What to do when you cannot find a developer

I get asked pretty much daily for help finding a developer for organisations or individuals. I can see why, Rewired State is crammed full of them as is Young Rewired State – but we are not an agency and these developers are not ‘ours’ they are part of a network of devs who love hack events.

However, what I can do is pass on a bit of advice on what to do when you cannot find that individual ninja you are seeking.

Firstly, I am going to assume that you need a website built, (if you want an app, simplest thing to do is find one of the many agencies that specialise in app building and pay them money). To achieve this webby dream you are after a developer who will build the whole thing for you, you are even offering proper money and are still struggling to find anyone? (Obviously if you are trying to do this on mates rates or for equity then you need to move on and find another thing to do in life). OK…

So rule number one: forget that plan, it is rare as hen’s teeth that you will find such a developer to help you do everything

If I were you here is what I would do:

1. Write a list of every person who will come to your website
2. Write down what each of those people are going to use it for
3. MoSCoW the list
4. Write a brief for your website, ask Google how to do this, you will get many answers like this I know the web brief includes you writing up the list of people who will use the website, but to my mind this needs to be done in the very first instance, to focus your mind before writing the brief
5. Educate yourself a bit in the world of developers: StackOverflow definition of the difference between a back end and front end developer is a good place to start, roam about from there
6. Now you can start looking for someone or a group of people to help you. Rarely will one developer be able to do everything for you. My advice at this point is to speak to someone like Thayer Prime, now that you have a clear idea of your needs and what you want to build, Thayer will help manage your expectations of cost and the best route to the right team – she is amazing.
7. Another trick, if Thayer is busy, is to look at your friends’ websites and find ones you like or elements you like and see who built them – if you can’t find any friends then have a look at other peoples’ websites and choose some you like – again, try to track down the builders
8. Write your copy. Using jumpchart with your front end dev/designer is a good place to begin. Copy breaks websites, you must nail this at the same time as the website is being crafted

When our shiny new Rewired State website is live, you will be able to see the fruits of building something this way, the site you see live now is the result of not doing it properly – even with, and maybe because of, having access to some of the world’s most high-class developers.

Final word of advice, if the website is the digital manifestation of your baby, your special project that is the pinnacle of your working or philanthropic life so far: accept that building it is going to be a bit like marriage: full of compromise, huge highs, desperate lows, frustration as well as satisfaction – but you need to be committed to it and find another half who gets it.

That’s it, hope this helped.

Types of hack day

A year ago I wrote a blog post: What’s the point of a hack day? You probably need to scan that and this one: What is a hack day?

In it I said that it would probably be different in a year, and to some extent it is, but one thing will never change, and that is how you should treat developers. Enough has been said on twitter today about the Cadbury hack and in my head a few weeks ago about the Hack for the high street event – both of which are hack days with the sole intention of the attending developers building an app for either a specific event or for a bunch of businesses, for free, or for props and chocolate.

This is wrong, but I am not being helpful in just saying so, but I must make it clear: I believe this is very wrong.

Thayer Prime has written an excellent blog post about how dangerous this is from a PR angle when you are a large, rich organisation, I would like to update my post from last year to reflect how I see hack days being legitimately used these days:

Hack for a cause

An open hack day, available for anyone to come to where there will typically be decent prizes at the end of it but developers are not paid. Organisation of such an event may well be sponsored to cover beer, pizza, hosting and whatnot but the developers are free to build whatever they fancy, or not if they just want to be there. Apps can be showcased but IP of idea and code remains with the developer.

Hack events like this are very effective for creating meercat moments in entire industries, most recently I saw this happen with the TV industry at the TV hack in Cannes and has been most notably successful with music and open government data.

Hack on new kit or new data/API

Some organisations need developers to engage with their new piece of kit or play with their new data. Hack days are great for this – but developers should be paid something for their time and IP for anything they make at the event should remain with the developer, both code and idea. Prizes should be awarded in addition to the payment to devs.

These are very successful and most recently I can cite the GLA hack day as a good example of this – devs were paid to explore some of the newly released London data sets during the typical two day hack setting.

Hack days as research and development

These are growing in popularity. Whilst they are expensive – you must pay developers the market rate – the expense is nothing compared to a typical six month round of R&D that would result in an awful lot less than a room of 20-30 developers, pizza and focus over 24-48 hours.

The end of these hack days produce prototypes that the commissioning organisation can take back and plug into their own developments and decision-making processes. Whenever we run hack days such as this we would have an agreement with the commissioning organisation and the developers in advance that the IP would fall into one of the following categories:

• IP for idea and code remains with the developer
• IP for the idea passes to the client
• IP for the idea passes to the client but the code is open-sourced on GitHub for the client, or anyone, to reuse
• IP for the code is passed to the client – this costs more than the above two options and we make arrangement directly with the developers to agree this sum as effectively the developers are working on direct commission from the client and should be paid as such at their usual rate

A successful example of using a hack day for R&D would be most recently with UKCES where they used an R&D hack day to test the build of their API. At the very beginning of the build they tested the API with the developers to see whether it was doing what it needed to do in order for developers to work with it in the future.

Hack days alongside conferences

These are interesting, and it depends on the conference as to how this should be handled with paying developers or not. The premise being that there is a conference on a subject that can be brought to life as the conference progresses by running a hack day alongside it really bring the subject to life, maybe even solving some of the more common challenges faced.

My rule of thumb would be that if the conference is aimed even in part at the developer community and they would be attending, or make up some of the audience, then an open hack day format alongside the conference is a great idea. If the subject is not naturally one that would attract developers, say the Cadbury conference on cocoa production or whatever – then a hack day alongside the conference would be an excellent way of bringing it to life or focusing on one particular challenge or problem, but the developers should be paid.

An example of a successful hack day conference would be Hacktivate that runs alongside Activate.

Marketing hack days

Some organisations come to us and want a hack day on order to have something interesting to talk about for their advertising campaign, or to align their brand with the perceived hack celebrities, the brogrammers and geeky chics. These are all good things – but they cost money.

An example of this is the Honda hack. Honda were launching a new Civic and wanted to align their brand with everything that sat under the umbrella of Power of dreams. What better than a hack day for doing such a thing? It was treated in the same way as the R&D hack days I spoke about above and after the event ran they relinquished all call on the IP to anything and still paid the programmers and developed the winning prototypes.

They had plenty of content to write about, point to and they had engaged with a community that did interesting things with their brand beliefs.

Hack days for app building

These are becoming more common, are the most dangerous PR-wise and if you want your app/s built for free, are alienating you from powerful members of the digital community. Believe you me the developer world is a small one, and your reputation will spread fast.

If you want an app built for your organisation, event or brilliant idea – pay a development team. If you are not sure what that app looks like and you want a number of developers to come up with some options for you – then of course, that can be done through a hack day, but it should be paid work.

Polite things to do

If you are running a hack day that falls into any of the above categories where developers are not paid, then take very special care to:

• ensure you take care of every detail and meet all caffeine and sugar needs in a timely fashion 😉
• offer travel reimbursement if you can
• have excellent, excellent prizes
• have lots of staff on hand to make sure the devs volunteering their time and talents feel appreciated
• enable the developers to be showcased to the best effect – be super-organised about that

Needless to say, Rewired State run hack days in all of the above categories. I am writing here after four years of making mistakes and learning from them, so trust me, I have learned this the hard way. Things are of course changing constantly, but there are some things that never change: don’t take the piss.

And before anyone picks me up on the charity hacks that we run, that is exactly so, we do run occasional hacks for charitable causes where developers do work for free, but we call on our own developer community for this and are very, very careful about what is being asked, by whom. We did this most recently with Refugees United and it was a humbling experience for all of us. But we are in the very fortunate position of being four years old with a robust and sizeable developer community of over 600 people that we can call on, and reward, as a group throughout the rest of the year.

And finally, whilst I am on this subject, Matthew Cashmore pointed out on twitter that the term Hack Day has been replaced by Hackathon on Wikipedia. MC has a *lot* to say about this and I concur that it is appallingly lame and something should be done to stop this march of mediocrity. A hack day is a hack day, has always been known as such. A Hackathon is a term coined by those who are scared that people will think a hack day means people will do bad things. Personally I can’t stand the term hackathon and will never run one – get it *run* a hackathon… I’ll get my coat…

The dilemma of scaling a social organisation, with commercial bits…

(13/09/12 I have updated this post, see the final paragraph)

… and not becoming a complete dick

This post is a stake in the sand for Rewired State and Young Rewired State.

The problem (ish)

Rewired State and Young Rewired State are now entering their 4th year as a community and their second as a limited company (secured by guarantee). It has grown enough that we need now to scale, to get proper funding and separate the two organisations. Scary stuff.

But it is essential to retain the binding oaths that sit at the core of both organisations:

• To keep the developer at the heart of everything we do
• To be open

To this end I am having to begin conversations and apply for funding with people beyond the community. These conversations are necessary for us to secure the financial and business support required to grow, and make it something that is here to stay and not something that falters.

These external people and organisations are chosen for their fit and beliefs; but whenever money is concerned – especially *proper* money – there will always be expectations from the organisation or person and we will need to adjust how we do things to meet these needs.

The solution

We need to be careful. Having spent six months talking to a variety of people about potential ways of scaling and growing the organisations it’s obvious that we come to a point where it is necessary to get a back-up team, primarily to keep me on point (as Got To Dance judges would say).

After many sleepless nights and much ferocious cooking (it orders my mind and pleases my family) I decided that these decisions are not something I could do alone, and it would be totally impossible to get a group decision, seeing as Rewired State now counts over 600 developers in its hug.

To that end, I spent some time thinking about those closest to me and who I would happily trust, without question, with the future of both organisations.

Those people were the following (in no order):

Ben Hammersley

Sym Roe

Thayer Prime

Ben Nunney

Jemima Kiss

{the links in each name were chosen by me, feel free to Google them}

And so I proposed to them, in a their own personal capacity, on virtual bended knee that they act as a developer steering group for the organisations. Every single one has agreed and for that I am humbled and hugely grateful. The role of this group has not been formally designed, but the starter for ten is that they will:

• approve all hack days in the pipeline
• be a part of all major business decisions
• be a point of escalation for RS/YRS developer concerns
• approve appointments

In the coming weeks I will publish the agreed role of this group.

But I am writing this post really because I do believe in open organisations and I believe that by writing this, so I might help others who are suffering with sleepless nights over how they can scale their business and retain the thing that sits at the heart of what they are doing and why.

For Rewired State and Young Rewired State this means developers, for other organisations it will obviously be different. But I chose this steering group because I know that, come what may, they would stand firm by what we believe in but understand that we need to scale in order to support our commitment and the ambition of the community we have fought for, brought together and support.

I hope that this post helps anyone who is in the same situation as me, and I would like to use this post to publicly thank the YRS/RS developer steering group for agreeing so readily to keep us on track.

Update 13/09/12 unfortunately this Board has not worked, I have been rubbish at keeping my side of the deal and having it as a remote reporting board as opposed to a really engaged thing – which I had dreamed of – was just not working, for anyone. I am in the process of completing some strategy work with two advisers and as a result of that we will move forward with a plan and structure that will be different to the above but will reflect the needs of the organisation and community. I do not yet know what this is. In the mean time I would like to thank the people on the board who gave up their time and attention to help guide us through this year.