When hiring a software developer, how do you get the full control of your app and website? What prevents the developer from taking over the work after they finish? Assuming they’re coding everything manually and not on a firebase subscription and you have no technical knowledge
In: Technology
Legally signed contract outlining work to be done; turning over all control and passwords; all work/revisions is properly of hiring party, yadda yadda
Then consider working with someone who has been vetted by a work peer or similar…..everyone has a reputation.
It’d be pretty shortsighted to try to completely boot your only developer from anything but the most trivial app.
Software requires periodic maintenance and troubleshooting – if you don’t have any in-house development team, buying an app then booting the developer is like buying hiring a chef to set up a restaurant kitchen for you, then asking them to be out before opening night.
The real way to handle this is to do what’s called “rotating the keys”: most services allow you to use the old key to create a new one. Then, you swap the app to using the new keys. Then, you delete the old keys.
It’s considered good hygiene to do this regularly at software companies and it’s often done quickly after an employee is let go if there’s any risk that employee might be feeling bitter.
Some (bad) services don’t allow you to have multiple keys, in which case rotating the keys requires “eating the downtime”, which basically means from the time that you swap over to the new key until you can get your app restarted using the new key, that part of your application won’t work.
If you’re completely nontechnical… good luck. Secret keys are usually stored as environment variables on your hosting service, so you’ll want to look there.
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