I started in middle school with TI-BASIC apps on my TI-85 calculator to help me in math and physics classes. Then I moved on to VB .NET a few years later when I got to university. Pretty much I did it all with scratch-my-own-itch problems as they cropped up.

It progressed as such for me (mainly due to course progression at school): TI-BASIC >> VB .Net >> C >> PHP >> C# >> Python >> Ruby

So far elance.com has gotten me decent wages that an American would expect; however, freelancer.com and vworker.com have yielded nothing but $5/hr crap jobs and projects where the scope creep was so bad I ended up making like $2/hr by the end. Also, freelanceswitch seems to be better because you have to pay $7/mo to bid on jobs and most of the $5/hr crowd won't do that.

Are you going to make the code available? I love reading other people's sinatra code.

A lot of people heavily borrow from existing site's designs; however, it'll probably hurt your portfolio. If people realize that your designs aren't actually original they may not want to hire you or they may insist on reduced pricing.

SEEKING WORK - Phoenix, Arizona - Remote Work Yes

I like to develop web apps using Rails, Sinatra, and web.py. I'm also into Scala and C# development a bit.

Awesome post. I've always wondered what it would take to fix a mobo these days.

Not sure just how useful this is but it's definitely a cool idea.

I've used elance, freelancer, and v-worker, and a few others without much success.

The Aussie companies have retarded policies for allowing you to get your funds out of their account (freelancer makes you wait 15 business days for instance for the first transaction). They also take their cut before you even start the work, often placing your account into the negative and then if the client bails they keep your money.

It's hard to get bids accepted when most people are choosing providers based solely on lowest price rather than aptitude. Also, like 90% of the people that I've worked with on these sites are high-maintenance and change the project's scope every five minutes. One guy even is trying to sue me even though I implemented what it is he wanted (pre-scope-creep).

And as for Craigslist being better; I don't think so! Every job that I've gotten through Craigslist except for one has been low pay, the client dragged their feet with everything and yet was super demanding and unrealistic in their expectations.

There's gotta be a better way to do freelance business but these sites don't appear to be it. Many of them are just places with sub-par services for freelancers that are designed to upsell you add-ons like testing and badges.

For me it's the pressure of my peers that will flame and bash me in public on the social networks that keeps me plugging away.

I get link expired errors often too but that is an issue of scale and server reliability rather than usability don't you think?