"rent an expert" with AirPair

Running a single-person startup is challenging. Learning new technologies by the usual methods (going to meetups, working through tutorials, etc.) are great for general, high-level knowledge, but not particularly good when you need advice about specifics. Finding an expert to discuss best-practices and implementation details is the fastest, most efficient way to get started and avoid costly dead-ends. You know those experts exist, but how can you find them?

The answer: http://airpair.co/

Following a brief description of my project with AirPair, I was able to choose Peter Lyons (stackoverflow.com/users/266795/peter-lyons), a developer with great credentials and expertise that matched my goals. He was able to quickly translate the requirements from my existing Ruby project into a more streamlined iteration in Node.js. He patiently explained some arcane aspects of Node and cemented the abstract tutorials I had done to real-world examples. Peter followed up the sessions with outlines and code examples--I didn't expect that and really appreciate it now that I'm writing new code. Perhaps the most valuable result is that I now know that my project's overall re-design has been vetted by a professional.

And all of that happened in just three hours over two sessions.

You don't need AirPair if you are extremely well-connected and have lots of industry-leading professional friends who all owe you favors. For the rest of us, there's AirPair. I would highly recommend AirPair to anyone who needs to "rent" expertise, and I am definitely going to use it in the future.

Regards,

R. Bryan Hughes www.logicalcat.com