We have now employed our first oursourced resource and so far things are great. We have code coming in to our SVN server each day and we can see the project developing.

We got an extremely good developer from Russia who speaks great english. We found him through ODesk.

Odesk is very impressive, its a great platform. On signing up someone to do a project you get access to SVN and Bugzilla through their system. It also provides monitor of work done and hours put in by your resource.

We will continue to update how we get on and will give more details on what we are getting built soon enough.

We now have 4 bids in for Rails Manager application. The prices vary quite a bit and also it difficult to determine what the price will end out at as some are offering fixed price and some hourly rate. Its also hard to determine how good the people are but I am fairly impressed by the calibre of what I have read anyway.

And we have uploaded our second project up on to the sites today. Its a more web based one so I expect more quotes as web projects seem to draw more quotes anyway.

I've wanted to experiment with some of the outsourcing sites like ODesk for a while now. It always sounds like a good idea but when I head stories about outsourcing it often falls flat.

I've just posted a test job though. You can see it here: Rails Manager

The idea is I'll get someone to build a simple rails manager for Leopard and see what happens. If its good I'll put it up for download. Its a small enough app that its not a big risk and its no risk to our core business.

I'll continue to post updates on how we get on, but I'm getting worried now. The job is posted an hour and we have no bids :(