Hello! I am Joseph, an independent developer, hacker, freelancer, writer of code, banisher of bugs, bounty hunter, will program for burritos-er, and cool crypto kid. I have worked on (crypto) products for ConsenSys, Decentraland, OpenSea, Gitcoin, Storj, Airbus, and others. I consider myself a pretty productive software engineer, but I only have so many hours in a day. Recently, I’ve been working on ways to get more done and try to scale my time. Enter .
In the last two months I have put about $4500 in bounties, on GitHub issues for projects I’m working on through the Gitcoin platform. I fund individual issues that I need help on, which I know someone else will be able to do faster than I can. Then I can take on more projects.
Gitcoin is a fire-hose of talent
I am not a designer, and sometimes I need help fixing the CSS for a web development client I have a job with. Enter the skills of Gitcoiner @KuhnChris. Instead of me messing around for a full day with flex boxes, I can get someone much more skilled than I am to finish it in an hour or two at a fair rate. Another recent project has a part of it in Golang, which is not my strongest language. So I enlisted the help of five Go developers to get a massive project done, with thousands of lines of code, in about 2 months. My client was happy because they get a great product, faster than I could deliver on my own. They also get to see a bunch of new devs working on their codebase, who they can talk to when they have job openings and use to grow their developer network. Companies with Open Source products love to see new people working contributing.
Finding help I can trust
When you make a bounty you might have several people apply to work on it. Here are some suggestions and tips I have used to get the most out of Gitcoin and find the devs you can trust:
- Look at previous bounties they have completed. Have they done work that has been accepted for high profile orgs like Metamask or Open Zeppelin?
- Check out their , Gitcoin’s way of keeping track of who are the rock stars
- Give them mini tests by asking people what they think about certain technical concepts in the #community-focus-dev channel on slack.
- Ask the Gitcoin team if they have seen any stand out bounty hunters in the specific area of your task.
I have tried other work platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, but there is so much noise on the platforms, and a saturation of crappy developers sending fake portfolios. I like Gitcoin because I can check out what similar products devs have worked on and what organizations that I respect have they contributed to. If I see that user @Iamonuwa has completed IPFS related bounties before, maybe he is the perfect person to help lead the charge on this new IPFS feature I want to build. And I don’t have to pay until the pull request is merged and the tests passed. It is still always important to cover your code and review PRs closely.
Doubling my income
I have essentially hired an entire insanely talented engineering team, without having to do any interviews or worry about a greater overhead. Because of that, I have quadrupled what I am able to produce. Yes, it takes more project management skills and organization, so it’s probably not for everyone. But after paying my helpers I’ve still doubled my income from client work. Using Gitcoin is the best way I have found to scale my time.
What you should learn from this
If you want to build something fast that you don’t have time to build, but which you think would add value: just bounty it.
🎁This article written with love by Joseph. Follow me on and to see what I’m building next.
Published at Sat, 27 Apr 2019 15:33:05 +0000
