Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

If any programmers here that frequent the board are interested in making some money can you please contact me via PM.

Basically the program I am after is a batch hand converter for Poker Room hand histories. The following should be used as a reference for what I want it to be able to do (http://www.pokermentor.net/PonksSaver.exe). I want to be able to drop my hand history files in to the program and it converts them into a format I choose.

PM me with interest and a indication of the price you would want to take on this project.

Thanks.

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

Just a heads up. If you haven't had custom programming done before, you may be in for a shocker. Custom work from good developers even for something simple will cost you a lot. I wouldn't expect anyone who knows what they are doing to do this for less than $500-1000. Probably more depending on what features you want.

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

At $500 I normally have a couple days invested in a project. As the development time increases so does the price of the product and if you have somethign requiring a solid man month, my pricing has to include the oportunity costs required in such an endevour. The flip side is that I produce something extensable, maintainable, reliable, and without royalty to the customer.

Many developers will change if the product they are creating might have a resale value, but for most custom poker apps the market is very very small. Case in point, the party mine application was offered for sale a while back. I tried to do a fair estimant of what that product might be worth on a clean buy out, and frankly I came up with a figure of a couple grand. The developer put way more time into the app than the money would indicate however he provided the sweat equity at a discount to himself, a good outside developer can't normally do such things.

I'm not trying to discourage the OP, but it's something to think about.

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

Most custom work is custom because there's not much of a market for it. Something like this may be marketable, and you might get the developer to charge less in return for a cut of the profit if it goes commercial.

A lot of developers charge by the hour. I do custom work and charge by the hour. The amount they charge depends on several factors: experience, reputation and opportunity costs (how much they could be making doing something else). Expect to be charged between $50-200 per hour of work.

Also, development takes a lot more time than you might think. An application that accepts one hand history format and spits out another with no interface or configuration options may take 10 hours to design, write, test and deliver. So right there, you've got a good deal of money involved. Add in additional features and the time and cost adds up quickly.

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

dont forget support if hh format changes.. ie even more hours...(if desired that is)

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

If someone wanted to add Pokerroom support to Games::Poker::HistoryParser - probably 3 hours work if the hand history format is sane - then adding a batch handler would really be trivial. I may do it today for other sites just to see how easy it is.

Regards,

T

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

I'm pretty sure PokerRoom uses a special database format, not an ASCII format.

www.pokermgr.com

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

[ QUOTE ]
I'm pretty sure PokerRoom uses a special database format, not an ASCII format.

www.pokermgr.com

[/ QUOTE ]

I was afraid of something like that. I signed up at Pokerroom last night to see what their histories were like, and I wasn't encouraged.

Regards,

T

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

[ QUOTE ]
I'm pretty sure PokerRoom uses a special database format, not an ASCII format.

[/ QUOTE ]

You are correct. The PokerRoom format is crazy. It will take you a few hours just to figure out what they are doing.

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

[ QUOTE ]
Just a heads up. If you haven't had custom programming done before, you may be in for a shocker.

[/ QUOTE ]

Absolutely. People, for the most part, have no idea the amount of time involved to write even relatively simple programs. Particularly anything that parses data without a clear definition of the data rules. A sample hand history is rarely sufficient because NL is different from limit, is different if someone is all, if someone disconnects, etc, etc.

I'd be suprised if it didn't take someone close to 40 hours to figure it all out, code it, test it, and productize it into something you can fairly easily install (even if it's just a zip file you unpack). That's $2000. Then there's maintenance any time the place changes the hand histories.

If enough people put up a bounty on it on some open source network like sourceforge, you might get enough demand to fund it. Otherwise you just wait until some undergraduate CS major gets bored and does it for fun.

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

Could you paste a hand history of the format you'd want converted?

I wouldn't charge to code it if it was requested by alot of people.

Of course you wouldn't get acess to source code nor a product that would be easy to sell(It would have a serial and work for you only).

Although im not a programmer by trade or anything, Just a 18 year old who taught himself when he was 12.

What features out of interest?

Depends how long i'm looking at to code it and the potential reward etc.

I was considering writing a hand converter for every site avalible just not sure if anyone would buy it/need it.

Seeing as i can make a bit playing poker with my time, or be having fun i wouldnt code a worthless program.

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

As somebody who has spent more time decoding hand histories and programming this exact kind of software, I can say that adding support for PokerRoom isn't that horrible:

*PokerRoom puts money in pot amounts next to all actions, which is nice and easy

*PokerRoom includes uncalled bets in the final pot size, which is nice and easy

Other than using a non newline delineated format, there is nothing particularly nastly about it.

However, I will say I have never looked at all the worst case situations, so I have no idea how multiple blinds, split pots and other situations are handled, and one bad case can make the whole decoder a bitch to program.

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

Hah, actually I just needled around this database format. I was always concerned with the ASCII hands for PokerGrader, but this database format is hilarious.

Doesn't look too complicated though, just have to decode everything.

Re: Programmer Needed - Will Pay
 

I just spent some time with it also. It is pretty amusing, and extreme overkill.

I probably won't be bothering with extracting Pokerroom histories. I just can't see it being worthwhile. I spend my entire day mucking about in databases, and this just holds no attraction for me.

Regards,

T