GeoffM

I need a contractor to burn through some upcoming web dev work with me, very short contract of a week or two. Previously I've used freelancer.com but this time I need somebody local, a phrase that foreigners on freelancer.com don't appear to understand , and to be fair, probably not too many US workers on there. So how can I advertise cheaply? LA Times is $500+, StackOverflow is $350, CareerBuilder is $400+. Craigslist is only $25 but the listings are sparse so I don't know how effective it is. Any other ideas?

Ash UK/US

Check out snag a job.

penguinsix

elance
odesk
craigslist

Dice.com is good, but not sure if they have part-timers.

Duncan Roberts

Or you could just stick up some flyers in the computer science department of a local college. Bound to get plenty of cheap, willing and potentially decent people!

Bluegrass Lass

sologig.com...no idea if they charge though

markwm

Is this for a professional gig or just a hobby/vanity site? In my experience "a week or two" is invariably wrong and does not give sufficient time for the developer to even understand the problem, never mind code a solution. Most of those sites are viewed with some derision by professionals (other than Dice.com) and I don't think you'll find the level of competence you probably need with a $25 ad on Craigslist.

On the other hand, doesn't sound like you'd pay my rates, either. :-)

Bob

Same issues though, of not finding locals.

If you've a good LinkedIn network, or local group, post on that and you'll get good hits for locals.

rentacoder.com might be a option, been years since last looked though.

GeoffM

Thanks for the ideas.

That's an excellent idea! Especially as the summer break is imminent. I'm going to contact the poly up the road.

Professional. Basically I have a Joomla site I need to convert to .Net, just basic stuff like forums, chats, downloads/uploads, articles, etc. Anybody familiar with MVC would knock it up in a heartbeat. I'm making progress but have other work to do so I need a quick boost. Whether it gets finished in a week or two is irrelevant: I just need it progressing.

In any case, thank you for your experience but my estimating as a software developer-to-manager was actually pretty good, even if I do say so myself. It's the projects I wasn't in control of that ran amok.

I wouldn't pay my rates, and certainly not for this.

markwm

"Anybody familiar with MVC would knock it up in a heartbeat."

GeoffM

You're not familiar with it then? Most of my experience in the past is with Delphi and safety-related development so very little gets done. Moving on to .Net generally and I see productivity increase dramatically, ignoring the safety-related bit for the moment. Going from PHP to MVC is a massive boost. It's boilerplate work.

In a heartbeat? Yes.

markwm

Quite familiar which is why I don't use it - much prefer web forms: gives me far greater control: MVC abstracts too much away which is fine for quick-n-dirty development. Similar reason as to why we've stopped using EF (or any ORM) and gone back to ADO.Net - we want to control the product, end-to-end. Granted the use of tdd is somewhat problematic with web forms but that is more than made up for by having full control over the code and structure.

Just an opinion, mind: there is plainly room for both and circumstances and requirements may dictate that one is preferable to the other for any number of valid reasons.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/...ebForms-vs-MVC# is a decent article, in particular, some of the comments at the end make interesting and informative reading.

GeoffM

Horses for courses! Well, as I say, it's pretty simple/basic stuff and the framework I've built so far is pretty easy. Mmostly just importing and converting the Joomla component data before displaying it. Actually that sounds really trivial but I'm learning several technologies at once yet pretty happy with how it's progressing, hence how I can extrapolate that out to somebody that doesn't need to look up ? versus ?? every time they use it, then realise that the column was crappily designed in the first place.

Cheers for the article, I'll have a read later.