Hi all
I have a small app I am looking to develop. Looking for opinions on the best places and ways to solicit developer response without being overwhelmed by commercial firms and the like.
The project itself is posted in Marketplace but beyond that and Facebook, I dont know the best way to approach finding a developer. The project is small but there is a budget. See my sig for link to specifics.
Thank you!
It’s good you have a budget and aren’t just one of the millions of “I have a brazillion dollar idea and I want you to code for free for the equity, because it will be worth TRILLIONS! I’ll take 90% because I did the hard work of having the idea, sound fair?” folk out there.
Given that, I would suggest the following:
Go to Upwork and look for high rated developers - have somebody who knows code vet some of their samples, and beg/pay them to do at least 2 checkins to vet the ongoing code being built, so you know they’re not just farming it out to a body shop. I typically look for folk in Eastern European countries as a good price/quality point, but there are good ones in many countries.
Learn to code yourself - only that will give you total quality and creative control.
Look for somebody young and hungry in your network in college for CS. This is probably the least likely to end well, but it’s at least theoretically possible to turn out ok.
Thanks, ill look at those options. I dont have much if any experience in software development and the whole process of hiring developers. I don’t have a clue how to break down and evaluate a developers work or determine a fair rate.
To that end I have been trying to be exhaustive in my planning and concept design. I am intimately familiar with the audio engineering elements from years of studio and patchbay design and work as a professor of audio eng, teaching theory and practice of all aspects of music and audio production/studio technology.
Ive actually got a full wireframe and a complete spec on core functionality, basic and extended logic trees for the conditionals and a point summary of the workflow and principal use cases.
Ive also written a decent spec on down stream extensions to the core application itself.
I would consider coding it but I would be limited to js/html5 and poorly at that.
I could probably knock out a basic prototype of the main functions, but I wouldn’t have a clue how to handle the add-ons that require a back-end db : the drop down list of gear that tracks number/type of connections per piece of hardware, and especially not the ability to auto pop (and validate) that db with user additions to the gear list. And that’s the easy one.
<vaguely relevant tangent>
I have never been a coder per se, much to the eternal shame of my father, who was a very high level mathematician and cryptographer for the Dod, designing most of the Cray 2 systems at Ft. Meade and a key player in the development of Ada.
I am extremely rusty on anything beyond basic front end stack stuff, and even there im far from current, its been several years of nothing but child theme tweaks in WordPress and modding some simple JavaScript if I absolutely had to.
The only code related work I do whatsoever at any level is very specialized work in Reaktor Core (a synthesis engine and dsp enviroment for NI Reaktor, not really a language per se) and
KSP (http://www.nilsliberg.se/ksp/scripts/tutorial/), a byzantine scripting language for dsp management and sample library development in Kontakt, which is a high powered sampler engine and instrument ecosystem. It is so…different…that syntactically it is closest to Pascal and most work is a painstaking slog through large sample collections and cranky ui assets.
</tangent>
So yeah I can take it pretty far for an amateur and probably simplify the dev work to an extent, but I know when I am swimming in waters over my head. Budget and strong planning can help me steer the project and that’s enough for this one.
Edit: deleted duplicate post
Make sure your app is very well designed up front. That way it’s just an implementation effort, and one that can be cost quantified up front. You want to create images for the user interface, and show every menu item and option you can. Define whatever processing it does very specifically because a good developer can help you work out what you want done but you’re paying a lot for something you could do yourself for free.
If the app is not too complicated you may be able create most of it yourself.
Start with some basics right now so you can find a developer with the right skill set and experience:
What platform does this app run on? Is it for a PC, if so Windows or some form of Unix or something else? Is it meant to run on a phone? Is it browser based or does it use a custom interface?
How much data is involved? Does it need a database that needs to be maintained?
Does the app need to communicate with other apps locally or across the net?
ETA: Good luck with this and have fun doing it.
Thank you. I’m realizing that while I have done a fair bit of planning there are definitely elements that need clarification
I do want this to more of an implementation job than a full design/development package.
I am interested in a web app as well as Android and iOS eventually. Not interested in a full desktop app at this point as that is not likely to be as universally applicable to my target user groups.
I have little sense of the relative costs per platform and I need to get a handle on that for sure.
I sent your Marketplace post to my business partner who’s a musician and a coder, and knows his way around a recording studio almost as well as he knows his way around app development. I’ll let you know if he’s interested.
Thank you! Its a unique project. Most people who have ever built a studio or designed a patchbay are immediately interested when I discuss it, because there are no solutions beyond excel that address the problem and are geared towards signal flow, most solutions are designed to create labels instead (which is,also a huge headache but a good template helps a lot)
My studio has 8 - 48 point patchbays, each 48 point bay has 96 connnlection points. (Not counting a 16x16 matrix switcher, which adds way more complexity)
At last check, I had almost 800 cables of one type or another wired up.
Full commercial studios can easily have 10x amount for full size consoles and equipment per studio facility
If you’re going to make this a real product, keep in mind that you’ll need to have long-term support for debugging any problems. It sounds like the core capability will be complex to program, so there’s a good chance there will be issues that come up in the field. Plus there’s always the normal issues that can come about from the user interacting with the app. Don’t just do this as a one-off development effort or else you’ll be scrambling when changes are needed.
It’d really be best if you could work with a friend or associate who knows how to program. I would think there would be crossover between people in music and people in the app business. If you put the word out that you’re looking for an app developer, someone in your circle might be able to hook you up.