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WeekendHacker

weekendhacker.net

98 pointsheelhook25 comments

Great idea. Some thoughts:

    "A boutique network of developers & designers"

This is too dense: "boutique", "network", "developers", "designers".

Instead try something that reads well, like "Get help with your MVP" or "Get help with your weekend project". This has the added benefit of explaining the benefit.

In other words, IMO you should switch your short-and-big and your long-and-small message:

    WeekendHacker

    "Get help with your MVP"

    "WeekendHacker is a site for entrepreneurs, programmers and designers to meet and work together on small projects and maybe turn them into the next big thing."

I like "a boutique network of developers & designers". Sure, other explanatory text is welcome, but in general I hate the american way of writing prose which actually says very little.

It isn't the American way of writing. It is the boring business way of writing which says very little.

Please don't restrict this to web developers. This could be useful for lots of other fields:

    - Academics: This data just got published, let's analyze it!
    - Native app programmers: Open source application X lacks 
      feature Y, let's add it!
    - Embedded system developers: The arduino/mbed/BeagleBoard lacks
      a driver for this system, let's write it!
    - Physical constructs: This seniors neighborhood in Grand Rapids
      lacks wheelchair ramps, let's build some!

Some would obviously be location dependent, and you'd be much more dependent on tags to filter content (which is OK, as long as you have a good system to manage tags), but this could be much bigger than it currently is.

With sufficient size, you could probably get some good advertising revenue - users are willing to tell you precisely what they love to do, and I don't think they'd mind a few ads on these topics. I'd definitely go for the ad-supported model for this one.

We are not :)

Stay tuned for a couple of new communities coming out.

Interesting thought. I've seen IOUs between developers and designers go bad sometimes though. Different people quantify things differently. I gave a dev friend three hours of tutorial on photoshop, and later he complained about me asking him for the time back, even though that was the whole point – so I could learn some programming. Then it became an issue of "tracking hours too closely" and we never really connected again.

I'm not saying it can't work, but it does get hairy with "social debt" and how different people interpret that. "My time as a developer is worth $150 an hour, and yours is worth $75 an hour, so the time I put in is worth twice yours." I heard one dev tell a designer that once.

We interpret it pretty loosely. Don't get too hung up on the terminology :)

I have had 200 projects through and 600 pledges of help. Most of those I have asked have been positive. I am simply connecting people, the rest is up to them.

You held your friends' unwillingness to return a favor against him and destroyed a friendship?

I'm sorry, but that's just immature, and it's possible that by disconnecting from you your 'friend' made a wise move. It's just three hours of time; your friend is a human being. I interpret social debt as a proxy to good manners, and nothing more. I freely <strike>loan</strike>gift money, time, and stuff to my friends and relatives, and I make a point to forget about it ASAP. It's just stuff! It makes me sad when people let transient stuff like 3 hours, a broken borrowed tool, or a $20 IOU get in the way of your relationships. If your friend hesitates to call you because they expect that you'll ask about "when are you going to teach me that/return this/refund that" then there's something wrong. Life is about people, not time you've spent in the past, the stuff you own, or the money in your wallet. Do something kind today.

A system to correlate helpfulness should be implemented to prevent help vampires[1] from draining the site's users, but it shouldn't be featured too prominently. Perhaps anonymous exit surveys could be used to determine reputation, visible on a users' profile? Something like "User participated in X projects and received an average rating of Y/5 for contributions", and users with extremely low ratings could get "You've been warned" annotations.

The system probably doesn't even need to specify whether the user volunteered help or requested help for the project; this tool will only thrive if there are plenty of projects to do, and it can be hard to come up with good ones. Unless, of course, I'm misinterpreting this and the project authors don't participate in the effort, which could make this difficult.

I don't see this as much as an IOU exchange center as an opportunity to work on stuff I love to do with people I haven't yet connected with.

[1]: http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

I have actually written all the projects I have had through and asked for their feedback on a number of things. Among others quality, whether the project owner answered all the pledges etc.

I've been looking for what they're advertising, so I'll see if it delivers. I feel like community needs to come first -- if HN did something like this, I'd be more confident in it.

WH was launching in May. We are now over 7000 members have had 200 projects through and 600 pledges of help. I have had 11 newsletters out before the one today.

This is just a project I did on the side. It just so turned out that a lot of people liked it so we expanded it a bit so people can access it online.

This is my attempt to bost the community part of WH :)

Love the idea.

Suggestions:

1) add a way to filter by skill without logging on (if I don't see something I can help with, where's my incentive to open an account?)

2) add a hardware tag e.g., "embedded," "hardware," "Arduino," "mechanical" Most of my useful skills are in embedded programming and hardware design and I really like doing short projects.

Add the tag yourself! My profile [1] features EMBEDDED C, PCB-DESIGN, and DSP tags. EMBEDDED C existed, I created the other two. EMBEDDED and EMBEDDED SW were also extant when I got here, but there's currently no search feature to see who else uses these tags or what projects used them.

I think HARDWARE is too ambiguous; this could apply to anything from implementing a task on a breadboard to architecting a server rack.

That said, Thomas said that they were working on improved tag features as fas [sic, he's working fast!] as they could. [2].

I've suggested this on the UserVoice tracker [3].

[1]: http://www.weekendhacker.net/hackers/Kevin%20Vermeer

[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3238678

[3]: http://weekendhacker.uservoice.com/forums/138659-general/sug...

Cool idea. A bunch of the projects don't feel like short, weekend projects though. But still, a very cool idea.

Some initial site feedback:

* The tags should be links so that I can click one and filter on all projects with that tag.

* Where is the search box? I assume that I just don't see it, but if it doesn't exist then that should be project #1 on there.

Yes we are working on both :)

Running as fas as we can.

For now you can click the match my skills to find projects that are looking for the skills you have.

I love the idea, but browsing thru projects needs some work. I'd love to be able to say "show me all projects needing a developer" -> "show me all b2b projects" -> etc

But this is a great first step!

Looks like this was already suggested by jdludlow [1]

> * The tags should be links so that I can click one and filter on all projects with that tag.

Or was that not what you meant?

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3238678

I like the idea very much! I recommend you also try founder2be.com

A singles site for as yet unattached founders.

I love this.

Just signed up, but it's hard to figure out exactly what this is and what I'm supposed to do. Need to do a better job of explaining

Content from FAQ's should be front and center once you register. Just a suggestion

Good idea. Maybe on the right side. I could have it

Thus far I see quite a bit of projects looking for UI, Designers...

And luckily there are quite a few of them on WH :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com