Everything You Need To Know About Finding A Developer
Hiring a developer can be much more difficult than hiring a designer, especially if you’re not familiar with code. With designers, you can easily look at their portfolio to see what kind of work they produce, but even if a developer shows off their code, it’s not always easy to tell how good or bad of a developer they are.
The quality of a developer’s code is very important, but how can tell the quality of it, if you don’t know what you’re looking at? How can you tell if they’re going to be great to work with? Lucky for you, everything you need to know about a developer can be easily found in their online persona.
Do They Have Personality?
The easiest way to learn about a developer is to check out their personality. Check to see if they have a blog, twitter account or another place where they write. The signs of a good developer should show through their writing.
Here are some things to look for:
- A happy attitude
- No drama or snarky writing
- Acts professional, but personal
- No profanity
- Good grammar and spelling
Read a couple of the developer’s articles. Do they sound confident? Do they know (or sound like they know) what they’re talking about? How does the community embrace this developer? Do they get a lot of negative comments? Even if you don’t understand the topic, it should be easy to figure out if they know they subject well or not.
Do They Keep Up With The New Stuff?
No one wants to hire a developer who’s 10 years behind technology, yet I still seem to find brand new sites written in tables and frames.
Just as the freelancer needs to do some research on the client’s industry before sending out a proposal, the client also needs to do some on the freelancer. What are some of the new advancements in the development world and is that developer keeping up with them?
Give The Developer A Secret Test
While it’s not ok to give the developer something to work on for free so you can test them, it is ok to put their previous work through a quality test.
- Visit W3C.org‘s validator. Does their work adhere to proper coding standards?
- Follow up on the developer’s testimonials and actually ask their past clients what they thought about their work.
- If you know another developer, ask their opinion on the quality of code.
Is The Developer A Known Face?
It’s easy to tell if the developer is good at what they do if you see their work and writings everywhere. Some places to look for their work:
- Do they guest write for popular industry blogs?
- Have they written any non-client based apps or plugins for fun?
- Have they written any books?
- Do they have any large clients?
- Have they appeared in a podcast?
- Have they been interviewed by other sites?
Are They Worth It?
Good developers tend to charge a lot more than everyone else, usually at an upwards of $100 per hour or more. Ask the developer why they’re worth that much and why you shouldn’t just pay the other guy $5 for the same service.
The developer should be able to easily and succinctly explain why they’re both different and better to work with than others.
The Continue Work After Work
Every developer needs a like outside of their IDE (the program they use to code). However, the best developers are masters of combining their personal and professional lives.
Here are some other things to look for in a developer:
- Do they read development and business based books?
- Do they attend conferences, meetups or workshops?
- Are they a member of their local chamber?
- How active are they on both the online and offline communities?
They’re Out There
It seems overwhelming to try and choose the best developer out there, but I assure you it can be done with just a bit of time and research!
For the Developers
Can you help clients out by leaving some tips on how to choose the right developer?
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
Really nice and honest article. As you mentioned, one good thing is having a quotes or testimonials thing on your blog so that customers searching through your website can easily connect with your past clients and talk with them about your service.
Also many web developers suck at web design and the best you can do is to hire a designer to design your website. Because if it looks like it’s from 1999, it won’t be very effective.
Yup, every time a client comes to me to ask for designer, I always send him to one of my designers that I’ve partnered with, then they send them back to me for dev work.
I believe it is hard to know as a non-developer to see what a developer can do. Even if they have a blog, it is then still hard to understand what they say. Also know what podcast are good to be in or which weblogs are good to be seen in.
Choose someone who you have a good feeling with. And know what you want from them and look afterwards that the developers delivers what you hired him/her for.
It is very difficult, although I think that most great developers do the above things, so even if they don’t understand the technical aspects of the blog posts, they can still see they’re active in the community.
I would say that peer reviews and relationships with other developers is one of the most important factors. Do they move about in reputable communities? If yes, they’re likely okay – because one developer isn’t going to conceal another’s ignorance.
Good point, I hadn’t thought about that before.
I like the article some points i think like developers are good if they write a lot for the web. I do not write a lot as i am bad at it doesnt make a developer less skilled. Also test websites using w3c shouldnt be taken too serious as websites like your own could fail due to say a wordpress plugin, doesnt make you a bad coder.
I think it is very hard to know who are good and who ain’t most my work repeat and through word of month which is trusted. Price in the uk is hard to by as an example high priced company with a good rep do goverment work so on, charged a company over 8000 pound for a seo book telling them to add keyword here and there, nut shell ripped off.
In the end i say best contact previous customers and ask people…
Embedding video for instance can trip up the validator, but for the most part it does a good job.
Josh, it depends on how you embed it. For instance, Youtube embed codes are invalid, but you can easily change that code to be valid. I keep a handy valid flash script around for those cases.
Sure, I suppose I should have clarified my previous statement. The embed code generated by many sites (such as youtube) will not validate when dropped into place. This is not really the fault of the developer, but who ever is responsible for content creation later on, as they may not understand that the code will not validate. Mostly, it won’t validate because the embed tag is used, which was created by Netscape and no longer necessary as hardly anyone uses a brower that requires flash to be embedded this way. The object tag will suffice.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay/
Tom,
You should still aim to valid most parts of your sites. If a WordPress plugin you use isn’t valid, you should try to find another, as there are tons of well coded plugins out there.
To be honest Amber i do try make sure all my code is valid to at least Transitional most the time Strict just sometimes getting wordpress and jquery to work well can be eventfull lol…
But thats part of the fun of development the puzzles you face to make something do what you want it to do and make it work universal across browsers and resoluctions lol
Just an interesting observation. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amberweinberg.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.1
I wouldn’t necessarily agree that HTML validation is terribly crucial. Cross-browser compatibility, unless you’re intentionally breaking certain browsers – is. Validation is just like automated testing, IMO – it keeps you out of hot water. It’s a tool to ensure you, the developer, are writing the best, cleanest code possible – but at times the developer knows best – and no automatic HTML parser will take into account every real-world situation or use case.
I guess the point is, I wouldn’t choose a developer over another simply because one developer’s HTML validates, and the other doesn’t.
I kinda kept this thought out of my initial post, but decided to jump back into this dialogue.
That’s just a simple error with a plugin though that takes two seconds to fix (and I did) that doesn’t make validation any less important. I actually have a post about it coming out.
(I can’t reply to Amber’s post, but…)
Oh, I agree. But it I wouldn’t choose another designer/developer over you because of that validation error. That’s the point.
Yea but that’s you. Most of the clients I have will actually check for validation and turned a lot of potential devs down because they didn’t bother to do it.
Can anyone answer this question for me?
I have been studying CSS and Javascript for the past year and a half, and I cannot seem to go further than the coding itself. Everytime a language is updated *or WordPress for that matter* every designer on the planet seems to be on the same page. How is that? Smashing Magazine is a great resource, but it does not give me the full scope of how to create custom Javascript menus or PHP upload forms, for example. Where can I find this information, does anyone have any great books or websites that might contain this info? Thanks in advance.
cheyennepaxton17@yahoo.com
I find http://net.tutsplus.com/ to always have great articles about CSS/JS. I would also say follow the “Smashing Magazine Network” http://www.smashingmagazine.com/network-posts/
Most books do seem to say the same thing how to make a basic theme which files to have and where to add the loop. Depends on how you want to add stuff as website normally have one fixed navigaction most people used to just make there own navigaction in the header.php and leave the wordpress functions out of it. Smashing Mag have a book called beyond wordpress which explains alot of the working how to add php function through the functions page….
WordPress are releasing there own ultimate guide this year which would be good as they will be able to go in depth a lot more due to them being the creators..
Hi Amber
I agree that it can be very difficult to find a developer, but I don’t think your article is particularly useful for selecting one.
If I were in this position I don’t think it would be practical for me to contact several potential developers and ask them what books they read or what communities they participate in after work.
The ability of a developer to understand their client, have regular, coherent communication and deliver to deadlines is most important.
You can only find this information through having a direct contact with them (you can’t beat meeting over a coffee) and, as you suggested, checking their testimonials.
As Tom said, most good developers get plenty of work through word of mouth. So people should ask around for recommendations.
I disagree.
Pretty much all of my clients are agencies and freelancers, so I don’t get any work through word of mouth because these clients never want to share me.
I’ve actually gotten several clients because they’ve seen me write on several blog posts, they’ve seen the kind of tweets I’ve sent out, or what I’ve done in the community. Most even tell me they don’t understand any of the technical stuff I write, but they still enjoy reading what I write and can tell that I know what I’m talking about.
Also, I don’t know about other freelancers, but none of my clients are even close to being local, so face-to-face meetings are impossible
Good post, Amber. I think you make a lot of great points!
I published a short paper about this topic awhile ago people may also find useful.
http://www.codepoetrysoftware.com/resources.aspx
I am a bit late to the game on this post. I just wanted to comment on what non-developers should do to find a good developer. Ask this simple question:
“Why do you like being a developer?”
From people that I have talked to whom can’t answer that question well, or they don’t get engaged with the question their work quality tends to suffer. People that really engage on this question are usually passionate about their work and want to do a good job thus doing a good job for you.
I know personally I could talk for hours about programming and things surrounding it. It is a fun topic to talk about and I also love explaining to non-tech and non-dev types why I like it.
p.s. Just wanted to say I am really liking the site I am a fairly new reader. Keep up the good work.
Buddy, that’s a great idea. You can find out a lot about the developer with just that one simple question!
Ps. Welcome to the site!
Thanks for the welcome.
If they’re like Jeff Atwood, they’re probably a good developer: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/
He’s opinionated, passionate, and helpful to his audience through his blog posts. Also, blog posts “comparing” code and showing what solution is better and why makes his expertise shine in a way that a non-dev could somewhat comprehend.