There are a lot of apps I want that that I can't find, apps like a personal-corporate search tool, or a corrosion-resistant wiki, or adding a graph navigation (link) layer to a plain text repository.
I know enough about building software that I can, fairly quickly, make up an initial set of requirements that I'm reasonably sure are a good match to readily available toolkits and technologies. I can quickly revise them to match timelines and resources. It's a bit of an odd knack but it's one I have.
There are architects I know who can, in an hour, lay out how to build to those requirements -- including specifying platform options and toolkit alternatives.
The first step is free for me. For $1K-$2K for 1-2 hours work I can find good people to do the second step.
Things get tricky when we try to turn this into code. Anyone who has done outsourcing knows that there's a gap between the theory of Ugandan MOOC grads wanting to work for $20/hour and the reality of high school quality coders who work for a year before moving into management. Not to mention little details like testing.
Open source only works if the app is something the developers themselves want to use ... and that's a special case.
So for $2K I can only get to the pre-coding step given today's methods for organizing paid work ...
No comments:
Post a Comment