
Ask HN: Where to find co-developers for side projects? - Liberator
I&#x27;m college student, working as a part-time Java developer. During summer I would like to work on a side project, which includes building a webpage from a scratch. It is not a billion dollar startup idea, in fact, it probably won&#x27;t be profitable at all, I&#x27;m doing it only for fun and to learn new things. The thing is, I don&#x27;t know anything about webdesign except for some basic html and css and I don&#x27;t want to spend whole summer learning javascript and responsive design, because it would feel more like a chore to me, when it is supposed to be interesting and fun. I&#x27;m looking for a front-end developer (Angular&#x2F;React&#x2F;...), who would join me and together we would attempt to create something. No rush, no deadlines, no salaries. So the question is:<p>Is there a place where can I find people looking for something to work on and expecting nothing, but an experience in return?<p>EDIT: HN won&#x27;t let me to reply to all comments, because I am &quot;submitting too fast&quot;. I just want to clarify - I don&#x27;t want someone to make whole webpage for me. I just want to do the classical split between backend (I&#x27;ll do that) and frontend. That&#x27;s like how it is done in most of the companies.
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startupdiscuss
I just googled these:

[http://pushboard.net](http://pushboard.net)

[http://builditwith.me](http://builditwith.me)

[http://cofounderslab.com](http://cofounderslab.com)

[http://doerhub.com](http://doerhub.com)

[http://founder2be.com](http://founder2be.com)

[http://founderdating.com](http://founderdating.com)

[http://foundrs.com](http://foundrs.com)

[http://startupweekend.org](http://startupweekend.org)

[http://techcofounder.com](http://techcofounder.com)

[http://venturestorm.com](http://venturestorm.com)

[http://waxidea.com](http://waxidea.com)

~~~
balazsdavid987
That's a great list, thanks!

------
Frizi
If you need a frontend developer to realize your idea, become one or change
the idea. There are many people who like to code just for fun, but they have
plenty of ideas already. In the end time is the most limiting factor for many
of us. You have to pick what are you using that time for very carefully.

~~~
treve
Kinda want to echo this. There's _so many_ projects that I could participate
in, yours would have to be a pretty unique one for me to be interested.

But that being said, it's not impossible. The people I've done 'fun, not for
profit' projects with tend to be with friends, but I can see myself getting
interested if your project has something that scratches a real itch for me ;)

You could also consider finding 'hack nights' in your city. You might find
people there looking for projects.

Or you can decide to pay for work.

------
nfriedly
This might not be the answer you're looking for, but if you don't already have
someone in mind, then you should probably build you side project on your own.

Also, basic html and css is all it takes to build a webpage. (Well,
technically you don't even need the CSS...)

JavaScript is definately not required. Responsive CSS is a bit nicer to have
to make the website mobile-friendly, but this is all you really need:

    
    
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
        <style type="text/css">
        * {max-width: 100%}
        </style>
    
    

Build with what you know or want to learn, and if someone comes along, great,
and if not you should be just fine.

~~~
davchana
Thats a genius idea for making sure none of the elements goes our of viewport
width. I always had this issue that a div has standard border padding, and
width:100% pushes its right to out of viewport. Can't wait to try this.

Just few genuine questions, as I am learning, specifically in making static
fixed header bars for few of my fun projects.

Does the meta tag in ur comment needs closure(>), or is it something I might
have never come across?

Does implying a max-width 100 in percentage means every element gets max 100%
of "its" parent element, which can be traced down back to HTML as super parent
of all tags, and thus if I could use "vw" viewport width as units instead of
%?

~~~
4lun
> I always had this issue that a div has standard border padding, and
> width:100% pushes its right to out of viewport.

You likely want `box-sizing: border-box`: [https://www.paulirish.com/2012/box-
sizing-border-box-ftw/](https://www.paulirish.com/2012/box-sizing-border-box-
ftw/)

------
original_idear
"I'm doing it only for fun and to learn new things."

Vs

"I don't want to spend whole summer learning javascript and responsive design,
because it would feel more like a chore to me"

Huh?

~~~
imdsm
I was going to raise this point. Is it about building a webpage or about what
the webpage will do? If OP doesn't want to learn how to make a webpage,
perhaps OP shouldn't make a webpage.

~~~
mythrwy
I want to learn how to get others to make me a webpage!

A forward thinking individual and upper management material for sure!

~~~
sh87
That too for free.

------
0x4f3759df
At your college. Put up a flyer or reach out to some computer minded
organization. You're not actually going to get an angular / react dev (they
cost $$$$), best you can hope for is someone with no skills who wants to be an
'angular / react' dev.

~~~
Liberator
> You're not actually going to get an angular / react dev (they cost $$$$) I
> also make $$$$ programming, but that doesn't mean I'm not willing to do
> something for free.

------
trinifar
It sounds like you are looking for a friend to code with. Try your local area.

Otherwise everyone has their own projects.

No one will read what you wrote above and think "Wow, he sounds like a good
leader with a solid plan."

I could go on and on with suggestions.

~~~
Liberator
I don't think I need to be a good leader for this. What I'm looking for, is a
place with bored programmers, where I could present what I want to do and
maybe there will be someone who says "this looks fun" and join me. Or is
nobody doing software just for fun anymore?. It's a specific topic and I don't
want to bother my friends with it, I need someone who will be 100% interested
in it.

~~~
hluska
> I don't think I need to be a good leader for this.

> It's a specific topic and I don't want to bother my friends with it, I need
> someone who will be 100% interested in it.

These two things are mutually exclusive. The kinds of people who you want to
work with tend to have ideas of their own, or a multitude of other offers to
choose from.

Since your job is to get people excited enough about your idea to build it for
free, you need to have some good sales skills. And, if you want to keep them
engaged and productive, you'll need to be an amazing leader.

If you pull this off, I suspect that you'll learn as much about leadership as
you do about code. Good luck!!

------
sophacles
I can think of a couple routes to this:

* find various organizations devoted to this. Even the small town I live in has a "design society", a python users group, a generic "coder group" and so on. Often groups like this have hack times - just get together, work on your own stuff, but have other people with different skillsets there too to help, co-learn or whatever!

* Find local hackathons - these are a bit more intense but many of them are not primarily contests etc, but just a short-term version of the above

* Find your local (hacker|maker)space.

* Put out an ad in the Craigslist gigs (computer).

If these resources don't exist for you, consider starting them!

Story-time: I was perusing the local Craigslist and came across a person who
had put up a tutoring gig - she wanted someone to teach her flask in a
structured way. I replied that I'd be willing to share my experience and co-
learn, but not really structured and because of my obligations and conflicts
of interest I couldn't take payment. Instead I suggested we do the co-learing
and experience sharing as a Python Users Group. The one that previously
existed in our town had been defunct for several years at that point, and I
wanted to see it happen so people didn't need to offer money for learning
resources. Long story short - that pug has been around for 5 years now and is
still going strong. I'm only involved as an attendee once a month or so, and
the other person who founded it coordinates the hack sessions, but new folks
have stepped up and filled in the rest of the roles!

Good luck with your adventure - if you have to go the "start a thing" route:
warning it's a lot of work, but rewarding. If that happens and you could use
advice/experience feel free to reach out:

    
    
       $HN_USERNAME@$GOOGLES_FREE_MAIL_SERVICE

------
Cerium
Forums and IRC channels specific to the domain you would like to work in. I
have not done any myself, but I see people teaming up to make domain specific
applications quite often.

For example, I am part of a tea channel on IRC. There are two people who have
teamed up to make a tea journal app for Android.

------
austincheney
I am trying to write a new programming language. Language design is new to me
and would really love a co-developer. If anybody is interested the language is
at
[https://github.com/prettydiff/simple](https://github.com/prettydiff/simple)
and the design is still at the very beginning.

Basic design goals:

less is more, holy war elimination, strong/strict references, no syntax
overloading, blocks by reference, single paradigm, sub-types by
assignment/extension instead of by generics, lexical scope instead of
classes/inheritance

~~~
mabynogy
Interesting!

Consider post it to /r/ProgrammingLanguages:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/)

~~~
austincheney
I did not know this existed. Thank you very much!

------
hamstercat
Find local hackathons in your city. In mine I can find some on
[http://meetup.com](http://meetup.com). That way you get together with
strangers, work on something for a day or a weekend or whatever, and there's
no pressure after that. You'll get to learn new things and make connections at
the same time.

EDIT: thanks for the correction, it's meetup.com not meetings.com

~~~
eeZah7Ux
you mean meetup.com?

------
johndevor
My tip to you would be to raise your goals. Learning JavaScript should not be
a chore if your goals are high enough.

------
Twisell
Actually it would be nice to have a competence exchange website where
volunteers could register and find matches. But instead of dating, this could
be for developing.

Because the limitation of the "just do it yourself on your own" approach is
that when looking for specific solutions I often stubble on a dozen of half-
backed, dubiously maintained, side projects. And I can't keep from wondering
what great things theses solos developers could have done had they worked
together form the start.

Also a good example come to my mind, you might want to ask OpenStreetMap.org
developers how did they gather and start what is a "recent" and huge FOSS
success story with a large community behind it.

------
eeZah7Ux
It would be very nice to have a platform where people can propose/ask for
FLOSS projects and subscribe to them as potential contributor / tester / user.
It could allow searching by keyword/tag/topic and voting.

~~~
mowenz
This is the only understandable reason I can see that people would upvote thE
parent topic. Other than that, the OP has provided no value proposition to his
potential partner.

------
forkLding
Created a fb group for this scenario:
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/665825200225224/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/665825200225224/)

~~~
davchana
Its sad that I quit fb few months ago because it was sucking most of my free
time and now I cant have a look on this group.

------
caser
Hackathons and meet ups might be a good place to start.

------
sharemywin
Maybe you can talk about what your looking to create.

Or, maybe build it as an API and people find it useful and build front ends
for it.

~~~
Liberator
Well, I'm looking to build a modern and robust opensource anonymous imageboard
software (most people here probably know about 4chan), as all the existing
usable alternatives are written in PHP and the code is 10 years old and barely
maintained. Yes, maybe I will try to do the front end by myself and also
provide rest api on the side, if anyone was interested.

~~~
pythonaut_16
One bit of advice, don't go for React/Angular/front-end unless you actually
need to or you actually want to.

Whatever web framework you're using (probably some variation of Spring if
you're using Java) should have built in templating which should be more than
sufficient to build an MVP/Proof of concept imageboard. I doubt 4chan is
running any kind of SPA either.

Then if your project is successful or you want to stick with it, you can build
your frontend javascript app as a phase 2. In most webframeworks you'll do
largely the same query/controller work to get the data for both a JSON API and
a templated web page. The API will just map that data to JSON while the
templated page will map the values into an HTML response.

~~~
vinceguidry
This, 100%. Fancy Javascript frameworks are super-complicated, and are easy to
misuse. Unless you spend the time learning the principles, all you're doing is
needlessly introducing abstractions.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
...and unnecessary for 95% of webapps. Most of the time user have to click few
buttons and refresh few divs and nothing more.

------
andrewmcwatters
This is really low effort. If you think this is a chore maybe you just
shouldn't do it. You sound like an ideas guy who doesn't want to do work. You
also sound like you basically want other people to work on your side project.
Maybe you should start something first. People are more willing to help those
who help themselves.

