#freelance development

‘Captain Zins’

[DOS] [GERMANY] [MAGAZINE] [1994]

“The free GriPS Computer Game!”

Help! The financial world is topsy-turvy!. The unscrupulous Mr. Money wants to plunge his people into ruin, and shifty moneylenders the Sharkey Brothers also have their dangerous fins in play.

Good advice is expensive? No, even free! Because anyone who can now play the Captain Zins computer game for free can have Professor Brombori use his Flux Connector to zap them into the cyber world, become Captain Zins and save what can be saved.

This is fun and informative game about GriPS, the new Dresdner Bank offering for young people.

The computer game "Captain Zins" is available in every Dresdner Bank while stocks last. Don't wait - start! ~Ad blurb Note: “GriPS” was a bank account package offered to teens by Dresdner Bank during this time.

The story behind this lesson is what comes with custom-freelance development work as opposed to having a company do custom development work for you. We operate a large POS system that interfaces with an ecommerce solution to sell the majority of our products online. Unfortunately the vendor supplied ecommerce solution didn't work for our needs so we hired a third-party, freelance developer to build us a custom ecommerce solution to interface with our POS system.

The solution was built and deployed two years ago - it was what we needed then, but now new bugs have arisen and we need additional feature enhancements. But since we were working with a freelance developer without a support contract - we get limited responses from him on the work we need done. 

The developer responds to emails and phone calls when it's convenient to him and when the work requests aren't too much of a burden on him. If  troubleshooting takes 30 minutes, he'll respond. But if it's going to take an hour or more of development work - forget it. It's not that we aren't willing to pay him either, we'll pay him to fix bugs and develop new features.