How to develop a python application?

[Jeremiah Dodds]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 4:12 AM, Vincent Davis <vincent at vincentdavis.net>wrote:

> This might be a off topic but this also seemed like a good place to ask.
>
> I have an application (several) I would like to develop. Parts of it I
> can do but parts I would like to outsource. I am thinking mostly of
> outsourcing most of my django (or similar) work and otherwise have
> some custom classes written.
> I would like to do this small bits (that is the out sourcing) at a
> time for many reasons but I realize there are down sides to doing this
> (I probably don't know all them)
>
> I have a this specific project in mind but don't mind this topic being
> rather broad. I would like to read and learn more about developing
> software (commercial or open source)
>
> My questions
> How do I find programs interested in small projects.
> How do they expect to be paid or how should I pay.
> Are sites like elance.com good?
> What do I not know to ask? That is what should I be considering?
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
>
>
>
> Very brief description of the project.
> The app would take GPS, Heartrate, Power(bicycle) data from a Garmin
> GPS and other devises and upload it to a database. After that I have
> several calculations and analysis of the data. Then display graphs and
> other statistics. This is a very brief explanation.
>
> There are several examples of similar python projects, but not web based.
> Granola
> pygarmin
> garmin-sync
> The closest web based example would be Training Peaks
>
> http://home.trainingpeaks.com/personal-edition/training-log-and-food-diary.aspx
>
> Thanks
> Vincent Davis
> 720-301-3003
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>


With regards to sites like elance, I can only offer advice here from a
coder's perspective, so I may be missing some things, but here goes:

You can probably find people on elance or rentacoder, or similar sites to
work on your app. You will need to be very careful about who you hire though
- the sites are filled with incompetent coders, and bots that represent
_teams_ of incompetent programmers.

I used to do a good bit of work on sites like that, and a lot of my work was
fixing apps that got written by other people on those sites that had no idea
what they were doing. We're talking about 10,000 lines of PHP that got
changed into ~2500 with simple, mostly automated refactoring because the
people who wrote it had apparently never heard of a for loop.

Payment is normally done through an escrow service. The price you're willing
to pay generally gets decided on before work begins, and the people who want
to work on it can make bids saying how much they want for the work, and you
can talk to them - make sure they know what they're talking about, haggle
price, etc. There tends to be protection for both the person paying and the
person working to avoid you not paying them if they did what they were
supposed to, and to avoid you having to pay them if they didn't.

All in all, using sites like elance can get your work done, and it can get
it done well and on the cheap - but you'll have to spend a significant
amount of time weeding through automated responses and making sure you're
getting the right person to work on your stuff.
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