
HackerBuddy - rick_2047
http://hackerbuddy.com/
======
avk
(Copy & pasted from a feedback email to Dave because I thought others might
like to elaborate and discuss):

Great job on starting HackerBuddy. I was impressed with how quickly it matched
me up with someone!

Ideas as they came to me:

1\. Cool icons and good tooltips for areas of expertise!

2\. I like my profile but you should allow vanity URLs like
hackerbuddy.com/artvankilmer

3\. Are you pulling pics from Gravatar? Nice bit of personalization.

4\. Twitter and HN icons would be a natural addition :)

5\. My Twitter and HN usernames are probably my HackerBuddy username. Could
suggest that automatically instead of making me type it in.

6\. Browse Users isn't prominent enough!

7\. How I can give feedback isn't prominent enough!

8\. Browse Users can't just be a dump of profile names. I need to be able to
slice & dice by expertise, general availability (don't suggest folks that have
already been paired with a bunch of other users), etc.

9\. Some kind of reputation / recommendation / feedback system would really
help. Why not pull in a user's HN karma or StackOverflow score to help seed
things a bit? Even feedback on a user's profile of how helpful they were would
help.

10\. "CSS" is painfully missing, esp. since you have "Design", "HTML", and
"JavaScript". CSS != Design (e.g. I think Photoshop, Illustrator, wireframes)

11\. Logged out home page is a good start but you need more to hook folks. Try
imagery of hackers helping hackers, appealing to folks obsessed with HN karma
/ SO scores / Twitter followers, and just nailing your value prop. "Free karma
for helpful hackers" doesn't do it for me.

Keep up the good work!

~~~
5l
A github link as well as twitter/hn would be good as well

------
illdave
Hi guys - I'm Dave, the guy that built HackerBuddy. Thanks for all your
feedback - it's really useful. I'm planning on improving the site over time,
and I'll be going through the comments and adding in any skills that seem to
be in demand, I realise some of the options are pretty limited right now.

At the moment it doesn't email people when a match has been made - my thinking
behind that was the person who requests the help would most likely already
email their new match to ask for help - if you guys think it would make more
sense for the app to email to introduce, then I could look at including that
too. Thanks again for all your comments! :D

~~~
csouth
I don't know that auto emailing is necessary. I tend to agree with you in the
fact that the person who actually needs the help should initiate the email to
the person. Something you may want to provide the option to provide contact
information other then email (IM mostly). I would prefer to get an IM then an
email most of the time.

~~~
illdave
Thanks, I like that idea - I'll add it to my list of things to do :)

------
ltjohnson
Just signed up.

But, my main areas of expertise (statistics, e.g. data analysis or mining,
modeling or forecasting, designing and analyzing experiments, ...) don't mesh
well with your categories. Have you thought about allowing users to search
profiles, or some means of adding categories (sugestion box?)?

~~~
timtadh
This would be nice as my skill set didn't match your categories that well
either.

------
csouth
This is a very interesting idea that I haven't seen done before. From what I
see you would have the potential of having several people helping you with
your startup. If this is the way it seems something like a "project dashboard"
to organizing help would be awesome. While it would be possible to keep track
of all of this in your email it could get difficult with 5+ people helping you
with different aspects of the startup.

All an all I love the idea, very simple design, easy to use. I will use it
over the next few days and let you know again what I think.

------
topcat31
I love this site - as a recent coding n00b (see
<http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001>) having mentors around is invaluable.
Whether it's just offering advice or actually helping you write some jquery
having someone to bounce ideas off is essential. I really hope this gains
critical mass so that everyone uses it and it becomes a hub for finding casual
mentors.

~~~
mbesto
Tom - I saw you speak at the London HN meetup last week and your work was very
inspirational. I've always been a business guy in the tech industry but never
actually coded anything (i've reversed engineered some php in joomla, but
nothing crazy). I'm in the process of putting together an app for my squash
group so people can add their matches and view standings. I did the Python
tutorials from Google as well and have spent some time learning django.

Also, StackOverflow has also been extremely helpful, especially given that I'm
such a noob at this. For example, one of my questions was so basic about the
ORM that after I found out the solution I felt like such an idiot. [1]

That being said...if you want a business and/or hacker buddy to bounce ideas
off let me know. My contact info is in my user listing.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4907479/how-do-i-do-
multi...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4907479/how-do-i-do-multiple-
joins-and-aggregation-with-django-orm)

~~~
topcat31
Awesome! Let's get in touch, I love playing squash too :)

~~~
mbesto
Cool! e-mail sent!

------
moe
Kudos for the color palette, I absolutely love it!

I noticed you need some help with the typography though, so let this be my
first hackerbuddy contribution:
<http://f.cl.ly/items/0A3o083L2v1O402t1z1x/hacker-buddy-2.png>

Sorry for png instead of CSS, I hacked it quickly in inspector, but should be
easy to reproduce.

~~~
alisey
Full justification doesn't work well on the web, especially for short lines,
because the spacing between the words is not consistent and the gaps are too
large. Flush left, ragged right looks better. (Also, minus sign isn't a
replacement for en dash).

~~~
moe
As said, just a quick hack with no claims to perfection, but imho an
improvement over the original.

Left-align vs justify might be worth retrying, justify won in my 5-second
comparison. You're right about en dash; I left the copy entirely untouched
because I didn't want to spend more than a few minutes on the whole thing.

While you're at it, the signup-button could use some love, too...

------
tlack
Fantastic idea. "Casual mentoring" like this brings a lot of the benefits of
incubators to those not participating in them. I'll echo others in saying that
we need more specificity in our expertise and a better browsing system.
Perhaps allow people to specify their own "tags" and list their experience on
different sites as line items, and then display all that in the browse screen.

------
cmer
Great idea!

It would be great if you could expand the areas of expertise though. For
example, I have significant expertise with cloud computing, EC2 deployment,
scaling, MongoDB, but there's nowhere to mention this. I also have expertise
deploying Rails in production, the different possible setups, etc. Just
checking off "Rails" is a bit broad.

Thanks!

~~~
tst
Yep, mcrittenden recommended a tag system
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2176517>) in the first thread. I'll just
quote him:

 _I'd like the hardcoded areas of expertise removed in favor of an
autocomplete freeform box, much like Stack Overflow's tags box. For example,
I'd like to put that I'm a Drupal expert and I'd like to look for node.js
help, but neither of those are options._

~~~
cmer
Oh boy. I totally missed that. Thanks.

I'm not sure a tagging system is the best option though. It's very flexible
indeed but it's at the expense of the simplicity of checkboxes. Especially
when many tags mean the same thing. eg: rails and rubyonrails.

Since "hacker" expertise is a limited scope, perhaps expanding from there is a
better idea?

~~~
weirdcat
Maybe you could use the best of both approaches by presenting the most
popular/important/broad tags (e.g. PHP, usability, CPC) as a _suggested_ list
while allowing users to add their own, more specific or less popular tags
(e.g. drupal, memcached, adsense, appengine).

~~~
pyre
Or (as long as it's performant), an auto-complete as you type so that both
"java" and "javascript" show up in the auto-complete's suggestion list when
you type "java" in. In the above example, a person would type in 'rails' and
see the 'rubyonrails' auto-complete, and (hopefully) choose that instead.

------
liedra
Hi! I just signed up, and I thought I'd go see who was about to help a
potential me - and it signed me up as needing help without any sort of
confirmation! Now I'm in an embarrassing situation where I need to explain to
my poor buddy that I don't actually want his help, I was just poking around :(
Perhaps you should add some sort of confirmation to the "need help" thing :)

ETA: some sort of "undo" button (i.e. no longer needing help) would be nice :)

~~~
jschuur
Ditto. I clicked 'Help a fellow hacker' thinking it would lead to a page about
that process, or with a list of people needing my skill set, but now it sounds
like I might be contacted by someone who took the time to write me a
personalized request that I'm not (yet) ready for.

I just signed up to get a feel for the site for now.

I also recommend skill set options in product management, project management
and community relations.

------
gregsadetsky
Just signed up -- great idea!

Small problem: I clicked the "Get Startup Help" button, selected an area of
expertise, and was then paired with someone. The random selection (instead of
being able to browse available profiles) is not necessarily a problem, but now
I can't cancel my request for help...

Also, it would be great if you sent out emails when you were paired with
someone else -- a sort of automatic introduction. Do you send out an email to
the person that was paired? Hopefully -- as I won't necessarily come back to
the site to check if I have requests waiting for me.

Finally, perhaps the global list of users could be augmented by a bit of
geographic info -- just to see if someone's close to you (might be nice to
meet fellow hacker buddies)?

------
stanmancan
I haven't read through all the comments yet... I like the idea, the site's
design is pretty awesome, but I'd suggest making the "Help a Hacker" and "Get
Startup Help" buttons more prominent and easy to find. It actually took me a
bit of hunting to finally find them on my profile page.

Might work well to have them on the index page _if_ you're signed in.
Otherwise you get the copy on what the site is and how it works.

Just an idea :) Well done though!

------
Zak
The options for programming languages are absurdly limited. I want to help
people with Clojure, Haskell and Lua. I don't care that they're not as popular
as the options you did offer; hackers generally don't pick tech based on
popularity to the degree that other people do.

------
ancymon
Is it really that fantastic? I think better place to find help are Q&A sites
(like SO) or even Ask HN "feature". In such places your problem is seen by
more than one "fellow hacker", so the chance to solve it is much greater...

~~~
kmfrk
At the very least, it will serve as a case study on the merit of mentoring.

------
weirdcat
A detail: I miss titles below the icons representing various skills. I really
hate to have to mouseover just to check what a cup of coffee means. I know it
looks cooler without text, but usability suffers.

------
xpaulbettsx
I like the idea, though your categories are pretty thin - neither C# nor WP7
show up as checkboxes (nor does F#, Scala, or Clojure).

Maybe a "suggest a category" feature would help here?

~~~
rodh257
Yeah needs C# or VB as options, ASP is there, but is it ASP.NET, or just
classic ASP?

------
SoftwareMaven
There are a lot of important items that are not "development" that are
missing: product management, business development, sales, etc., that can all
be helpful to the aspiring hacker.

------
kmfrk
I am using a Gmail address that is registered with a "+" filter, i.e.
`firstnamelastname+hackerbuddy@gmail.com`, and I think it breaks Gravatar. I'm
getting a broken image.

~~~
a-priori
Yes, that will break Gravatar since its algorithm uses the hash of the entire
address to find your image.

------
qixxiq
I know its a little late on this thread, but how about adding some more
manager related tasks to the thread: Hiring, Managing Employees, etc

I understand its not a completely "hacker" category, but there for a hacker
that needs to complete a lot of those tasks for my startup -- I'd prefer to
speak to a hacker than get advice from more business orientated people.

------
brianmwang
One small suggestion: stop using text-align: center on everything. It's
generally poor design practice and makes for unfocused layouts.

------
jschuur
The help page says email adresses are swapped. It would be nice to see some
kind of blind, double confirmation process, where both sides get to briefly
interact first before that is done.

Sometimes, you just want to get to know someone else first before you give out
an email address.

------
rottendevice
Good to know I'm not the only one making this website.

<http://www.makethatthing.com/>

(shameless self promotion, I know, but I wish Dave the best of luck with his
site)

------
mendable
Nice idea, have signed up to try it out.

Really would like a faceted search function to filter and search users with
specific skills, the "browse users" list is fairly useless as-is.

Also needs a "close account" function.

~~~
illdave
Thanks for the comments - I agree, the browse user list is pretty dreadful at
the moment. I'll be looking at adding a search function as a better way of
finding people in the next update. (And the close account function too)

------
jwwest
Very nice job. The design is incredibly clean and functional.

------
bryanh
I did something similar with EveryMentor.com. There have been quite a few
fruitful matches so far (one was 2 wedding planners! how that happened I've no
clue).

------
omouse
This is free right? Is it also free/open source?

~~~
illdave
It's free, yep - I'm planning on open sourcing it once I've improved the code
a bit, too.

------
jackolas
People love numeric karma. If you can find a nice way to do without making
human interaction "cheapened" please do.

------
cemregr
Great! Could you add Design with different subcategories like information
architecture, visual design etc?

------
danest
Signed up and hopefully I can get some help with the parts or ruby I don't
fully grasp yet.

------
pbreynolds
Signed up and volunteered. Love the idea and looking forward to seeing how it
goes.

------
bablingo
How come Drupal gets no love in the 'how I can help' area?

------
Deal-Tracker
Great idea! Seems like the site has a decent user base.

------
ArturCarvalho
Could you add a favicon? Thank you for the great work!

------
Jsarokin
Signed up. Looks like a solid idea if it works :)

------
gibsonf1
Nice site. How about Lisp? Search?

------
eurohacker
what is the hackerbuddy site built with - php, ruby ?

~~~
treo
It's directly on the about page:

What is HackerBuddy? HackerBuddy is a weekend project built using Ruby on
Rails. It was built as a way to learn Rails, there is a very large chance that
this site will collapse under the weight of it's own awkward code. If it does
- sorry - I plan to improve it as I get better at coding in Ruby, please bear
with me.

