happycipher

Paul Graham has a nice little essay about his perspective on this: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html .

It's pretty lengthy so I would suggest pondering over various sections and re-reading it after a while to let it all sink in, but a helpful primer nonetheless.

Thanks for sharing, I totally agree the inability to have a side conversation on video call makes group conversations so unnatural & zoom fatigue is a big issue!

Just out of curiosity, would your perspective about talking to someone change if this interaction was just a 2 person conversation? And if you could not look at a screen (ie audio or more low-tech phone call)?

Hey thanks for the answer!

Just out of curiosity, how did your team work to develop that habit when starting out? Is there anything in particular you did to hit that critical mass? I find it can be difficult at times to build that up.

Thanks for sharing your perspective! Glad to hear those organized chats have been helping out even if they aren't full replacements.

Thanks for the tips! I've heard a few of these methods being tried out these days, especially the games & socials helping out.

Just curious, do you find people joining those always on voice channels like Discord often? And are these set up for the team, or some larger group?

Thanks for sharing, definitely agree that having roommates helps a lot with the face to face interaction throughout the day!

Curious, do you still reach out to those close coworkers during lunch in some other medium? Or have you found that to be pretty challenging?

If the problem sounds interesting to anyone, I hacked up a little landing page to try and explain the proposed app better and gauge interest, https://trychitchat.web.app/ .

Shoutout to https://uselander.xyz/ for making it so easy to create clean landing pages.

Hey there, sorry about the rapid repost!

Like I mentioned earlier, I think I messed up somehow the first time because it didn't show up on "Ask HN". I hope I didn't make this redundant for any viewer.

Bit new to HN, but very sorry, I'll make sure to not repost in the future so quickly in case it actually is just a timing issue.

Oh ok thanks for the follow up! I definitely agree it's challenging to replicate that kind of situation virtually. Especially if people eat lunch at different times, low visibility as to when they're not busy etc.

Hey, I'll check it out, thanks!

Hey there! I am the same poster from before and I apologize for the initial post. I think that post got suppressed by HN for some reason. I suspect it's because it somehow spiked up 5 upvotes and I fear they thought I linked it to people or used bots or something.

Hey, this link is super interesting thanks so much for linking it! I really like their concept of a spatial dimension to meeting people virtually (reminds me a bit of onlinetown).

For the purposes of "breaks" though, considering all the zoom fatigue that people face, I was thinking of something that pairs people together for a more hands-free interaction (like audio or phone call) which allows people to actually walk around or brew coffee or whatever, just like when they're on break in a physical office.

Haha, I appreciate the candor! I definitely do like the tranquility now a days when I'm deep in code as well.

Just out of curiosity, would your answer also apply in moments when you wanted to take a break (ie got away from the desk, took a walk etc)?

Thanks for the feedback, it's very help and constructive! Regarding the 3rd point about screen fatigue on the computer, would a lower bandwidth (ie phone call or audio), help mitigate that issue? Although lacking non-verbal body cues, I have found 1:1 phone calls to be somewhat nice for long calls, usually bc I'm hands free (but unsure how it would apply in a short spontaneous conversation).

Again, thanks for your thoughts!

Hacked up a landing page to outline the idea better if the problem sounds interesting, https://trychitchat.web.app/ . Would love to hear everyone's thoughts!

P.S. https://uselander.xyz/ is a fantastic way to hack up landing page to explain your idea. Super clean format, GUI if you just want to change text, and you can download the source code if you want to go deeper. No association to them, just a big fan.

Sorry about the confusing branding haha. We heard a lot of software developers express interest in a tool that provided easy access to all their frequently used symbols, but didn’t want the messiness of a cursor-controlled freehand. Curious, do you enjoy freehanding as opposed to structured symbols?

Hey, thanks for taking a look!

Excalidraw is a great tool and we believe their hosted instance also supports collaboration for multiple users. Open sourcing the project is not in our current plan as we’re focused on iterating and adding more integrations that we think are useful to software engineers based on feedback; however, we’re open to the idea in the future if we have more bandwidth to support an open source project.

Thanks for your feedback on the styling of shapes! We wanted to focus Scribble on building more software specific symbols (and we’re looking into adding more scalable support for even more symbols down the road. Part of that meant reducing the amount of styling choices to optimize for speed.

Curious if there’s anything in particular you enjoy about those styles for your use case of a teaching scratch pad?

Totally understand where you’re coming from. Excalidraw is a great standalone whiteboard tool, which is why we forked it to start off our project. This includes some new features that we felt made the experience better for our use cases. For example:

- Slack app integration to make it easier to start whiteboarding sessions

- Adding the ability to save and load drawings with Google Drive

- Symbols that we commonly use (e.g., databases, clouds, tables)

- Removing features unnecessary to our use case (sloppy drawing mode, opacity, background colour customizability, etc.)

We're not monetizing this app—we wanted to share a tailored version of it that we found useful ourselves, and hope that you may find it useful too.

We’re open to any other concerns/questions as well.

Thanks for bringing that point up! So just to reiterate for other people, the Hacker News link redirects to our landing page on Notion, which shows how to use a few features we thought would be useful to you (GDrive integration, Slack app etc.), and wanted to make sure that they were discoverable.

On a side note, Notion is also surprisingly good at quickly creating a simple landing page (easy formatting, gif support, collaborative editing, no code required)!

Hey, thanks for the great question! Yep, Miro is a fantastic whiteboarding tool and we've used it in the past. In terms of why it wasn't fulfilling our needs, there were a couple things.

First, to give some context, we mainly use our app in 2 cases so far. One is where you're explaining some technical concept over Slack, and you need to draw a quick and simple diagram to complement your thought. The other is where you're creating a slide deck for a feature design, and you create a diagram to be copied in one of the slides.

For Miro (or LucidCharts), there's friction to start drawing right away. You need an account to use the app, and making an account is surprisingly cumbersome in a few cases. For example, if your org doesn't have Miro linked with your company SSO, then it would be hard to start using your personal account to draw company-related IP (technical diagrams). In addition, if your org does have Miro linked with SSO, we've heard cases where you need to request access to that app through an IT ticket, which can take a day or two. That’s why we decided to move the SSO stage to the point of long-term storage, rather than at the beginning when you're just using the app.

Assuming you have an account though, there's friction in going to Miro and creating a new board, or using an existing board which may be a messy (kind of like a scratch pad). We personally see the value of being able to open something up from inside a Slack convo or go on a web page, and have a new canvas where you can start drawing right away.

There's some other small UX things that we didn't like. Eg. no easily discoverable keyboard shortcut to access common shapes, not being able to connect arrows to rectangles other than the 4 points prescribed, having to click twice to add a new type of shape.

However, Miro is a fantastic tool and has super cool features for those heavier workflows (templates, tons of integrations, commenting). We just didn't find it as suitable for those 2 lighter cases that I mentioned.

Curious as to what your students are using Miro for?

Thanks for taking a look! We currently do not have support for free-form drawing. We understood that this could be a valuable feature, but decided on not including it for now to give better access to other symbols that may be more commonly used. (eg. rectangle, circle, database etc.) We found in our experience, most software developers either don’t have a tablet, or don’t use it regularly for work.

Thanks for bringing this point up though! Curious as to what your use case is when thinking about using our app? We're still not 100% sure on the most useful symbols/tools to add, so as we get more feedback, we’re happy to look into including free-form drawing.

Hey Hacker News,

Co-creator of Scribble here. My friends and I are three undergraduate engineering students, and we’re building a digital whiteboard for remote software engineering teams.

Earlier this year, we transitioned to remote work during our software internships because of COVID-19. We noticed that a big thing we missed was being able to just walk over to a coworker's desk and draw something out, or huddling around a whiteboard to brainstorm ideas. Sure, we can type paragraphs over Slack or schedule a Zoom call, but we found they drag on and take a long time to resolve. We tried a few digital whiteboards like LucidCharts or Draw.io, but found them clunky to create simple diagrams.

To fix this, we wanted to create Scribble with a few principles in mind:

1. Asking for help should feel as simple as tapping a coworker on the shoulder. We made a Slack App so you can hop onto a whiteboard mid-conversation with a simple command - just type /scribble into your channel and click join.

2. Digital whiteboards need to feel seamless for synchronous collaboration to work. We give simple shortcuts to all the symbols you need - that means no more searching through hundreds of shapes, or messy freehand on a trackpad. We’re also happy to hear feedback if you feel there are any symbols we missed!

3. It’s your data. We integrate with your own Google Drive sign on and storage solutions. That means zero personally identifiable information or intellectual property gets saved to our servers.

We were able to build a really responsive web app with the help of open source tools such as Excalidraw (their approach to rendering symbols using the Canvas API was very foundational to the way we designed it for other symbols), as well as your everyday favourite web tools such as React, Express, Socket.io, and Typescript.

If you’re a developer who’s been missing that shared context and spontaneous back and forth with your coworkers, we’d love for you to give Scribble a try and let us know what you think!