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HackerBuddy

hackerbuddy.com

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(Copy & pasted from a feedback email to Dave because I thought others might like to elaborate and discuss):

Great job on starting HackerBuddy. I was impressed with how quickly it matched me up with someone!

Ideas as they came to me:

1. Cool icons and good tooltips for areas of expertise!

2. I like my profile but you should allow vanity URLs like hackerbuddy.com/artvankilmer

3. Are you pulling pics from Gravatar? Nice bit of personalization.

4. Twitter and HN icons would be a natural addition :)

5. My Twitter and HN usernames are probably my HackerBuddy username. Could suggest that automatically instead of making me type it in.

6. Browse Users isn't prominent enough!

7. How I can give feedback isn't prominent enough!

8. Browse Users can't just be a dump of profile names. I need to be able to slice & dice by expertise, general availability (don't suggest folks that have already been paired with a bunch of other users), etc.

9. Some kind of reputation / recommendation / feedback system would really help. Why not pull in a user's HN karma or StackOverflow score to help seed things a bit? Even feedback on a user's profile of how helpful they were would help.

10. "CSS" is painfully missing, esp. since you have "Design", "HTML", and "JavaScript". CSS != Design (e.g. I think Photoshop, Illustrator, wireframes)

11. Logged out home page is a good start but you need more to hook folks. Try imagery of hackers helping hackers, appealing to folks obsessed with HN karma / SO scores / Twitter followers, and just nailing your value prop. "Free karma for helpful hackers" doesn't do it for me.

Keep up the good work!

A github link as well as twitter/hn would be good as well

Hi guys - I'm Dave, the guy that built HackerBuddy. Thanks for all your feedback - it's really useful. I'm planning on improving the site over time, and I'll be going through the comments and adding in any skills that seem to be in demand, I realise some of the options are pretty limited right now.

At the moment it doesn't email people when a match has been made - my thinking behind that was the person who requests the help would most likely already email their new match to ask for help - if you guys think it would make more sense for the app to email to introduce, then I could look at including that too. Thanks again for all your comments! :D

I don't know that auto emailing is necessary. I tend to agree with you in the fact that the person who actually needs the help should initiate the email to the person. Something you may want to provide the option to provide contact information other then email (IM mostly). I would prefer to get an IM then an email most of the time.

Thanks, I like that idea - I'll add it to my list of things to do :)

I would very much appreciate the option to cancel a help request.

Just signed up.

But, my main areas of expertise (statistics, e.g. data analysis or mining, modeling or forecasting, designing and analyzing experiments, ...) don't mesh well with your categories. Have you thought about allowing users to search profiles, or some means of adding categories (sugestion box?)?

This would be nice as my skill set didn't match your categories that well either.

agreed. What about the business side of a startup: sizing the market, modeling the business, raising funds, building a team, etc.

Letting people search within the profile is a great idea, thanks! I'll try to add that in version 2 - I know the current categories are a bit restrictive, but that would be a good workaround.

This is a very interesting idea that I haven't seen done before. From what I see you would have the potential of having several people helping you with your startup. If this is the way it seems something like a "project dashboard" to organizing help would be awesome. While it would be possible to keep track of all of this in your email it could get difficult with 5+ people helping you with different aspects of the startup.

All an all I love the idea, very simple design, easy to use. I will use it over the next few days and let you know again what I think.

I love this site - as a recent coding n00b (see http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001) having mentors around is invaluable. Whether it's just offering advice or actually helping you write some jquery having someone to bounce ideas off is essential. I really hope this gains critical mass so that everyone uses it and it becomes a hub for finding casual mentors.

Tom - I saw you speak at the London HN meetup last week and your work was very inspirational. I've always been a business guy in the tech industry but never actually coded anything (i've reversed engineered some php in joomla, but nothing crazy). I'm in the process of putting together an app for my squash group so people can add their matches and view standings. I did the Python tutorials from Google as well and have spent some time learning django.

Also, StackOverflow has also been extremely helpful, especially given that I'm such a noob at this. For example, one of my questions was so basic about the ORM that after I found out the solution I felt like such an idiot. [1]

That being said...if you want a business and/or hacker buddy to bounce ideas off let me know. My contact info is in my user listing.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4907479/how-do-i-do-multi...

Awesome! Let's get in touch, I love playing squash too :)

Cool! e-mail sent!

Kudos for the color palette, I absolutely love it!

I noticed you need some help with the typography though, so let this be my first hackerbuddy contribution: http://f.cl.ly/items/0A3o083L2v1O402t1z1x/hacker-buddy-2.png

Sorry for png instead of CSS, I hacked it quickly in inspector, but should be easy to reproduce.

Full justification doesn't work well on the web, especially for short lines, because the spacing between the words is not consistent and the gaps are too large. Flush left, ragged right looks better. (Also, minus sign isn't a replacement for en dash).

As said, just a quick hack with no claims to perfection, but imho an improvement over the original.

Left-align vs justify might be worth retrying, justify won in my 5-second comparison. You're right about en dash; I left the copy entirely untouched because I didn't want to spend more than a few minutes on the whole thing.

While you're at it, the signup-button could use some love, too...

Wow, thanks Moe! You're right, my typography could definitely be improved - I can't tell you enough how grateful I am for the mockup. I'll get playing with the CSS :)

By the way, I stole the colour palette from Adobe Kuler. For hackers that struggle with design, it's amazing (ColourLovers.com, too)

Fantastic idea. "Casual mentoring" like this brings a lot of the benefits of incubators to those not participating in them. I'll echo others in saying that we need more specificity in our expertise and a better browsing system. Perhaps allow people to specify their own "tags" and list their experience on different sites as line items, and then display all that in the browse screen.

Great idea!

It would be great if you could expand the areas of expertise though. For example, I have significant expertise with cloud computing, EC2 deployment, scaling, MongoDB, but there's nowhere to mention this. I also have expertise deploying Rails in production, the different possible setups, etc. Just checking off "Rails" is a bit broad.

Thanks!

Yep, mcrittenden recommended a tag system (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2176517) in the first thread. I'll just quote him:

I'd like the hardcoded areas of expertise removed in favor of an autocomplete freeform box, much like Stack Overflow's tags box. For example, I'd like to put that I'm a Drupal expert and I'd like to look for node.js help, but neither of those are options.

Oh boy. I totally missed that. Thanks.

I'm not sure a tagging system is the best option though. It's very flexible indeed but it's at the expense of the simplicity of checkboxes. Especially when many tags mean the same thing. eg: rails and rubyonrails.

Since "hacker" expertise is a limited scope, perhaps expanding from there is a better idea?

The problem I see with this is it might not be all that limited. There are quite a few areas of expertise out there, which could make for quite a large form, where as defined "sections" with a free form tag style fill in would make for less clutter. Its "hackers" were talking about after all, most if not all are going to be familiar with a tag system.

As far as the duplicate tags there a number of ways to correct this. First and most prominent is community editing. The other option is to tie tags together with a backend system - for example ruby-on-rails === rubyonrails === rails === RoR

Maybe you could use the best of both approaches by presenting the most popular/important/broad tags (e.g. PHP, usability, CPC) as a suggested list while allowing users to add their own, more specific or less popular tags (e.g. drupal, memcached, adsense, appengine).

Or (as long as it's performant), an auto-complete as you type so that both "java" and "javascript" show up in the auto-complete's suggestion list when you type "java" in. In the above example, a person would type in 'rails' and see the 'rubyonrails' auto-complete, and (hopefully) choose that instead.

Other areas: embedded development, networking, shell scripting, Lua, electronic systems

Hi! I just signed up, and I thought I'd go see who was about to help a potential me - and it signed me up as needing help without any sort of confirmation! Now I'm in an embarrassing situation where I need to explain to my poor buddy that I don't actually want his help, I was just poking around :( Perhaps you should add some sort of confirmation to the "need help" thing :)

ETA: some sort of "undo" button (i.e. no longer needing help) would be nice :)

Ahh sorry - you're absolutely right, there should be some kind of confirmation first. I'll add that to v2 :)

Ditto. I clicked 'Help a fellow hacker' thinking it would lead to a page about that process, or with a list of people needing my skill set, but now it sounds like I might be contacted by someone who took the time to write me a personalized request that I'm not (yet) ready for.

I just signed up to get a feel for the site for now.

I also recommend skill set options in product management, project management and community relations.

Just signed up -- great idea!

Small problem: I clicked the "Get Startup Help" button, selected an area of expertise, and was then paired with someone. The random selection (instead of being able to browse available profiles) is not necessarily a problem, but now I can't cancel my request for help...

Also, it would be great if you sent out emails when you were paired with someone else -- a sort of automatic introduction. Do you send out an email to the person that was paired? Hopefully -- as I won't necessarily come back to the site to check if I have requests waiting for me.

Finally, perhaps the global list of users could be augmented by a bit of geographic info -- just to see if someone's close to you (might be nice to meet fellow hacker buddies)?

I haven't read through all the comments yet... I like the idea, the site's design is pretty awesome, but I'd suggest making the "Help a Hacker" and "Get Startup Help" buttons more prominent and easy to find. It actually took me a bit of hunting to finally find them on my profile page.

Might work well to have them on the index page _if_ you're signed in. Otherwise you get the copy on what the site is and how it works.

Just an idea :) Well done though!

The options for programming languages are absurdly limited. I want to help people with Clojure, Haskell and Lua. I don't care that they're not as popular as the options you did offer; hackers generally don't pick tech based on popularity to the degree that other people do.

Is it really that fantastic? I think better place to find help are Q&A sites (like SO) or even Ask HN "feature". In such places your problem is seen by more than one "fellow hacker", so the chance to solve it is much greater...

At the very least, it will serve as a case study on the merit of mentoring.

A detail: I miss titles below the icons representing various skills. I really hate to have to mouseover just to check what a cup of coffee means. I know it looks cooler without text, but usability suffers.

I like the idea, though your categories are pretty thin - neither C# nor WP7 show up as checkboxes (nor does F#, Scala, or Clojure).

Maybe a "suggest a category" feature would help here?

Yeah needs C# or VB as options, ASP is there, but is it ASP.NET, or just classic ASP?

There are a lot of important items that are not "development" that are missing: product management, business development, sales, etc., that can all be helpful to the aspiring hacker.

I am using a Gmail address that is registered with a "+" filter, i.e. `firstnamelastname+hackerbuddy@gmail.com`, and I think it breaks Gravatar. I'm getting a broken image.

Yes, that will break Gravatar since its algorithm uses the hash of the entire address to find your image.

Add your commented email address to your Gravatar account.

I found the culprit: my ad-blocker (Ad Muncher)'s blacklist has picked Gravatar up somehow.

I'll contact Ad Muncher and alert them to the problem.

I know its a little late on this thread, but how about adding some more manager related tasks to the thread: Hiring, Managing Employees, etc

I understand its not a completely "hacker" category, but there for a hacker that needs to complete a lot of those tasks for my startup -- I'd prefer to speak to a hacker than get advice from more business orientated people.

One small suggestion: stop using text-align: center on everything. It's generally poor design practice and makes for unfocused layouts.

The help page says email adresses are swapped. It would be nice to see some kind of blind, double confirmation process, where both sides get to briefly interact first before that is done.

Sometimes, you just want to get to know someone else first before you give out an email address.

Good to know I'm not the only one making this website.

http://www.makethatthing.com/

(shameless self promotion, I know, but I wish Dave the best of luck with his site)

Nice idea, have signed up to try it out.

Really would like a faceted search function to filter and search users with specific skills, the "browse users" list is fairly useless as-is.

Also needs a "close account" function.

Thanks for the comments - I agree, the browse user list is pretty dreadful at the moment. I'll be looking at adding a search function as a better way of finding people in the next update. (And the close account function too)

Very nice job. The design is incredibly clean and functional.

I did something similar with EveryMentor.com. There have been quite a few fruitful matches so far (one was 2 wedding planners! how that happened I've no clue).

This is free right? Is it also free/open source?

It's free, yep - I'm planning on open sourcing it once I've improved the code a bit, too.

People love numeric karma. If you can find a nice way to do without making human interaction "cheapened" please do.

Great! Could you add Design with different subcategories like information architecture, visual design etc?

Signed up and hopefully I can get some help with the parts or ruby I don't fully grasp yet.

Signed up and volunteered. Love the idea and looking forward to seeing how it goes.

How come Drupal gets no love in the 'how I can help' area?

Great idea! Seems like the site has a decent user base.

Could you add a favicon? Thank you for the great work!

Signed up. Looks like a solid idea if it works :)

Nice site. How about Lisp? Search?

what is the hackerbuddy site built with - php, ruby ?

It's directly on the about page:

What is HackerBuddy? HackerBuddy is a weekend project built using Ruby on Rails. It was built as a way to learn Rails, there is a very large chance that this site will collapse under the weight of it's own awkward code. If it does - sorry - I plan to improve it as I get better at coding in Ruby, please bear with me.

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