joshuarr

Hey, I am a graphic designer and front end developer. I've tossed around some php and rails - enough to know that I should let other people do that. I often find myself in the unenviable position of having to hire programmers for contract based projects, and it feels like a shot in the dark as to whether or not I find a good one for the job when the time comes.

At the moment I am looking for a collaborator on a project that I am working on. The first stage is to design and develop a system for uploading photos of garments against a white wall that can remove the background from the image. We're trying to avoid flash, so I'm looking for someone who can chop out some crazy amazing java / javascript solution and integrate it into a php based cms. (Probably SilverStripe.)

I've been posting on twitter, but I haven't had a ton of luck luring in anything but agencies and outsourcers. And I've had bad luck in the past with formal job posts.

Anyone have any advice? I hate the idea of crowdsourcing sites like elance...

{Sorry if you've already seen this, i'm resubmitting for more feedback.}

UberGoose is a 'social catalog' that provides a forum for people to rate and discuss things. I think of it as Wikipedia meets Digg with a bit of Facebook and Amazon thrown in. Items can be goosed, which improves their popularity within a category – more popular items get more exposure. Additionally, goosing things adds them to your profile, so other friends and other users can see what you like. The goal is to become the go-to destination for user based ratings, reviews and discussion forums on the internet.

The site is currently stuck in private alpha. Really, it's a prototype, as it only hints at the site I imagine. It has several critical flaws due to its incompleteness, but is still kind of fun (but obfuscatory) to play with. The alpha test site was useful as far as putting together a development roadmap, but at this point I've exhausted my development funds. The current site was built in rails.

I've taken this about as far as I can for the time being and so I am looking for help moving forward. Ideally I would like a talented rails programmer and/or business guru to partner up with, but I don't know how to go about finding someone who fits the bill who would also be interested in working on the project for equity.

Any advice is appreciated, but I'm much more concerned with how to move forward than how to improve the current site.

Thanks!

http://www.ubergoose.com