Trevor, really appreciate the post. Any reason you chose elance over other sites (odesk, guru, etc)? Any additional tips (eg did you try encouraging certain freelancers with great credentials to bid on your work)?

Just to toss it out there, Go (Golang) is becoming increasingly popular, but still has a relatively small community (much of which is based outside the US). This seems like a potential good case for using freelance developers (when language experts are few and geographically distributed).