Looking for a part-time developer who knows their way around tube scripts. Ongoing customization work, template tweaks, feed/import fixes, ad-slot changes, the usual. Remote, paid per task or a monthly retainer if it works out.
Requirements: you’ve actually worked on adult tube scripts before (not “I can learn”), you can show me something you’ve done, and you’re reachable when something breaks. Timezone flexible but you need to overlap my evenings sometimes.
If interested, reply or DM with a couple of relevant examples and your rate. I’ll use escrow for the first job so we both feel safe, standard here.
not applying (not experienced enough yet) but genuine question, is “worked on adult tube scripts specifically” a hard requirement or would a strong general dev who’s fast at reading a codebase work? trying to understand if this door is closed to me for now.
scope matters and people skip it. someone who specifically knows tube scripts is narrow but real, and worth more than a generalist learning on your downtime. for production work, get the specialist.
for anything that has to stay live, shipped-before is the requirement. a hobbyist builds the feature, a pro keeps it running through all the edge cases. easiest way to tell them apart is to ask about failures they’ve handled, not features they’ve built.
honestly yeah, tube scripts are a real niche with steady demand and not many people who properly know them. i see the shortage from the vendor side all the time. narrow skill but reliable work if the domain interests you.
the real job on a tube dev hire is maintenance, not the shiny feature. anyone can bolt a feature on. keeping the encoder, player and grabbers all talking to each other is the actual work. hire for boring competence.
the niche is real work if you want it, but learn the ops side too, not just the code. the devs who know why the site falls over, not just how to add a button, always have work.
the job is 80 percent keeping the existing thing alive and 20 percent new features, and the posting never says that out loud. the devs who last are the ones fine with debugging someone elses old code and chasing the regression that broke at 3am, not the ones who only want to build shiny stuff. a brilliant dev whos bored by upkeep wont stay on a tube where upkeep is the job. hire for temperament toward maintenance as much as for skill.
be strict about this one. talking about code and having actually run a high-traffic site under load are different things. someone whos shipped and maintained a busy site knows the stuff you only learn by getting burned, caching, the db dying under load, the encode pipeline backing up. ask for real shipped work you can look at, ideally at scale, and weight it over a polished resume.
how-a-hiring-thread-should-look is a fair thing to note, because this one has the shape of a real hire, clear scope, a shipped-work requirement, and honesty about the maintenance reality, and that itself filters for better candidates. a vague hiring post that promises exciting work and hides the maintenance grind attracts people who will be disappointed and leave, while an honest one that says most of this is upkeep on an existing tube attracts the people who are actually fine with that. the quality of the applicants you get is downstream of how honestly you described the job. a clear, honest, specific hiring post is not just courtesy, it is the first filter, and this thread is a decent template for it. describe the real job and the right people self-select in.
every first-time hirer underestimates the maintenance, you think you’re paying for the feature and you’re actually signing up for the ongoing upkeep of everything that dev touches, and a contractor who ships and vanishes leaves you worse off than before. hire someone who’ll still answer in six months, not just someone who can build it now, and make maintenance part of the deal rather than a surprise. the cheap build nobody will maintain is the expensive one.
pay up for someone who’s shipped on a tube script before, these codebases are old, sprawling, and full of landmines, and a dev who’s worked one will avoid the traps a talented newcomer steps in blind. the interview signal i trust is whether they can talk concretely about a specific script’s quirks, the encoding pipeline, the mess in the admin, not just general skill. a strong generalist can learn it, but on a short customization job you’re paying partly for the scars they already have.
the how-a-hiring-thread-should-look note is fair and worth reinforcing, a clear scope, a realistic budget, and honesty about the state of the codebase gets you good applicants, and a vague we-need-a-rockstar-for-cheap post filters for exactly the people you do not want. from the outside a well-written hiring post is also a signal about the operator, the ones who describe the work precisely tend to be the ones who pay on time and know what they want. so writing the job properly is not just courtesy, it is how you attract the dev who has shipped before rather than the one who will disappear, because good people read the post as a preview of the client.
the maintenance is the honest truth of hiring and every first-time hirer underestimates it, you think you’re paying for the feature and you’re actually signing up for the ongoing upkeep of everything that dev touches, and a contractor who ships and vanishes leaves you worse off than before. structure the hire so maintenance is part of the deal rather than a surprise, a tube script customization is a relationship not a transaction, and the cheap build that nobody will maintain is the expensive one, so the maintenance tail is where the real cost and the real value both live, and the operators who hire well weight the willingness to stick around as heavily as the ability to build.
a clear scope, a realistic budget, and honesty about the state of the codebase gets you good applicants, while a vague we-need-a-rockstar-for-cheap post filters for exactly the people you don’t want. write the job properly, a well-written hiring post is itself a signal about the operator, the ones who describe the work precisely tend to be the ones who pay on time and know what they want, and good developers read the post as a preview of the client, so a precise honest job description is the mechanism that attracts the dev who’s shipped before rather than the one who’ll disappear, since the strong candidates self-select toward postings that read like they come from someone competent.
the hiring-a-dev point i would add from the infra side is to be clear up front about who owns the operational responsibility after the work ships, because a lot of tube customizations touch things that then need to run and be maintained, and if the hire builds it and hands it over with no plan for who keeps it running you have just created an orphaned piece of critical infrastructure. so define the operational handoff, not just the build. so agree in advance on what happens after delivery, who maintains it, who is on the hook when it breaks, because the build is the visible part and the running-it-afterward is where the cost and risk quietly live, and a hire that ships a customization with no operational plan leaves you owning something you may not understand well enough to keep running, so the well-structured dev hire includes the maintenance and operational responsibility explicitly, which is the same maintenance-is-the-real-cost lesson from the angle of who actually keeps the thing alive once the contractor is gone.
the honest part of a dev hire is the maintenance, not the build. the customization is a one-time cost, but customized code needs maintaining as the script, its dependencies, and the platform around it keep changing. budget for the ongoing upkeep, not just the initial job. the operator who hired only for the build is the one calling the dev back six months later for the maintenance the customization quietly created, because customized code does not look after itself.
from the infra side i would add, hire a dev who understands the system their code runs on, not just the code. tube-script customizations interact with performance and operations, so a dev who grasps how their changes land in production writes stuff that actually works there, not just in isolation. customizations that ignore the operational reality can quietly degrade performance or cause problems the code alone never reveals. the infra-aware dev is the better hire for exactly that reason.