time and
communication.

I feel this service is targeted toward people who have simple one-off "puzzle"
problems ie. write me a quick recommendation algorithm for a data structure of
this format.

I'd be interested in seeing some case studies to see what exactly are the
types of problems you are solving. "Small programming task" is a bit too vague
for me.

~~~
jaimefjorge
Those types of problems are addressed by consulting firms with thousands of
employees. We are trying to be do micro consulting for that itch you have but
cannot scratch it in time :)

We are actually surprised by the amount of "puzzle" problems we are getting!

Thank you for your interest. I will be putting an example problem page and a
testimonial section as soon as possible to address that.

~~~
sitkack
Another one could be generate skeleton sample applications. I am often trying
to wire together a bunch of technologies and if someone built a 300-500 line
toy sample app that I could take an extend this would go a long way.

Examples ...

Take d3.js and cubism.js, generating time series plots from data out of a
postgres database using tornado or flask.

Use spring,jdbc template,jetty,redis,jackson,jersey to create a caching web
server pulling data from postgres, caching into redis and returning JSON data.
Use this sample schema and JSON payload for the sketch.

------
facorreia
Nice idea. I realize at this point you're just trying to feel the waters and
measure demand. Good for you. But even for a first iteration landing page, I
think you need to demonstrate more awareness of how hard it is to outsource
software development (even in small morsels).

Submit > payment > success just doesn't convince me, on the contrary, it makes
me wonder if you ever delegated software development tasks to others. Not
counting issues such as domain knowledge and integration, that were already
mentioned by others, communication is extremelly tricky. For small-sized jobs,
producing a full specification of both funcional and non-funcional
requirements and going through a few cycles of submit-review-resubmit can take
more time than required to just do the job myself.

With all those caveats, I would have use for services like these as well and I
hope you can do a good job of communicating why someone would go to Codacy
instead of Odesk, Freelancer.com or RentACoder.

~~~
jaimefjorge
Thank you for your encouragement!

The idea of the submit > payment > success is that it should be easy for devs
to get started sending problems. In the background, however, you will be able
to specify a number of requirements and details for each task. For instance,
for every problem we try to detail a solution for it. For more complex tasks,
some more discussing will be required.

However, given the small problems that we are getting and the awesome
description capabilities of the people sending them, this is surprisingly
cool.

However, we still have a long way to go. Just to be able to help people out
with their work is already a very cool thing for us.

Thank you for your constructive opinion and the references.

~~~
sitkack
I would limit the problem domain so that delegation is easier.

    
    
        1) submit unit tests in format XYZ
        2) tests pass
        3) receive code
    

Generate high level reports off of submitted code (kloc, cyclomatic,
whathavs).

Another one would be

Design the urls for a REST interface and the JSON responses, worker implements
code to support REST using framework A/B/C.

Or, implement algorithm in paper FOO using Python, Julia or Ocaml, should be
able to read this dataset...

It has to be fairly constrained or else it is hard to specify and complete
projects. They should come back within the same order of magnitude that one
would complete them in anyway w/o either party being overworked.

One could also, instead of money, implement it as a sort of quid-pro-quo, I
see a simple task (for me) that I could knock out, this gives me credits to
spend on other projects. Virtual currency of code.

Also, licensing is an issue. I wouldn't want to work on code I couldn't keep.
This just seems wrong to me. The only way I am ok with it, is if the rates are
really high and that doesn't seem amenable to a site like this.

------
monkeymace
Until I came to visit the comments, I was convinced this could be a hoax/joke
site.

"Wish you could spawn a human thread to help you? If you have a task, small
enough to delegate to someone, then this is it!" (Spawning humans!)

"Are you currently overworked, exhausted and have too much on your plate?"
(Don't most people have too much on their plate?)

The site and its copy are vague and universal, which makes it funny,
especially the 'Submit Problem' screen.

Only when I looked at the About Us page did I start to think this could be
real.

However you also say "We find sites like stackoverflow very useful, but what
if there was a middle term between them and small consultancy firms?"

You are basically trying to become a small consultancy firm it seems. Unless
you let people sign-up and handle tasks themselves, like a
crowdspring/99designs meets mechanical turk for programming.

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makecheck
I think that even though you're requiring payment, you need to show some free
examples of code that you have written. You have to make people think
"wow...that's really well-written code" before they'll hand you just anything
to work on.

One of the most important things to me when delegating a task to a programmer
is trust. I wouldn't ask just anyone to solve just any problem, so you should
demonstrate to potential customers the kinds of things that they can ask of
you.

~~~
jaimefjorge
You're right. Trust is huge. In order to gain trust from developers we are
trying to make this personal. We are responding ourselves to every email sent
and talking to everybody. We dont have automated responses also because of
this. We also have put our faces for you to see it.

However, we understand that we have a long way to go. However, things are
running! people are sending and getting their problems done. Hopefully today I
will put a testimonial section in the page to address that.

Thank you for your feedback!

------
bdcravens
I hope I don't come off rude, but I don't see anything here that I couldn't
get on oDesk. Maybe less. On oDesk, I can pick a language. Here, you don't
mention what your skills are. So I could send you 3 problems, one in Lua, one
in ColdFusion, and the third a distributed map reduce job for MongoDB, and
assume you do them all?

Given the grammar and the names on the About Us, I assume I'm paying cheap
off-shore rates? What I'm seeing here is a group of folks who want to tackle
outsourced work, but aren't big enough or experienced enough to take on full
projects. The attempt is to brand it in such a way to capture some of the
startup dollars out there. However in reality, it's just the same kind of
freelancing that's been going on for 15 years.

------
mistrQ
Brilliant idea. I think this is pretty awesome.

However, from my (brief) usage of the landing page, I don't quite understand
who will be doing the delegated work. Will it be some intern, or will it be
your team? Who is your team? More specifically, what are there skills and what
guarantees do I have?

Also - I can see potential problems with undergrad students submitting
assignments to be done. Any idea how to regulate that kind of stuff and ensure
you aren't just helping someone do something that they aren't allowed to
delegate (or is this not your problem?).

I'm sure the details will be clearer with time, and for simple tasks this
could work quite well.

~~~
jaimefjorge
Thank you! This gives us so much motivation.

As a group (and previous software engineering students) we talked about this.
We define that, as soon as we detect that a given task is homework or project
related, we wont do it. We prefer to nudge the student in the correct
direction instead of receiving money for the student nor learning.

We understand that, although this is morally cool, we wont make money out of
this. This is a price we are willing to pay: no homework and no software
projects to prevent students from learning.

(we will probably add this as a disclaimer. Also I know that sometimes is
difficult to triage a homework assignment out of professional development.
This is where the human triage we are doing will help)

Thank you for bringing this up and for motivating us!

------
eaurouge
Here's an idea. Consider accepting GitHub issues. If it's a private repo, I
can add Codacy as a collaborator. Then I'll create an issue, maybe write a few
specs to define my acceptance criteria, and pass it over to you.

~~~
jaimefjorge
Very cool!! I will create a github codacy account right now. I'm also putting
it on the site as a feature.

What an awesome idea. Thanks man.

~~~
jaimefjorge
I created a codacy github account for that purpose. Feel free to talk to us to
talk about this!

~~~
facorreia
One thing can be said in your favor: you're iterating fast! Way to go putting
those lean startup principles to work.

------
zekenie
In my experience, communication is the lion's share of the work in a
programming project. Unless the task is super self contained, I can't see this
being useful. I suppose I could say, "I need a jquery plugin to do this" or I
need a thingy to read this obscure file format and turn it into x y or z. But
aside from examples like that, I think this might not meet the cost/benefit
requirements of most potential customers. That said, I already can think of a
self contained task I want to ask you guys about.

~~~
jaimefjorge
I guess you have a point there. We are trying out an idea we had and the
feedback is surprisingly good. Turns out there is room for type of tasks!

Regarding that self contained task: well, please do!

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mendable
I just submitted something that I need doing - looking forward to seeing what
you guys are capable of doing.

EDIT: One feature I would like to see is for you to have an automatic email
confirmation of a submission, including the original submission body itself as
a record of what was requested.

------
jfaucett
great idea! two suggestions though: 1. fix the english grammatical mistakes
(sorry, I realize you're programmers but it doesn't look or sound
professional) and 2. drop bootstrap or modify/lessjs it so that it doesn't
look like a website someone threw together in 10 minutes.

~~~
jaimefjorge
Thank you for your constructive criticism! Will work on it right now.

~~~
pdelgallego
There are plenty of twitter boostrap themes for ~$20.

A fellow HN user started this theme shop:

<https://wrapbootstrap.com/>

~~~
rpicard
That is such a good idea! I really hope that catches on.

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encoderer
I'm having a hard time imagining the sorts of tasks I could hand-off to you.
To all the people offering encouragement here, can any of you comment on
something specific you could see yourself using this for?

I suppose I can think of things like... suppose I had a DB schema, you can
create the SQL and the Django models for me. But I'm really wracking myself to
think-up better examples. I mean, I don't start new django projects very
often. And even then, it's rare I work out an entire DB schema on paper first.
Usually the process of creating the Django models teases-out the final design
decisions.

~~~
jaimefjorge
What if you have some processing you need to make in a collection of your
programming language? What if you have to make a script (in your favorite
scripting language) to fetch and transform information? How about some good
old SQL queries you need to develop? How about that algorithm you have to
implement?

Our premise is that programmers often find themselves with these micro
problems that can be often considered yak shaving.

Please don't shave yaks; use us :) (thank you for your interest)

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salimmadjd
Cool idea! I could see myself using it. However, I'm not sure how scalable
this business is, unless you're planning to crowdsource this to some per-
verified team of experts

~~~
jaimefjorge
Right now it isn't very scalable, you're right. However, given this positive
feedback we are having, we will really consider taking people in to take care
of this load.

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thejash
I really like this idea. I will be keeping it in mind over the next few weeks.
Please add more information (what languages? what size problem? what price?)

~~~
jaimefjorge
Thank you! Please keep it mind; we want to hear from you (even if just to talk
about programming).

We have experience in a number of different programming languages, different
frameworks, etc.. The best approach is to send it first and we will try to
find a way.

We are focusing on small problems that are affordable (starting from 10$) for
you and that alleviate that work load you have.

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cpeterso
Your favicon is busted: <http://www.codacy.com/assets/images/favicon.png>

