Show HN: GetHacker - Paid, short term projects for developers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: GetHacker - Paid, short term projects for developers

gethacker.com

29 pointsjmonegro65 comments

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.

Could I ask you why? Aside from the e-mail address (which is private), I would assume you'd want the github/work information to be public anyways.

Mainly becuase it's basically an email subscription which I avoid unless I know what value I'm getting ahead of time.

Site looks good, btw, I hope it goes well for you. I was just offering one insight into a potential reason people might not sign up.

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!

"We're sorry, but something went wrong."

Sometimes this happens with Heroku when uploading things to the database. Make sure all your database credentials are up and correct.

I guess this site is just a landing page to estimate the demand.Not actually implemented?

Me too (signing in with github)

Same. Message appears for me after attempting to authorize the app on GitHub.

When trying to sign up?

Yes. Unable to connect with Github

Same here

same here

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 somewhat agree. How about not charging the fee until someone actually applies for a project? For now, I'll just refund empty projects.

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.

That's mostly right, yes.

I was under the impressions that it cost 50$ to submit a project (the site fee), in addition to the payment for the developer.

Correct.

Ahh. Could be me just being dumb but you might want to clarify that on the site. "you both can take it from there." is a bit ambiguous.

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.

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

Thanks for the feedback. I've begun addressing the performance issues.

Looking at this from a non-developers perspective there's one thing that would put me off- waiting until Saturday before developers see the job.

If it's a small job it's likely the job poster will want to get someone working ASAP.

Got it. It's probably not for those immediate issues, but how would you feel about a "rush" option for a higher fee?

http://www.gethacker.com/developers/auth/github/callback?cod...

"We're sorry, but something went wrong."

Same problem. It happened to me right after it sent me to GitHub and I clicked the 'Authorize App' button.

The first project on the site is to fix that problem ;-) A perfect chicken-and-egg implementation!

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.

Thanks!

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.

I just figured that out and pushed a fix, here's hoping that was it.

Also, "The process is over and you're project will be coming together soon" -> "your project"

Fixed!

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.

We only use github for auth. Then, developers fill out their profiles with links to their work, bios, and skill list.

You should add bitbucket too, they have an auth api as well.

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.

Case in point, the sign-up doesn't even work. I just get a very generic error message.

Thank you, I'll definitely work on that.

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.

I completely understand. I'll put that at the top of my to-do list.

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 ?

Hi,

Can you try signing up again? The $50 is the submission fee, separate from what the developer gets.

Tried to fill out my profile after initially only saving my email address, but the textfields don't take my input anymore ...

Sorry about that, I'll look into it.

Having the same issue. The textarea fields take my input but the input fields don't.

I think this is a great idea. I'm a software developer at a big tech company; I just signed up to see if there are interesting projects.. good luck!

The contact link doesn't work on Chrome/Fedora 17. Other than that, seems pretty nice. good luck.

Working on it.

Out of curiosity, what did you use to make those animations? Cool site, by the way.

CSS3 transitions, by the look of it (http://www.gethacker.com/assets/application-69339e2f3b3262c7...)

Animate.css (http://daneden.me/animate/), super easy css3 animations.

The animations jump around in a visually unsettling way on an ipad 4 as the page loads.

250USD minimum for a project? How exactly did you come up with this price?

Randomly. What are your thoughts on it?

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.

Wow, apparently you guys crashed Heroku! I'm working on it!

That's great news. Means people are interested. Can't wait to see the idea when it is back up.

It is now! I threw more dynos at it.

keeps asking me to fill out my profile, but looks cool - I like it so far, gj!

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