Personal Opinion Alert, take with grain of salt: I'm not likely to give out my personal information (email address, github account, etc) just to see a list of projects. I'd certainly give you my information to apply for one. Was the list of projects public, I'd be more likely to sign up for "interesting" ones be sent to me. Our definitions of interesting might be different, and seeing a public list would make me more comfortable.
I found myself okay with it because they'll send the developers a list of projects. From there I apply on ones I'm interested in, rather than the other way around.
We'll see how it goes this Saturday. As a freelancer I'm always open to new client discovery.
Clients are fed up with broken promises and shoddy work from the hordes of "freelance" sites and low-cost development shops around the world. Similarly, the best Indie designers and developers struggle to be matched with great clients and differentiate themselves online.
Many have tried to fix this and some succeeded to an extend. The deeper issue with such an initiative is how can you maintain the quality, that you promised, over a period of time.
You have to be on it all the time and you cannot let anything on its own. A good developer may be over-worked and may not deliver on another project, whilst she did an awesome work on the earlier one.
Disclaimer for this plug: I'm one of the co-founder of http://lxidd.com/ and we have been trying to solve this problem at a larger scale and magnitude. We're opening up only to select Clients and only via referral and introductions.
Just curious, do you have a list of other websites that does similar things? This article has made me quite interested in it (i'm a developer) so I'd like to know more of that market. Thanks!
This seems to be pitched somewhere horrible between the fun side projects ideas site and contract work. Take out the $50 charge and it suddenly looks great
$50 isn't very much for a days work. Also if I'm doing contract work it would be nice to pitch the price to the project and my skills rather than having some arbitrary fixed price. If I have taken someone's money they will feel entitled and I have to deal with difficult clients vague requirements and suchlike. They will also (presumably) retain the rites for the code produced.
Remove the $50 and it can be just for fun. I can bail on people I don't want to work with and I can retain the code if I want to extend it or show it off on my GitHub.
Hmmm... I don't think that the $50 is going to the hacker. I think that is just the fee for GetHacker to connect the project owner with a developer.
See the 'get to work' bubble on the homepage: "Once a project owner decides to pick you for their project, we'll connect you both via e-mail. The GetHacker process is over, and you both can take it from there." which implies that once a match has been made, there may be further negotiation, but it won't be facilitated by GetHacker.
I don't think this would be for mission critical projects - that stuff will be done by the inhouse team. Just small things that I can get done over the weekend that will make stuff better. E.g. adding responsive design, optimising widget y etc
Also the $50 fee should be conditional upon a developer being successfully picked - at least initially so to boost volume.
I was under the impression that GetHacker receives $50, it's the price a client has to pay in order to connect with a developer. Then you the developer would be able to negotiate costs with the client in private.
It seems the site is using WEBrick as the webserver. Replacing it with Thin should help a lot performance wise.
Heroku has as section in their docs on how to change that: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails3#webserver
Also, letting the application serve all the static assets has an even bigger impact on the number of dynos you need.
I'm not a heroku user, but it seems there are some good solutions to this problem, like https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/cdn-asset-host-rails31
The way you have piched it, doesn't show a difference from other freelancing networks:
"Then, you can review their profiles and get in touch with the ones you like" – that's how it works with odesk/freelancer.
"When you see a project you like, just click on Apply. Project owners will be notified of your applications and will review your profile to determine if you're the right ..." exactly ...
"Short term projects" – these websites already showcase plunty of such.
Now you have added restrictions like $50 and only saturday to see projects.
I think there's an opportunity for a dev marketplace where client post a project, and it automatically finds a right candidate.
I will never understand reliance on Github for screening applicants. Here, the people that need a hacker probably have no idea what to look for in a Github account.
It seemed like a good idea until I hit "contact" and it's just an email address. Not as credible as I'd prefer were I looking for more information about the company behind this since it could have legal implications regarding taking on work outside of the country, taxes, etc. If I can't learn more about the site/company, it looks like just someone's side project and, hence, I question the support/security/stability/etc. of it.
I like the idea, don't get me wrong. Call me paranoid, but I just like to know more about who I'm handing my information over to before I sign up for something. Thanks for looking into it.
Alright, I'm working on the signup errors. It appears to be hit and miss. I personally can't replicated but I'm upping the dynos on heroku and checking my code.
I often see this with sites that assume a GitHub account has an associated public email, when that is not always true. The Devise gem for Rails has this issue, if you are using that.
It's under heavy load and possible during development. I will wait when it start loading later tonight.
edit: site actually loaded, but sing-up for developers failed .
Also, please be more up-front about how and how much a developer gets paid. Is the $50 a project submission fee ? Is the $50 the actual income submitted to the developer minus your commision ?
think it's reasonable. I personally think it's a good bar as this will be 3-5 dev hours which is about a day's work. Given you match projects with the right domain experts, this can be a good substantial project.
