[muzani]

Personally, I wouldn't take on a project like this through Upwork. I have no familiarity with either libraries, and it's hard to tell from here whether it's an easy thing to do or something that requires massive hacking or an architectural rewrite. Hourly pay offsets the risk, but I don't want to take something that I'm not at least 70% confident of completing.

The problem with many freelance jobs is that they're a form of, "My team are too dumb and slow to do this, so I'll outsource it and see if I can get it done cheaper." When it's often an impossible job. Ironically, I would take the same job through Toptal, because they're known for at least vetting the clients.

On the other extreme, I once commission some pixel art on Upwork. A logo designer applied, with no experience. I asked her for a sample of any pixel work she's done, and she got offended, saying that she had no experience and I should pay her to try. I have a few months of experience here and I suck, but I doubt this random stranger would do better with 5 hours of experience.

So Upwork has this mismatch on both sides, with expectations and experience. It was probably better when anyone could just apply for a job, which meant that you were likely to just come across someone who is experienced with some niche library, the same way you would on Stack Overflow. Maybe another option would be asking someone who has contributed to the library to work on it - consulting is a common business model for open source.

[mytechtoday]

I think your option of soliciting from one of the developers themselves is the best option, in hind-sight. Both of them have the skills and direct domain knowledge of their own code.

If that fails, contacting another developer who has forked he code and is also supporting the libraries also might work.

I appreciate your advice and comments. Thanks

[yayr]

For design work, especially logos I can recommend designcrowd.com