

Ask HN: Review our app: masterbranch.com - masterbranch

Hi HN
We would like to have some feedback about the app we are building.<p>Masterbranch is a site which makes CVs for developers based on their real experience (Open Source by the moment). In a future there will be tools for people who haven't worked in open source. Now we are focusing in supporting different forges and with time keep growing and giving support for more but we are also trying to polish what we already have.<p>We have few employers registered, and they think the service might be nice and useful, but we would like to know more about how other developers like us see the site, what they like, what they dislike... Any feedback is welcome and appreciated  :)<p>Our aim is to be useful for developers to get great and cool jobs and give employers a good tool for hiring talent and to reduce the hiring error in technical recruitment.<p>Thank you for your kind attention<p>Cheers
======
savant
I'm interested in seeing how you classified a developer in certain categories.

I just searched my Github profile (I am josegonzalez on Github, savant
elsewhere) and noticed on the sidebar that it had a bunch of links to types of
developers. One of them was "CakePHP Developers". How did you categorize me in
this section, and will you make such methods known? I'm curious as I run
CakePackages.com (<http://cakepackages.com>) and your algorithm is pretty
accurate. Since part of that particular app is indexing CakePHP-related code
AND developers, it would be nice to see how you are categorizing developer's
repositories (I've been thinking of using PHP's reflection class to do
categorizing for my purposes, but I want to know how to auto-find CakePHP
developers themselves...)

I love the idea, and as soon as I sort out my OpenID provider (HEY ADD
FOAF+SSL SUPPORT!), I'll be signing up for this service :)

~~~
masterbranch
Hi, For the algorithms our inspirational reading was "Programming Collective
Intelligence" <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321>

As all the recommendation algorithms the basis is the text, and dictionaries
with technologies, and of course a long time blacklisting words by hand.

We didn't think about ssl but, could be a nice feature. Is already wrote down
in our roadmap. I like it.

About <http://www.foaf-project.org/> give me some days and I'll put it. I can
tell you when this is done through GitHub's message system.

We are really appreciating and considering every ideas all of you are giving
here. Thanks a lot.

------
jswinghammer
Recently I wanted to hire a consultant for an open source project. I had no
idea how to do this because there's no easy way to find out who the right
people are and who is interested in working on bug fixes that are interesting
to me as a corporate user of their work. I googled and found that the project
I needed work done on had a page for this but I only found it by searching
(and I didn't expect to find anything when I did).

Maybe there are sites out there that do this and I'm just unaware of them. It
seems like if you can solve that problem you'd have a nice feature on your
hands. Maybe it's a separate site from what you're doing now. Don't know. It
seems like it might be a common problem for people wanting to use a variety of
open source tools and aren't plugged into the developer community for that
project.

Just a thought I had today and I saw your site trying to do something related
so I figured I'd share it. Good luck.

------
stevenwei
Hey this is a great idea. I know I'd rather hire from a pool of open source
developers whose contributions I can take a look at ahead of time.

I think your biggest challenge is not in finding employers, but getting the
community of developers registered on it. I would probably position it less as
a job hunting site and more as a 'show off your projects' type site. Once you
get enough developers on the site then adding a job board section becomes a no
brainer.

Have you thought about integrating StackOverflow as well? E.g. not just the
code they've written, but the programming advice they've given.

~~~
masterbranch
We have been thinking about StackOverflow info, but we have some doubts about
it. How to measure, how to compare it with the code info, etc. We prefer first
work with the code, trying to "do one thing a time and do it well".
Nevertheless hopefully in a not very long time we will try to start giving
tools to improve CVs with non FOSS.

Regards

------
tomazmuraus
I came across this website a few days ago and I like the idea and execution so
far :)

In my opinion, you should be able to manually edit project description and add
extra information to it.

Also more forges like lauchpad, ohloh? and others are needed.

P.S. At what rate do your spiders crawl GitHub and other websites?

It looks like that many projects with recent updates are missing.

~~~
masterbranch
Glad to hear about you like the idea.

We will add more forges, it is in our roadmap.

Crawling speed depends on the forges and if we have the project info or if is
pending to be got for the first time.

Hopefully, the speed will become more stable and new projects, and
contributions come up earlier in Masterbranch.

------
ELV1S
<http://www.masterbranch.com/developer/nv/139036> "NV has worked in 2 Open
Source projects."

It's not true. <http://github.com/NV> — 27 repositories.

~~~
masterbranch
Hi. We do not have all the projects yet, but they will be there soon.

------
bradfordw
Forgive my ignorance, there is talk of "CV" or "CVs" everywhere on the site.
Without googling for it, I would have no idea what it was or is. I think it's
an overused abbreviation on your main and about pages.

~~~
masterbranch
Hi, We now that in the US the most used word is resume, but CV is widely used
in the rest of the world.

~~~
bwh2
I actually first thought the site was about version control, given the name
and the CVs references (which I assumed was a typo).

------
MrMatt
clickable link: <http://masterbranch.com>

