Show HN: Made Personal Site Last Night (For YC App)
christopherbiscardi.github.com
christopherbiscardi.github.com
this site looks miserably bad on the iPad, it's riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, the design is neither functional nor aesthetically pleasing, the content is a mixture of resume, personal history and some horrible over saturated snapshots.
If you're looking for a job I would strongly suggest you buy a word press theme and go with that instead if trying to make a website like this.
And lastly, calling yourself a polyglot is pretentious, Just say you speak seven languages or whatever.
The best way to show you're good at something is by demonstrating it, rather than stating it.
But I've saved my its critical comment for last. Please don't list trivial technologies, like vim, iterm etc. if you're a software developer I would expect you to be highly competent in an editor and I don't care which one it is. If you're a designer I expect you to know photoshop and illustrator and indesign, if you're a web developer I expect you to know JavaScript and sass and HTML and CSS. For any technology that you are "experimenting with" just don't mention it.
When I get a software engineering candidate resume and they list Word as a skill I immediately throw it out.
And lastly, if you're going to make a personal site that puts your best for forward, don't do it in one night, give it some actual thought.
Don't say you're clever, show it, do something clever, try it at least on a mobile device! For an example of doing rather than saying take a look at hakim.se
But seriously, hanging indents, a very minor textual hierarchy, your Masonry layout is messed up, etc.
It all looks very unprofessional. KISS is your friend unless you are a master of making these complex responsive sites. Fix your voice, too. This is your site. Don't write it like a biography if the site itself is an autobiography (unless you're really funny and clever about it, which you aren't).
The purpose of a site like this is to allow people to find out more about you. What you've done mashed your entire professional life into a really, really long document that only looks passable on mobile phones. Figure out what you want to say. Make it CLEAR. Use CONTRAST. Put those pictures on your flickr page and link to it.
Personal pet peeve: don't tell me how experienced you are at a certain language or technology with a percentage--show me some shit you made.
The reason for the photos being on the same page is because it eliminates a click, a page load and a move offsite.
I'll work to become more knowledgable in the field of design as I clearly have left some issues on the table. (I enjoyed reading through the link btw.)
Thank you.
edit: Just checked out Easy Retirement Planning. Looks pretty sweet. What age do you think is a good time to start using such a platform?
Christopher Biscardi is a polyglot engineer specializing...
Vim is my primary editor.
I was also a part of the track team in college.
Chris also played the drums and owns 4 bass guitars today
Chris took up Juggling in middle school
You should choose one and stick to it.
edit: should be fixed.
Perhaps an accordion would serve to condense the information into a more manageable space... or maybe displaying them in a different chart style. I'll have to put some thought into it.
/* otay. I bootstrapped it. Can I Haz Startup Now?*/
When I was in my mid 20s, I would have loved that. Now that I'm in my mid 30s, I admire the courage, but wonder if it might be safer to remove? Sort of the 'best foot forward' principle...
Originally this was just a side project to develop something other than the product for a night. It then grew into a personal site to be used on a YC application.
I appreciate the viewpoint, and since I know not what PG & co are actually like IRL, it may be wise to remove the comments.
I'm trying to get into YC this year (with my co-founder) and I didn't have a personal page... so I made one.
* There are a lot of design issues with this but the main problem is how you prioritize your weakest qualities...the Education heading is the most obvious one. If you have nothing to list than just remove it. It's obvious YC type people don't require that someone graduate from Harvard in order to be successful. As it is now, it at best makes it look like youve submitted a draft resume. At worst, it shows that you can't break out of the conventional mindset, such as the one thinking that Education must always be at the top of a resume
As for Mongo, I've set up sharded, replicated deployments for clients to run node API's off of. Typically on AWS. I've also worked with GridFS for image/metadata storage and retrieval.
I was hesitant to put it so high because I am not intimately familiar with the gritty plumbing of Mongo, which lends strength to your point that skill bars are pretty subjective.
In the end, I made the skill bars as a way of saying "I'm competent to work with these technologies" and as a comparison between the various tech I have listed.
You are correct though. A frame of reference is important. I do plan to place aside information either in popovers or attached sidebars.
edit: That's an interesting comment about the education space. I placed it highly because I actually dropped out of college to start my own consulting business. In that way it would not represent the traditional model of a Harvard education representing the top of the chain and would add more to the story of how I became who I am, and how I can drive a company forward.
edit2: Thank you for making me look at the Education section again. I now understand why you think I'm still in school, awaiting a degree. Changing the wording now.
But this is a problem because you won't get any jobs if you say your skill in the language they use is 3/10. And of course you have to compete against people even less skilled than yourself who rate themselves at 9/10.
Maybe the way to solve this is to take the space used for skills and use it to show off your projects. If you're new to a language, your most interesting project will be something small and simple. But for the languages you're most comfortable in, you will likely have built something awesome.
I think I will swap out the skill bars. Maybe some code/explanations would work better.
I'm no YC-er so don't have much insight beyond what can be inferred in the discussions on HN...but the most interesting part of your resume to me was your D1 athletic achievements. To compete at that level almost automatically gives you cred as someone with drive.
Where you should put that piece of info, I can't say. If not at the very top, well, definitely not at the bottom where you have it now. To put a more pessimistic spin on it, the fact that the athletic achievements were the first thing to catch my eye also implies that you haven't done enough to explain your other concrete achievements. I criticized the skill-bars because I think you can do a much better job describing yourself.