Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by seyfulislam 4233 days ago
It depends on the complexity of the task that the other is going to do. If it is a straightforward but time consuming, than it will speed things up massively. However, if it has connections with a lot of your critical/tricky parts of your very own code, then you should provide enough background information about your code, or it will just slows the process down.
1 comments
constantinLG 4233 days ago
You have right, but this triggers me to the other side of a programmer perspective. Thinking from a test driven development, and creating parts that are easy to mock and test, couldn't be the outsource-process mindset be a one more reason to better write code handling the dependency of the other parts of the system? This way, i think that some critical parts can be easily mocked up in the outsourced code, so the complexity gets easier to manage. What do you think?
link
seyfulislam 4233 days ago
Mocking the behavior of your code may be as hard as writing the actual code. I mean, you are right, you can feed an outsource code with fakey, but covering all test cases in the mocked up code needs a lot of work which drives us to the point I mentioned earlier: You have to teach them your code.

You are right, though, at some point that aiming to create parts that are easy to mock and test is a good practice. But here we have a question about one -a single freelancer- getting help by outsourcing at some point (which is probably close to the deadline) some functionality. I don't think there are plenty of freelancers out there who put modularity on top of their priority list when writing code. They care about the time deadline, functionality, robustness, error tolerance and at some point modularity shows up in the list. Many one-guy-cares-about-all projects are black box whose features other than functionality are not taken care of by the customer and the programmer.

link
constantinLG 4230 days ago
You have right. From what you are saying, i understand that in some ideal conditions, meeting THAT coder might help you a lot. Otherwise, it will just be a loss of time and money. Thank you for your thoughts!
link