Ask HN: Is there a site for consultants / mentors “as a service”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a site for consultants / mentors “as a service”?

9 pointsdewey8 comments

I'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.

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't want to burden open source maintainers with "usage" questions if it's not strictly a bug.

I guess what I'm asking is kind of a money-based bounty system coupled with a platform like StackOverflow. Is there such a thing?

PS: I'm not an impatient person, just sometimes it would be nice to get the opinion of a professional on a question like "what would be the Rails way of solving that issue?".

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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.

I've had generally positive experiences on https://www.codementor.io/

That sounds pretty interesting, thank you!

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.

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?

> 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.

Not for technical stuff, but for managerial stuff: http://leadingup.co

https://clarity.fm/ for business advice, less technical questions.

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