
Show HN: Made Personal Site Last Night (For YC App) - biscarch
http://christopherbiscardi.github.com/
======
hnriot
Must be a really slow day if someone's "home page" has made it, it's like 1996
all over again.

this site looks miserably bad on the iPad, it's riddled with spelling and
grammatical errors, the design is neither functional nor aesthetically
pleasing, the content is a mixture of resume, personal history and some
horrible over saturated snapshots.

If you're looking for a job I would strongly suggest you buy a word press
theme and go with that instead if trying to make a website like this.

And lastly, calling yourself a polyglot is pretentious, Just say you speak
seven languages or whatever.

The best way to show you're good at something is by demonstrating it, rather
than stating it.

But I've saved my its critical comment for last. Please don't list trivial
technologies, like vim, iterm etc. if you're a software developer I would
expect you to be highly competent in an editor and I don't care which one it
is. If you're a designer I expect you to know photoshop and illustrator and
indesign, if you're a web developer I expect you to know JavaScript and sass
and HTML and CSS. For any technology that you are "experimenting with" just
don't mention it.

When I get a software engineering candidate resume and they list Word as a
skill I immediately throw it out.

And lastly, if you're going to make a personal site that puts your best for
forward, don't do it in one night, give it some actual thought.

Don't say you're clever, show it, do something clever, try it at least on a
mobile device! For an example of doing rather than saying take a look at
hakim.se

------
jblock
<http://contrastrebellion.com/>

But seriously, hanging indents, a very minor textual hierarchy, your Masonry
layout is messed up, etc.

It all looks very unprofessional. KISS is your friend unless you are a master
of making these complex responsive sites. Fix your voice, too. This is your
site. Don't write it like a biography if the site itself is an autobiography
(unless you're really funny and clever about it, which you aren't).

The purpose of a site like this is to allow people to find out more about you.
What you've done mashed your entire professional life into a really, really
long document that only looks passable on mobile phones. Figure out what you
want to say. Make it CLEAR. Use CONTRAST. Put those pictures on your flickr
page and link to it.

Personal pet peeve: don't tell me how experienced you are at a certain
language or technology with a percentage--show me some shit you made.

~~~
biscarch
Fair judgement.

The reason for the photos being on the same page is because it eliminates a
click, a page load and a move offsite.

I'll work to become more knowledgable in the field of design as I clearly have
left some issues on the table. (I enjoyed reading through the link btw.)

Thank you.

~~~
jblock
No problem. Hopefully you take all this criticism from HN as just that:
criticism. Iterate and make it better! You're already a step ahead of a LOT of
people out there.

~~~
biscarch
That's exactly what I'm doing. HN is giving me exactly what I was hoping for.

------
calgaryeng
How is this on the front page of HN. I have seen far more interesting things
on the second page, and I have submitted posts with __useful __information!

~~~
biscarch
I'd love to check some out. Which of your posts would you recommend?

edit: Just checked out Easy Retirement Planning. Looks pretty sweet. What age
do you think is a good time to start using such a platform?

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cocoflunchy
You switch several time between the first and the third person to talk about
yourself:

Christopher Biscardi is a polyglot engineer specializing...

Vim is my primary editor.

I was also a part of the track team in college.

Chris also played the drums and owns 4 bass guitars today

Chris took up Juggling in middle school

You should choose one and stick to it.

~~~
biscarch
Agreed. Thank you for the feedback.

edit: should be fixed.

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Wintamute
I think the idea of using skill bars to describe tech experience is
interesting, but it's information overload at the moment.

~~~
HyprMusic
Agreed, ccuracy of skill isn't really important since you're trying to show
your ability to learn, adapt and solve problems. Language isn't as important
as a good engineer and/or entrepreneur (I'd except YC are very language
agnostic). As suggested elsewhere, maybe list the language and then some very
brief descriptions of projects.

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hluska
I checked your source (I'm like that) and found this at the top of your
stylesheet:

/* otay. I bootstrapped it. Can I Haz Startup Now?*/

When I was in my mid 20s, I would have loved that. Now that I'm in my mid 30s,
I admire the courage, but wonder if it might be safer to remove? Sort of the
'best foot forward' principle...

~~~
biscarch
You have a point.

Originally this was just a side project to develop something other than the
product for a night. It then grew into a personal site to be used on a YC
application.

I appreciate the viewpoint, and since I know not what PG & co are actually
like IRL, it may be wise to remove the comments.

~~~
hluska
You've got a good looking site - best of luck on your application!

~~~
biscarch
Thank you!

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anonymouz
You should do some proof reading. E.g. "probabley", "He states that HE could
have done better, had he studied for either exam, but the tradeoff wasn't
worth it." (highlighted personal pronoun is missing). It's trivial but on a
CV-type page these things tend to stand out.

~~~
biscarch
Highly Appreciated. I'm looking over everything again.

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HyprMusic
In my opinion the font is way too big. Makes it very difficult to read your
full story, and it's too out of proportion with your skill bar text. Remember
your target audience is professionals, but people learning to read.

~~~
biscarch
The more I read it, the more I agree with you. I was trying to preemptively
adjust the font size (I prefer large text and find myself zooming in all the
time), but in combination with the paragraph width I'm starting to believe it
doesn't work.

------
biscarch
If anyone takes a look I'd love to hear some feedback.

I'm trying to get into YC this year (with my co-founder) and I didn't have a
personal page... so I made one.

~~~
danso
Why did you choose to put skill bars at the top that have no frame of
reference rather than a listing of actual accomplishments? Your skill bars for
node.js and mongo are at expert levels...what have you made with them?

* There are a lot of design issues with this but the main problem is how you prioritize your weakest qualities...the Education heading is the most obvious one. If you have nothing to list than just remove it. It's obvious YC type people don't require that someone graduate from Harvard in order to be successful. As it is now, it at best makes it look like youve submitted a draft resume. At worst, it shows that you can't break out of the conventional mindset, such as the one thinking that Education must always be at the top of a resume

~~~
biscarch
I've been working with node since v0.2.x Mostly JSON API's. I wrote an oauth
library awhile back from spec to talk to the tumblr api. Recently I've been
moving away from node for API's and towards Clojure, but that's a different
issue.

As for Mongo, I've set up sharded, replicated deployments for clients to run
node API's off of. Typically on AWS. I've also worked with GridFS for
image/metadata storage and retrieval.

I was hesitant to put it so high because I am not intimately familiar with the
gritty plumbing of Mongo, which lends strength to your point that skill bars
are pretty subjective.

In the end, I made the skill bars as a way of saying "I'm competent to work
with these technologies" and as a comparison between the various tech I have
listed.

You are correct though. A frame of reference is important. I do plan to place
aside information either in popovers or attached sidebars.

edit: That's an interesting comment about the education space. I placed it
highly because I actually dropped out of college to start my own consulting
business. In that way it would not represent the traditional model of a
Harvard education representing the top of the chain and would add more to the
story of how I became who I am, and how I can drive a company forward.

edit2: Thank you for making me look at the Education section again. I now
understand why you think I'm still in school, awaiting a degree. Changing the
wording now.

~~~
spectre256
Here's the problem with skill bars: Bjarne Stroustrup rates himself at 7/10
for C++ knowledge. So if the language creator is at 7/10, where is anyone but
the most skilled programmers? Probably somewhere around the 3 to 4 range tops
(and the scale might be logarithmic).

But this is a problem because you won't get any jobs if you say your skill in
the language they use is 3/10. And of course you have to compete against
people even less skilled than yourself who rate themselves at 9/10.

Maybe the way to solve this is to take the space used for skills and use it to
show off your projects. If you're new to a language, your most interesting
project will be something small and simple. But for the languages you're most
comfortable in, you will likely have built something awesome.

~~~
biscarch
Thanks for the perspective. Skill bars are clearly non-trivial.

I think I will swap out the skill bars. Maybe some code/explanations would
work better.

~~~
danso
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to just be negative...just realizing you're
obviously trying to set yourself apart from the crowd (and should be applauded
for doing so), and so am trying to point out where you can avoid creating
pitfalls in the process.

I'm no YC-er so don't have much insight beyond what can be inferred in the
discussions on HN...but the most interesting part of your resume to me was
your D1 athletic achievements. To compete at that level almost automatically
gives you cred as someone with drive.

Where you should put that piece of info, I can't say. If not at the very top,
well, definitely not at the bottom where you have it now. To put a more
pessimistic spin on it, the fact that the athletic achievements were the first
thing to catch my eye also implies that you haven't done enough to explain
your other concrete achievements. I criticized the skill-bars because I think
you can do a much better job describing yourself.

~~~
biscarch
I highly appreciate what you're doing for me. This is something that is very
important to me, and every bit of advice and criticism is worth gold.

------
sneak
Hire a copy editor.

~~~
biscarch
On it.

