Advice on taking on software bounties and small freelancing tasks
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I am considering dipping my toe back into the field a bit - not really seriously yet, but sort of testing the waters.
Unfortunately, my previous experiences with freelancing, and with sites like freelancer.com and guru.com in particular, has not been particularly positive. So I figured I'd look at OSS bounties first.
Unfortunately, most of those are through bountysource.com, and here is where I run into my first big problem, because it seems that the site hasn't had any activity since last September. I tried to e-mail their support team, but got nothing back.
Does anyone know if the site is still live? Their Twat-ter feed is still active, but nothing on it seems to be related to the site itself.
?
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I've still been receiving emails from them and people still seem to be posting and claiming bounties...
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@LB_ Hmmn, I am guessing that it's a PEBKAC issue, then, but I don't know what I am doing wrong. I'll try again, and see if there's some setting I screwed up or something.
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@ScholRLEA I see what you see, the most recent issue is 10 months old. I'd say it's a dead site too.
There also seems to be no way to filter out bounties that have already been paid-- isn't that what you'd want by default?
How do you get paid? Is there an escrow, or do you just have to hope and pray the guy who posted the bounty won't say, "oh, I forgot about that, I don't need it any more sorry."
EDIT: this issue has been updated in the last month: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/303143-set-window-devicepixelratio-for-retina-screenshots
EDIT EDIT: they also launched some kind of crowd-funded something-or-rather a month ago: https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/bountysource
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@blakeyrat In their front mobile page I see some very recent bounties, like 33min ago.
The first two on the list are old ones, advertised as "featured".
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OK, that's odd... did they put everything into the app, and assume no one would ever use the website? Also, I can't find an Android version of it on Google Play. It may be there, but it doesn't show up in a search on 'bountysource'.
Perhaps. The website's search UI is awful: ugly, dated, doesn't retain search options, doesn't update automatically on option changes, just bad all around. If I had the money I'd post a bounty to fix that myself. Maybe I should be a good citizen and do it myself gratis, given that this is all supposedly repo'ed on Github. I'm not sure it would be worth the trouble, though.
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@ScholRLEA that was on my mobile browser, if the desktop version is unusable you can make chrome emulate it.
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@groo I see that on the desktop site too, right below the "Featured" bounties.
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@groo OK, apparently I am an idiot and failed a spot check. I didn't notice that the front page had a listing of recent activity, and so I was using that crappy search tool.
It's still a
, though, as the search tool is one of the first things you see, and would be (to me, anyway) the natural place to start. As it is, it seems that there is no way to find recent bounties by language, and no way at all to search by toolchain, platform, or a bunch of other things one would want to be able to filter by.Seriously, that listing on the front page doesn't help me for shit. And the issue descriptions I've read are almost all terribly uninformative for me as a developer, though the website itself can't really be blamed for that. A better display of the issues would help - the problem description basically just looks like the first comment in a thread, with nothing much to distinguish it from the comments that follow it, it would be better if it stood out more IMAO - but that only would do so much.
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Are you looking for money or practice?
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Confidence-building, mostly, though money would be of considerable use right now as well.
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@ScholRLEA For confidence-building, find something you use, or can use, and find a way it doesn't quite work. Plenty of smaller projects out there would love the help but don't advertise on bounty sites.
I've never made much money independently, so I can't help much there. A little pocket change here and there.
