
Ask HN: Is there a site for consultants / mentors “as a service”? - dewey
I&#x27;m working on a side project and learning a new programming language at the same time. Sometimes I get stuck with questions that seem like they would take an experienced person a few minutes of time to answer to steer me into the right direction.<p>Usually I hop onto IRC, ask friends, open GitHub issues, ask on StackOverflow etc. but answers there usually take a while to trickle in and also I don&#x27;t want to burden open source maintainers with &quot;usage&quot; questions if it&#x27;s not strictly a bug.<p>I guess what I&#x27;m asking is kind of a money-based bounty system coupled with a platform like StackOverflow. Is there such a thing?<p>PS: I&#x27;m not an impatient person, just sometimes it would be nice to get the opinion of a professional on a question like &quot;what would be the Rails way of solving that issue?&quot;.
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codegeek
I have always wanted to build that service even though never got a chance yet.
I even have the domain registered for it (experthours.com). There is the
generic clarity.fm and then there is sites like codementor.io. But I am not
quite happy with both. The idea is that you will be able to connect with
someone who is really good at 1-2 things and then give you tips as a
consultant. They won't do the project for you but guide you. Something like
that.

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rboyd
I've had generally positive experiences on
[https://www.codementor.io/](https://www.codementor.io/)

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dewey
That sounds pretty interesting, thank you!

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shinryuu
I was a mentor on codementor.io for a bit. My experience was that there is a
significant overhead in understanding the problem for not much gain.

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jascii
I'm not sure the financial incentive of such a site would be significant
enough to generate a faster response time than the channels you already
mention.

Besides, isn't part of the beauty of side projects that you get to go down
rabbit-holes figuring how something really works without economical pressure?

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dewey
> Besides, isn't part of the beauty of side projects that you get to go down
> rabbit-holes figuring how something really works without economical
> pressure?

Definitely, that's the whole reason I'm doing it (Learning Rails in this
case). Part of what is fun for _me_ is also to see what's the "right" way of
doing it so getting some professional input sometimes would be nice.

I do also have a bunch of other projects with different objectives where I
just want to ship something even if it's held together by some duct-tape.

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machtesh
Not for technical stuff, but for managerial stuff:
[http://leadingup.co](http://leadingup.co)

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mtmail
[https://clarity.fm/](https://clarity.fm/) for business advice, less technical
questions.

