19 Dec 09 Can You Really Rent a Coder?

I've been a fan of Dan Appleman for about as long as I've been a professional programmer. He is one of my heroes. Unfortunately, Dan only blogs rarely, so I was heartened to see a spate of recent blog updates from him. One of the entries asks a question I've often wondered myself: can you really rent a coder?

Over the past year or two I've kept an eye on the various online consulting sites - Elance, guru.com, RentACoder, oDesk. I've actually used RentACoder once (as a buyer on a very small project) and was satisfied with the results -- though I suspect I spent more time writing the spec and managing the programmers than I would if I had done the work myself.

I'm surprised Dan opens with such a sunny outlook on these services, because I've heard almost universally negative things about them. As professional programmers, I think we're all naturally inclined to see these sort of low-bid contract sites as cannibalizing and cheapening our craft. It's roughly analogous to the No-Spec movement for designers.

The odd thing is that, despite the sunny outlook, the article Dan wrote on this topic comes across as quite cautionary:

• You'll be competing with people around the world. In fact, you'll be amazed at how little people in some parts of the world will bid. That’s because a few dollars an hour can work well in a country where the average wage is a couple of hundred dollars a month.
  
  
• Many of the projects posted are unrealistic. For example, people asking for a clone of ebay for under $500. What ends up happening in these cases is that usually somebody ends up getting ripped off (either the client or the consultant who underbid or fails to deliver).
  
  
• A lot of projects go bad. They get cancelled. Or the consultant who bid on the work never delivered, or delivered poor results. Or the client has unreasonable expectations, or doesn’t actually know what he wants.

Maybe it's just my natural bias talking, but these sites seem awfully impractical to me.

Simply sorting out the DailyWTF project pitches from things you could actually deliver -- at ultra-competitive offshore programming rates, no less -- would require the patience of a saint and the endurance of an olympic athlete. Specification documents are hard enough to write when everyone involved is a coworker sitting in the same room. I can't even imagine the difficulty of agreeing on what it is you're building when the participants are thousands of miles away and have never met. But then I thought Amazon's Mechanical Turk was a failure, and it seems to be enjoying a moderate level of success.

Dan has a small chart comparing the services of these online freelance/consulting sites. It's too easy to write these sites off as an affront to software engineering. I guess they're sort of like dating sites -- they might be one way to find a client relationship, but I'd be highly suspicious of any professional developer who can't find a stable, long term relationship with a client eventually.

If nothing else, we should be looking at them for research purposes, as a baseline. Surely you can demonstrate better value to your employer than the random, anonymous programmers on Elance, guru.com, RentACoder, or oDesk. And I'd certainly hope that the projects you're working on are more sensible and rewarding (in both senses of the word) than the stuff that appears on those sites.

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Tagi: natural bias, apeman, sunny outlook, coue, rentacoder, ebay, average wage, low bid, spate, pitches, ly, programmers, guru, programmer, heroes, designers, peoe

19 Dec 09 Upgrade Santa for the 21st Century [Photoshop Contest]

For this week's Photoshop Contest, I want to spruce our old friend Santa up with technology. His sleigh only runs on what I assume is 8 horsepower, after all. Let's give him an upgrade.

Your task is to upgrade Santa Claus with technology. Come up with your best images and email them to me at contests@gizmodo.com with "Upgraded Santa" in the subject line. Save your images as JPGs, PNGs or GIFs, and save your files named as FirstnameLastname.jpg using the name you want to be credited with.

On Tuesday, I'll go through the entries, pick three winners and then post the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!

Tagi: pngs, santa claus, old friend, horsepower, ly, subject line, 21st century, images

31 Dec 09 Apple tablet rumor party: Fox News, former Google China president, and the 'iGuide'

No words can stress how much we're sick of Apple 'iSlate' rumors right now, but when someone with powerful links speaks up, we gotta take note. Kai-fu Lee -- former Google China president -- has joined the Apple rumor mill by leaking what he claims to be insider knowledge of the device. Now, we've heard a lot of this same noise before: sub-$1000 price, an iPhone-like appearance, 10.1-inch multitouch screen, video conferencing, cellular connectivity, 3D graphics and virtual keyboard. What really got our attention is Lee's link with Foxconn -- the Apple OEM is one of the main contributors to Lee's post-Google investment venture, Innovation Works, so there's a good chance that Lee's spoken to someone overlooking the manufacturing of a certain Apple device. Of course, we can't abide Lee's final proclamation that "Apple expects to produce near ten million units in the first year!" This is pretty bold considering Apple's only sold five million portable computers so far this year (and ten million was the number of iPods sold in Q3 2009 alone), but hey, who knows if Steve Jobs has already worked out a subsidizing plan with some carriers to lure us all?

Continue reading Apple tablet rumor party: Fox News, former Google China president, and the 'iGuide'

Apple tablet rumor party: Fox News, former Google China president, and the 'iGuide' originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The iPhone Blog, CNET  |  Kai-fu Lee's microblog, Fox News, Mac Rumors  | Email this | Comments
Tagi: apple tablet, china president, fox news, iphe, virtual keyboard, insider knowledge, somee, news former, google, mac rumors, portable computers, multitouch screen, steve jobs, rumor mill, milli, good chance, ipods, q3, kai, ly

12 Feb 10 ESC: Multicore ecosystem still evolving

Still grappling with the challenges associated with moving to multicore architectures, software developers continue to struggle with basic questions, including not only how best to move to multicore but also whether or not it makes sense to do so for a given application, according to David Stewart, CEO of embedded systems design tool startup CriticalBlue.



Embedded system - CriticalBlue - David Stewart - Companies - Development
Tagi: software developers, compas, design tool, architectures, ly, ceo, challenges, david stewart

22 Feb 10 After 2 Years of Development, LTSP 5.2 Is Out

The Linux Terminal Server Project has for years been simplifying the task of time-sharing a Linux system by means of X terminals (including repurposed low-end PCs). Now, stgraber writes "After almost two years or work and 994 commits later made by only 14 contributors, the LTSP team is proud to announce that the Linux Terminal Server Project project released LTSP 5.2 on Wednesday the 17th of February. As the LTSP team wanted this release to be some kind of a reference point in LTSP's history, LDM (LTSP Display Manager) 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 were released on the same day. Packages for LTSP 5.2, LDM 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 are already in Ubuntu Lucid and a backport for Karmic is available. For other distributions, packages should be available very soon. And the upstream code is as always, available on Launchpad."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tagi: linux terminal server project, linux terminal server, th release, slashdot, ldm, linux system, reference point, ly, ltsp, linux