The Problem
Resource hunting is a major concern for any enterprise. Especially in a product development tool floor, when you are trying to solve a problem in a peculiar domain space, there would be a definitive need to keep in touch with a core tech consultant for Idea Screening.
But the real challenge is, how could I find reliable/expert Consultants instantly?
The Strategy
Contacting Job Portals/Agencies would be an idealistic approach. Unfortunately, it is usually time-consuming especially when you’re looking for a consultant and the stack-set requirement is queer.
So, the next logical approach would be hunting the social networking sites like LinkedIn and Q&A sites like StackExchange. But it’s very laborious to backtrack profiles cross-referring the required stack-sets manually.
I faced a similar situation in my office BizTalk360, and just like any programmer I was lazy enough to create a simple Application, where you can type in a keyword(tech-tag) and you get its top global contributors. For instance, you can key in the tag “BizTalk” and you’d get the top global contributors in the field of Biztalk, whom you can keep in touch for consultation or hire ’em up!
The Solution
Thanks to the “API way of the world” where most of the social structured sites (StackExchange, Twitter, Facebook, etc.,) expose their data via API. I was toying around Angular 4 + Electron + Material very recently and I created a simple application called “Scout My Consultant”. For now, I’ve used only StackExchange API to get me top contributors for a given keyword(Eg., BizTalk, etc.,) and site(Eg., StackOverflow, ServerFault, etc.,)
In future, you can also make use of LinkedIn API to filter profiles based on skills, Recommendations etc., to amplify your search results.
You can find the source at https://github.com/yothesh/ScoutMyConsutant
Feel free to fork and experiment as you please.
“Find Simple Solutions to complex problems. The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But the complexity blocks all the three steps. ” – an excerpt from Bill Gates Harvard Address
