The rising "gig" economy is encouraging an increasing number of individuals to work for themselves in a more flexible manner. Remote developer jobs are one of the fastest growing areas of such work, yet the vast majority of such offerings are limited to mid-long term project. Projects with scopes of a few days to a few months can be of interest to developers, but there is no current platform to recruit developer skills on a much shorter time basis (i.e. 10 minutes to a few hours). In similar gig economy industries, such as driving for Uber, more than half of drivers work between 1 and 15 hours a week. We wanted to provide a way for developers to earn money in the most flexible manner possible.
GreenHatHackers is a platform to connect developers with questions, buggy code, or design challenges to other developers who might have the answer. The gig economy is premised on a fast-paced, extremely flexible and easy to partake in culture, and GreenHatHackers provides a platform to optimize these areas for developers.
GreenHatHackers is a platform built for the web, which we built using a combination of JavaScript, HTML, CSS and jQuery.
We found it challenging to properly implement our test suite functionality. We hoped to have the option for users asking questions, especially related to buggy code, to be able to provide a hidden test suite to run submitted answers again. This was to ensure that all answers are correct before payment is released. This proved to be more difficult than we originally envisioned.
We're proud of building our first website from the ground up, and proposing a tool we believe will be beneficial to developers everywhere.
We learned about what it takes to make a platform that is both intuitive and enjoyable to navigate and participate in. Neither of us had much experience with web development, nor with UI design, so we had the opportunity to learn a great deal about building a website from scratch to serve a demonstrated need.
We want to deploy our platform live, in particular by better building out infrastructure for bug submission. We first plan to launch the site within out CS community at school on a free basis, where we provide the majority of the answers to student submitted questions. If this caught on, we plan to start offering the option for students to offer a small sum of money in exchange for debugging help or general development questions. Students would then be able to provide an answer if possible, and collect the offering bid in exchange. We see this as a great way to encourage students to help one another, in a way that benefits all involved.