A Retrospective
A few months ago I opened this job post looking for a developer to help make a couple plugins. I decided to partner with @vini_brito because I had a hunch he was the best candidate. Luckily for me, it turned out I was right. Vini Brito did a fantastic job on my plugins. I will get into that more, but first, a little on why I decided to partner with him in the first place.
The bidding process
When I started the bidding process, I received around 6 quotes. Vini’s quote wasn’t the cheapest one I got, but it stood out for the following:
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Unlike a few people who responded to my bid, Vini followed my instructions. For example, I had asked interested persons to “direct message me with their availability and up to 3 portfolio pieces” of their work. Oddly enough, some couldn’t fulfill those three simple requests. So a tip to those out there trying to recruit help - if the “help” can’t follow simple instructions at the beginning, then don’t hire them. They will be negative help.
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I remembered Vini being helpful and courteous to me in this post from six months earlier. He was offering to go a tad out of his way to help me, some random stranger in the community. That’s very cool. (also, sorry Vini, I actually never responded to you on that
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The other thing that stood out to me was that he was generous in his written replies. That is to say, he answered what I asked for and shared a little more. It turns out that he does the same thing in his actual work.
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Instead of giving me a simple cost estimate of the work, he communicated his bid as a range… with a low end and a high end to cushion for any unforeseen development costs. That’s a small detail but signals some important information - that he is a practiced developer with a realistic understanding that projects have unknowns baked into them.
Actually working together
So instead of taking the cheapest offer, I paid more to partner with Vini. We officially started on December 19, 2019 and finished this week. For those counting, that’s an engagement of about 2 months and 2 weeks to build 2 plugins. That said, the real work he did probably happened over the span of about a month, since he was often waiting for me to reply (and I’ve been busy with a product launch)… so Vini works quite fast.
He works remotely from Brazil but his communication is so good that we were able to do 100% of our updates within a private thread on Bubble’s forum. Oddly enough, he hasn’t even heard my voice. I’ve heard his in one of the video responses he made for me and he’s a tad shy about his accent 
but he shouldn’t be because his English is quite good.
There isn’t a project on earth that has been completed with 0 misunderstandings going into it… and so, naturally, we had a few - some of which I caused. For example, he didn’t notice that I wanted something that involved a subtle 2px by 2px progress bar indicator. But seriously, few would have noticed that without calling explicit attention to it (which I failed to). Vini shined in the way he patiently handled my requests for corrections and ultimately built exactly what I asked for plus a few useful features I didn’t know to ask for.
Afterwords
Once complete, Vini transferred ownership of the plugin code to me. He offered me lifetime support and a one year bugfix guarantee which is fantastic because I wasn’t expecting it. Enhancements beyond that come with a fee.
In addition to the 2 plugins he made for me, another result of his learnings on my project are his two newly released plugins called Satellite and Orchestra, which together make it possible for plugins to work within repeating groups. In his own words, this:
Literally eliminates the weird limitation of not being able to refer to things inside a repeating group.
That’s a big deal for those of us wanting to program advanced logic inside of repeating groups (which is what I needed). He could have sold this isolated mechanism for a premium on the Bubble marketplace but has instead chosen to contribute it to the Bubble community. That’s just another way Vini is a great Bubble developer and community member. Just like how he offered to go out of his way to help me, some random stranger in the community, 6 months before we partnered on this project.
So if you’re looking for a Bubble developer, then consider hiring @vini_brito (check his site here). I couldn’t be happier with his work and professionalism 
Thank you Vini! I look forward to working with you again.
