Upwork proposal: Ongoing Drupal Developer - Bug fixes, Troubleshooting, Development

Hello,

I am an IT consultant and manager with a strong software development background and MA in computer science & maths. I am also the leader of Code Your Dream - a team of professional Drupal developers located in Russia. For several years we've been in the top 1% among all other software developers on Elance/Upwork.

I'm sure our team can work on your Drupal projects, providing very high quality work at an affordable price.
My team is small - there are only 4 of us, so there's a very big advantage in hiring us compared to individual freelancers and large agencies. We are flexible, quick, dedicated and our combined experience is enough to implement any task.

Here are the responses to your questions:

> 1. Your knowledge of the Drupal 7 API - including dealing with nodes and field collections from code.

I'd give our team 10 out of 10 here, since Drupal has been our main specialty for several years. And we did a lot of custom coding, so we work with Drupal 7 API on a daily basis.

> 2. Your knowledge of Features and Rules.

9 or 10 out of 10. We use Features on a daily basis, we use Rules often, however, our experience shows that in many cases custom implementation is preferred over using Rules.

> 3. Your knowledge of Drupal debug tools, with an emphasis on discovering bugs on eval'd code

We usually use Devel and our own custom debug module called CYD Utils (which works with eval'd code as well). With these 2 modules we cover all our debug needs.

> 4. Your experience working with complex (and buggy) existing code to solve problems.

Around 60-70% of our usual work is debugging complex existing code. So we have great experience with that.

> 5. Your PHP experience.

We have very good PHP experience overall, sometimes we work with pure PHP or Frameworks like Symfony, CodeIgniter and other. Since PHP evolves, and currently version 7 is available, I'd say we have 7 or 8 out of 10 in PHP (we still have much to learn!).

> 6. Your hourly rate, and any discount for ongoing work.

Our standard hourly rate is $X/hour, our discounted rate for long-term projects is $Y/hour (we use exactly this rate with most of our current long-term customers).

> 7. Your availability in hours per week.

Since our workload is flexible - we have a number of ongoing contracts, we can provide the hours depending on your tasks.
So our availability in hours per week equals to the hours required to solve your tasks.
Just as an option - we could assign a dedicated developer to your project and provide you 40 hours/week.

> 8. Your availability each day, in US Eastern Standard Time.

We work during our day on business days, and we're in UTC +7. I am also available for status meetings our mornings and evening, which are evenings and mornings for our US-based customers.
Since it looks like we're 12 hours ahead of you, it's easy to calculate: we can meet from, say, 7pm to 10pm your time on Sun - Thu and from 7am to 10am your time Mon - Fri.

> 9. Your experience with Drupal 8 and Wordpress (for future reference).

We implemented a couple of custom modules for Drupal 8, and a Drupal 8 website.
In the past we worked with WordPress, implemented custom plugins for it, also did a couple of websites.
So we have this experience, and Drupal is actually more complex than WordPress, so there's no problem in doing WP development for us, although we love Drupal more :-)

Please also note that our services include:
- requirements analysis
- coding by senior Drupal developer who follows Drupal coding standards and best practices
- project manager assistance
- prompt communications (we respond within 24 hours, and even faster on urgent matters)
- deployment to our development server and out git for demo purposes and for speeding up the development process
and more!

So please contact me if you are interested. We'd love to build a great mutually beneficial and comfortable long-term relations.