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Peer-programming is appealing to programmers because they often do work alone. The opportunity to work alongside another developer and learn/share is a selling point. Services that provide the opportunity to pair through screenshare make a lot of sense.
I started working on Hackhands. Hackhands is a service that connects programers with people who have programming issues. The service bills the user who needs help and pays the ‘teacher’ a dollar a minute.
My first experience was positive. Hackhands sent me an email telling me someone needed help with a javascript issue. I logged in and immediately gain visibility on the users problem. We used a video chat with screen share. I directed the person on how to resolve the issue, while using the Hackhands interface to send code snippets. The session lasted 14 minutes and pleased the end-users.
I tried the service again yesterday and had a different experience. The person with the problem had a problem that was much larger. The person wanted to set up a parallax web interface to an existing webpage. The page had issues that couldn’t applied to a parallax layout. The problems scope was beyond a short meeting
The problems with this user raised a flag. These services are effective in their domain, but completely fail when extended beyond. The second user I connected with left displeased because his expectations were not met. He should have hired someone to do the job. He had no idea how the Javascript and CSS worked on the page.
These services are useful for users who are on the right track. Hackhands is perfect when users know something should work, but don’t know how to execute a specific part of their problem.
If you know your stuff and want to help people, check out https://hackhands.com/#/