

Tell HN: We're building a "HN Office Hours" app. Help us. - rguzman
http://hnofficehours.com/

======
drewcrawford
I don't have regular office hours. I start work anywhere from 12-1pm and stop
anywhere from midnight-5am. Sometimes I take days off. Sometimes I'm too busy
to answer the phone. My schedule for something like this is pretty much
unpredictable.

Proposal: rather than specifying hours, just let me specify here / gone like a
regular IM client. If it looks like it's going to be a slow day, I'll turn on
the tap, and if things pick up I'll turn it off.

~~~
hooande
I can understand your situation, but I like their proposed approach (if I
understand it correctly). A lot of people like to make appointments in order
to be able to plan their time. During YC, you can schedule a 20 minute block
of time with PG where he talks to you one on one. A lot of people find it to
be useful, and I think it would be great to have something similar for HNers.

Some people like to be able to say "I have 20 minutes from 11:00-11:20
scheduled to talk to this person on this date about my project". Personally,
I've always felt that scheduled appointments feel more "serious" than IM
conversations. If I've made a commitment to talk with you for 20 minutes,
you're much more likely to get my undivided attention during that time. Plus I
can prepare for our conversation. If I can't make it, I'll just reschedule.

~~~
drewcrawford
Maybe I understood wrong then, and I'm not in the target market for this? I'm
not really interested in having "serious" conversations except with people who
pay me to solve their problems.

I was much more interested in the brainstorming or "fresh pair of eyes"
aspect. (My day job is an iOS developer) I'm more than happy to give some
advice on somebody's iOS app / idea / Apple / app review / APIs when there's a
lull in the day. I do really enjoy helping people out.

But the minute I need to start "reserving" time and "scheduling" for this, it
starts sounding billable to me. That's the sort of thing I get paid to do.

Put another way, think of the analogy to open source. I am more than happy to
field a few e-mails a day doing support for my OSS projects. But I'm not going
to reserve time in my day for it unless I've got a support contract in place.

~~~
rguzman
Think of this is as "networking". You have to allocate time beforehand to do
that: meetups, coffee, etc. This is no different. The only difference is that
instead of expecting to make small-talk the expectation is technical talk.
Further, I think it is good to be able to make yourself available quickly on a
whim "mark me as available now" like you described.

Now, your time may be more valuable than "technical networking" with this
crowd. Sure. In that case, you're not in the target demographic, like you
concluded.

~~~
drewcrawford
It's my observation (there are exceptions, but in general) that the awesome
people are busy doing awesome things, not idling somewhere. So I would
optimize for the busy person, not the person who can set aside 8 regular hours
every week. Set a low commitment barrier, and attract great minds.

For me personally, there's a list of people 3 feet long on HN that I'd love to
pick their brains about something. But I feel like a bother. (In a couple of
instances, I've even been told I'm a bother. Sorry guys.)

Don't optimize it for me. Optimize it for the people _way_ busier than I am.
If pg (or grellas, or patio11, or ...) start using the service, it will both
be unimaginably useful and also gain traction.

~~~
eru
Sounds like an interesting idea. Perhaps you should even focus explicitly on
pleasing, say, patio11 (if he agrees to give you feedback).

Stuff that's optimized for on specific person (or a very small group) often
also gets better responses from the a much wider audience, then if you went
for a `generic' person in the first place. (I can go and find the sources for
this.)

------
SomeCallMeTim
Have you guys seen Aardvark? Aardvark sends questions to friends and friends-
of-friends via IM and/or email. If HN readers all linked together as friends
or friends-of-friends, then your questions would be routed to the appropriate
people based on interests. And if no HN people are available to answer your
questions, they get routed off to the rest of the Aardvark network.

Even if people don't like this idea, it wouldn't hurt to look at how their UI
and features are set up, since they're one of the pioneers in doing exactly
the same kind of thing the "HN Office Hours" app is trying to do.

You can link to me here: <http://vark.com/s/UR0C> \-- everyone who links to me
will be a friend-of-a-friend and will be auto-networked by Aardvark, assuming
they all use an IM program compatible with Google Chat or Yahoo IM. Or if
someone else wants to volunteer to be the "hub" of HN users, feel free to post
your link here.

Just a thought. :)

~~~
cullenking
But then you have to deal with the annoyance that is aardvark. I turned that
stuff off when I got five questions in a row that literally were first page
google results.

IRC room with a site mapping persons profile to their nick would be less
bothersome, however then you have the distraction of yet another conversation
in the background....

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
Aardvark has an auto-response for questions you can Google:

google

Which sends them a summary of the first Google hit for their question. See:
<http://vark.com/commands>

I get an occasional question you could Google, but it's been rare. You can
also just pass. And you can tell Aardvark how often you want to be contacted.

IRC or other chat room software would be too noisy for me--I wouldn't ever
want it to be trying to get my attention.

------
user24
That thread caused a lot of ripples. It's clear that this is a service that
many people want.

Here's another thread inspired by kentf's submission;
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1517198> and there's a collection of
google docs here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1517198>, you might
want to build your database around the type of infomation people want to
share.

Also, minor proofreading thing on the homepage: "want to build a site to those
facilitate interactions"

I'm not a django guy otherwise I'd be offering to dive in.

I can offer space and bandwidth on my dreamhost "unlimited" shared hosting
plan.

And I love beta-testing things!

(note to HNers, please save the discussion about what "unlimited" really means
for another time.)

edit: another thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1516015>

~~~
rguzman
Thank you. Just fixed the typo.

------
kilian
Please see if you can combine something with <http://hnhackers.com/> and/or
<http://www.hackernewsers.com/> It would be a shame if a third site comes
along that does something related (even slightly) without working together!

~~~
rguzman
Do you run either of those? We'd love to integrate as much as possible.

~~~
kilian
I don't, just throwing it out there. The creators shouldn't be hard to find
though.

Anyway, I'll see if I can contribute some html/css/js work over the weekend :)
see you all on irc!

------
maxwin
I am so amazed by how frequently people come up with the same idea. I have
been thinking about making an office hour app 7-8 months ago and been talking
to everyone I know for feedbacks. Fail on me for not being able to execute it
sooner. Good job for taking the initiative, guys.

~~~
ezl
sometimes it just takes someone to get the ball rolling. we'd honestly really
rather have this be "everyone's project" instead of "our project". Please
contribute. This is ideally going to be a very open process with lots of
people committing code and ideas.

It would be a waste to ignore whatever ideas you came up with in 7-8 months of
thinking about the app.

------
ezl
hey guys, ezl from pybrew here. So we're basically a python shop, but we'd
really love input/collaboration from anyone.

The primary reason we're trying to approach this as a group project is we
think it'll be fun to collaborate with new people; so even if you're not a
Django guy, please feel free to contribute. We definitely need people with
design savvy, UI advice, people who just click around the site and look for
broken things, etc.

Don't feel like you have to stay the whole weekend or anything. Hop in and say
hello. Any advice/suggestions are welcome.

~~~
kashif
Are you guys only looking for local help? I am in India and would love to chip
in but this weekend isn't the best time. Can't this be an ongoing, online
thing. We can all chip in and host it too - a community developed/run/managed
app?

~~~
rguzman
Yes. We want to make it as open and community-maintained as possible. We're
just kicking it off. Any help is welcome, local and remote. You can fork the
repo on github or ping us for anything else.

------
jim_dot
I don't really get it...

~~~
mahmud
If you like someone's comment, you can click on their office hours link and ..
AWESOME!

------
ez77
I believe this is great. I have one comment (really one wish) to make. It
would be absolutely fantastic to see some screencasts of HNers in action. In
particular, how you get the skeleton of a project up and running. I, for one,
would pay for content like this.

By the way, I haven’t tried PeepCode. Do you guys recommend it? Again, along
the lines of getting things started. I look, for instance, at the App Engine
documentation and (even though they offer a launcher) I wonder how
professionals give the first brush strokes in less than several hours. How can
I avoid constantly going back to the documentation?

Thank you, and sorry for the ramble!

~~~
duck
I would highly recommend PeepCode... very high quality screencasts and a good
range of topics as well.

------
phpnode
I just rolled out timezone search to hackernewsers, e.g.
[http://www.hackernewsers.com/users.html?User[timezone]=Europ...](http://www.hackernewsers.com/users.html?User\[timezone\]=Europe/London)

This is part of a larger set of community features that I've been working on
for a couple of weeks and will be deployed soon. It looks like we've had the
same idea

------
ezl
the github wiki is where we're storing a lot of ideas:
<http://wiki.github.com/ezl/hnofficehours/>

it is editable by anyone with a github account. if you have any ideas, please
feel free to contribute (leave your HN username as well with your ideas so we
can contact you if there are questions)

------
wooster
Neat. I might start up my office hours again. For anyone thinking of starting
their own, it's totally worthwhile. I wrote about mine a couple of years ago:

<http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2008/10/30/office-hours>

------
samratjp
1) I hope the final product will be OSS 2) To keep spammers out, we could
enable a karma threshold parameter. 3) As about UI, I've always been looking
for an excuse to look into SproutCore ('course, this is free) or Atlas (which
does cost).

~~~
ezl
_1) I hope the final product will be OSS_

It absolutely will.

------
proexploit
UI Design / Adobe CS guy here. Email is in my profile if you want specific
design help. Got a fairly busy weekend but I've got 3-4 hours to contribute.

I'm into using CSS3 (w/ fallback styles) in production so that would be cool.

------
alain94040
I was working on a similar idea "Flash Mob: Help a Startup Out", but the
specifics were to have a live chat at a given time, and have everyone
(available and willing) throw their 2cents in.

------
hartror
What OSS licence will you guys be using?

I was planning on spending the weekend holed up coding Django anyway so I will
put my hand up to own a feature!

~~~
ezl
MIT

------
companionsphere
It might be a good idea to have some restriction on users so that the service
is not overwhelmed (a yahoo answers-type situation might not work out well).

~~~
rguzman
Yeah, you're right. We want this to be HN centric, so I think we're going to
start by limiting to HN users.

~~~
JunkDNA
I think it would be good to also limit by karma score too. It's trivial for
someone to come here and create an account. I'm not sure what the cutoff
should be, but probably low enough so as not to exclude people unnecessarily,
but high enough that it weeds out trolls and people who are just not that
serious.

~~~
companionsphere
I'm not so sure about that... If you look at my profile, I almost never
comment or link anything. And yet, I have been a dedicated reader since I
first found HN. I have also done as much as I can to bring new, intelligent
users to HN. But none of this is reflected in my karma score.

Though I could be wrong... Maybe I should just start contributing more.

~~~
eru
Bringing in intelligent people sounds like a good contribution to me. No
matter what the software thinks `contribution' should be.

------
Sukotto
Sounds like a good use of a wave-like app if you include voice chat.

Are there any existing wave-alikes (FOSS maybe?) to leverage?

------
foxtrot
I dabble in UI design, and if I get the time would like to help out. Hopefully
see you either tonight or tomorrow at some point.

------
stevelosh
Python coder here. Sounds like a fun idea. I'll pop into IRC if I get some
free time this weekend.

------
kadabra9
i'll be around this weekend, would love to help out. not much of a python guy
but pretty well versed in MVC and can prob contribute on the design /js end of
things as well

------
ahoyhere
You guys didn't specify a time zone.

I'd be happy to contribute a bit of visual design (interaction design, too, if
you're interested in listening to an expert)... but I assume you're either
east or west coast USA, so I'll be very, very asleep by then.

Now, though, I'll add that the idea of a public office hours would only be
enhanced by the back and forth being public. I'd be much more inclined to help
Person A during my office hours, if my help would be available later to
others.

EDIT: Check out this time zone visualizer I designed:
<http://everytimezone.com> \- feel free to borrow the mechanic, because not
only will you have to deal with time zones for the hack-time, but you will
have to deal with them for office hours.

~~~
jasonkester
That timezone visualizer is gold.

I live in Europe, and am chronically bad at calculating timezone offsets in my
head. Calls to clients on the west coast usually involve at least one moment
of panic where I think I've missed it, followed by two hours of waiting
because I calculated the time wrong, followed by an apology for calling an
hour late.

This is also nice because my clients are even worse than me, and generally
have no idea when it might be daytime over here. A nice blue bar would do them
some good.

~~~
duck
Another useful one is <http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/>

