New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: 45-minute “unblock me on my personal project” consultants? Ask HN: 45-minute “unblock me on my personal project” consultants?

Ask HN: 45-minute “unblock me on my personal project” consultants?
21 by afarrell | 16 comments on Hacker News.
Hi folks, I’m trying to get back into doing side projects for my own learning. However, I have a problem and I’d like to know if I can trade money for a solution. Back when I was in uni or a new grad, I frequently repeatedly had a problems with package managers, setting up test frameworks, figuring out how to use a debugger to get to a point in a test, package managers, other development environment issues, and especially package managers. My response back then was to spend hours yak shaving and going down rabbit holes. As a student, this led to a lot of wasted time. When I got to the workplace, this habit led to me getting some pretty strongly-worded feedback that I needed to get better at asking for help when I ran into these sorts of problems. After a few years, I’ve mostly gotten over the “I’m not a real engineer if I only have a surface-level understanding of npm” feeling. Asking well-framed questions leads to a coworker popping up and unblocking me pretty quickly and the team as a whole moving more efficiently. But what do I do for personal projects? Is there anyone who has a really solid understanding of npm, gems, rvm, protractor, node-debugger, etc. and offers the service where I can book time on their calendar a week from now, send them a clear description of my problem, and videochat with them for 5 minutes to 45 minutes and then pay for 45 minutes of their time? What would rates generally be? Folks with experience doing consulting or services, how would you structure such a transaction? Would it be best to have someone on retainer? Or would they just have themselves up on calendly as described here: https://ift.tt/2JgbXQF ?

Hi folks, I’m trying to get back into doing side projects for my own learning. However, I have a problem and I’d like to know if I can trade money for a solution. Back when I was in uni or a new grad, I frequently repeatedly had a problems with package managers, setting up test frameworks, figuring out how to use a debugger to get to a point in a test, package managers, other development environment issues, and especially package managers. My response back then was to spend hours yak shaving and going down rabbit holes. As a student, this led to a lot of wasted time. When I got to the workplace, this habit led to me getting some pretty strongly-worded feedback that I needed to get better at asking for help when I ran into these sorts of problems. After a few years, I’ve mostly gotten over the “I’m not a real engineer if I only have a surface-level understanding of npm” feeling. Asking well-framed questions leads to a coworker popping up and unblocking me pretty quickly and the team as a whole moving more efficiently. But what do I do for personal projects? Is there anyone who has a really solid understanding of npm, gems, rvm, protractor, node-debugger, etc. and offers the service where I can book time on their calendar a week from now, send them a clear description of my problem, and videochat with them for 5 minutes to 45 minutes and then pay for 45 minutes of their time? What would rates generally be? Folks with experience doing consulting or services, how would you structure such a transaction? Would it be best to have someone on retainer? Or would they just have themselves up on calendly as described here: https://ift.tt/2JgbXQF ?