[qeorge]

Couple of tips:

1) Look for people who are good writers (prose and such). They tend to be good communicators.

2) Look for programmers who admit their areas of weakness.

3) As always, you're probably worrying about scaling way too early.

Best of luck, and congrats on the grant!

[lsc]

good advice.

Also, use standard tools. If you have cobbled together, badly written php/MySQL, there are armies of SysAdmins (like me) who can come in and do relatively easy things without touching the code much to make it scale better. If you use something new and weird, well, you had better hope your tech guy sticks around, and is good enough to make it scale, because he'll be hard to replace.

I've worked at several places where 1. the founder cooks up something that is revision number four thousand on a pile of php/MySQL spaghetti that was originally intended to do something else, but this time it finally gets customers. 2. the guy hires me to prop the thing up while he hires a compitent developer to re-write the thing in a scalable, maintainable manner, 3. they switch to the new code base, I get bored and leave.

going from step 2 to step 3 often takes a few tries. Don't get too discouraged.