All substantial periods of economic growth have come from fundamental changes in the way people work. The assembly line became a powerful tool because it allowed workers to become incredibly efficient at a specific task. As the assembly line came to prominence in the early 20th century, it slashed production costs and ushered in an new era of inexpensive consumer goods. Here at Workherder.com, we believe we are standing at the threshold of a similar revolution, this time in software production.

Workherder.com is a low-friction marketplace for software skill, designed to make building your vision as easy as adding items to a shopping cart. So, for instance, say you are building an application and need to add authentication. You know there are gems and packages that do it, and that with a couple of days of effort, you could learn the ins and outs of a particular gem, and finally get it to do everything you need it to do in your application. But, somewhere out there, there is another engineer who has been there before. In fact, he has been there many times before. What would have taken you a couple days to learn, would take somebody familiar with the gem a couple of hours to do. Workherder.com brings you both together for mutual benefit.

Now imagine performing this feat over and over again, across all of the pieces of your application. You could build with the strength of 10 regular developers. You could do this all at a fraction of the cost of having a full time dedicated team. Instead, you have a team with just-in-time expertise. Suddenly, you crush the learning curve. Suddenly, you are conducting a symphony of software. Suddenly, you are like Neo at the end of The Matrix, and 1’s and 0’s obey your mastery. Ok, perhaps the Neo thing is a bit much, but workherder.com will let you build better software, faster.

Being a workherder is an entirely different philosophy of software creation. It means thinking, not in terms of libraries and code, but instead in systems and services. It involves knowing a little bit about everything in the system, but also knowing when to augment your expertise with external help. It is about delegating the details to focus on integrating the whole.

And working on workherder.com combines the best parts of freelancing with assembly line efficiency. You can get paid great money to help a few people a day get your favorite library integrated into their applications. When you are bored of the library, move on to helping out with another. You become the foreman of your own software assembly line, and you get to profit from your efficiency.

With your help, we can forever change the way that software is built.