Web app for interviewing technical candidates in the browser
github.com
github.com
Btw, could you clarify exactly which type of licence you are using (https://github.com/paf31/initialround/blob/master/LICENSE). Is it something like BSD?
It was clarified in the README. My bad.
I see it as good coding karma; and you never know the contacts you might make (I initially wanted to hire one of the creators; but I settled for buying him a few beers since he had just accepted another offer).
Even though I invested a fair amount of time in continuous refactoring while actively developing it, refactoring and documenting to a point where I wasn't embarrassed to make it public and could realistically say that someone else would be able to use (which ended up happening with tuftstext.com) and perhaps modify or extend it was a significant learning experience.
IIRC I spent a few weeks on that, but I think it was worth it. Instead of setting aside the project with a vague idea of the right way to do some things, I ended up actually having done them the right way, so now when I encounter a similar problem I know how to do it the right way the first time.
This is basically the same situation you would face if you were handing off code when leaving a company. This experience is one reason why I think it's important to develop and document your project to open source quality standards throughout the lifetime of the project.
And what better way to do that than to open source your code even for an active company? Usually you're probably not competing on tech, and I bet any community contribution you'd get is greater than the likelihood that someone will actually manage to maintain an instance of your code.
The books-by-course space is a perfect example of this. So many "startups" have duplicated so much work building these sites, when what you actually need to succeed is marketing. (The thing we took away from it, I think, is that you need per-school branded sites.) They should start sharing resources more.
What do you know, here's the college bookstore part of GetchaBooks extracted into an HTTP API, now with parallel scraping, that I just made public on Github: https://github.com/mwhite/bookstore-api Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to get working. But expect to get sued.
To be honest, even if you involved an English professor, the outcome would probably be the same. Asking a native English speaker for marketing/copy writing advice is not the right thing to do. Find somebody who is good at copy writing or learn how copy writing works.
> "Recruit Top Developers with Feedback-Driven Interviews"
That doesn't make logical sense. Recruiting is about finding candidates. "with interviews" makes no sense in this context.
"Feedback Driven Interviews" means nothing to anyone. Google doesn't know what it means. It is not an industry term. It is bullshit bingo. That never works.
Why not start with "Improve your hiring process by ..."?
I am no copy writing pro, but you need to learn to invert. Become the customer and sell yourself. Write in the active voice.
So 'recruiting with interviews' makes sense to me.
Hope you fare better in your next venture. If you haven't started, you should.
Good luck!
I should be a target customer, since I periodically interview candidates for programming positions. However, landing page and screenshots failed to explain to me what the unique selling point was. How many people here know what "Feedback-Driven Interview" is?
Whole product seems to be about providing an online testing tool ala topcoder.com. But coding tasks are usually only a small part of the interview process (not that I agree with that, but that's what happens at 90% of companies I've applied for).