

Show HN: What I built 6 months into learning to code - paulbrowneng
http://www.evemi.com

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jeswin
I just joined. I am trying to understand how this is different from Pinterest.
If this is indeed different, can you explain it here?

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hey jeswin, first of all thank you for joining and giving it a try, it is
really cool you giving it some of your time and helping out with some
feedback. The question you ask is a very good one, and I guess one I was sort-
of expecting, here is how I see evemi and why I think it is unique..

evemi is a platform for hanging out with new people that are similar to you,
whereas I see Pinterest as more for self-expression. On evemi you follow the #
hash-tag pages over following people (even though this is possible too) and
anyone can post to these hash-tag pages too. I see the pages on evemi as
individual communities that anyone can contribute to and follow and be a part
of.. So for example if you are a designer you can reach out and post to the
#design community on evemi and get some feedback and collaborate with other
people around the world into design like you. The original idea was that I
wanted a way to communicate with new people like me and I thought other people
out there might feel the same way.

I guess I see evemi much like the forums we all grew up on and loved back in
the good ol' days - it is a place to meet similar people and have a discussion
around a shared interest.

Would love to know your thoughts on all of that jeswin - do you think there is
something in all of that or do you think I am way off the mark lol!

~~~
depa
"Hang out with people that are similar to you" is a great one-liner. You
should open with that instead of "follow the things that you love".

~~~
paulbrowneng
Nice point depa, I think I have tried every one liner I can think of over the
past few weeks but yeah I think you are right - after all that is what evemi
is all about probably over following the things you love, thanks for that
point.. Can't believe that after all of the this time searching for a good
one-liner lol!

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kyro
If I'm going to invest the time and effort into registering for an account,
I'll need to know what exact benefit your service will be providing, how you
plan to position the product and differentiate it from competitors in the same
space, and your 6-month roadmap with projected revenues.

I know you're only 6 months into learning how to program, but if you want to
roll with the big boys on HN, you're going to need to prove your worth.

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hey kyro, I understand I have to prove my worth, and programming is already
something I am becoming extremely passionate about. Your points about
understanding the benefits of evemi before you sign up I tried to explain on
the <http://evemi.com/why_evemi> page, have you checked out that page?
Regarding revenue, that is really not something I am concentrating on right
now, I am just trying to learn as much as I can and hopefully build something
maybe a few people might find useful and fun.

~~~
davidkatz
From my experience, most people will never visit a second page on your site,
or even scroll down to read more text. The best thing you can do is hit people
right in the face with a strong value proposition. In your case 'Follow the
things you love' seems to abstract, it doesn't really do anything to
communicate the product to me.

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hey david, okay thank you for the advice, I also think I need to do a better
job of getting the message across straight away on the landing page. depa had
a nice idea on here a minute ago to use the line - "Hang out with people that
are similar to you", I think he is right in that it spells out to people what
evemi is all about from the word go.

~~~
davidkatz
'Hang out with people that are similar to you' is a good value proposition.
It's a need that many people have that's not met well on the web today. On
it's own though, it lacks credibility.

My first reaction would be: 'Meh, whatever. A hundred products already tried
to get me to hang out with people like, and I'm using none of them'.

Perhaps it would be useful to consider the problem.

The web is full of places where you can interact with people around topics of
interest. Reddit, Facebook Groups, countless chat products, and a sea of
specialised communities from Chess servers to HN.

The biggest problem left unsolved in this space is: how do you get people to
form real relationships online. Relationships that spill over beyond the site
in which it originated and give you a chance for genuine friendship.

If Evemi lets me have more superficial interactions with people around topics
of interest, it's probably not going to go very far. If it does have the
chance to get me to form genuine relationships, I'd need to know how it does
that before giving any credence to 'Hang out with people that are similar to
you'.

Just my 2 cents.

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mlebel
The mobile version of the site is really slick. The onboarding for a new user
felt friendly.

Two things:

1\. I had little context of who the people were I could choose to follow (save
for their photos).

2\. I had no place to upload a profile photo.

Care to share your tech stack or how you progressed over six months of
learning? I'd love to hear about it.

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hey there, the mobile version is extremely incomplete at the moment, I threw
it together really with a little jquery mobile.. I guess now with the ios6
updates I can add the option to upload a photo after sign up. Also on the site
version (which is much more complete) there is a little more information about
who the people are you are about to follow and why you are following. I
definitely have some work to do on the mobile version so thanks for the
comments and advice!

A few people have asked about how everything progressed over the last six
months so I am going to add a comment here with some more details in a few
minutes.

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mgkimsal
I would lead off with this:

<http://gyazo.com/3a3958557ec6c07e1ce34e635526a45d>

it gets right to the point and avoids the awkward 'click through full page
slideshows of feelgood BS' (assuming you even understand you're supposed to
click words in the first place).

Those words on the slideshows ... some letters always clash because the pics
are a mix of light and dark, as are the letters. Just drop it.

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hey thanks for taking the time to comment, that's some good advice. On the
ipad version it does that and skips the intro. A few people have made this
point so I definitely need to look at this page again and simplify it a
little. Thank you.

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guru_shastry
IMHO, the design is too influenced by airbnb's. Feels and looks the same in a
very explicit way - the top bar, the logo, the colors, the photos.

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hey guru_shastry I am guilty as charged! :) I was definitely influenced by
airbnb's design in some places and over the coming weeks I plan to make the
design more like 'evemi' and less like airbnb, I definitely want to have a
much more unique feel.. I am totally new to coding and also to designing but I
guess one improtant thing I have learnt is that I need to keep things modern
and slick, but also original and unique, thanks for the comment and advice. :)

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SethMurphy
Could you tell us a little about the technology you used, your background, how
you learned to code and what you found most challenging and most rewarding?
Those are the most interesting parts of this story to me. The site looks nice
regardless of the derivative nature, don't let the negative comments get you
down, good job.

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hey Seth, thank you for the nice words and it is great to hear you have an
interest in me and the journey I have been on. A few people have asked me
about this now so here is a little more about how I got to here..

I am 25 years old living in Leeds in the UK and previously I ran and designed
my own small magazine for the printing industry. I loved doing it but in a
shrinking market it was no fun and cold calling for advertising space was
definitely no fun. The feedback I was getting was that 'everything is going
on-line' and after having a little experience in the printing industry I was
totally feeling the same way.

I began spending a lot of time reading about start-ups and the tech scene and
I thought it sounded pretty interesting and exciting. I guess I considered
myself a little entrepreneurial after doing the magazine and thought I might
be capable of doing my own thing on-line too. I just wanted to have a shot at
it myself. Around the same time I was also wondering if there were other
people out there similar to me that I could chat to about all of this. So I
decided the best thing to do would be to learn how to code and jump right in
at the deep end and build something pretty big to both learn the skills you
need to build something and also to try and solve the problem I had of
connecting with some new and similar people to me.

One of the biggest challenges I had in the beginning was not knowing where to
start. I did a bit of research into the technologies used to build
twitter/facebook/foursquare/etc and I came to the conclusion that there was a
lot of help and a big community for php/mysql so I decided that would be best
for me to learn first. But I really can't describe how difficult it was taking
this first step. There is so much out there about different technologies and I
had no idea what css was and what you use that for instead of javascript etc -
it is really difficult even for me to comprehend and remember now but starting
from nothing and with very little one to one advice it is really difficult to
know where to begin.

I bought a few php/mysql books and started reading. the after the first page I
stopped reading. Going from 0 to reading about variables and arrays etc just
really did not work for me and it went completely over my head. then I came
across a few youtube videos. I watched some great tutorials that took me step
by step through creating a basic php/mysql website from scratch and I found
these to be extremely useful. I played with these for about two weeks and then
decided to just start making the thing I really wanted to spend my time on and
was excited about (evemi). I guess the point here is that it was better for me
(and maybe it is better for other people too) to just get stuck in and start
making something over trying to learn all about it first. if you just start
making something you learn what you need to know as you need to know it
instead of been barricaded with an overwhelming amount of information before
laying down your first line of code.

I had the first bare-bones version of evemi scrapped together in a few weeks
and then after a couple of months I asked a few friends to come along and give
it a go. While my friends were using it I was iterating as fast as I could to
make it better and that is where I am today.

I guess the best lesson I have learned from this so far is the importance of
moving quickly and working hard. When I set out learning all of this 6 months
ago I was completely dedicated and passionate about achieving what I set out
to do and I was sure I had to do it as quickly as possible. I think my drive
and determination is what has got me out of bed early and kept me working
until late into the night for the past few months and got the product to here
it is today.

evemi is still nowhere near a finished product, and there is a hell of a lot
to do to change it and improve it before it fulfils the vision I have for it.
I am just trying to listen to the users we have and develop it the best I can
whilst I try and keep learning and pushing myself. If evemi has got this far
in quite a short time I am excited to see what it might look like and what it
might be able to do in another 6 months. For now I just need to keep focused
and keep coding.

~~~
SethMurphy
Thanks. Age wasn't important though, just background and experience. The eye
for design you had already started cultivating with the magazine work shows.

------
cup
Just some advice:

When I clicked on "What is Evemi" I spend about 30 seconds waiting for the
page to fully load before I realised I had to click. Maybe I've just tired but
it was a bit difficult for me to realise what was going on.

Also when I look at how evemi works, the pictures you have are a bit too small
for me to read the text, im not sure if thats on purpose or not.

~~~
dizzystar
>>When I clicked on "What is Evemi" I spend about 30 seconds waiting for the
page to fully load before I realised I had to click.

I didn't realize I had to click until I read this.

I'm not sure what the concept is, or even if the rest of the site is up and
running, but if you did, it's a pretty good effort.

I'm not particularly interested in the idea, but that comes from someone who
doesn't like using facebook or twitter. Hopefully someone who is really into
this stuff can weigh in.

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hey dizzystar, thanks for commenting. Yeah I definitely need to add a prompt
to click on that page, and I think I need to clarify the concept a little too.
The site is built-ish once you sign in (still lots I want to do) but nice to
hear from some people on Hacker News that have an understanding as to the
learning curve I have been on.

------
tmchow
Regardless of the visual similarity to Pinterest, the underlying idea seems
interesting.

More so, I commend you for your effort the last 6 months learning something to
code. It's not easy to get into it, so congrats!

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hey there. Thank you for taking the time to comment and for seeing beyond the
layout. No doubt I need to make the concept a little clearer and I have lots
of iterations to the design and concept until I really have something here -
this is just my first attempt and I am pretty excited to see what I can turn
evemi into after another six months.

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anthonyhchan
Great work - the aesthetics reminds me of airbnb :-) I would suggest that you
do some kind of input validation for the 'request an invite' box - eg,
checking for empty strings.

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hey Anthony, wow thanks for the nice words (and yeah I totally was inspired in
places by airbnb - I really love their design work)... Good point about
validating for emails - I need to check duplicate entries too, also think I
need a good way to check if it is a valid email address that is been entered -
that has been causing me a couple of problems in the last few hours.

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jameswyse
Looks great! Though your 'sign paint' font took a while to load, so I was a
little confused when I clicked on 'what is evemi' as there were missing words!

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hey James.. Thanks for the nice words! Yeah I have had a few issues with
knowing what font files load fastest - I am still very much a beginner! Very
nice to have your words of encouragement, let me know if you have any more
thoughts or feedback! :)

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spindritf
> Invalid file format..

When uploading a profile picture in png or jpg. There are some other little
things but in general it looks slick.

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hmm, okay will have to look into that, was you uploading during the sign-up
process or from the settings page? Thanks for the comment!

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neilkelty
I'd suggest a clear way to unsubscribe from those SendGrid emails or they're
going to start getting marked as spam.

~~~
paulbrowneng
Hmm, okay never even thought of that, at the moment you can only unsubscribe
from the site, but yeah you are right I need to add a link in the emails too -
very good point.

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kami8845
Come on. If you're gonna post to HN don't link me to some landing page with a
huge jpg of 2 chicks and a form to put my e-mail in. I feel like this goes
against Show HN/hacker etiquette

~~~
paulbrowneng
Sorry about that.. I did not know what page to link to, I really wasn't after
sign-ups for the sake of sign-ups, I just wanted a little feedback from some
more experienced people.

~~~
kami8845
You still get my respect for shipping something and showing it to HN. There's
not many people that manage to do that. That being said I'd like to have a
little more to see before I give up my e-mail address.

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rjh29
Yawn. This is well executed, but completely derivative. It is shame to see
evidently talented web developers making knock-offs of Tumblr and Pinterest.

~~~
kreutz
Fucking buzzkill man. He is 6 months in. Let him build what he wants

~~~
paulbrowneng
Haha, thanks man!

