Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

skillswap.in

62 pointsjackfranklin52 comments

This is a brilliant! Excellent execution as well and it brings people together to form connections that can last longer than the current exchange.

This is what we should be seeing more of on HN.

Thank you :)

Nice idea, simple and helpful, especially as there are quite a number of interesting offers with different skill groups like "need help with coding, can offer help in writing" already.

Thanks! The idea was to keep it stupidly simple, and not limit what people could ask for / search for. Had a couple of people ask if non web dev topics were allowed - to which my reply was "of course!"

Do you have plans to make it work without a Twitter account?

Not currently, no. Twitter seems like the perfect way to allow people using the site to connect and get learning.

I really, really like the idea. However, I neither have nor want a Twitter account. Would it really be difficult to allow people to use the site without a Twitter account?

This one is the best:

_vojto is looking for help with Data analytics.

In return, they can offer their help with Relationship advice.

Good one, beautifully done. Just signed up. :)

Request: Provide an option to delete swaps. Once I've found someone willing to exchange help, maybe I wouldn't want to continue advertising the swap?

Just a thought... :-)

Thanks - that one is absolutely on our list.

In fact, you don't even have to allow delete - you can just let the users 'hide' them. That way, if I want to offer the same swap, I can just 'unhide' it. :-)

Out of curiosity, what's the stack? I read Heroku & MongoDB. I'm guessing it is an Ember.js app?

EDIT: unhide not unidentified. Damn you auto correct!

The entire source code is on my GitHub account: https://github.com/jackfranklin/skillswap

It uses the free Heroku instance with the free MongoHQ addon. That way if the site failed completely I wouldn't be out of pocket! If it keeps being used we'll either stump up some cash for Heroku or look at other hosting options. For now the free Heroku is fine, and the free MongoHQ addon still has enough space, particularly as we're storing so little.

There's no Ember or any similar framework, just a bit of jQuery that does the search filtering (which I want to improve - the entire site is a result of a 3-4 hour hack yesterday, plenty can be improved upon).

It's a small Ruby app that uses Sinatra, with Mongoid my gem of choice for talking to MongoDB. Uses the omniauth gem to authenticate with Twitter, and that's about it. Dead simple :)

For a few-hour hack, it has been done quite beautifully, I must say. Kudos!

I'm more of a Django/Python guy myself and I've been running a few of my own self-learning projects on Heroku, too. So yeah, I know where you're coming from. :)

You might want to look into using Bootstrap Typeahead.js to auto-tag topics posted by users. I recently got it working with a bit of jQuery on one of my own projects by using Django Rest Framework to serve the corresponding JSON content. It may even help you auto-match users in the future! (I'd like my ESOPs now, please. :P)

I wish I knew how to Rails, but I've only just begun with Django, so I suspect I may not be of much use to you with the code. :(

Good luck, and may this project take you places! :)

> In fact, you don't even have to allow delete - you can just let the users 'hide' them. That way, if I want to offer the same swap, I can just 'unhide' it. :-)

Yes - there is already a flag for this in the model, but the functionality on the front-end to mark it as complete didn't get finished (yet).

Great idea, novel execution.

However - you might want to stick some validation or a moderation step in: the first in the list is currently "necenzurat is looking for help with getting laid. In return, they can offer their help with massage.".

Unless, of course, that is the real underlying intention of the app...

EDIT: After a short think, I think it would be nice to use a similar auto-complete "tag" entry system a la Stack Overflow. This would make entering any number of skills a great deal easier than just a text field.

Yup - spotted and deleted that one.

I think we need some form of being able to flag an entry as spam, and it going into moderation when that happens.

Fantastic idea! Just out of curiosity, what hosting service are you using?

Currently it's on Heroku, using the free instance and the MongoHQ addon. Find it perfect for little side projects like this, especially when launching at first to see if the idea is any good or not.

I know I'm a bit old fashioned about correct use of TLDs. But. Is this for Indians to swap their skills or not? If not, the domain is very misleading.

"skill swappin'", perhaps?

I'm sure there's an aesthetic argument. But I think there's a stronger correctness and not-misleading-ness argument.

Where is the 'correct use of TLDs' documented? I hope you never come across URL shortening services, like goo.gl, or bit.ly or you'll really get confused.

Do you run afandian.com? You should change it to afandian.co.uk because that's really not a commercial website and by your logic, you're misleading people by using incorrect usage of the TLD system.

Well you could start with RFC 1591 which indicates that Country Code TLDs are associated with countries.

If I want to sell fish to the United Kingdom I could register fish.co.uk . If I wanted to sell to France it could be fish.fr (or poissons.fr). India, fish.in (I'm not going to guess that the translation).

You may decide that you want to grab an Indian address because it looks nice but that doesn't stop it being a technically not a correct usage. If you accept the existence of ccTLDs (and they do exist) then you have to accept that inherent to their existence is an association with a country.

Non-geographic TLDs exist. They may not look nice, but they exist for a particular reason (cases where geography isn't relevant).

I know people are doing their best to dilute the naming conventions for aesthetic reasons, but it doesn't change the facts of the matter. If someone wants to register a Skill Swap for use in India they're SOL.

EDIT:

Yes, afandian.com is mine. My presence on the web has nothing much to do with my geographic location (unlike my imaginary fish shop). And .com is non-geographic, so surely that's the right choice on geographic grounds?

As for whether or not I'm a commercial entity, that's a fair question on technical grounds. But I think most people understand that .com has become the general purpose domain (I'm not an ORG or a NET or a GOV). The .co.uk domain is equally 'commercial'.

Consider that the majority of people aren't familiar with RFC 1591 -- I think that would nullify any argument that the use of a country code TLD is "misleading".

Numerous countries in fact permit and promote international registration of their ccTLDs as a product for creative domain names, including .co (Colombia), .cc (Cocos islands), .fm (Federated States of Micronesia), and .it (Italy).

And importantly, conventions change, and RFCs are a starting point for an evolving set of standards. .net isn't limited to "only the computers of network providers" as RFC 1591 states. Is everyone with a .net domain doing something incorrect?

(It looks like I made my last edit after your reply.)

Who wants to use my new Java library? It's in the namespace `java.util` because I like coffee and utilities.

All I'm saying is that a domain name dedicated to a particular country can cause confusion if it turns out not to. I'm not saying you can't do it. Some are obvious (bit.ly) and some you don't know until you try (vagrantbox.es). I'm not advocating a hard-line approach, I'm just saying it can be confusing.

And I personally think it's a shame (like I said, I know it's an unfashionable point of view. I'm not expecting to convince anyone).

Corollary: What if I do want to register a domain about skill swapping in India? Do I have to put "India" in the name?

I like this... I was just thinking about last night how it would be nice if I could just swap with someone.

I would note you might want to protect against things like "help me get laid" I see it it on the homepage just a moment ago. while a legit request, you'll likely lose users over it. I can imagine there will be other crazy and illegal requests too.

Agreed - going to add some system to enable people to flag entries as spam, at which point they will be removed and undergo moderation.

This is amazing. Actually anything that allows people to ask help without being treated badly by other users or mods is something i find amazing.

It would have been much better if there were any way to ask for help without twitter. A simple PM system maybe.

Awesome. It's a site-idea I have myself been toying with but never gone with. Maybe you can extend the scope of your site beyond programming-related topics? For example, I'd be interested in exchanging driving lessons for programming tutoring.

Good Idea. Well executed. Edit: Hide "Offer My Help" on my own swap(when logged in)

Good spot, thank you. Will add it to the list.

How about letting people add some more information besides 'skill'. I.e., what sort of project they need help with or what is the scope of the help needed?

Nice one. Would be better if folks asking for help could be made to (or optionally) be a bit more specific about the sort of help they're after.

Great idea! I'm going to sign up

I love this. This is the type of idea/site I aspire to create. Simple, easy, useful.

Already connected to 2 people. You might onto something grand here!

Awesome job, bang on target, no bullshit, good luck!

Brilliant. I'm loving this.

phpmentoring.org

Something I would really like to see here is use of gender-specific pronoun "he" or "she" instead of "they". Yes, the language has changed so that "they" is acceptable as gender-neutral singular, but it's still regularly jarring, and when the information is or can conveniently be there (you can very easily collect it—male, female or unspecified) it makes it much more pleasant to read.

Do you know how we would go about doing it? (That's not a snarky Q - I genuinely don't know!). I too would love to but I'm unsure as to how to reliably do it - and in the mean time gender-neutral was a safer bet.

You could tie it in with letting the user specify the name to display; changing away from using Twitter handles is probably not a bad thing anyway. Thus you could have as part of the sign-up process:

    1. Call me _________
    2. Refer to me as 
       ( ) male ("he")
       ( ) female ("she")
       (x) gender-neutral or plural ("they")
       ( ) actually, we're a group ("they")

For e.g. Twitter sign-up, you'd auto-fill the first with their username and the second with gender-neutral.

That does sound rather awkward and could hopefully be improved upon. (I added the final option as it occurred to me businesses could use this.)

I agree that the concept of displaying "he" or "she" would indeed be an improvement, but I feel as though the only way to get over the awkwardness of the form questions you defined would be to go through some kind of "profile builder".

This obviously takes the app to a new place - now talking about some sort of profile system - this would obviously be a huge feature to add with a load of other implications.

You can try to avoid it grammatically.

@person is looking for help with PHP. In return, @person can help with CSS.

I like this because it means each sentence is meaningful out of context and can be separately indexed, searched, etc.

I feel this would be the best way forward.

It's probably just be the circles you travel in, but to me it wasn't jarring whatsoever. (I use the singular they in any case when I'm referring to someone whose gender I don't know/a hypothetical person where gender doesn't come into it, or if that's what they want me to use!)

The language has changed? Singular "they" has been used in English since at least the 15th century.

Exactly. Educated English writers, including Shakespeare, have been using "they" as a gender-neutral third-person pronoun since Middle English. I believe there's even evidence of this in Old English.

It's only been in the past century that proscriptionist grammarians have dreamed up this pedantic rule and sought to eliminate English's sole gender-neutral singular pronoun. But since educated writers and common folk alike have been using "they" as a singular pronoun for centuries before these neo-grammarians dreamed up their rule, it's a hopeless and utterly useless quest.

Couldn't agree more.

The prescriptivist intervention wasn't in the past century, though, it was in the 18th. It's been traced to a single grammatical treatise—I forget the name but can look it up if there's interest—which argued for singular "he" as the standard. Ironically, the book was written by a woman—how's that for troll fodder?

Yes, you're right. I hesitated when I wrote "last century", since I had vague memories of the neo-classicists who were leading the charge for his/her exclusively, since they believed it more closely reflected pure Latin usage -- which they sought to emulate in English. So it doesn't surprise me that it goes back to the 18th century.

Ironically, most of the people I know who now advocate for the gender-neutral third-person singular "they", and from whom I learned its history, have classical training to some degree or another.

Thanks for the correction -- I'll have to try and track down that book.

I found it again. It was A New Grammar by Ann Fisher (1719-78), and this is a good article on the subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-onlanguage-...

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Fisher_(grammarian) .

The irony is considerable. Not only was the originator of generic "he" a woman, she was a successful woman entrepreneur when such a thing was unheard of. What's more, her book was known for arguing against the incursion of Latin rules into English grammar—which is what generic "he" was.

Wow, I'd never heard of Ann Fisher. And the fact she was arguing against Latin goes against all the conventional wisdom I've heard about the whole he vs they push. Very interesting.

Also, I've bookmarked that NY Times piece for future use when someone on the Internet berates me for using third-person singular "they" or "their".

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