Wow, 2 weeks seems a little short?

[ResidentBiscuit]

So, I found a job posting on craigslist about someone looking for programmers for a start-up company. I decided to inquire about, and talked myself up a little bit. Anyway, we exchanged some emails and this guy gave me offer. Here's what he said.

Ok. Here you go. Attached are the general specs that I will post for national and international freelancers within the next week. We would really like to work with local talent so here's your chance. Take a look at the specs and give me your thoughts.

Most importantly, do you know that you could figure it out (given time and a little help)?

If you know you can figure it out, then we'll ask you to create a very simple Facebook App and we'll pay you for it even though it's really just a test (though you'll use much that you figure out in this test project in the larger project). We'll ask that you create a Facebook app that pulls and stores the "interests" of the app-users and allows other users to search the interest of all registered app-users. No graphics, no pretty interface, just a working FB App that grabs data and puts it in a searchable format. Can you figure it out?

If your still interested, here are the next steps

Step 1) Let us know if you know that you could figure out the application that is the core of the first project for this local-startup.

Step 2) Let us know if you know that you could figure out the test facebook app. If so, we'll commit to paying you $50 for your time to do so.

Step 3) When you get the test FB app done (2 weeks tops), we'll meet for coffee or a soda, I'll bring you $50 cash and we'll talk about the details of this local startup. We'll talk about where a young coder like you might fit into the first Topeka based high-end start-up in years.

Fair? Don't be shy, give me your thoughts.

Now, I have NO experience with facebook apps, so I did some research. Came to the conclusion that they're written in JavaScript and PHP. I also have zero experience with that. Now, learning these isn't a huge deal to me. But, two weeks? With school and work, I doubt that's possible. And I don't really have experience with working databases or search engines either. So, what would you all do in my position?

[chrisname]

I think you could learn enough Javascript to do it in two weeks. Then you could possibly use jQuery rather than having to learn PHP (jQuery is a Javascript library).

Javascript tutorial: http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp
jQuery tutorial: http://www.w3schools.com/jquery/jquery_intro.asp

If it doesn't look like you'll get it done, make sure you tell him ahead of time (either to tell him you're not ready, or to ask for more time). If I were you I'd resolve to have told him by the tenth day if I wasn't sure I could do it.

[naraku9333]

On one of the developer pages http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/canvas/ it says you can use any language that supports web programming including python, java, and C#. If you're not already familiar with java or C#, I found them fairly easy to adapt to coming from C++.

[ResidentBiscuit]

Well, he also gave me very little information on what it is he wants. The attached document is for the larger project that he's picking people to work on.

Javascript looks like HTML. And connecting to/working with a database seems like a big deal. I could be wrong, but it just sounds like it would be a whole lot of work.

[Cninja]

javascript,PHP,networking..etc.


if you can learn all of this in two weeks with work,school and still getting 8 hours of sleep.

then screw this guy and go work for google.

[naraku9333]

There are java and c# APIs available so you may not need to pick up much javascript or php if any. After some googling it doesn't look like this test app should be too difficult, the majority of your time would likely go to figuring out the parts of the API you need and maybe storing the searchable data. I'd like to look at the developer docs, but I don't have a Facebook account.

C# API
https://github.com/facebook-csharp-sdk/facebook-csharp-sdk

Java API
http://code.google.com/p/facebook-java-api/