I’ve just started a new company with a colleague Matt Poole. Its called WeAreCoders.com and I’ve been really excited about getting this going. Its an idea that I’ve had for ages, and harks back to when I’d just left university and was trying to make it as an actor.

As an actor the most important thing to do is get yourself an agent. Without an agent you are pretty much dead in the water. But agents aren’t interested in just anyone, they want to only represent people that are going to get jobs and therefore make them money. If they consistently send the wrong person up for auditions then sooner rather than later they aren’t going to be allowed to send their people up for jobs.

Obviously my acting career went terrifically well as I’m now a coder – but we do have something similar to agents. Recruiters.

Now I’m not going to moan about recruiters – I’ve been gainfully employed for the past few years because of them. And I’m not going to complain about getting phone calls about C++ jobs, even though there isn’t anything anywhere on my CV that mentions it. The tech field is wide and it would be ridiculous to expect that recruiters could do their jobs and also understand it all. However it does create a weird dynamic for contractors and clients. Because the recruiters can’t really know if the contractor is up to the job then actually what happens is that the end client (normally an advertising agency or such) gets the contractor in for an interview. To see if they can do the job.

What I started to think about was what if there was an agency for coders that people could only get on to the books if they were good enough. And what makes them good enough? That other freelancers have worked with them and rated them as coders. So then you would have a group of coders where you don’t need to worry about if they can do the job, just if they are going to fit into the team.

I then started discussing this with Matt and we realised that even better than that we could put together teams of freelancers that have worked together before to deliver projects for clients. And that is where WeAreCoders was born.

The website is live http://www.wearecoders.com and the blog is up there too, http://blog.wearecoders.com. We’d love to hear back from you about what you think of the idea and more importantly if this is something you’d like to be a part of.