kylebragger

Thanks very much. It might be my favorite one yet :)

You're welcome. It's the same on the project side, so should be interesting to see how the targeting works out.

I'm pretty excited about this. If you submit a project, mention HN and I'll give you 50% off the first one.

Haven't got that far yet :)

But there certainly will be, so long as there is enough interest from the hiring side.

Clickable: https://kylebragger.wufoo.com/forms/short-term-project-match...

Yeah, we're working on cleaning all that up. Sorry about that.

Gah, sounds like Paypal is acting up (again).

We always intended the site to be a solid place for dev/designer hybrids, as well as outright devs/designers. It used to be our sweet spot as far as user type was concerned, and I think it's something we could still potentially do well.

Glad you like that log :)

And, clickable: https://forrst.com/signup

Are you looking to start something purely online, offline, or a hybrid?

I would be happy to help answer what I can, though it's tough to fit a succinct answer here, as there are many facets to building community. Kyle at forrst.com if you'd like to chat at some point.

Very odd, we'll take a look.

You just gave me a great idea re: coderwall :)

It involves account age + number of repositories you own, more or less.

Done. Mind sharing how old your account is and how many public/private repos you have? We're trying to tune things on our end.

Sorry about that. We had to request private access since we figured not everyone with an active account would necessarily have public repos. Going to change it to only look at public for now.

Ah, sorry about that. Yes, I was referring to the font called Lobster. It's freely available in the Google Web Fonts directory, and it's already been overused to death, IMO.

Surprisingly, no mention of http://angel.co/

It allows you to create a page like this: http://lifepath.me/kyle

Have you seen http://lifepath.me?

Hit me up - Kyle at forrst.com

Sorry for the late reply. We're prototyping a new invite system where we do a few things:

a) drop the whole "Apply" motif, since it's not so much about approval/denial as it is ensuring the integrity of the community. It's caused a lot of confusion.

b) move from a "use your invite and become accountable for the invitee" model to a vote-centric one: you cast votes for folks you'd like to invite, and depending on the reputation of the voters, after a threshold of votes is reached that person is invited in. People who voted on users who end up being invited get a point - we're building a leaderboard that will surface the users with the most points -- basically trying to reward, through exposure, users who are great at growing the community. (NB: this leaderboard will also feature users who have a large amount of comments marked as helpful or starred by staff)[1]. The overall goal here is to use humans as a "not a good fit for Forrst" filter. We're trying to encourage folks to grow the community by rewarding them with recognition -- both within the community and publicly.

c) We're also working on some other stuff that will whitelist users who want in based on various things (e.g. having a verified email address with a well-known company e.g. Google, Facebook, etc.). Also have been working on looking at a user's existing social graph(s) to determine potential overlap between that person's network and the Forrst userbase. Much of the credit for this one goes to Nate Westheimer (innonate.com). FWIW I'd love to speak to folks who've done similar things (kyle at forrst.com) Also looking to make it dead easy to get dev/design shops on, and furthermore, to make it simple for existing Forrst users in good standing to get their teams on board.

Happy to elaborate on any of this.

[1] I should add that we're really pushing right now to make it all about quality comments. Posts, to me, are second class citizens. They only exist to create great discussion/feedback/critique.

The Postmark team is absolutely awesome. Forrst has been a happy customer since very early on, and Chris and team have gone out of their way to be helpful wherever possible. It's a huge reason why we haven't even considered Amazon or anyone else.

Our session lib is my arch nemesis these days. They should be good for a year, but for whatever reason, it's hosing them. I'll see what I can do...

Thanks, Jim!

We're requiring invites always, in order to keep out recruiters, "idea" people, and other non-dev/designers, as that would likely detract from the community in a grave way.

We are, however, in the middle of a huge overhaul to the invite system to ensure that developers/designers can and will get access, while still ensuring only they do so.

The new system will be much, much less of a black box, and hopefully alleviate the frustration too many folks have had to experience.

Haha, indeed.

But thank you, I really appreciate it!

Thanks. I appreciate where you're coming from. It was a bit short-sighted of me to add that field. FWIW We're working on an overhaul of the invite system and model.

Thanks so much. It seems like forever ago that those went up. I'm really proud of the progress we've made in the last year.

This is a neat idea and something I had considered prototyping a while ago. If it's helpful, my goal was to create a better way than email to share links with a very small, consistent group of people. Good luck!

I enjoyed it; it was addictive to the point where I kept hitting refresh to watch the progress bar grow. Offering real rewards beyond just "you'll get access sooner" incentivized me to actually share the URL vs. just signing up and leaving as I usually would. Well done.

How much? Where'd you register them?