My Software Development Nightmare

It was 2am and my computer screen held bleak news: The build crashed again, just like it did every night for the last three weeks.

To make things worse, there was no easy way for me to test for this bug; I had to install the application on my secondary laptop and leave it running for up to 8 hours. If it crashed (which it always did), I had to spend the next day trying to find out why.

“Except I couldn’t find out why.

As the weeks crawled by, a terrible epiphany emerged: I was battling the “Moby Dick” of Bugs…A “Can’t Fix” bug…A bug so venomous that there is no solution…a bug so nasty, it will take you down with it to the bottom of the failure abyss strapped to an anchor...and it was in a critical feature…and everyone was extremely pissed off…and it was my fault.

This story ended badly…although it didn’t have to.

A year later (at a different job) I learned from a Flex guru co-worker that this issue was caused by a bug in the Flash client while running on certain Intel chips. It might have been avoided by using a different animation technique.

Oh what I would have given for that information when I needed it most…

From time to time I still think of that bug and what I could could have done differently…which is where AirPair.com comes in.

Introducing Elastic Expertise

You may already be familiar with the concept of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2). It works like this: The amount of computing power available to you scales automatically to your needs. You only pay for what you use, when you use it. Simple.

That is the crux of what makes AirPair.com potentially revolutionary:

“You can now rapidly locate and engage advanced expertise for a few hours in a targeted, timely manner.

Like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, AirPair fits into the advancing trend of the “unbundling” of labor and knowledge resources (in this case, technical know-how). AirPair allows many people to market a few hours of their expert time from anywhere in the world.

“…and thats a good thing.

More people can access top talent in an affordable manner and top talent can now effectively work from home and get paid to contribute their wisdom in 1-2 hour increments. Everyone wins.

Unleash The Power of Pairing

The primary technique underlying AirPair is the technique of “Pair Programming” via Google Hangouts. You find an expert in your problem domain (perhaps Node.js or mobile design) and schedule a meeting to pair up on finding a solution to your problem.

You don’t need to be a software developer to lease your time…you could be an SEO expert, an online marketer, a designer, an accountant…everyone can do it.

Key insight: AirPair Is About Connections

What sets AirPair apart is that it is a powerful business development technique for small businesses and independent contractors alike.

“AirPair facilitates a “trial run” of a potentially long-lasting working relationship.

You might find a job, a startup co-founder, a future employee or locate contract work for your own small business. Worst case scenario: You will get to help people struggling with interesting technical problems, just like I was those many years ago.

So don’t delay…give it a shot…Pair up today.

PS: My profile…ping me if you have an Android or iOS bug or want to compare coding horror stories.

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