Find A Developer
Ever heard of Rent-a-Coder? Post a project and a bounty, and grab the next person who comes along. Like so many great apps, it’s now got a Ning equivilant: Find-a-Developer.
I’ve been playing with this app, and I can honestly say that it is the best architected web application I’ve seen in a long time. Links where I need them, when I need them, without me needing to think about them. I don’t need to look through navigation or search through mystery-meat menus: everything just flows so nicely.
The only problem I have with the app so far is that there are so few Ning developers. I know there are more people than just me out there who are interested in working on Ning, and feel they’d be up to it. The challenge isn’t that hard: get some code together, knock out an App (or link to some older projects) and get going!
Also, there’s the use case for someone who’s not a developer: the kind of people who want to get something done on Ning, but have more cash than time to throw at it. As you can see from Gina’s example, it’s easy to set out what project you want people to work on. Think you can tackle her request? Just drop her a message via the interface. But before you do, you might want to throw a profile together, just in case.
As with all apps on Ning, Find-a-Dev is clonable. Don’t want to work on Ning, but have a desire to set up a Python marketplace? Clone it, change some words, and you’re off. Want to create your own marketplace for knitting services and projects instead? Go for it.
Want to set up a marketplace for bodyguard services — but don’t think you have the PHP code for it? Well, a great place to start would be to post your idea to find-a-dev, and get some people interested in it. After all, there’s probably lots of people out there looking to help write some code for you — you just need to meet and interact. What more perfect playground to find them in than Ning?
(Meta-info: I had a bug in my RSS feed, so the past two entries were delayed. You’ll probably see three updates at once: sorry about that.)