About searching freelancers, programmers, consultants with the DevExpress expertise and XAF in particular

I have recently come back from a 3 week vacation on Crete and I feel in a good mood for blogging. BTW, in my first-time experience, this place has a plethora of sights for both active and cultural holidays, crystal clean sea, tasty traditional and sea food, fruits plus Greeks being very nice people all with a funny Tolis-like accent:-) - it will be the reason for my pleasant memories again and again.

Today, I want to cover a question which I periodically receive privately or in the Support Center:

"Can you recommend anyone that might be interested in working as a consultant/programmer to help us develop our XAF app?"

Well, there are surely many developers that can qualify for this, and the first and probably the best way of locating XAF freelancers (as well as freelancers for any other technology) is using specialized services like https://www.upwork.com and https://www.freelancer.com. I just picked the two ones from the top of my head, so there may be alternatives and you must learn more on them first. For instance, check these example queries:

https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/browse/?q=devexpress%20xaf https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/browse/?q=expressapp https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/browse/?q=xaf

https://www.freelancer.com/job-search/devexpress-xaf/1/
https://www.google.com/search?q=XAF+freelance.ru 

Such web sites usually have a 'Job Success Score' or similar rating mechanisms, so you can make a more weighted decision on employing a certain contractor by his or her portfolio without searching much.

EDIT: This new web site may be helpful as well: https://www.xafers.jobs/. It describes itself as follows:
"Xafers.Jobs  is a job service that provides xafers with pre-screened XAF jobs leads that offer real pay for real work. From web to windows to mobile, from reporting to dashboards, all of the job openings we bring you offer some form of our loved XAF framework."

Another way is to post such job offers directly in XAF groups in social networks where interested third-parties will see your requests. In the first place, these are:

 our LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2367509)

 and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/DevExpress.XAF/) groups. 

There are also a few links to third-party XAF-related services which you may find helpful on our framework landing page, though take special note of the disclaimer at the bottom of this page. Another place to find XAF/DevExpress freelancers is the general DevExpress group (unofficial) on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/89351) or the eXpand Framework forum: http://www.expandframework.com/forum/index.html.

I prefer the aforementioned methods to direct recommendations (unless I am 100% certain and can risk my reputation) also for better openness and competition because I do not currently maintain a list of such freelancers and consultants (and thus I do not evaluate the quality of their services myself).

Finally, I want to remind you that XAF customers are DevExpress Universal license owners who are entitled to priority technical support. Our specially trained support engineers and developers have been developing and maintaining XAF for almost a decade and are always happy to help you solve or clarify things for the tool we all love and for which we live here (e.g., best practices, approaches from the online documentation, demos, examples, videos, etc.). Our help desk or the Support Center, while assuming a non-verbal communication format is still quite efficient. This has been proven by our own experience, and the experience of many our customers as well as the success of similar support/knowledge base systems like StackOverFlow. Almost all experienced XAFers I know (and whom I am even afraid of, because today they can probably customize XAF even greater than I can imagine it myself:-)) also started with basic questions (sometimes a lot of them:-)) and improved their knowledge as they proceeded using the framework. This is a normal learning process and you must not hesitate to ask questions to learn and accomplish your tasks. We are here to help and this can be another option without the need to pay extra.

I hope you find all this information helpful. Do not hesitate to ask me questions in comments.