This article is about hiring the proper (not only good) Drupal freelance developer for your next project(s). There are already some more detailed articles talking about this issue and I would suggest to read them before reading this post.
Times ago, I was fixing a customer's website made by another developer. It was a really mess! Javascript code, direct printing of variables and other "bad codes" were found in most of the php templates. I was wondering if the developer that did that kind of work did spend a minute to learn the Drupal basics and the "Drupal way" practices.
So, next time you are about to hire or cooperate with a Drupal related person check the following:
- How active is he/she with Drupal? (projects, commits, patches, posts, issues, events watched etc). You just have to ask for the user id on Drupal .org and you will get anything under https://drupal.org/user/869224 where 869224 is the user id of mine.
- Which are his/her portfolio work?
- Does he/she have a specialization (eg on theming, module development, data stracture etc)?
- What is his/her public reputation with Drupal (eg Q&A, Codebase profiles, blogging, speaking at events etc)?
- What is his/her costs?
As you can imagine there are too many things to take into consideration but, luckily, everything you need to know is out there in the web!