I agree that it can be to a day raters advantage if a project runs long. Personally, I prefer to take the longer term approach and (aim to) do a great job fast. It helps to secure you for future roles and boosts the chance of being recommended to other clients.

WRT Flex, I’ll keep you posted. What I can tell you is it’s very well suited to large projects with concurrent developers (if you adopt a good MVC structure). Ultimately Flex is Flash, so if you’ve got a great (team of) AS3 programmer(s) smaller projects may not benefit from big frameworks…. then the argument will all come down to code reuse, libraries and architecture and all that fun stuff.

The Flex discussion here seems to be about speed of development and degree of “clunkiness” on smaller apps. I’ll make a note to blog about the comparisons some time in the future. These days a lot of Adobe consultants seem to focus on creating “custom components” which may have helped reduce the clunk factor in our case, if I had taken that approach.

On another note, have you or David worked with AMF yet (or Flash/Flex Data Services as it is sometimes known)? If you want to soup up the speed of your apps, using this can really make a difference.

I do feel though that anyone on a day rate has less pressure to complete the job quickly as someone who quotes a fixed price for the project. This will not apply to everyone but for most people they will probably not finish the job as quickly if they are on a day rate.

Personally I think you did a good job Matt, but over the last year we have had numerous contractors and not many of them were good value for money.

Also I am still to be convinced about flex though )

Kudos to Dave! Stripping the app all the way back to pure AS3 removes the need for the Flex framework which no doubt “slicks it up” somewhat.

As you mentioned in another one of your articles though, frameworks are so important – especially for maintenance and growth. In hindsight I would have gone with Cairngorm or some other Flex MVC framework and not tried to reuse any of the previous guys stuff.

From my perspective, the biggest issues were:
– Time was wasted trying to reverse engineer the previous contractors work
– Code requirements were “Create a readable easy to follow solution that newbies could learn from”, rather than “Create a maintainable/extensible application”
– Specifications were mostly verbal (which is fine), but feedback wasn’t always available when necessary (you guys were soooo busy, always in meetings!!)
– Big problems with the AIR certificate when we had to change machines
– Flex styling can be a little clunky (but that is improving: see degrafa and Gumbo for upcoming improvements)
– There were also a couple of classic Flex gotchas

I still think Flex is a fantastic technology that is improving over time, but it is still considered “new”. There still aren’t a whole lot of Flex guys out there!

Regarding the “watch them like a hawk” statement, as I recall you and Scott were very busy and on a couple of occasions it took a day for you to respond to decisions that needed to be made. Perhaps, “make sure your time is made available to them” would have been a more appropriate statement? You imply that “the contractors” were taking the mickey, which I can assure you was not the case for me…. for the other guy however, I cannot comment.

As a side note, I think that 4 hour per day commute also took it’s toll after the first week…. but that just sounds like an excuse

I look back on my experience at Busara fondly, and I really hope I didn’t leave too bad an impression.

All the best,

Matt (The second of the two contractors)

P.S. When exactly did you stop wearing clothes??? Thankfully you weren’t the “Naked CTO” when I was there