Programmer for Hire

As posted on Craigslist:

I’m an independent web application developer (see www.jpl-consulting.com plus my blog to learn everything about me).

Bottom line: I want someone able to handle my client’s typical 0-10 maintenance issues for $300+/month.

Here’s the setup: I have several active web application projects out there which I built and am responsible for supporting and maintaining. Starting in May my wife and I are going on World Tour: three months road tripping about in the US, and then we leave the country for about a year. From experience I know how much it sucks to land in another country with a technical problem to fix, having to frantically search for an internet cafe, and hop online to save the day.

What I’m looking for is an apprentice: someone reliable whom I can trust, get up to speed on the projects I am responsible for, and have them be able and competent to handle any issues as they arise when I’m offline and unreachable. For all the projects I have out there with clients, I generally see between 0 to 3 issues that crop up in a given week. Questions, general tweaks, bugs to fix.

If you are able to handle that sort of thing and be my first line of support while I’m off in the world it’s a huge win for me: my clients get great service and support, and I don’t have to stress over things trying to fix a problem on some internet cafe machine which only has IE6 installed.

Paying someone $300 a month to handle something between 0-3 hours of work/0-12 brain farts is so very worth it to me. If more things come up than the norm in a given month, I’ll pay you more. If less things come up, awesome: enjoy the $300 and I thank you for the peace of mind.

My preference is a fellow freelancer, someone who can respond to the occasional email or phone call that comes up quickly. The applications are in PHP (vanilla, no heavy framework), MySQL, CSS, HTML, and MooTools JavaScript (if you know JQuery, you should be fine). Ah, and a few fringe projects are in WordPress.

Other perk: I don’t know how much you care to learn and grow as a freelancer, but if it’s important/interesting to you, this will entail learning how I do large scale/highly paid projects as a one man team, and I’ll be happy to teach you whatever I know to get you up to snuff to support my projects.

To determine if you’re experienced enough to be fit what I’m looking for, check out www.truedat.us, it’s an open source project of mine. If you can comfortably read through and follow that code base, you should be fine. (If you want to make a bang up impression, add a feature to it that you think is cool and show it to me!)

I’m excited to meet whomever I’ll meet who replies to this ad, fellow hackers are so cool. If you feel good about your understanding of the trueDAT code and would like to be my support apprentice and earn some extra cash for the next year, please give me a shout out!

Update

Talk about “ask and ye shall receive”: the day I posted this I had lunch with a friend with whom I’ve done some work before. I told him of the ad and he, to my surprise and delight, said casually “I’ll take on your people for you.” Though I am bummed to have the opportunity to meet other hackers, how nice to have this handled!