Rent-a-Coder Experience
For a few weeks I tried www.rentacoder.com as an alternative source of income. It was very interesting seeing the variety of work available (although shocking how little some people will pay for it!). I had to learn a lot about some completely new areas and I had to learn it quickly to get the job done in time... challenging but actually very fun!
So far I've written a tiny application that must run in the background and once per hour close down any open internet browser windows and restart the browser in full-screen mode (I imagine this is for a shop display where the standard settings get messed with a lot). The client actually doubled the fee with a bonus, which was nice.
The second project I took on was larger and involved generating barcodes on a UNIX based system using the 'Code 128 C' barcode encoding system. I had never dealt with barcodes before and the encoding for them is pretty weird, plus I didn't have a UNIX system handy so I had to write the code semi-'blind' (I tested it in Win32 and made sure it was straight ANSI C). The project was done well ahead of schedule and again the client was delighted.
A small utility to repeatedly scan the user's desktop for any occurances of a given image (probably a pop-up, but the image can be anything at all) and click the mouse in the centre of it when found. At the request of the user it moves the mouse pointer in a human-plausible manner rather than jumping to the correct location.
NOTE: this code is available to buy, as the rent-a-coder bidder didn't complete the purchase transaction.
A utility which connects to an FTP server, downloads a configuration file and parses it, then downloads one or more files based on the settings encoded within. Permits configurable data throttling via data request break intervals.
An Adobe Photoshop plugin to apply various forms of convolution mask to the current image.
I'll continue to post my new areas of experience as I complete the projects...