Ask HN: Are you like people from Greenland?
I'm a 27 year old Problem Solver from Greenland.
We aren't many people up here on top of the world so limiting yourself to a single field is most likely gonna mean excluding yourself from potential stuff in the future. Unless you have awesome talents - which I ensure you many greenlanders do when it comes to things as music or drawing or hunting or storytelling... But for those of us who didn't turn out to have artistic talent, well, yeah, we could either pick an education and get a career job to earn some resources or do like me and not care about what people thought, decide money should never rule your life and do whatever you felt like. Best decision of my life! It has taken me through lots of awesome positions from assistant-bicycle-mechanic, web programmer, sales person, project manager, web designer, marketing coordinator, entrepreneur, publisher, tourist guide to stuff like cleaning stores so early in the morning I'd wish... I don't know... I'd wish that manual labor in Greenland was so expensive, they'd use robots to clean the stores, or something. And although my list of jobs is extensive, my employers list is really short. In fact, a lot of those positions have been with a single employer who hired me when I was very young because I wanted a bike but my somewhat wealthy father didn't want to give me one because he thought I should learn the price of things/value of money/whatever. Instead of learning me to respect money he fueled a passion I had for solving problems. All of those jobs and I have never been fired or asked to quit, and I have never let any of my employers down. On a need/want basis I still work for the very same guy that gave me my first job.
All of this is true but I'd never usually bring any of it up. The thing is just that the HN community seem to have huge number of very skilled technical people and I don't really consider myself to fit into that crowd. Probably mostly because I'm the least gifted programmer of the hacker friends I have. I'm also the least gifted designer among the visual artists-y friends I have. But I understand and cherish both fields.
Now, it's sort of given I have a ulterior motive with this and I know this is getting rather long but I the length of the text has two purposes. I had an idea that it might've sorted the good shrimps from the other stuff that the fishnet catches. No, that is not a greenlandic saying, I don't even know how they catch shrimps but I really love their taste. Secondly I hoped it would give some sort of idea who I was and what I might be like.
Enough about me... The prerequisite for the question: Greenlandic people are often considered unproductive and inefficient by people who don't know us. Once people get to know us they will quickly realize we're all about living life and enjoying the things we like. You see, hundreds of years of living in extreme conditions and in challenging environments with a "job" that meant risking everything in order to literally put food on the table for your family or whoever couldn't provide for themselves in the settlement, has learned us an invaluable lesson: When life treats you nice, like giving you an opportunity to go sailing in the wonderful weather, you take the opportunity and you really, really enjoy it, because you never know when your next chance to do so is gonna be.
So, are you like people from Greenland?
My ulterior motive: If so, you might want to help me fulfill this idea I have. While the greenlandic way of life is about enjoying what you have, it doesn't mean trying to avoid work. Work after all is what most would consider the essence of a great life. When it comes to computer stuff there is so many tasks and so much thinking that has little to do with what you are actually trying to do. As the co-founder of a new local magazine that wanted to improve the consumer's and the advertiser's experience I realized there was tons of tasks that had very little to do with writing content, designing ads or servicing customers. To avoid errors we had to make a strict structure and have naming policies and whole lot of other stuff. To manage the process we used project management tools and we had to-do lists and a whole lot of other crazy things. I spent a lot of time trying to find some form of system that was great at it all. I even considered developing a unified solution that took care of everything out of Adobe InDesign. In the end I gave up the search, and I certainly didn't have the time to develop a system myself. And why should I? All the applications we use, we use for a reason: they are our beloved and most trusted tools. It would be naive to think I could replace all the different applications I used with a single application that worked just as great.
Here it comes: I want to make an integration workflow "framework" that greatly limit all the trivial stuff, taking care of all the needed interactions across all the applications, leaving the user with what they love to do: coding or designing or whatever they do. (You could say it would be like Automator on some drug that made it crazy fast.)
That is the core of it. I have lots of ideas for great implementation and starting capabilities as well as future features that doesn't go beyond the core principle of the idea.
What I need is someone willing to join me for making it. I can code, I can design but I am not insanely great at either. I'm a sucker for great UX and I think this application could improve the overall UX, regardless of what tools you may use. (Unless you use emacs or vim as I am told they are what the hardcore hackers use and they already sort of do all this macro/scripting stuff.)
I'm open for whatever licens people would want to make this under. It could be some open source licens or we could try and sell it or something. I basically just want to make it because I'd love to use it myself.
What do you think? Could this be something? Could you be interested in making this with me?
PS: I work on Mac OS X (10.6, not sure about Lion yet). I'm open for other platforms I am just not able to help making those and I can't test for them either. PPS: I don't know what drug makes you crazy fast cus we only have cannabis here in Greenland.