I’m looking to hire on help for my Mac app projects. You can apply now and I’ll be looking forward to pick someone in March.

The Available Topics

Ordered by importance:

1. Wiring NSTextView and friends and use the Cocoa Text System to write a better, no, the best Markdown syntax highlighter. I wrote a ton about the topic myself, and I have a couple of interesting approaches prepared, but my time is too limited to make the ideas reality as quickly as I would like, so help (aka paid labor) is appreciated! This includes variants based on C libraries, server/client like service architecture, and pure Swift. We can also talk about Open Sourcing the result if that is a thing you burn for.
2. Writing a data model and UI for better file content tracking (got the file/directory tracking part already) to integrate project progress better into the WordCounter.
3. Designing a UI to manage user-created scripts in an app and execute these manually or on a regular basis. A poor man’s cron, so to speak, but more accessible to non-programmers. Scripts will usually work with plain text content and produce more plain text stuff.
4. Writing a replacement for, or customizing the vanilla NSTableView of TableFlip to make multi-line cell contents a thing while keeping the UI responsive. A replacement component would be more greenfield-ish than improving the existing UI code, of course.
5. Actually not for Mac: Adding iCloud sync to a Core Data-backed iOS app. It’s a simple latest-change-wins merge, with a data model with only 1 Entity/table that predates easy iCloud syncing, though. It’s part Objective-C, and I’m fine adding on more Objective-C.

Have another look at my apps to see what kind of stuff I work on.

The Setting

This list of stuff is mostly about self-contained modules. You can think of these to be greenfield projects, so you don’t need to deal with existing code most of the time. We will design components from UI to API together and you’ll get to be as creative as you want and the project allows.

Depending on what you eventually want to do with the rest of your life and how well we resonate with each other, consider the topics above to be entryways into a long-term cooperation.

Timing is flexible. Part-time is totally fine. For longer-term nuts to crack, it even makes sense to spread out the workload a bit, especially in the beginning. After all, you’ll need to get accustomed to everything, and I believe it’s nicer for both of us if you have more headspace. The pressure of trying to churn out 40 hours right from the get go might actually get in the way. The opposite sounds a lot more sensible, so if you only have 2 days per week to spend, no problemo.

Please note there will be no SwiftUI or Combine for the foreseeable future, but I’m game for RxSwift.

The Requirements

I’m looking for experienced developers with a knack for the problem of their choosing, because I’m happy if you’re happy at work, and we’re both more happy if you pick a topic that motivates you to excel.

If you really, absolutely want to tackle more boring and menial tasks, I can see what I can do after we finished some of the interesting stuff.

Get in touch if

• you are interested in a topic mentioned above,
• you have experience with the problem domain and macOS app development,
• you are available “soon”,
• you can work as a freelancer/contractor.

Don’t know if “experienced” applies to you? Introduce yourself and we’ll find out!