This month our engagement with Florida Citizens Alliance came to an end after ten years, and with it FLC Action Center — the civic action platform we built and maintained for them — went offline. Counting the years before the Alliance owned it, we worked on that one application for thirteen years. Projects end; that is normal. But this one deserves a proper look back, because it is the clearest example we have of how we work.
It Started With a Test Job on Elance
In June 2013, Thomas Alvord, owner of Liberty Action Center, invited us to a job on Elance. He didn’t sugar-coat it: “I have gone through a few programmers, who haven’t quite had the skills needed.” And: “This is a VERY COMPLEX system.” He was choosing between us and one other developer, and there was a lot more work waiting for whoever got the first job right.
The first task sounded small: two Facebook buttons on a campaign form that weren’t working. Along the way we found out why the system had beaten everyone before us. The application was really two CakePHP applications nested inside each other — and every developer before us had been troubleshooting only one of them. Once we saw the whole architecture, the fixes followed.
Thomas’s review on Elance, a few weeks later:
“He is the best programmer I have worked with. I had a very complex project and he knew how to debug and get it working. If you are deciding between him and another programmer, choose him. You won’t be disappointed. I will be working with him on ALL my projects in the future, both big and small.”
He meant it. The test job became the project.
Then It Changed Hands
In June 2016, Florida Citizens Alliance took over the application from Liberty Action Center. New owners usually bring their own developers. Keith Flaugh, who led the Alliance, kept us — because we already knew the system inside out from the Liberty Action Center years, and could integrate it into their own site instead of starting again. By then Elance had become part of Upwork, so that is where we started working with the Alliance.
That decision turned into a ten-year engagement.
What the Platform Did
FLC Action Center was the digital backbone of the Alliance’s grassroots work: a coalition of more than 100 organizations and over 250,000 supporters, working on education reform across all 67 Florida counties.
At its core was the function the Alliance had bought the application for: taking a subscriber’s address and matching them to their own elected officials, by county and legislative district. Around it we built action alerts, petition campaigns, legislative tracking and direct supporter engagement — plus the background jobs that kept it all synced with data from multiple outside vendors, automatically.
In February 2026 the Alliance was at the center of a national story about Florida’s proposed AI Bill of Rights for children. We wrote about it at the time: Our Client Florida Citizens Alliance Is Making National Headlines. When a movement is in the news, the platform behind it has to simply work.
What Both Clients Said
“Manish is a fabulous programmer. I have been very grateful to be able to work with him. He is one of the best programmers I have worked with. Dedicated, hard working, and smart.”
— Thomas Alvord, Liberty Action Center
“Manish has been very responsive to our business and time requirements, possessed the technical knowledge to effectively meet our needs and his professionalism and attention to detail has been greatly appreciated. Equally important, his cost estimates for the work required have been on target with no surprises.”
— Keith Flaugh, Florida Citizens Alliance
What It Taught Us
Read the whole system before touching the code. The teams before us were not careless; they were looking in the wrong place. Most “impossible” bugs we see are architecture problems wearing a bug’s clothes.
The small test job is the interview. Two broken Facebook buttons turned into thirteen years. To anyone starting out on Upwork: treat the first small job as if the whole project depends on it, because sometimes it does.
Trust is earned on the hard problem — and it can outlive an owner. We didn’t win this project with a proposal. We won it by fixing the thing nobody else could, and the application’s next owner kept us for the same reason.
No surprises is a feature. Of everything in Keith’s recommendation, the line we are proudest of is the last one: estimates that held. Reliable software and reliable numbers come from the same habit.
Thank You
To Thomas, for the invitation and the test. To Keith and the team at Florida Citizens Alliance, for ten years of trust. If your organization has an application that nobody can seem to fix, we would like to hear about it.