I paid a Ruby agency over $40k to have a Ruby on Rails site developed. Now it’s done and is working fine.
The issue now is that I’m not a developer, and I can’t afford to hire one. For every single change to the site (e.g. change the header, add some analytics code, add a Twitter button) I’m getting charged a minimum of 1 hour’s work at their hourly rate which is pretty high.
I don’t mind paying the agency for new development work, but by getting billed for these tiny things I’m feeling like my hands are really tied and I can’t tweak anything.
I’m thinking of hiring a Rails developer with a good rating from say Elance.com for $25/hr, to use on an ad-hoc basis, say 1-2 hours per week for small changes here and there for a much lower cost.
Do you think this is a practical idea?
Would it take the developer too long to familiarize himself with the code? Or does he not need to know the full inner workings to do simple changes?
Is there a big risk of the developer screwing up the site, or stealing the code?
Thanks a lot for any advice and input, would really appreciate it!
I’ve never used e-lance, I used to use odesk.com. The hourly rates seemed lower.
If the developer is worth is money he shouldn’t need to know the inner works for a rails framework, they should be super changes for the dev.
Stealing Code? In theory he could steal your code. When I worked free lance on odesk, I was never interested in all at stealing code. I wouldn’t worry about this much at all, especially if you go with reputable devs(odesk has a feedback / rating system).
I thinks this is a very good way to go about doing this.
Thanks a lot for your advice. You said “he shouldn’t need to know the inner works for a rails framework, they should be super changes for the dev.”
By that do you mean that he could make small changes, e.g. to the header, adding links or analytics code without having to understand the rest of the code?
The changes you describe seem to be very simple and I would say that it is not necessary to know the inner workings of your site to add, for example, analytics code to the header of a page.
I’m not a hardcore rails developer, but have worked on a couple of rails projects recently so can qualify this with a reasonable amount of experience.
If you wanted to send me a concrete example of what you are trying to do via PM (probably better not to post details here), I would be happy to look at this in a little more depth for you.