How I verify whether I'm contracting a good developer

I recently landed my first freelance job as a dev, and plan to continue doing it, so I appreciate this insight a lot. Thanks.

Thanks for your insight, Alex.

If you aren't technical yourself, I would advise getting someone who is to interview on your behalf.

Referrals can be helpful.

As a small project, asking them product questions can be valuable too as they will inevitably need to think critically from a product perspective for some features they build. Present a business/user problem and ask them what type of solution they would build to address the problem is good. There are developers who are excellent from a technical perspective that can thrive on a formal engineering team (with good product management) that will make you pull your hair out when they build a feature that satisfies the technical requirements but does not solve the intended product problem.

I agree with your bullet points. One thing I've realised is you don't really know how good someone is until you hire them.

Sometime you just never know, even with the checklists, people know how to say the right things.
Personally, I will always take a chance the first time I hire someone, so I start with a small job that I can afford to lose the money if the developer turns out to be useless. Then I start to develop a network of developers that have done good work for me in the past and over time, I know who to go to for certain tasks.

iotaby.com recently launched it's pre-screened remote developers service, they're very affordable and ensure that freelancers deliver on your requirements, you can give them a try.

I prefer to find people on GitHub and their personal sites. Once you see their git repo, you can see what kind of code they commit, how they work and how they make PRs, document, etc.

On personal sites and Twitter, you get a chance to see the artifacts of what they’ve made, the problems they’ve solved and how they think about it. Anyplace where you can see their work is great.