Show HN: Codacy, delegate your programming tasks. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Codacy, delegate your programming tasks.

codacy.com

27 pointsjaimefjorge33 comments

Thinking about code you have to do, but you are busy with something else?

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.

Already thinking in a perfect example of something you could delegate right now?

Perfect! Send it to us: http://www.codacy.com/submitProblem

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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.

Cool ideas. Seriously considering them. Thank you!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

A fellow HN user started this theme shop:

https://wrapbootstrap.com/

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

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.

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)

And even then, it's rare I work out an entire DB schema on paper first.

One scenario: building a new django app on top of an old database.

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

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.

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?)

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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